Final days

With only days to live, Billy Capps is more concerned about his wife Lisa and their three sons than the cancerous mass in his stomach that will soon close the small hole to his intestinal tract, leaving him to starve to death.

Billy, a 62-year-old former construction worker, was recently diagnosed with Stage 4 stomach cancer and told that he had only a few months to live.

When he showed up last week for an appointment to have a feeding tube put in, the news got even worse.

Instead of having a few months to live, he was told that he has only a few days – about two weeks.

“They came into the room and said that there was nothing they could do because the cancer was too massive to get a tube through it,” Billy said.

Right now, Billy is on a liquid diet, drinking Ensure “with three scoops of ice cream in it.”

Soon, though, he won’t be able to handle even that.

Billy and Lisa have made his funeral plans. He’ll be buried in Mansfield, which is where the couple moved from a couple of years ago after Billy had the heart attack that ended his 45-year construction career. He wanted to be near Lake Granbury and in the community where his now-deceased parents grew up.

“Me and my wife would come down here all the time and go fishing,” Billy said of when his parents were alive.

The last time Billy went fishing was in the spring. He stopped because that’s when the stomachaches started.

“I just got to where I didn’t feel good,” he said.

He went to see his doctor but blood work showed nothing abnormal, he said.

Last month, though, the stomachaches “got real bad. I could only eat two or three bites and it would just come back up,” Billy said. “At first I thought it was a stomach virus or a stomach infection.”

Back to the doctor he went, and this time the doctor sent him to the Emergency Room. A CAT scan and endoscopy revealed the cancer.

“That’s how massive it grew, how quick it spread,” Billy said. “It’s also actually in my liver, too.”

Lisa, Billy’s wife of 37 years, is an assistant manager at Whataburger, according to Billy. She’s trying to work her scheduled shifts through all of this.

“I don’t think the reality’s kicked in all the way yet,” Billy said. “She’s just trying to stay strong for me and the boys.”

“The boys” – the couple’s three grown sons – are spending a lot of time with their father in his final days. One son, Calvin, an assistant principal at a middle school in Carrollton, has taken time off to stay full-time with his parents until his father passes.

There is another boy, too, about whom Billy is concerned: his and Lisa’s 18-year-old grandson, who has lived with his grandparents all his life.

“He’s really taking it hard because he always went fishing with me and was with me a lot,” Billy said. “He’s been taking care of me a lot.”

Taking care of Billy is about to get a lot tougher.

‘A GREAT FATHER’

A team from Asana Hospice & Palliative Care in Fort Worth is working with Billy and his family.

Right now someone is coming to the home twice a week, but once Billy’s condition worsens and he can no longer hold off on the morphine and other medications he’s been avoiding, Asana will be at the house every day.

“I know when I start taking (morphine) that it’s going to pretty much be over,” Billy said.

Business Development Director Tina Thompson said she felt an “instant connection” to the family, maybe because they love country music and she used to sing country music professionally.

She was impressed that the couple’s sons wanted to be part of the conversation about their father’s care.

“You don’t see that often,” she said of the level of the family’s closeness. “We take care of people who have no one. We have a vigil program because we don’t want someone to pass alone.”

Asana is working to create a “lasting memory” for the family, a program similar to the Make-A-Wish Foundation. The lasting memory for the Capps family will likely involve music, she said.

One of the most successful country songs ever written was “Live Like You Were Dying.” Sung by Tim McGraw and released in 2004, the songwriters wrote the lyrics based on people they knew who viewed life differently once they found out they were terminal.

For Billy, a diagnosis of Stage 4 stomach cancer wasn’t needed to make him more loving toward others. He’s always been that way.

“I work with a lot of families and I see (households) that are so heartbreaking because the relationships in the homes are so broken,” Calvin said.

“Mom and dad never really made a lot of money, but our house was always full of caring and love and support, and my dad was such a great father. He was always there. He was always loving and supportive.”

Family members have created a GoFundMe page to raise money to help pay Billy’s medical bills and funeral expenses. Billy said he is on Medicare, which is accepted by Asana, but doesn’t know what bills might hit the mailbox after he’s gone.

“I just don’t want my family to be burdened,” he said.

To donate, go to www.gofundme.com and type “Billy Capps” in the search box.

By Friday morning, more than $3,000 of the $15,000 goal had been raised.

Although coping with the diagnosis “wasn’t easy,” Billy said that he is a “Christian, God-fearing man that grew up knowing God. I guess that’s what helps the most.”

He will need that faith as the cancer edges closer to completely blocking his digestive tract.

“It’s a lot to grasp,” he said. “But we don’t get to choose the way we go.”