We put my dad on hospice days after he collapsed. They said he had no brain function. It didn’t make sense to keep a vegetable plugged up to all those tubes if he was never going to wake up.
I wasn’t there when the test results were gone over, mom was and she relayed them the best she could. Even with the nurse’s help what I was being told didn’t really stick or make sense.
I feel like I was asked to weigh in on a decision that I didn’t have all of the information on. Hospice or wait? My brain said it wasn’t logical to wait, we had already done more than he would have wanted. He would have had a DNR order tattooed to his chest if he thought it would have helped. But the part of me that still believes in magic thought he might still come around. I silenced that voice and the voice that replaced it shocked me into disgust with the thoughts it shot across my brain. “Give him what he wants, and make him regret taking it.” There would be no regret for him after this decision… you don’t regret in death. And just like that I started to feel guilty.
No one talks about what hospice really is. Its always just said that they make sure that the patient feels no pain. Well that’s only half of it. They don’t talk about the rest because it doesn’t matter that your family member isn’t in pain if you’re watching them dehydrate and starve to death.
As the days dragged on and we kept having to call the nurses to administer pain medication because he was having fits. “Funny thing for someone who is brain dead to be doing”, that hopeful part of me whispered. The nurses explained that it was just impulses and that there was no reaction to stimuli. More guilt for contributing to this decision.
He was hooked up to a catheter and every day his urine output dropped more and more. It eventually got to the point that they didn’t even bother to dump or change the collection bag more than once a day, if that. The color was so dark and the tube had started to collect orange crystals and blood. His kidneys were shutting down. Guilt, again. Every time I looked at that fucking bag.
The very last day when I arrived at the hospital to sit with him and give my mother a chance to go home and shower I noticed the discoloration of his hand. This was the sign the hospice nurses had been looking for when they would check his hands and feet. The blood was no longer circulating to his extremities and it left his hands looking pale, discolored, and dead.
While my mother was gone, Joe and my sister sat with me. I sat at his left shoulder, my sister next to me, and Joe across the room by the door. We were all talking, the door was closed because with emotions as high as they had been, we had a tendency to get animated and emotional.
The conversation had quieted. My daughter had taken my mother home to shower a while before and they should’ve been headed back to the hospital any time. I was just sitting there watching his chest heave with every breath. They had come in maybe 30 minutes prior to give him more morphine because he was grimacing which was a sign to me that he was in pain.
I watched his chest rise and fall rhythmically, thinking of how he used to play the harmonica and tried to teach me. How we used to jog at night when I was in elementary school and he taught me how to breathe effectively while running. “Inhale - 2 steps, exhale - 2 step” all the while gazing at him but not seeing him. Then my vision snapped into focus as I saw his chest rise, and fall, and then be still.
I put my hand on his chest and looked panickedly at my sister trying to hold back my tears. “Is he…” her question never really concluding. I looked at Joe and barked for him to get the nurse. He came back with 2. They took his pulse, listened for a heartbeat, and pronounced him dead.
My sister met our mother and my daughter at the entrance from the parking garage. We didn’t want her to know until she got to the room, but she could tell from the look on my sister’s face and the fact that she was meeting them at the entrance. We sat in the hospital room with his corpse for an hour, crying, laughing, telling stories, before we finally decided that we needed to remove his necklaces before we left and they sent his remains to the funeral home.
His neck was already stiff, and his skin had a strange sticky substance on it that smelled and felt gross. It took me and my sister to work those necklaces up over his head. We said our goodbye’s and left the hospital. We re-grouped at my home, to continue the sharing over Mexican food. And that was the start of our life after Ted.