Hospice doesn't kill people. If you've got a condition that makes you likely to die within six months, you can enter hospice; but that doesn't obligate you to die. And it doesn't mean you have to be uncomfortable while you go on lingering. Hospice keeps you comfortable.
It doesn't withhold treatment that would, for instance, bring down a fever or stop vomiting or help you breathe.
My mom has caught a norovirus that her roommate had last week. The roommate's mother had it Sunday. The lady who checks the trashcans came down with it while I was visiting on Monday. It's going around; there are standing treatment orders for anyone who gets it: liquids-only diet, room rest, the meds hospice approved for Mom.
She has a fever of 102. When you are 91.5 years old, you don't get a fever like that unless you are going-to-war sick.
My mother's immune system goes to war with a vengeance. I am in awe of her immune system. Since she entered the nursing home, she has not died of the flu, of multiple UTIs, of vomiting every single meal for weeks, of pneumonia or of falling out of her wheelchair and cracking open her head. All of those things were trying to kill her when we put her in hospice.We put her in hospice because she was dying — of the UTIs, the pneumonia, and she was miserable about the vomiting that would not stop. She would say that her side hurt a little or her finger hurt, but really it meant parts of her were in serious discomfort. She had a bedsore. She was on a catheter.
But then came hospice, and she got better.
She's been stable and relatively well since March 2015, when we put her in hospice and they changed the way she was handled, literally. Thanks to the nursing home staff, which is a bunch of kind people, and also the hospice regimen which removed almost all of the remedies she was taking, her immune system has stepped up.
Before the phone rang this evening while I was teaching my class at the arts center, I'd almost forgotten the horrid state of chronic emergency we lived under last winter. It was a sleepless urgency, and there were important documents I was not able to go anyplace without. Also, the phone sat beside me night and day, and it rang, a lot, always with news like that I received tonight: Your mother is very sick. We are doing this. We are doing this other thing. We will continue.
Since hospice I've had time to bitch about the unhappiness, the sadness of witnessing her dementia. I've had the luxury of an intellectual abstraction, self-study, the trying to observe my grief; and I've gotten ... comfortable.
It's like I have been in hospice, too.
I read your blog and sometimes I comment and then delete it, not always wanting to seem like I'm comparing my mom's end of life journey to your mom's. So instead of that I will say I'm glad you have this blog and that you are able to sometimes observe your grief. It changes you, but it opens your heart too to everyone who has been there in some way taking care of a loved one. My heart is open and aches for you, what you are going through.
ReplyDeleteI would be glad to read anything you wrote. More than glad.
ReplyDeleteI think recognize the feeling behind deleting a memory you might have written. Lately I delete a lot of the things I start to write on other people's Facebook pages. I don't want to be that person who seizes the opportunity of their unhappiness to display mine.
But this is a different space. I want this blog to be an exercise in thinking about life, and I would be glad to have your story added to mine, because then we would be thinking together — which is a beautiful, beautiful hope.
Even though I sort-of dread the intimate sadness that shows up when friends stop me to talk about their parents, that's just my immediate, childish will reacting. When I reflect like an adult and try to remember my ultimate desire here, it makes me feel heard that people are inspired to tell their story.