Sara..

I still have not been able to answer Sara's email.  I just.. can't.

I cannot imagine what it would be like to see your parent waste away for over twenty years.  Sara's dad has Parkinson's and has been in a nursing home for ages.  Her mother's house has stairs and she cannot physically manage his needs.  It must be breathtakingly painful for all of them.  Whenever I think about it, it makes me so sad.  I think about what we expected as a much-shortened life expectancy for my dad, maybe eight years tops.  (He had been diagnosed with dementia, thought to be Alzh.)  I can't imagine that dragged out over so many more years.  It just about breaks me in two.  Sara said her dad is a very different person now compared to when she was young.  I believe it.  She said he has no quality of life in the nursing home.  I absolutely believe that also.  I so desperately wanted to keep my dad out of a nursing home for that reason.  Fate came along and made sure he stayed out. ... Grrrr, fate... separating us... grrrr.  Enough of that.  It just nauseates me to think of their family situation with him.  A slow death is a cruel one.  That's why we're almost glad our dad went so damn fast.  It didn't have time to rob him of everything.  We didn't have to watch it after all.

Now that we are in mid-January, I am as expected having to confront the issues of last year at this time.  I feel my mind spinning, remembering how I was trying to get in front of the problem, my heart searching for alternative reasons for his fogginess.  I had forgotten about the conversation at DS with the electrical heart doc/technician, who said emphatically that his fogginess had nothing whatsoever to do with the cardiac arrthymia (sp?).  Irregular heartbeat + delirium would not not NOT warrant that kind of disorientation.  Delirium causes all kinds of chaos in elderly patients, but not to the degree we saw with him.  Dementia was underneath it.

Bottom line: we did the damned best we could with what we had.  He died of kidney failure post op, not from the dementia.  We HAD to do the surgery, otherwise he would have died most likely of the infection.  We had no choice.  We did the best for our patient that we could.  His kidneys crapped out and that was the fact.  Like Elizabeth Kubler Ross writes in On Grief and Grieving, getting him to the hospital sooner would not necessarily have changed the outcome.

Of course, I just miss him and wrestle with it.