Followup
Just a quick followup to my series of recent posts on death and dying, to report on the answer I was given to my one final question, that being: Why is my father receiving no nutrition?
The doctor's answer was that to give him nutrition would (with, the doctor said, at least a 2/3 probability) have shortened his life by a few days, along with making his death far more horrible. The gist of it is that once the terminal agitation starts (as documented in my previous posts), the emotional frenzy actually causes organ systems --- most notably the digestive and urinary systems --- to stop functioning. (The doctor gave me a lengthy step-by-step description of the chemical processes that lead from agitation to system shutdown. I understood about half of it and remember at best half of that, though he stressed that he'll be very willing to go through it again and answer as many clarifying questions as I care to raise.)
Therefore: If we had given him nutrition (or even water) intravenously, the digestive system couldn't have handled it, and it would, in all probability (again, the doctor says at least 2/3 probability) have gone straight to his lungs and drowned him.
I did not have the sense that I was being snookered here, although my sense of such things is surely fallible. In the long run, I will want to learn more about this --- not, as I've said in previous posts in order to relitigate anything, but partly because it's intrinsically interesting and partly because I might be making similar decisions for someone else someday.
As it stands, they believe he's very unlikely to go more than another 24 hours. He appears to be resting very comfortably, and my mother remains remarkably at peace. She coralled me yesterday and today into her project of sorting his belongings into give-aways and throw-aways, and we followed up with several trips to the dumpster. (My mother is to hoarding as Darth Vader is to random acts of kindness.) In the event that my father makes a miraculous recovery, he's going to have plenty to be pissed about.
This entry was originally posted at https://wotw.dreamwidth.org/130745.html. Please comment there using OpenID. I'll read comments here too, but if you have a choice, I prefer them there.
The doctor's answer was that to give him nutrition would (with, the doctor said, at least a 2/3 probability) have shortened his life by a few days, along with making his death far more horrible. The gist of it is that once the terminal agitation starts (as documented in my previous posts), the emotional frenzy actually causes organ systems --- most notably the digestive and urinary systems --- to stop functioning. (The doctor gave me a lengthy step-by-step description of the chemical processes that lead from agitation to system shutdown. I understood about half of it and remember at best half of that, though he stressed that he'll be very willing to go through it again and answer as many clarifying questions as I care to raise.)
Therefore: If we had given him nutrition (or even water) intravenously, the digestive system couldn't have handled it, and it would, in all probability (again, the doctor says at least 2/3 probability) have gone straight to his lungs and drowned him.
I did not have the sense that I was being snookered here, although my sense of such things is surely fallible. In the long run, I will want to learn more about this --- not, as I've said in previous posts in order to relitigate anything, but partly because it's intrinsically interesting and partly because I might be making similar decisions for someone else someday.
As it stands, they believe he's very unlikely to go more than another 24 hours. He appears to be resting very comfortably, and my mother remains remarkably at peace. She coralled me yesterday and today into her project of sorting his belongings into give-aways and throw-aways, and we followed up with several trips to the dumpster. (My mother is to hoarding as Darth Vader is to random acts of kindness.) In the event that my father makes a miraculous recovery, he's going to have plenty to be pissed about.
This entry was originally posted at https://wotw.dreamwidth.org/130745.html. Please comment there using OpenID. I'll read comments here too, but if you have a choice, I prefer them there.