My dad passed from metastatic melanoma on the 11th. Went from a mole on his back to lungs and brain, not sure in which order. The hospital he was in, jesus... they do not listen to patient families at all. It felt as if they were tacitly telling me I don't know my old man. He was tough. He had a very tough upbringing, but he joined the army after marrying my mom and did well by us. He never complained about pain or being sick, including before his final hospitalization. We had to call an ambulance, after he and I failed to make it upstairs to put him to bed for the night a few weeks back. He had undergone one Ipi-Nivo treatment that caused liver inflamation and a few weeks of steroids. That's when we started getting scared... like *really* scared. The only option left to us was one that made him too sick to continue. Prednisone got the liver back in shape, and he had one treatment of just Nivo, but it was too late; the brain tumor on the left slowly bled, as melanoma will, and increased in size to the point his right side movement and coordination was severely affected. The EMT's that showed up were very concerned about stroke, and that also terrified me. See, he had surgery for trigeminal myalgia a ehilr back, that resulted in him losing sensation in the right side of his face, with a slight accompanying droop. His inability to use his right arm or leg and the pretty brutal aphasia from the intial tumor ressection in May... Now, I can see why the medics thought stroke; all the signs were there, but were all side-effects from other stuff. I hadn't known about the brain tumor bleeding at that point, but they did a scan at the hospital they took him to, discovered that and told us as much as well as transferring him to the NACU (neuro acute care unit) where he recovered from the ressection in May. We still had hope then. I visited every day, including sleeping in his rom at the hospital, reading to him and using a little sponge on a stick to give him diet ginger ale; he could no longer swallow. His surgeon and another doc let us know hope... it's gone. It's no longer if, it's when. Surgery was off the books, but they'd try radiation if he agreed to it, but he was on dilaudid all the time; his will also indicated nothing that would prolong needlessly his suffering would be undertaken. A week and a half. That's how long he lasted on 'comfort care,' which is just being doped to the gills.