Joey Feek can no longer get out of bed, but the country singer remains convinced she’s going to defy doctors who say her cancer is terminal, her husband Rory wrote in blog posted Sunday.
“There isn’t a day that goes by that she doesn’t look me and her family in the eye and say ‘I’m gonna beat this,’ or ‘I’m getting better, I believe that,’” he wrote in his “This Life I Live blog” posted Sunday under the headline “Braver Than Me.”
Feek, 40, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and is under hospice care at her childhood home in Alexandria, Indiana.
“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,” Rory wrote. “[She is] thinner. Much thinner. And with a hip new hairdo. But she is beautiful. So so so beautiful.”
Joey has unfathomable strength and “will to live,” her husband said, not just for herself, but also their 21-month-old daughter Indiana, who “gets excited every morning to see her.”
According to Rory, their family and Joey’s doctors sometimes “believe that the time must be very near.
“But today and the last few days have been incredible,” he noted. “Part of us once again believes that God is answering Joey’s prayer by healing her body and taking the cancer away, despite all the odds.”
Rory wrote that he wanted to “shine a light” on the realities of hospice — specifically that “it’s not uncommon for people to be on hospice for six months, or longer.
“The word ‘hospice’ makes us all think the worst,” he shared. “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.
“I’m sure in some cases, it probably happens that way. But last year when my mother was dying of cancer, after hospice was brought in, Mom lived another three or four more months before she breathed her last,” he said.
Fans of the Southern singing duo, known as Joey + Rory, have watched the Feeks’ journey unfold on social media and Rory’s blog since Joey was diagnosed with cervical cancer in May 2014.