Yikes. I haven't been on in a few years. Again, there's reasons for that. My husband, Little Hawk, (AKA Husbandface) has been a handful with the issues he had before, and now, some new ones. What's new? Well, he had a heart attack. Don't freak out, he's alive, but it was touch and go for a few months. He's now in what's known as a Persistent Vegetative State. This means that he isn't able to do much communicating with us, is unable to move himself around in bed or out of it, and is not able to safely eat or drink, he most likely would choke.
That's a lot to deal with. And I could have let them pull the plug on him, but I didn't because A), I love him and I couldn't bear to let him go, and B), he told me that in such a situation, he would want to be
kept alive no matter what. Those were his exact words.
I also could have put him in a skilled nursing home, but I didn't seriously consider it, for a number of reasons. The main reason was that he has a horror of ending up in a nursing home, and I promised him a long time ago that I would never let him go to one.
So, we were in the hospital. At first, he was totally unresponsive. Only breathing because he was hooked into a breathing machine. Intubated. Kept alive by a feeding tube down his nose. And while he was like this, the doctors told me that he was brain dead. That he would never recover. I was numb, unable to keep a coherent thought together. I told them that I wasn't pulling the plug, that I would take him home and care for him, for the rest of his life. How long would he live? Nobody knew.
However, he slowly improved. One day he started fighting the breathing machine, trying to breathe on his own. So they turned it off, to see what would happen. They waited until I left to do that, I would just like to point out. And he breathed on his own. They extubated him, and he kept breathing. Suddenly his survival factor jumped way up. Now there was no "pulling the plug," he was fighting to live on his own. He underwent surgery to have a permenent feeding tube placed, and he was, eventually, moved out of the ICU onto a different floor. He had spent a MONTH in the ICU.
He continued to improve. He opened his eyes, winced in pain when he was pinched, and once, so quietly, told me, "I love you."
Eventually they let me bring him home. Now I have a caregiving team that helps me turn him every two hours, to prevent bed sores. We wash him and fill his feeding pump and keep him comfortable in bed. We use a hoist to move him to a wheelchair so we can watch movies or take him for a walk. At night, I get up every two hours to keep turning him in bed.
And he keeps improving! He is seeing a Speech Therapist, who has guided him from occasional nods and shakes of his head to verbally answering questions. He tells me he loves me every day. He calls me his Little Bird again.
This is hard work. I won't pretend it isn't. I am his legal guardian now. I have to do our finances and comply with a nearly draconian set of legal regulations regarding care and finances. There are court appearances to prove that I am not misusing or squandering his money. It's scary and tough.
But it's 100% worth it to know that the love of my life is
alive and getting the best care I can give. I would give up a hundred freedoms and every penny we have if it was needed.
Now I'm all worn out from typing all this up. Crafting reports tomorrow!
