State Of The Ysabet...
Okay, I figured I should go ahead and write this up; it's not fun, but... one of the reasons I have a blog is to keep track of what happens in my life, the good stuff and the bad, and this fits. If I've let things slide lately-- if there are emails I should've answered and people I haven't talked with-- my apologies; things have been kind of rough.
Last weekend my mom, who y'all have heard me talk about before, was found clammy and unresponsive and was rushed to the hospital. (To those of y'all who haven't heard me talk about her, she's 83 and a severe Alzheimer's patient, and she now lives in a wing of a hospital that specializes in just such things. She's at the point where she spends a great deal of her time in her youth, and recently it's gotten to the point where she cries occasionally for her own mom, very like the child she used to be.) They got her into an ICU bed, where she was diagnosed with a severe uterine infection (very dangerous to the elderly, and very common), sepsis throughout her entire body, and some sort of bad intestinal block. On the following day they did surgery and removed a considerable portion of her intestines, which were necrotic.
That was Sunday; today's Wednesday, and she hasn't woken up at all. She's not responding to vocal requests or commands, only to pain stimuli; she's been running a fever around 101, has had spikes in her blood-pressure and has required blood (I'm not sure how much.) She's been diagnosed now with pneumonia in her left lung as well.
Not good, no. My family keeps telling me to wait, not to fly out yet; she may pull through. But it's increasingly unlikely-- and she's on full life-support, and pretty much all of us have DNR statements in our living wills (I sure do.) So...
Tonight, the nurse told me that they're doing a CAT scan to monitor her brain-activity. A lot'll depend on what comes back from that-- if she's still there, so to speak, and the docs think that her body has a good chance to heal, then that's great and she's where she needs to be and doing what she needs to do (though gods, I wish she'd wake up!) But if the results are bad and the docs don't think she has enough in her to beat the infections and the pneumonia... then the ventilator she's on constitutes Extraordinary Measures.
I don't want to have to decide that it's time for my mother to die.
Nobody should have to decide that.
I don't want my sisters and my brother to be part of that decision; I don't want my mom's only living sister, my aunt Irma, to have to help decide that for her.
But... if it was me... and if she's waiting out there somewhere, held down like a balloon with a fraying string, then...
I didn't write this to have everybody go 'We're so sorry, Ysabet'. I know y'all are, because I tend to hang around with good people. I'm writing this down so in a day or a month or a year I can look back and remember what happened at this point and the whys and wherefores of it. She-- her body at least-- is still alive; her mind, or as much as can be reached through her illness, may be so also. Or maybe she's gone. I don't know, and I don't know what'll happen in the next few days.
I love my mom, and I want her to have what's best for her; if that means dying, letting the string break, then yes. If she can heal and come back to the world the little distance that the Alzheimer's will allow, then yes to that.
Anyway. Wanted to write this out. I'll let y'all know what happens when it happens.
Last weekend my mom, who y'all have heard me talk about before, was found clammy and unresponsive and was rushed to the hospital. (To those of y'all who haven't heard me talk about her, she's 83 and a severe Alzheimer's patient, and she now lives in a wing of a hospital that specializes in just such things. She's at the point where she spends a great deal of her time in her youth, and recently it's gotten to the point where she cries occasionally for her own mom, very like the child she used to be.) They got her into an ICU bed, where she was diagnosed with a severe uterine infection (very dangerous to the elderly, and very common), sepsis throughout her entire body, and some sort of bad intestinal block. On the following day they did surgery and removed a considerable portion of her intestines, which were necrotic.
That was Sunday; today's Wednesday, and she hasn't woken up at all. She's not responding to vocal requests or commands, only to pain stimuli; she's been running a fever around 101, has had spikes in her blood-pressure and has required blood (I'm not sure how much.) She's been diagnosed now with pneumonia in her left lung as well.
Not good, no. My family keeps telling me to wait, not to fly out yet; she may pull through. But it's increasingly unlikely-- and she's on full life-support, and pretty much all of us have DNR statements in our living wills (I sure do.) So...
Tonight, the nurse told me that they're doing a CAT scan to monitor her brain-activity. A lot'll depend on what comes back from that-- if she's still there, so to speak, and the docs think that her body has a good chance to heal, then that's great and she's where she needs to be and doing what she needs to do (though gods, I wish she'd wake up!) But if the results are bad and the docs don't think she has enough in her to beat the infections and the pneumonia... then the ventilator she's on constitutes Extraordinary Measures.
I don't want to have to decide that it's time for my mother to die.
Nobody should have to decide that.
I don't want my sisters and my brother to be part of that decision; I don't want my mom's only living sister, my aunt Irma, to have to help decide that for her.
But... if it was me... and if she's waiting out there somewhere, held down like a balloon with a fraying string, then...
I didn't write this to have everybody go 'We're so sorry, Ysabet'. I know y'all are, because I tend to hang around with good people. I'm writing this down so in a day or a month or a year I can look back and remember what happened at this point and the whys and wherefores of it. She-- her body at least-- is still alive; her mind, or as much as can be reached through her illness, may be so also. Or maybe she's gone. I don't know, and I don't know what'll happen in the next few days.
I love my mom, and I want her to have what's best for her; if that means dying, letting the string break, then yes. If she can heal and come back to the world the little distance that the Alzheimer's will allow, then yes to that.
Anyway. Wanted to write this out. I'll let y'all know what happens when it happens.