End stage stories

[MJIthewriter]

I'm bringing this topic back because it was requested. Anyways, if you have a story to share please feel free to post it here. I'm working on the med health page and I can add your story to it.

[jml1986]

  My story is a little different then the previous poster. It has been two months and I will never forget what I saw that night as my uncle lay dying. He had been sober for ten years but the damage was already done.
  I got the call on a Wednesday night around seven telling me to get to the hospital. Since we had for years been expecting this, I thought that it would not effect me the way it did. I arrived at the hospital just as they were bringing him in. I stood with my aunt and cousins waiting for them to come and tell us that he had not survived the trip. That did not happen. Instead they came out and said they would come and get us when they had him settled in the emergency room. After that it was us endlessly taking turns going back to see him and telling him goodbye.
  What I saw that night was not my uncle the way I had known him. Instead there was this very yellow man whos stomach was so swollen that I thought at any minute it could burst. He was so yellow that the only way I can describe it, was that he was the color of a banana skin. This included his eyes, and even his lips and tongue.
  Some how, and I don't know how, he was still awake and taking to me like it was just another day. From seven pm to three am, this endless visiting went on. He eventually started coughing up blood and after awhile they had to suction it out, but yet he still lay there talking. You could tell he was getting weaker by the minute, but it seemed as if he had so much he still needed to say.
  At three am they decided to move my uncle to a private room. We all told him that we would be up to see him as soon as they got him settled. We all said our I love yous and we went out to wait until they said we could go up. At three thirty they let us go up to see him. I remember his two grandsons going in the room as we were walking towards it, and they just walked in and came right out sobbing. My mom who was a former nurse went in to see him and then came back out and told his daughters they needed to get in there. As we all went in the room together, there he laid, no longer awake and talking but he had slipped into the coma in that thirty minutes while they were moving him.
  For the next thirty minutes my cousins, my mom, my aunt and I stood around his bed singing the hymns that he had loved to sing when he was going to the nursing homes to sing for the elderly. We watch as his breathing got slower and slower, and then it stopped. My mother checked him to make sure he was gone and the sent me out to get the staff nurse. The nurse came in and confirmed that he had passed away, but said they had to have the doctor come up to call it. He did.
  The staff left us alone with him, while we all just stood there holding each other and crying, but said to let her know when we wanted her to call the funeral home. It seemed like forever standing there, but I know it was only a few minutes, when the nurse came in and ask us to leave while they did the post mortum prep. Once she was done we went back in and we all kissed him goodbye and waited for the funeral director to get there.
  The next time I saw my uncle was two days later, laying in his casket. He no longer looked sick, and they had done a great job removing the fluid from his stomach and covering up the discoloration of his skin. By the time the bodies get to the funeral home, the skin is no longer yellow, it has now turned to gray from all of the poison in the body. Thankfully the were able to cover that up and make him look normal.
  We buried him three days after he passed away, and as I stood there, I knew that this may have been the first time that I had seen an alcoholic die, but it would not be my last. For me this sadly will repeat itself because I have other famly members that drink just like my Uncle Bob did, and I thank god everyday that when my own father passed away nine years ago, it was a sudden death, because he too was an alcoholic and had he lived, he would have died the same painful death that my uncle did.

[boogieman]

If anything, I have learned that I don't want to die an alcoholic death. Hopefully, I've had enough of hell on earth, but I can't say "never" because I have a disease that tells me that I don't have one. A few years ago, I was confronted with the cold reality of untreated alcoholism. Someone close to me began drinking heavily in part to silence the punishing voice of their conscience. They had only used alcohol in moderation up to the last few years, and had been given a clean bill of health just months prior to a sudden decline. Being an alcoholic myself, I saw the progression from occasional use to excess on a daily basis. But I was unprepared for what  was to come.

I received a phone call informing me of this person's admission to the SICU of a local hospital. They were suffering from severe abdominal pain, and the doctors couldn't figure out why. When I saw them, it was obvious to me that they were also experiencing symptoms of  acute alcohol withdrawal. Our brief conversation on that day would turn out to be our last.

As the next days passed, the pain became so intense that a morphine induced sleep was the only way to keep them stable at all. But after a week, organ failure became the paramount concern. As the sickness progressed, kidney failure and a cardiac arrest prompted an emergency exploratory surgery. Inside, the surgeon found a mass of infection where the now liquefied pancreas used to reside. These septic remains had spread throughout the body, propagating organ failure. The surgeon cleaned as much away as he could and predicted a dismal outcome.

Two weeks after that first phone call, I was forced to make a decision as to resuscitation efforts to be utilized when the next inevitable crash occurred. Their survival would be precarious and very limited at best, with complications such as diabetes, constant pain, having to relearn how to write and speak again, and an overall quality of life that would be a mere shadow of their former self. That was in addition to the breaking of ribs and other agony that heroic measures would entail.

I tried to put myself in the same position as best as I could and made the choice. For the next three hours I stood bedside holding the hand of someone who had always been there for me, and watched the monitors display the heart rate decrease to an unchanging horizontal streak. The last moment consisted of a sudden strong squeeze of my hand and a mix of blood and other fluids from the mouth and nose. It was finished.

I still relive that final scene on occasion, but try to use such morbid flashbacks as not so subtle reminders of not just who I am, but more importantly what I am and what lies in store if I try to drink again successfully. Just for today, I haven't forgotten.