Mom tenatiously keeps hanging on. where was this fighting spirit earlier? when she first had brain surgery, she kept saying “I’m dying! I’m dying! It’s all over! Everything is ruined!” now she just keeps going like the energizer bunny. Why is she changing her mind at the last minute? Why couldn’t she have been determined earlier?
\nI got up every two hours last night to check on her. That went pretty well and it kept her pretty much out of pain. Except that I’m exhausted. Margie woke me up this morning and told me I’d better sit with my mom. She was breathing quickly and her pulse was racing, she was hot and sweaty. So I sat and held her hand for a while. My dad was leaving for work. He said, “call me if you think anything is about to happen.” I said, “uh, dad….” but he was already out the door. And after a while, we realized it wasn’t it and I went to take a shower. Vince and Tammy brought lunch, which was very nice. and then Christi decided maybe she had better head off to work too. I don’t know how she could have the energy with me waking her up every two hours and sometimes trying to ask her questions, “does mom look like she’s in pain?”
\nMom hasn’t been reacting really at all tofay. Her eyes are mostly closed. When they open, they’re grayish and cloudy and don’t focus. Or just for a moment. She’ll hear my voice and look at me and almost focus and almst seem to recognize me. She’s up to .4 ml of morphine every four hours and I’m thinking of going up to .5, because the .4 isn’t enough a lot of the time. Her heart has been racing all day. Her temperature has been going up and down. she sweats off and on. It’s hard to tell because I put ointment on her dry skin yesturday, so a lot of her is shiny. She twitches in sort of convulsions. Marie says not to worry about it, that everybody dying does that and te lorazepam won’t stop it. I called hospice twice yesterday to ask questions. The first time was because I had given her all the lorazepam I could and she was still twitchy (“Give her some more.”) and because she had a lot of wet respiration and I thought her mouth was filling up with fluid. (“Do you have a dentist tool or something I can use to get the fluid out of her mouth?” “Use a dry washcloth and after you get everything out, give her three drops of atripine.”)
\nSo right now she’s lying in bed, with her eyes open but unseeing, breathing noisily (5 – 6 seconds apart), swallowing occasionally and thoughtfully raising her eyebrows periodically. Her heart is still beating very fast and her head is warm and has turned a highly alarming shade of blue. Her eyes are sunken in. She looks like you’d expect a corpse to look, but she’s still hanging on. Almost nothing in her catheter bag today. Nobody even offered her water or anything. I doubt she’d take it and it would prolly just end up making her gugrle more while breathing. Oh she just looked highly paniced and clenched, so I’ve given her two more drops of lorazepam.
\nI went to get more oreos. you need munchies for your bedside vigils, especially as they head into their second week. Mom, you can’t always run around changing your mind at the last minute! Why are you doing this to yourself? You’re freaking us all out! I mean, we’ll miss you and stuff. . .
\nchristi went to the candle shop below her office this evening. She works in the Mission District. the proprietor saw her coming and re-opened the shop and handed her two BVM (Blessed Virgin Mary) candles and said, “you need these.” So now we have a whole bunch of candles. I got some essential oils to drop in them too. I was looking for ones to promote calm and peace and death. But all of them said they were for rejuvenation and exhiliration and energy and stuff like that. That’s definitely not what we’re looking for. So, I’ve been dropping in the candles drops of geranium (calm), rose (my mom loves roses), and vanilla (seems calming to me).
\nMom’s fingernails are getting bluish, that’s suppossed to mean that the end is near. But her skin hasn’t “broken down” yet. something alarming sounding that I’m not asking what it means. I’m sure it will happen soon. I know impatience is the wrong reaction. I don’t like seeing her suffer. This can’t go on much longer, since she never even woke up today. and thirst will get her if nothing else does. I think she’s going to have to go through every possible bit of suffering before this is over. All the sufferings of Job will be hers. I woouldn’t amkea dog go through this. I’d take it to the vert and have it put to sleep. But my mother I have to sit and watch suffer things I wouldn’t make a cat endure. This is all fucked up. Listen up folks. If I’m unconscious on my deathbed, in pain with no chance of recovery, call up doctor Kevorkian. For real. Maybe I should call my mom’s doctor tomorrow. I wonder how my dad would react…. I don’t know if I want to have that coversation with him. He’s extra weird right now (I’m sure I am too) and we’re kind of avoiding each other. I wish the social worker would come talk to him about his feelings or something, cuz I don’t want to. Maybe I should call her. And I’m not sleeping.
\nMy mom never wants me to leave when I come visit. As soon as it’s dark, she’d say, “you can’t go home this late, you’d better just stay over.” Well, now she’s got me here….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mom tenatiously keeps hanging on. where was this fighting spirit earlier? when she first had brain surgery, she kept saying “I’m dying! I’m dying! It’s all over! Everything is ruined!” now she just keeps going like the energizer bunny. Why is she changing her mind at the last minute? Why couldn’t she have been determined … Continue reading <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[76,103,104],"class_list":["post-2103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-celesteh","tag-death","tag-mom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2103"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2103\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4356,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2103\/revisions\/4356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}