So much for our concert last night. Darn. The tickets can be exchanged for another gig though so we’re gonna look up what’s coming that we haven’t already paid for. Maybe a Bob Dylan show is in the works after all- Kim might need that soon.

Yvette (Kim’s Mom) isn’t doing good. She was in the hospital for a couple days this week- she isn’t eating or drinking. We knew she was dehydrated by the way she acted and by her vital signs. Now the big question facing Kim and her sisters: G Tube.

Right now they’re doing the nasogastric tube. Which is ok for a little while. GTube is different- it’s more permanent and leads to other issues. She doesn’t have a POC in place but Kim is her guardian, and she will utimately make all the choices. Financial and otherwise. The medical descisions are always tough. They have a meeting tomorrow with Yvette and the doctors to go over all the options. In a sense if they chose no GTube now, Kim’s Mom’s days are clearly numbered now. It’s a matter of weeks.

I hate it when this happens. I remember when my Mother was finally at her last days. She had stopped eating weeks before. But she wasn’t demented- she had cancer that wasn’t treatable. She was literally dying by the minute. Pam took care of her during the week, Mike had her on holidays and I was there for the weekends. In the last two months though, it took a toll on both of them so I just moved in with Mom. And took care of her 24/7.

Em or Lisa or Krissy would come with me every weekend. Mom loved having the kids there and they brought some IMP back into her life. Mike would bring Sara over as well and she stayed with us for some weekends- kind of like a big sleepover at Grammies.

Everyone focused on eating. FOOD. Intake. Nutrition.

Mom didn’t eat much. So I tried to make the best of the little amounts she could eat. I remember cooking everything with real butter; I remember adding fattening stuff to all the food; I made her frappes with real ice cream and whole milk AND half and half.
Au Gratin potatoes with real butter and cream. That sort of stuff. It didn’t matter. She had lost her will to live and just wanted to go on. I didn’t see that. None of us did. We insisted the doctors prescribe her with appetite increasing drugs. We insisted upon vitamins and mineral supplements because we thought that might be a problem. We tried to make every dining experience special. It still didn’t click.

One day Mom told me: “Stop trying to force me to eat!” I asked her WHY. WHY are you doing this to US?
She said back: “I want to move on. I’m dying and I want to do it my way.”

We spent an hour talking about this. I finally got it.

So it was. I stopped pushing the eating. I stopped pushing the supplements and appetite pills. And I respected her wishes even though it killed me. It hurt to watch her lose even more weight- she was down to 65 lbs the day she died. She never weighed more than 130lbs to begin with BUT…watching someone starve themselves to death is VERY HARD. Mom’s cancer had taken a toll on her digestive system and she just had NO appetitie. Nothing we could do changed it. It’s not so much that she gave up as it was she accepted her condition; she didn’t want all the treatments and life-elongating therapies that would have just prolonged this horror. She chose to do it her way, even when it didn’t make sense to my sister and brother.

I was in charge of it all- the POA, HCPOC…I had to make the decisions about tubes and hydration and all that. In the end, they did place a nasotube in Mom; when I got to the hospital she asked me to have it removed and it was. She went home and died three days later.

Kim is going to face all this and sooner than later. As healthcare people we tend to focus on the things that keep people alive.
Like food, water, shelter, comfort, disease treatments. We have to be reminded that the person, the patient, is the one who should be making the calls when it comes to their own life. Unfortunately, Kim’s Mom’s dementia has taken away her ability to make any choices. Kim is really on her own with this.