What was hardest was the wait and the hope. And the warning, from my doctor in Vermont, that recovery from coma could mean many things far short of full mental function. The very intense medications that froze my mothers body and sedated her mind were gradually removed in December, some six weeks after she entered the hospital. The doctor warned me that it might take quite a while for the traces to leave her body, for her to emerge from coma. He thought her chances were good, given that he told me he thought %5 chance of living when he first began on her in the emergency room.
A week passed. She began to move a little. Then her eyes opened. But they looked off into space. No words, no actions, brought them in any specific direction. I would hold her hand and speak to her, but she would look anywhere and nowhere.
A week of this. Then two weeks. Then four weeks. Transferred off to another facility in Saratoga, and more weeks pass. An old girlfriend who is a nurse wonderfully volunteers her time to visit and help ask questions and request testing. I jump on the immature Internet and do research. The testing indicates low likelihood of waking from coma. The Internet has few answers. The new facility offers me the option of removing her form life support the first weeks she is there. Oh this wonderful American medical system! Medicare underpays for beds, and there is the background noise that suggests that the advice to me comes far sooner than to those better insured.
The details are many, but they are filler. My mother lives out six months before I think about this. My Vermont doctor has told me that the chances of waking after 6 months drop to about or under a tenth of one percent. And, he reminds me, waking from coma is not returning to life. Her bedsore wounds have not quite healed. She walked poorly before. Worse, she is most likely in what is called PVS or permanent vegetative state. She could live on this way for 20 years. Cared for by people who never knew her and thus cant care. Visited less and less frequently by those who do care. Non-responsiveness is hard to witness. It causes suffering for those who sit powerlessly beside a bed.
The decision creeps up on me as time passes. I am now her conservator. I am her son. She has written nothing of her wishes. She has not discussed it with her friends (though they all feel she would not want to stay this way). She has no close relatives. Only me. To decide the life or death of someone in a group seems somehow more comfortable. To decide this alone for a mother that in some ways I hardly know hurt. I had to turn the tables, to decide as if it were me there, to make the call. And I made the call. Me, myself, and I.
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