Hello All,

This is Ed’s wife Haley and sadly, this will be the final update on Ed’s blog.

Ed fought amazingly hard, and made it to Texas, surprising his doctors.  Unfortunately by the time we arrived his organs had suffered too much damage and he no longer qualified for the clinical trials being offered.

Ed passed away over the holiday in his sleep, while his father and I held his hands.  His last words were “I love you” spoken about 12 hours earlier.  The palliative care team at MD Anderson did a wonderful job making his last few days as comfortable as possible.  Our boys were flown out to Texas to say goodbye and Ed rallied and woke up for them, hugged them and told them how much he loved him.  Under the circumstances that was a wonderful gift.

Ed was the kindest, sweetest, most incredible man I ever knew.  He had the biggest heart and there has been an outpouring of support from people all over the country who loved him.  While his loss has caused an unimaginable amount of pain, seeing how many lives he touched and how important he was to so many people has helped to ease that pain a bit.

A memorial service will be held for Ed after the holidays, as he did not want a funeral and requested to be cremated.  Ed hated the idea of ever causing anyone grief, sadness or pain.  His final request was to have a party in his honor, where we share stories about the good times and celebrate his wonderful life.

Thank you all for following his story, your support helped him fight as long as he did.  He truly did love you all.

Before Ed passed he set up a college fund for our two boys, if you would like to donate you can find the Go Fund Me page here:

https://www.gofundme.com/edhigginsmemorial

Happy Black Friday, everyone! Thankfully I’ve learned over the years to do my Christmas shopping months early, so I haven’t needed to buy anything, but it’s still nice to have a day to sit around and relax with the family.

Or at least it would be, if I hadn’t woken up feeling flushed and exhausted. From the moment I woke up today, all I wanted was cold drinks. The coldest drinks. Powerade, water, soda, (mostly soda); I just needed to drink as much as possible. No foolin’, I’m pretty sure I went through six liters of diet soda this morning.

It eventually occurred to me (by which I mean my wife told me) to check my temperature, and it was up to 103 degrees. We called my doctor’s on-call nurse, and after some back and forth realized that there had been a misunderstanding about my steroid prescription. While that might have been the cause of the high temperature, her medical advice was to keep an eye on my temperature and make sure it didn’t go any higher, and otherwise to just get some rest.

That all turned out to be pretty good advice, because after laying in bed for approximately eight hours, I woke up with a normal temperature of 97 degrees. And a little sweat. Okay, maybe more than a little sweat.

Actor’s recreation of my post-nap state

All right, fine. I woke up with so much sweat that Haley and I had to immediately change every sheet and pillowcase, including the special sheet and pillow protectors that we’ve been using since chemo started, because I had soaked through absolutely every layer of everything we had.

After a cool shower and change of clothes for me, I’m feeling a good bit better (certainly less thirsty). According to my local medical expert Dr. Wife, this type of rapid fever and sweating is a common Lymphoma symptom, just crazy fevers out of nowhere as my body tries to fight the disease in my blood.

So the day was a little bit “wasted,” but if there’s a day to do that, the day after Thanksgiving is probably the day for it. The rest of the family spent their day playing games and resting, so it wasn’t like there were many family activities to miss.

And now that I’m feeling better we can continue with this week’s tradition of dinner followed by a Fast & Furious movie (for the purposes of this week, they will be referred to as Fast & Turkeyous). Tonight we wrap up the series, learning the Fate of the Turkeyous. I’m betting it involves a lot of destroyed cars and the Rock throwing someone through a ceiling.