Hospice

I guess I haven't really made this information public, but I guess I had better before... ooh, what do I put here?... before it's too late? That seems so dramatic, and yet that's the fact of the matter. Death is dramatic, dying is not so much, or at least not usually. My husband is dying. I'm getting ahead of myself here though, so let me start at his last ER visit.

Several weeks ago Dean woke up in the middle of the night with a bleed from his tumor. To you it might just look like a bad bloody nose that just won't stop. He had had 5 bleeds in 6 weeks- one after every chemo treatment for the last three treatments. The first of these most recent bleeds (he had had two back in Nov and Jan) was bad: white as a sheet when he arrived at the ER, barely alive. This last one didn't start out so bad and I sent him to the hospital under the care of competent EMTs knowing he'd rally and telling him I'd come get him when he was ready to be discharged. And hour and half later, the ER doc called asking when I was coming in because my husband "could be dead in 10 minutes." Of course, I ran (and sped) to be by his side, and when I finally found my husband, to my dismay they had stuffed his nose again (they did this in January), but this time Dean is pretty sure they broke his nose from the inside while packing it. Dean had asked the ER doc to let him die, but as ERs are in the business of saving lives, that's what they did. I knew as soon as I saw Dean, he would have rather died than go through the (debatably unnecessary) packing of his nose again.

Before he went to the ER that morning, Dean had already made the decision to begin hospice care at home. We were going to start making calls that week. Thankfully, now the social worker at the hospital would set it all up. Now there was no question. There would be no more painful procedures for Dean.

Now there are even more difficult calls to make: funeral homes, cemetery. Meanwhile, hospice comes every week. And every week my husband's need for pain meds increases. His discomfort increases. When the nurse asks if we have any questions, I want to ask, "How much longer?" I'm afraid she will have no answer and that she will say "not long" and that she will say something that sounds like too long (I am so conflicted). Somehow I make it through these visits without crying, but inside of me I feel a part of me screaming, groaning, oh how I ache. I break afterwards.

And every night I go to sleep (or to work) with the possibility lingering in the back of my mind, "Will he bleed tonight?"