Death while on the road...
I don't really need support or hugs or whatever. I'm about over this. I just thought I'd post in case anybody wondered where I've been for the last bit, and because I feel like running my mouth (fingers) a minute.
Got the news last Friday about 45 minutes from my drop that my mother had crashed overnight, and was brain dead on life support.
That was hard. She was already dead, so there was no use getting my load repowered and heading straight for the house, but it was really hard to go through the motions. So I dropped and hooked and drove a mile and unloaded/loaded and drove a mile and dropped and hooked again, and finally came home.
I bobtailed to the hospital to say goodbye to the animated corpse that used to be my mother. Life support is horrible. How could people have taken that Terry Shiavo thing all the way as far as they did?
Mom was a corpse having air forced into her, making her whole body convulse every couple of seconds, making her dead eyes open and close like those of a child's doll. Her eyes were completely dead. I've seen lots of dead animals, and I know what dead eyes look like. Not stoned, not drugged, not blind, but just dead. Lifeless. No life, no light, gone, totally gone.
She was on the max of dopamine, morphine, and epinephrine, and her heart was still winding down, down, down. She was an athlete, and had a damn strong heart. Her blood pressure was always ridiculously low, strong like an ox.
It took Dad and I about two minutes to make the mutual unanimous decision to go ahead and yank the plug, and not wait until her heart finally dwindled away to nothing, where it was already heading, in spite of all the drugs.
She was basically so far gone not even life support could support her life. Not without a heart/lung machine or something maybe. Maybe they could have zapped her heart back to life, but to what end?
Horrible. Just horrible. I should have gone there a day earlier. I'm home every day now. I almost went Thursday, but Dad said she was in a shitty mood when he was there earlier, so I was going to let her have another day to recover in the ICU before I visited. She was supposed to recover. She was supposed to come out of it. She was in "poor" condition, which is good in ICU language. Not "critical" or "serious" but just "poor."
That Friday, the 21st, was a long, long day.
She was only 55. She never even got old. She didn't seem that sick either. She was a little ill for a few weeks, but not five alarm go to the ER ill. Not until Tuesday, and she didn't want to go to the hospital on Tuesday. She hated hospitals. Dad took her Wednesday, and she went straight to the ICU. Then she just up and died, and died hard, with both feet and her arms straight out, balls to the wall, the way she did everything else.
Life is too short.
I know exactly what happened to her after sifting through the ashes of her life, but it's a private story, not for Google to know.
The one good thing to come of this is that I finally have inspiration to write the novel that has been eluding me all this time.
It will be a horror novel.
|
