My partner is home from the hospital, where she was rushed last week after becoming septic, most likely from a cat bite. Our cat Darby, whom she adores, and who has slept on her bed throughout the latest phase of her decline, bit her when she kicked him in her sleep because he had been playing with her toes. Twenty-four hours later she had a fever of 103 and was semi-conscious. The aide called 911. She was in the ER for almost 48 hours, then in a bed for the next three days. They gave her about 10 bags of antibiotics plus some pills to take home.
Despite not having a diagnosis (her heart disease is controlled with medication), she is fading. Basically, all the symptoms she has are those of someone dying of what used to be called "old age". This article, which I found by doing a Google search, bears this out. I don't know how long she has left. No doctor has said that she has six months or less, and that therefore she should be in hospice. On other other hand, pain is not her problem. Lack of a life force is. Here is a list of what is happening now.
1. She never gets out of bed. She refuses all attempts at physical therapy that involve trying to walk, even though she had been able to do this in March in the nursing home.
2. She eats very little. Every passing week she eats less. Now mostly she just drinks Ensure, eats ice cream, and drinks milk and water. She refuses meals that she once liked. (I have told the aides that if she refuses food she has to have a bottle of Ensure.)
3. She sleeps most of the time.
4. She is confused about the time of day, what day it is, and when I am coming, although she knows me and all other people she has contact with.
5. She has lost interest in most things other than snuggling, her own body, ice cream, and cute programs about animals on tv.
6. Her hands are cold.
I can't be with her all the time but I want to be with her more than I used to. I have to work 20 hours a week and want to sing (more on that later - that's the "optimism" part) but I don't want her to die without me there. A friend who has watched several people die said that as the actual time approaches I will know. Then I will take both cats (I couldn't bring Darby back to her house when she came back from the hospital) to her house along with all my blood pressure medicines and just stay there. I stayed with my mother when I thought she was dying, which was 48 hours before she died.
I don't think she is suffering.
As for the optimism, it is ironic that I keep singing better and better (my voice keeps getting bigger and the high - and low - notes keep getting easier) but am no longer interested in all that heavy 19th Century Italian music.
My teacher and I are going to put on a concert on October 1. As the piano where it will be is out of tune (or was last year) we are not doing a lot of opera anyhow. We were going to do the duet from La Gioconda but he said he feels that it is too high for him now, so we will do the duet from Samson et Dalila that precedes "Mon Coeur" and then I will just sing "Mon Coeur".
We also talked about some mezzo and baritone duets from the French repertoire. I might enjoy doing those so we might do a Shakespeare-themed concert next Spring. I would love to do the duet with Gertrude and Hamlet from the Ambroise Thomas opera and then we might do the Henry VIII-Anne Boleyn duet from Saint Saens' Henry VIII, which is based on the Shakespeare play. And we could end with something from West Side Story.
So life goes on.....
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