Joey Feek of the country music duo Joey and Rory has been fighting an intense battle with cancer for the past year. Although her prognosis doesn’t look good, Joey remains strong in her faith, and hasn’t given up hope for a miracle.
As the Inquisitr previously reported, Joey Feek was diagnosed with stage four cervical cancer in 2014, three months after giving birth to her daughter Indiana. Although she underwent a radical hysterectomy and several rounds of radiation and chemotherapy, Joey’s cancer returned and spread to her colon. Realizing there was nothing left for the doctors to do, Joey made the hardest decision of her life… to stop treatment and enter hospice care to spend out the remainder of her days at home with her family.
Since Joey’s diagnosis, her husband and duet partner Rory Feek has been documenting her cancer battle on his blog This Life I Live. In his most recent post titled “braver than me,” Rory spoke about his wife’s deteriorating condition, and explained what the term “hospice” really means to them.
“The word ‘hospice’ makes us all think the worst. The end. Or at least, the end is very close.
I think, like me, most people probably think when they hear that word that it means that the family must be gathered around their loved one… watching them say their final words and breathing their last breath. And I’m sure in some cases, it probably happens that way.”
Rory went on to recall when his mother entered hospice care, saying she lived another three or four months before she took her final breath. He also said that he had heard that it is not uncommon for patients to live on hospice for another six months.
“And so that’s where we are. A hospice nurse comes once or twice a week and she helps to make sure that Joey’s pain is under control – that her morphine drip is working properly – and to see if she and we, her caregivers, need anything,” Rory wrote.
“But God chooses the appointed time. Not us. Not hospice. My wife is strong. Very very strong. So is her will to live. Especially with a little one who gets excited every morning to see her.”
Joey Feek’s condition isn’t improving, and to hear Rory talk about it, it is a constant roller coaster; one day she wakes up feeling like her old self, and the next she spends her days sleeping the pain away. However, despite her prognosis, Joey and Rory haven’t given up hope, and Joey’s will to live is as strong as ever.
“Though now, she can no longer get out of bed – she is so sharp and clear and her pain, for the most part, is so under control by the medicine that talking to her – you would think she’s her normal self. Thinner. Much thinner. And with a hip new hairdo,” Rory wrote.
“But she is beautiful. So so so beautiful.”
Before Joey became too weak to walk and confined to her bed, she joined her husband in a final dance in their living room. Rory shared a photo of the intimate moment with Joey, who wore a plaid button-up shirt and leggings as she wrapped her arms around her husband, swaying back and forth as Rory sang George Strait’s “You Look So Good In Love” in her ear.
“She steadied with her cane and I softly moved her across the room singing George Strait’s ‘You Look So Good In Love’ in her ear,” he wrote. “In the middle of the song though, as I was being careful not to step on her toes – she stopped and looked up at me and said, ‘How about if I lead?.’ And I followed her lead as we slowly two-stepped on her mama’s living room floor.”
[Photo by Chris Pizzello/Associated Press]