About my life at present
My father has been fighting prostate cancer for the past several years, mostly successfully. Over the course of this year, he has become very weak, not eating well since 'food tastes like cardboard' and so forth. He has been hospitalized for the better part of a month with one thing or another, and a few days ago the muscles in his throat stopped working right. He sometimes physically can not swallow, sometimes it goes down and comes back up. The danger is two-fold, he could choke to death if they stopped working in the middle of a swallow, or something could get into his lungs instead of his esophogus. He has always said he would not want to be kept 'artificially alive', into which category he places a feeding tube.
My dad has decided to have them remove everything and go home onto hospice. He has other people living at the house who will be there more or less all the time. I don't expect him to last more than a few weeks without nourishment, and he has made this decision of his own free will. I can understand it and respect it, but it is still very hard.
On the other hand, we moved my mother, who has some form of senior dementia, to the same apartment complex as me, and she is doing very well. Previously she lived halfway across the next state over, alone, and my visits to her were not encouraging. She was obviously very out of touch with reality and often forgot her medicine. However, now that I can go over a couple of times a day, she is responding far more clearly and getting much less frustrated. She takes her medicine consistently (although I still check) and I am feeling more positive that she will be able to live independently for longer than I thought. (We did have her scheduled to go into a VERY nice independent living facility so that she could stay in her town with friends and family but she did not pass the cognitive tests)
Note to self: Don't have a crisis at the same time as my near-ex...
My dad has decided to have them remove everything and go home onto hospice. He has other people living at the house who will be there more or less all the time. I don't expect him to last more than a few weeks without nourishment, and he has made this decision of his own free will. I can understand it and respect it, but it is still very hard.
On the other hand, we moved my mother, who has some form of senior dementia, to the same apartment complex as me, and she is doing very well. Previously she lived halfway across the next state over, alone, and my visits to her were not encouraging. She was obviously very out of touch with reality and often forgot her medicine. However, now that I can go over a couple of times a day, she is responding far more clearly and getting much less frustrated. She takes her medicine consistently (although I still check) and I am feeling more positive that she will be able to live independently for longer than I thought. (We did have her scheduled to go into a VERY nice independent living facility so that she could stay in her town with friends and family but she did not pass the cognitive tests)
Note to self: Don't have a crisis at the same time as my near-ex...