I lay there and thought I was thinking about having “it” with my lovely wife, who wasn’t there, when Mom called. “It” is good for the soul, releases tensions and feels good. I didn’t really need to do “It” because I wasn’t particularly aroused at all,so it was no big deal when I didn’t get to have "it". I got up and went into the ‘space’. It couldn’t be called a room really, we had put the hospice bed in the living room because it was the room with the TV and truly the only room large enough in the house to accomodate it. So I went into the space and she gestured to me that she needed pain medication, i.e. morphine. This was the first time she had wakened me for that sole purpose. Usually she had to visit the bathroom. So this was probably the real beginning of the end --I had stated that several times that it was the real beginning of the end and maybe this time I was right, who knows.
Yes, my mom was dying. The pussies that called themselves doctors wouldn’t say how long or what they thought was the time frame because they didn’t want me to come back and sue them if they were wrong. You know, two weeks sir...and then she hangs on for a year... no one sues doctors for being wrong in a positive way but if they said she has six months and she goes tomorrow, people might try to sue. Not me, I will get my money some other way. The doctors have enough to worry about. Can you imagine graduating from college, ready to enter the door to your first job with $250,000 in loans to pay off? You have that and the old life and death thing on your hands too.
Not like firefighters though, they get thrust into the flames willy nilly and never know when. But to be fair, they rarely are in danger. Most fires are run of the mill and not much happens except that it gets hot and then very wet and then it is over. Three hundred and sixty four days a year the firefighter doesn’t get in a dangerous situation. Police maybe two seventy five.
Doctors, are on the string every day they work.
(You know, back when I was little they called this ‘stream of conscious’ writing. I think it is really just ADD.)
So doctors have it rough from the minute they walk into the ‘school of medicine’ which is much like a school of sharks, I suspect but with more fiber.
So anyway, I go to mom, get her the medicine she needs, and go back and try to sleep. It is 2:40, after all, and I should be sleepy. So I drift into never never land. Why is it called that anyway, or am I the only one that calls it that? Sleep, I mean, not the earlier ‘it’.
The real problem here is what the hell do you do with a situation like this. She is never gonna get better, you can’t off her but she really needs to be offed because she hurts too much. Keeping her around for the next _____? days costs about two fifty or more a day and does her no favors. Not to mention the stress it puts on me and the other family members who have to come by and make sure she has someone here all the time so she doesn’t die. What? she is dying but we do the death watch thing anyway. Always some one here with mom.
When I was a youngster,and I mean eight or nine, I would always tease mom, ‘get her goat’ they used to call it, and she would chase me around the house, literally outside we would run around the house, it was a small house, only 4 rooms and 750 square feet, so she often times would have a glass of water that she would throw at me when in range. Usually just the water, sometimes if she was really aggravated she would throw the glass (a plastic tumbler) too, but she almost always missed with both. This, I believe, gave us a special bond, like ‘our little secret’, only everybody knew about it because, believe me, we weren’t quietly running, we were yelling at each other like the house was burning down. (see ,the firefighters reference returns, but only briefly).
So where was I? Oh, yeah, the beginning of the end. How do you know? I bet I will know it when I see it. I did with dad
. Yeah, he was a scholarly man that taught High School (note the caps? that is because I think that that job is way under rated in the importance scale). Scholarly is not really the right word but there really isn’t a word that would work. He was a thrifty man when younger and even in early retirement he went out and dug the six foot hole needed to hook up the new water company because he didn’t want to pay for the back hoe. The same man spent hours grading papers at home and making lesson plans. He made less than forty grand a year in all his working years. I think it was much less than that but I don’t know for sure. I know that he never got an advanced degree. Partly because he wanted to keep the money to live on and partly because when he took some ‘education courses’ he kept using the word bullshit when referring to the course description. So scholarly is not the word, maybe well read and interested in reading more, would be a good description. He was always efforting toward learning. He watched the PBS station when they did a nature show and loved the early days of Disney when Disney was the only place you could see a flick with turtles screwing and foxes running. He bought a telescope to watch the stars with when we were young, he bought a bigger one when we were older and a programmable one at seventy years old or so. He loved music, mostly classical and in his older years got to be a fanatical Opera fan. So I knew when the end was near with him. When he stopped watching PBS and only listened to music he had heard before, no new music of any type, it was apparent he had given up. He was a devout non believer and skeptic extraordinaire of anything not verifiable. So when he quit ‘learning’ and concentrating on the nuances of Gotterdamerung, I knew it was going to be soon.
So when mom stopped watching the Sunday news programs so she could holler at the Republicyuks, I knew it was soon. When she stopped posting stuff about them on Facebook, I was sure, and when she lost interest in even using the computer, I knew it was gonna be soon.
2
Well, she lost interest in eating and even in having water, then, even so, she would sit up on the side of the bed. I had to have the wheel chair removed from the bedside, because even as weak as she had become, she got into it the other night when I was sleeping and I didn’t wake up until she turned on damn near every light switch she could reach from the chair. When I finally got to her she had her cell phone in her hand and was trying to remember how to call 911. Luckily she didn’t remember how. But when I asked her what she was doing she said she was trying to call 911 because she couldn’t find me. I think if she could have walked she would have gone to the car and tried to drive away. She had a strong will.
It was only a few more days of pain and empty stares with no recognition of most people and then she was gone. The remarkable thing about it was that the day of the evening she died, she sat up on the side of the bed and when the nurse asked her her name, she knew it and her birth day too. My brother came storming, yes that was what it was like, in from out of town and sat with her holding her hand. He had not seen her at her worst and she was that, I told him that as bad as it looked this was the norm for the last several days. He said he had a feeling, he had had the same feeling with Dad and he was right then, he had stormed in that day and it was Dad’s last. I poo poohed the idea and when he calmed down he ran to do an errand. While he was gone she died. My wife was there to help me and spend the night with me and Mom but Mom died early in the evening. She appeared to be sleeping and then I noticed that she wasn’t appearing to breathe and I was right. May she rest in peace as they say, whatever the hell that means. Maybe it is a real commentary on life. The only time we are not at war is in death. Some would say that even in death there is war in a place called Hell. Maybe so but I hope not. That would be the cruelest thing there is.
3
Maybe Hell is cruel but what about this lovely health care system. I don’t mean HMOs or Obamacare or any such, I mean can’t there be something that can be done for the terminally ill that are in constant pain? I don’t know how I will react when they tell me I have terminal something. What goes through one’s mind when you know your days are short. Some people go and do them selves in but the majority have to sit in their hospice bed and wait, often in pain, until they don’t have to wait anymore. Is that not cruel and unusual? The murderers on death row get a quiet injection until they are gone, why can’t we do the same for an obvious terminal case? Is that a fair way to treat the mother and father who kept us from harm and made our life easier? Let them sit in pain knowing it will never go away and they will not recover? Cruel and usual is what that is.
My beloved dog was in a lot of pain and we gave him an injection to keep him from being in pain, at least that hasn’t been outlawed yet. We should have the same ability when Mom is hurting and won’t get better. Is this the ‘Chrisitan” thing to do? We treat our pets better than our elderly and sick. At least with more compassion. Not us but our laws.
(By the way I find it interesting that the computer’s ‘spellcheck’ program gives me the red underline on spellcheck and health care but not on HMO or Obamacare.)
Well that is the story about health care in the USA now what can we do about it before I get to experience it my self.
