Belvidere, IL 61008 
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Return to Grief LibraryMy best friend; My Mother
Continued
It started out fine but as we sat outside and talked and she smoked, she seemed to be more and more distant, not able to answer me. Then she let out this terrible sound, I thought she was playing at first, but then her eyes rolled back in her head and her lips turned blue and her whole body was rigid and shaking, I knew she was having a seizure, I screamed for help for what seemed forever.
Everything started to move in slow motion, I had an older lady stand with mom and told her to protect her head no matter what happened, I ran in and shook the ER doors and suddenly people came from everywhere. Once I got them to understand that she was a patient there and what had gone on in the last week since she had been there they finally got her to stop seizing, I kept trying to tell them she had been fine when we went out, and that my mom had a DNR, I couldn't stop crying. I felt nervous and guilty and alone. My brother had gone home to Georgia once mom came out of the coma, and everyone else had gone home but me.
The next day she woke up back in CCU wondering why I was still there, she had no memory of the seizure. Her kidney function never returned to normal and the doctors talked with us and suggested dialysis until a liver-kidney transplant could be performed. Mom had surgery to prepare her veins in her arm for the dialysis as well as placement of a double lumen catheter in her chest for access until her arm was ready and she had her first two dialysis sessions at the hospital.
In the mean time I resigned my job at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice where I had been on medical leave and prepared to bring mom home to live with my family. I moved all of her belongings from her apartment to my house. Once home after a few more dialysis sessions she was put back in the hospital for more complications and the doctors discovered that her liver failure was so acute that she would never live to get on the waiting list for a transplant, so we made the decision to stop the dialysis and go on hospice and keep mom as comfortable as possible.
That was the middle of September. The first few weeks were not too bad, the hospice people were fantastic. But as we got into October, she got up less and less and it became harder and harder for me to help her get in and out of bed for anything and her pain got worse and worse combined with terrible nausea. Then she became unable to swallow, she would want to drink and I would have to tell her no, she couldn't remember she couldn't swallow, I would just walk out side and cry and cry.
More and more she slipped away and finally my hospice nurse told me to call the family in from out of town, my brother arrived just days before she passed. We both feel she knew he was there. My children (a boy 5 and a girl 3) wanted to go back to see her often and I never denied them access to her, I did not want them to be afraid of illness and death seeing as it is all part of life and I did my best to help them understand what was happening. On October 21st hospice couldn't find an aide to help with mom in our 24 hr care and my aunt and I endured the most awful night you can imagine, mom was having seizures and it was necessary for one of us to be with her at all times, giving her morphine and Atavan every hour to try and calm her.
Our angel Shirley arrived at 8:00 a.m. on the day Momma died. She was wonderful. Around 1:00 p.m. mom started to bring up old blood and Shirley let us know that the end was very near. My aunt and I and my brother were in the room when she took her last breath,I told them she was gone but the nurse said to wait. I knew she was gone, I just knew.
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