A Brief Interlude for the Very Bad Thing

Dave went home and had one good day in which he was slightly lucid and could talk to his friends who came out en masse and cleaned his house.

For four days I slept on the couch next to the hospital bed in the living room  and neither of us got more than two hours of sleep any night. He usually doesn't sleep, plus the bipolar meds were at CVS (seriously, four days to fill a prescription?) so he was up, and then he was experiencing terminal agitation.

One the fourth day the doctor looked at him and said, "Three more days." I signed up for 24 hour home health care. No one could start that night, but three days, right? "You'll be fine. he's comfortable." And then, "Since he likes fentanyl, let's do one fentanyl patch on each arm."  

That night the on-call hospice nurse was nice enough to come by with meds. She looked at him and said, "Two days." 

At midnight I sat down on the couch, and when I woke up in three hours, damn me, he was dead. Cold head, cold arms, raging hot belly. And don't tell me about how people wait until they are alone to die, they die because the people tethering them to the earth are gone. Or on the couch snoring, not giving them the syringe slurry of Dilaudid and Oxy.

Someone said to me, "Now he's not suffering," and I thought, "Well, if he had suffered I would have known about it," because he'd been plenty vocal up till midnight, and they did say midnight was when the fentanyl would take full effect. I guess that's "the lie when somebody dies" for Dave.

No suffering. I can't even imagine Dave not suffering. What would he do? What would he talk about?

Comments

[Big Dot]

I’m sorry. Tough times for you, but at least no more for Dave. Wishing you strength to get through all the stuff that follows.

[TheQueen]

Big Dot - true, no more tough times for Dave, unless there is an afterlife and he is watching as I unearth his deceptions …

[Allison]

Oof, I'm sorry. I think death comes when it comes. It's ridiculous that the medical professionals thought they could call it (I would have been impressed if they'd been right, but it would just have been a massive coincidence).

[theQueen]

Allison - I think they were estimating based on nature, not what I gave him, which was nature plus painkillers.