Published on Aug 23, 2014 by Bobby Powell
Folks, my wife – who has been bravely battling Stage 4 Colo-rectal and liver cancer for nearly two years – has been getting worse and worse over the past few months. I had to call an ambulance last Saturday afternoon due to her increasing refusal to make sense. And then she stopped talking all together. I did not realize it at the time, but she had slipped into a diabetic coma, her heart racing at nearly 200 BPM.
As you watch the video you will notice that I couldn’t find her “Do Not Resuscitate” order. Well thank God I couldn’t find it because a few minutes after I left the hospital Saturday night DeLynn had a heart attack, and for several minutes she was gone; but because I had left instructions to revive her that is exactly what they did. Her written DNR stated that should her breathing ever stop they were to let her go.
Even though I went against her wishes, ultimately she was glad that I did. Apparently there are several levels of care to withhold, it’s not as simple as “pulling the plug.” The way that she had her paperwork filled out, the doctors would have stopped working on her as soon as she stopped breathing, which she did a few times. We both agreed that was WAY too soon, so we will be sitting down with a couple of the hospital’s social workers to correctly fill out Living Wills for both of us.
Over the past few days she has improved enough to be moved out of ICU into a semi-private room; but even though they control every gram of food and every dram of liquid that she ingests, and measure everything that comes out, they can not get her diabetes under control, nor can they get her heart rate stabilized. I don’t imagine that they will let her come home until they get those two things leveled out.
From what I understand, they are finally going to send a couple of home health care nurses to help us out too. Nothing like having a client literally dying because they didn’t have a skilled medical practitioner taking care of them to make bureaucrats realize they weren’t “at capacity” after all. When people still had a lick of common sense they called that “Closing the barn door after the horses have escaped.”
I’m sorry if I sound bitter, I don’t want to be. I don’t want to lose my wife is all. She really is my everything.
What a roller coaster of a week it has been dear friends. First, DeLynn nearly dies and then I wake up looking like a Walking Dead reject with a bloody crust the size of a quarter in my left ear where blood had pooled, and my right eye swollen shut like it had been super glued with blood. I have no idea why I’m leaking blood from my ear and eye like this (although I’m fairly certain it is NOT Ebola.) Check out this picture:http://tinyurl.com/nfe5rmx
Why is he recording this?
Really. Why can’t he allow his wife to have some privacy and dignity during her last days on earth?