Not Dead Yet

My father is still alive and with us. The last blog post I wrote was right after the doctor had told us my Dad had two weeks left to live. Well, he has surpassed those two weeks. It's six weeks later. And he's still here, but his health has declined steadily.

My Dad is now bedridden. That happened after he tried to go back to his bedroom after he was sitting down in his favorite chair in the living room. He made it about 1 1/2 feet. Then he was too tired to get up. I had to roll him in his walker. That took about 30 minutes. When I got him back into bed, I knew that he wasn't really going to get out of bed. Then we had to start managing his pain with morphine.

 When he first started hospice, the careworkers and nurses kept asking him if he was in pain. It seemed like for the first couple of months he was in hospice, we didn't have to worry about it. I was grateful. But then he had an experience where he was up and "awake" in his chair for about a day and a half. He didn't seem comfortable and my mother hadn't really done much to help him with his discomfort. It was then that I decided to give him morphine for the first time. My father's a stubborn guy and he wasn't going to say outright that he was in pain. I think he's just trying to let everything wear him down until he eventually expires. But it doesn't work that way. It just creates unnecessary pain for him while his body decides when it's going to stop working.

The thought of morphine scares my Mom to death and for the first couple of weeks I was administering it, she was afraid to. So she let him sit in pain. All of it made me incredibly angry and I kept getting to this place where I would fly off the handle. How could she let her judgment be impaired by her fear? I didn't understand it and it made me angry. She was willingly letting him suffer by not offering him medicine that could make him feel better all because she was afraid of what the morphine represented: that he was really dying.

Eventually she came around, thank goodness. Then he started refusing food and medicine and oxygen. He's not talking very much. And he sleeps all day. I wonder what he's hanging around for? It seems like he's ready to go, but that he's holding on for something. Is he waiting for my Mom to forgive him? Is he waiting for me to let him know that we're all going to be okay and that he can be at peace?

It's not like we want him to go, we just want him to not suffer any more. It's no fun to watch someone die. Either quickly or slowly. It sucks.