Of course when I say he was asking for it I actually mean exactly that.  He asked me to punch him.  Well, he asked me to punch him but not hard enough to knock him out.  Afterwards we shook hands, hugged and he broke down crying.  He started to sob as he explained how he and his wife planned to retire soon.  How she meant the world to him and he would be lost without her.  Then a doctor came out of my mother in laws room into the hall where we were and he straightened up, took a deep breath and made polite conversation with her.

My mother in law weighs 83 pounds now.  She's been in the hospital for the past two and half weeks, which means she's been in the hospital more than out of it so far this year.  My wife is visiting with her three days a week and often spends the night there with her.

It's so hard to judge how things are going.  I think my mother in law is ready to give up, and my wife thinks so as well, but my father in law is still only talking about fighting as long as there's any chance at all.  I think it's slowly getting through to him that she has terminal cancer but he's not ready to admit it yet.

The problem is she's so frail now that she looks worse than my uncle did last year a week before he died of pancreatic cancer.  But she sounds worlds better.  When I visited my uncle last year it was clear he was tired and drained.  He carried on a conversation but the vigor he had before just wasn't there.  My mother in law sounds almost the same.  There's certainly some difference, but she essentially sounds the same.