Maverick .... from a wife's perspective

Latest update.

Redcoat is home for a week as freight takes a break for the holidays. He dropped off his load in Louisiana last week and is home now until the 4th. It's been a lonely holiday for him as he is home by himself while I've been staying down here at the hospice with my mom. At least he is able to sleep in his own bed.

For my Christmas present, he is going to detail my truck for me so that is giving him something to do while he is home.

I watch my mom getting weaker by the day. The morphine is making her dream and she's having trouble keeping track of what time of the day it is. When her meals come, she asks me whether it's breakfast, lunch or dinner. Mostly our days are now filled with trying to find a good position for her to lay so she doesn't hurt as much.

Redcoat and I went down to WalMart and bought several of the memory foam cushions to help her get comfortable. She uses the neck cushion under her head because the hole in it allows her to lay on her left side without putting pressure on her ear which had become very sore from laying on a regular pillow. I put another cushion under her right arm which currently is causing her the most pain. Then I put the knee cushion between her knees to help keep her hips aligned with her spine. Then it's a matter of pulling the mat under her to get her butt in the right place. After all that, I tug on her pajama top and the mat under her to get rid of any wrinkles that eventually feel like chasms to her after a while, and finally after a shot or two of morphine from the pump, she is able to doze.

We go through this after every foray to use the bathroom. I anticipate that within another week or so she probably won't be able to sit up anymore and that's going to really be bad for her as she is so dreading when that time comes.

For now, I read to her and sit beside her working on the quilt. She listens to the TV sometimes and the rest of the time she sleeps while the cancer does its thing eating away at her.

Stay tuned.

 

Latest update.

After a week off, Redcoat is back to work. I envy him. At this moment he should be in Oxford, MS loading up some particle board that is due in Cedartown, GA this afternoon. His route takes him right past the hospice where I am staying with my mom.

For the past few days, Redcoat has started up his truck and let it run for a while to make sure the battery is charged up. It has been getting pretty cold here in Mississippi the past few nights and this morning it's 22 degrees outside.

My mom has been steadily deteriorating the past week. Wednesday was the last day she could manage to get out of bed to use the bathroom and it was time for the Foley catheter. Friday was her last day of eating any kind of real food. Since then she has had only small nibbles of cereal, bananas, or a bit of cracker.

Saturday night was a nightmare because her morphine pump line was leaking and it was hours before I figured out why she was in so much agony. I kept hitting the bolus switch every 15 minutes but her pain kept getting worse and worse. Then I had the nurses give her 2 Percocets, but the crushed up pills are so bitter even though they are mixed with pudding. She threw them up in less than 5 minutes. By 4 in the morning she was begging to die. I thought maybe if I moved her it might help and when I grabbed the pad she was laying on to tug on it, it was wet where a fitting of her pain pump lay across it. It hit me what the problem was but just to be sure I held the fitting in my hand the next time I hit the bolus switch and sure enough, I ended up with morphine in my hand. I was like, OMG no wonder she's been in so much pain. So I told the nurses about it and they changed out the tubing. Once that was done, the pain started going away within an hour. Then, a couple hours later, the alarm on the pump went off saying there was an obstruction. They determined it was at the site where the needle goes into her arm so she required yet another tubing change. At this point I told them they needed to go ahead and switch her from the morphine to the Dilaudin. At first they balked because she hadn't finished the morphine bag but they had an order to switch her once that bag was empty and I think they felt bad that she suffered so much during the night so the RN went ahead and switched her to the Dilaudin. What a difference it has made. The Dilaudin seems to help her to relax and her hallucinations are not near as bad as they are with the morphine.

Then last night was the worst night of all since I have been here. All evening Mom had been complaining that she needed to pee. She wanted to get out of bed to go and I thought it was just some drug-induced confusion. But by midnight, I realized she was having some real discomfort as she kept saying she had to go. So I called the nurses to come in and check her catheter. They said it appeared to be blocked and worked with the tubing to move the blockage. But an hour later, she was starting to be in some real pain so I called the nurses again. This time they took off her diaper and saw the catheter had become dislodged. They drained the bulb to remove it and began to insert a new one. That is when the torture began and without going into too much gruesome detail, I will just say that I was holding my mom's head in my hands crying and wishing that I could endure this excruciating pain for her while she screamed in agony.

If I EVER find out that I have a terminal disease, I swear I will kill myself before it gets to the point where I have to go in the hospital or hospice to die. My mom was a very strong woman and a good-hearted person. There is no way she deserved this punishment at the end of her life.

Stay tuned.