It’s been many hours since she last spoke, but her breathing is steady, loud and labored.\u00a0 My sister and are sitting in a shit-smelly room in the Albany Medical Center, 5th floor, neurology unit.\u00a0 My sister is reading her kindle by the light of the patient’s bathroom.\u00a0 I am writing this backlit by my mac.\u00a0 The music is something Bach-like via Pandora.\u00a0 It’s not exactly a softly lit, pastel colored hospice room.\u00a0 There was no room at the hospice, but at least they got my mother out of the “stroke room” where an eager neurology resident made idiotic statements about an 89 year old woman with advanced CHF and coronary artery disease making “a full recovery” in 6-12 months.<\/p>\n
When confronted with the information that she’d had a heart attack as well as a storke and cardiology had told us they couldn’t treat the blockages because of the stroke risk,\u00a0 Doc Bollywood didn’t blink.\u00a0 He just said, “Well, that was cardiology. I’m talking from a neurological standpoint.”
\nTo which my brother-in-law replied, “Are you saying she can live without a heart? Who do you think she is, the Tinman?”<\/p>\n
That actor had it wrong.\u00a0 Comedy<\/em> is easy; dying <\/em>is hard.<\/p>\n Physical therapy also stopped by earlier. We sat\u00a0 astounded.\u00a0 “I guess she’s tired.\u00a0 We’ll come back later.”<\/p>\n Yeah, tired.\u00a0 She’s just resting.<\/p>\n Not everyone who works in a hospital is crazy.\u00a0 Only the doctors and the physical therapists. The nurses get it.\u00a0 Comfort care when nothing else can be done.<\/p>\n My mother hasn’t said anything in the last six hours or so, and hasn’t said anything we could really understand since yesterday. — though there was a moment earlier\u00a0 today when I thought she understood me perfectly and I imagined I understood her grunted, garbled reply.\u00a0 I was telling her how great Jack — her husband, my father was and how much he loved her, how I still felt his presence, and the caring never dies.<\/p>\n She looked at me, and mumbled something, which I imagined was, ” He was a great husband and father.”<\/p>\n I agreed.<\/p>\n Now my sister and I just sit in a dark room and wait.\u00a0 My mother gasps for every breath.\u00a0 She was gripping our hands hours ago — holding on for dear life.\u00a0 Holding on to dear life. But that’s stopped.\u00a0 Her knees are bent up, the way we remember our father’s being.<\/p>\n On the phone to my friend, a nurse practioner in New York, my friend overheard the 9 PM announcement telling all visitors to leave.<\/p>\n “That doesn’t apply to you,” she said.<\/p>\n “I know,” I told her.<\/p>\n They finally gave her morphine.\u00a0 A tiny bit.\u00a0 My sister was worried.\u00a0 My mother once had a bad reaction to it.\u00a0 It was after a fall.\u00a0 She was in pain, but the drug made her paranoid, hostile.\u00a0 “I don’t want her to go out that way,” my sister said.<\/p>\n But finally my sister agreed it was time.<\/p>\n 1 miligram to start.\u00a0 It’s already quieted the breathing.<\/p>\n We’re staying the night.\u00a0 Maybe in shifts.\u00a0 I used to work a night shift in a hospital. \u00a0That was years ago, psyche, not medicine, but still it seems familiar to be here and odd, watching the woman who gave birth to me, contracting into herself, becoming smaller, smoother, more fetal.<\/p>\n Her strangely unwrinkled face.\u00a0 Dying has a beauty too. It is as elemental, fundamental as birth, but not celebrated.\u00a0 Still, there’s nothing tragic here.\u00a0 We are not meant to be too long lasting.\u00a0 None of us gets more much more than a century, and no one gets out alive.<\/p>\n The morphine is helping.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s been many hours since she last spoke, but her breathing is steady, loud and labored.\u00a0 My sister and are sitting in a shit-smelly room in the Albany Medical Center, 5th floor, neurology unit.\u00a0 My sister is reading her kindle by the light of the patient’s bathroom.\u00a0 I am writing this backlit by my mac.\u00a0 … Continue reading Live Blogging \u2014 My Mother\u2019s Death Bed<\/span>