Horace Tiggs IV

This is a two point increase from the last picture which was 'Tiggs 6, Cancer 0'. I say if it works, why not let it. My family and I are the same entity in my mind as far as I'm concerned, and so subsequently if anyone in my family has cancer, has dealt with cancer, I get it, meaning not necessarily that I'm inflicted by it, but emotionally, spiritually, I'm in the same battle that they're in regardless of natural outcome. The story starts actually at the end with my old man – he's my step father but I call him my old man – I call everybody my old man! My old man passed away in February of 2015. He – a great man – very influential in ways I didn't recognize to myself. Very protective of my mother, my family, the whole nine. He passed away February 6 of 2015. I got a call from my sister about a week and a half before – she said 'hey, you going to see daddy? He's in the hospital blah blah blah'. I said 'Well, I didn't know that... I wasn't planning on going. Are you going?' I said 'Okay.' And so we talked a bit more and I know my sister, she knows what I do, I know what she does, so at the end of that conversation just from picking up what she was saying and how she sounded, I said 'Hey – are you asking me to go because you can't go?' and she said 'No I'm not.' I said, 'Alright I'll talk to you later', hung up the phone and the next morning I called my boss and said 'yeah, my sister is asking me to go, but she's not telling me so I'm going.' I think she called me because I'm much more flexible and mobile and I can get from any city to any city very quickly. She's got three kids. So I go to Cincinnati, this is the week before. No one knows I'm coming. I just walk into the hospital room. When I walk in my grandmother is there, my mother is there, old man's there, doctors looking 'who are you?' I get there, assess the situation – it's pretty bad. I didn’t' realize I was walking into bad news, but the first test he got there a month before had showed a spot on his liver. They were like 'we don't know what this is but we don't think it's that bad.' Well his health deteriorated significantly so that by the time I walked into the room, the spot had turned into a 7 centimeter growth on his liver. And he had just been told that it was cancer – it had been triple confirmed – but he was told that it was cancer after someone just before that told him that it wasn't cancer. A nurse came in and told him that it wasn't cancer, he goes nuts like 'great, this is great', another person comes in and says 'no, I don't know what they're saying, it really is.' Total deflation. This is when I walk into the room. My mom is emotional, he is emotional – very calm but emotional. I walk in and my mother is leaning over him saying 'Hey we're going to make it through this, everything's going to be fine, I need you to fight.' And he says 'Okay baby' – that's what he says to her. And then he looks at me – I'm literally [behind her] and he looks at me and I know him well enough to know some of these looks. He looks at me and we had a conversation without any words being exchanged. And the conversation was pretty much 'I'm telling my wife what she needs to know, now I'm telling you I'm done and I need to go home.' And I acknowledged it – this was just looks but I could see it in his face. So then I leave the room and I call my sister and said 'You need to get here, like now. This is not good.' Fast forward a couple days. I leave Cincinnati Saturday because of something I had to do with my daughter – [...] I come back on Tuesday. Between Saturday and Tuesday he's been released from the hospital, he's been put into hospice care. I did not know that when I left on Saturday it would be the last time I spoke to him. The last time I saw him he was totally incapacitated, he couldn't even open his mouth. It was a really bad situation. He's in in-home hospice care. I get there, hang out with him, hang out with my mom. She's a nurse so she knew something was going to happen. She says 'You go to sleep, I'll be down here and come down in the morning.' Well I came down in the morning and I kid you not, probably about 5 minutes after I got down there he passed away in the living room. My sister is on a plane coming from Atlanta, he passes away at 7ish in the morning, we mourn and are still mourning. But then I have to go – my mother says 'Go pick up your sister'. We're trying to figure out who says what – do I tell my sister, does my mother tell my sister? We're going through all this. This is the invasive little prick known as cancer. And anyway, I go get her, the whole 9, we go through the funeral and all that good stuff. As I take a look back on, A, the last conversation me and my old man had – it really was a 'Hey, don't worry about me, I'm good, I'm going to see the lord. I'll be alright.' But before they got married my mother told him 'We're not getting married unless my son says it's okay' – I'm a 19 year old kid at the time, it's 1996. And h