01.03.05
A Death Story
For at least a month, my father has been sleeping his recliner each night because his cancer makes it too painful to sleep lying down. On Monday, December 13th, Dad woke up in the middle of the night and went to the bedroom to check on Mom. She hadn’t been feeling too well the past few days — kind of spaced out and listless. Mom was asleep, but breathing funny. Also, she had shit all over herself. Dad and Brother called the paramedics and she was taken to the hospital.
My mom has had bowel problems as long as she could remember, so it wasn’t much of a suprise when the doctors decided that she had a bowel obstruction. This was serious, but fixable. The doctors could go in, clear out or remove the obstruction and put everything back together. However, for the first time in her life, she refused to have the medical treatment. My sister called me at about 1:00 pm that day and told me all this. Along with the news that if she did not have the surgery, she would die in four or five days.
I called the hospital’s ICU and asked for Mom. They handed her a cordless phone. We talked for a few minutes, and for the life of me I can not remember a thing she said. I do remember though that she wasn’t making a whole lot of sense. And then the battery on the fucking phone died. When I called back, the hospital said that there was no way for them to get her a phone.
Well, it was my turn to lose my shit.
Fortunately, Husband works at the same company I do. I called him up and asked him to go on a break with me. I explained the situation to him. While I smoked a cigarette (and I’m not a smoker), he held me. We went together up to see my supervisor and asked if I could please go home so that I could go see my Mom. My supervisor said that of course I could go and to keep in touch.
I picked up the baby from day care and raced home. I packed a couple of bags, diapers and all that. I got my email and sent one out to my professors telling them why I was ignoring my classes (see the archives). At about 4:00 pm I was getting the baby into the car when I got another call from Sister. Sister said that Mom had come to and had agreed verbally to have the surgery. The doctors whisked her into an operating room.
After I hung up the phone with Sister, I thought, “Hmm… maybe I don’t even need to go up there.”
You see, my mom has gone through incidents similar to this one (in severity, but not the actual condition) about a thousand times. She always pulled through.
My next thought was, “Fuck it. I might as well go up there. It is only a ninety minute drive. I will have plenty of time to visit and still come back in time for work tomorrow.”
When I arrived at Dad’s house, Brother was there and Sister was still at the hospital. Maybe 15 minutes after I arrived, Sister called Dad and said that the doctors needed to talk to him. The doctors told my dad that when they opened Mom up, they found that her entire large intestine was gangrenous. The doctors told Dad that they could remove Mom’s large intestive and she would be fed the rest of her life through a tube in her neck and be hooked up to a coloscopy bag. If they did nothing, Mom would probably pass away in 24 - 48 hours.
My parents had many discussions in the past about their wishes in situations such as these. We all knew instantly that my mom would not want to live that way. Dad told the doctor to close her up, make her as comfortable as possible and not to put her on any life support. The doctor said that they would do that.
I asked my brother to watch the baby and I went down to the hospital. My sister was already there. My mom was unconscious, but I talked to her anyways. After about a half an hour, I went home so that we could bring Dad and Daughter to see her.
The second Dad entered her room, my mom came to. She couldn’t talk, but she could see us, hear us, move her head and squeeze our hands. My father began to talk to Mom and told her what the doctors had found. He told her that if they did nothing, she would pass away soon. What did she want? By nodding her head and squeezing her hand, she told him that she did not want to live in the unending pain and discomfort that removing her large intestine would bring.
One by one, we all said our goodbyes. We asked her if she was in any pain. She let us know that she was not. The nurse broke the rules and let us bring the baby in so that Mom could see her.
We left the hospital at about 3:30 am that night. The next morning when I got up, I began looking for our relatives’ phone numbers so I could let them know that Mom was going to pass away. While telling my uncle (mom’s brother-in-law), a pastor in the Seventh Day Adventist Church what had happened, my brother came in and said that mom had died. Between sobs I told my uncle that my mother had died. He said, “April, let’s pray.” Uncle gave a beautiful prayer for the comfort of us, Mom’s family, for the beautiful release of Mom’s soul to sleep until Christ’s return, and for our reunion in Rapture.
