A Chapter Ends
So, my mother died on Sunday, July 14.
I got an email from my pop on July 2 saying she was critically ill and to please call her friend Janice in Las Vegas for details. I got in touch with pop, Janice, and hospital, and then the whirlwind began. By the time anybody found me, she'd been in the hospital for 8 days, and had been in an induced coma and intubated for 3. She had a right pleural effusion, pneumonia, hyponatremia, malnutrition, and a whole slew of other issues too numerous to name now.
Overnight, the hospital started calling me for permissions for more procedures, including biopsies. On Wednesday afternoon, July 3, the first doctor I talked to said her labs were looking better after they'd tapped the effusion/drained lung fluid and things were looking up. By 9pm the biopsies had come back, and the oncologist called me and said we were dealing with small cell lung cancer and the only hope was aggressive chemo, which would likely not work, would not improve quality of life, and was not recommended. The original doctor called me also and said he did not think she would be able to survive without a ventilator.
She fricken hated that ventilator, and never wanted it in the first place.
I'm going to elide the details here, but I flew to Vegas on Sunday July 7, with the help and support of many friends who pulled together to make the trip possible. I spent a lot of days and hours waiting on other people and making the hospital wait on me and family and friends for decisions and changes to her care that had already been decided, but in the end I chose to take her off the ventilator and move her to hospice. She knew I was here (probably 50 times she woke up and was surprised and pleased - propofol turned her into Dory the Goldfish), but she was only really present for about 15 minutes after we got her into hospice, when she'd been off all the ICU drugs and the vent for hours. She said HI to me all excited when she first woke up, she wanted a chocolate malt so we got her that, we put her glasses on when she wanted them, and she said it was okay for Janice's son to come visit. And then they put her on the hospice cocktail and that was it.
She fought and fought. She had a mission which kept her restless and in a constant state of negation (even back in ICU), and she never relented on it, from Wednesday until her passing on Sunday morning, unless I asked for more drugs. I sat by her bedside through most of it. In the ICU she liked music - in hospice, she didn't. There was not much to do but read email and facebook updates and hold her hand and speak quietly to her. I told her I'd be right back with more drugs to make things feel better. I told her I loved her. I told her that whatever she needed to get done, I would figure it out and take care of it, and she didn't need to hold on for that. Stubborn lady, fighting fighting fighting, but in the end, the lungs just failed.
...
In the week since, I've been cleaning out her house, donating her clothes, setting aside stuff that I want to keep, trying to find out about her finances so I can get her affairs in order. Her house and her paperwork is a mess (she was sick for about a year) but her closet is *immaculate*, just like the daughter of a psychotic person obsessed with neatness would have. ;) She liked peach/orange/coral and blue/aqua/peacock but other than that we have similar taste in... everything. It's a sad thing, going through her stuff, and knowing that the reason we never shared this stuff while she was alive was because she didn't want to bother me and intrude upon my life, and I didn't need a mom relationship and didn't reach out regularly as a result.
The memorial is today. It's going to be hard. Making all these decisions for her has been extraordinarily difficult for me, as her twin in many ways but as a stranger in lots of others, and I feel like I'm not getting things done right. Except for the part where she didn't want intrusive medical care. I know I did the right thing there.
I got an email from my pop on July 2 saying she was critically ill and to please call her friend Janice in Las Vegas for details. I got in touch with pop, Janice, and hospital, and then the whirlwind began. By the time anybody found me, she'd been in the hospital for 8 days, and had been in an induced coma and intubated for 3. She had a right pleural effusion, pneumonia, hyponatremia, malnutrition, and a whole slew of other issues too numerous to name now.
Overnight, the hospital started calling me for permissions for more procedures, including biopsies. On Wednesday afternoon, July 3, the first doctor I talked to said her labs were looking better after they'd tapped the effusion/drained lung fluid and things were looking up. By 9pm the biopsies had come back, and the oncologist called me and said we were dealing with small cell lung cancer and the only hope was aggressive chemo, which would likely not work, would not improve quality of life, and was not recommended. The original doctor called me also and said he did not think she would be able to survive without a ventilator.
She fricken hated that ventilator, and never wanted it in the first place.
I'm going to elide the details here, but I flew to Vegas on Sunday July 7, with the help and support of many friends who pulled together to make the trip possible. I spent a lot of days and hours waiting on other people and making the hospital wait on me and family and friends for decisions and changes to her care that had already been decided, but in the end I chose to take her off the ventilator and move her to hospice. She knew I was here (probably 50 times she woke up and was surprised and pleased - propofol turned her into Dory the Goldfish), but she was only really present for about 15 minutes after we got her into hospice, when she'd been off all the ICU drugs and the vent for hours. She said HI to me all excited when she first woke up, she wanted a chocolate malt so we got her that, we put her glasses on when she wanted them, and she said it was okay for Janice's son to come visit. And then they put her on the hospice cocktail and that was it.
She fought and fought. She had a mission which kept her restless and in a constant state of negation (even back in ICU), and she never relented on it, from Wednesday until her passing on Sunday morning, unless I asked for more drugs. I sat by her bedside through most of it. In the ICU she liked music - in hospice, she didn't. There was not much to do but read email and facebook updates and hold her hand and speak quietly to her. I told her I'd be right back with more drugs to make things feel better. I told her I loved her. I told her that whatever she needed to get done, I would figure it out and take care of it, and she didn't need to hold on for that. Stubborn lady, fighting fighting fighting, but in the end, the lungs just failed.
...
In the week since, I've been cleaning out her house, donating her clothes, setting aside stuff that I want to keep, trying to find out about her finances so I can get her affairs in order. Her house and her paperwork is a mess (she was sick for about a year) but her closet is *immaculate*, just like the daughter of a psychotic person obsessed with neatness would have. ;) She liked peach/orange/coral and blue/aqua/peacock but other than that we have similar taste in... everything. It's a sad thing, going through her stuff, and knowing that the reason we never shared this stuff while she was alive was because she didn't want to bother me and intrude upon my life, and I didn't need a mom relationship and didn't reach out regularly as a result.
The memorial is today. It's going to be hard. Making all these decisions for her has been extraordinarily difficult for me, as her twin in many ways but as a stranger in lots of others, and I feel like I'm not getting things done right. Except for the part where she didn't want intrusive medical care. I know I did the right thing there.