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Originally Posted by C Elegans @VonDondu: Hope your friend is ok by now! |
Thanks for the good wishes, but he had a terminal illness (emphysema/Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease), and he passed away on Friday morning. He was essentially in a coma for the last two weeks. His family had him disconnected from life support on Thursday evening, and I spent the night at his bedside with them. I haven't been visiting Gamebanshee much for the past few weeks because I've been spending so much time with them and helping them run their family-owned business. It has been a real roller-coaster ride.
I don't know if you can appreciate the raunchy Texan sense of humor, but we've had a few moments of levity. If some of the things we did by my friend's deathbed were put into a movie, it would probably be banned or picketed for being inappropriate and offensive. You'd have to know the man and his family (and me) in order to see the humor in it. For example, we had our eyes glued to the monitor to see signs of any change in my friend's condition (when we weren't lying on the floor or sitting in our chairs sobbing). When we couldn't take the pressure any more, his daughter and his son started speculating about what might happen and ended up placing bets on things like whether his pulse would go over 140 in the next 15 minutes or how many hours it would take for him to "flatline". It was quite a sight to see them throwing quarters and dollar bills onto their father's lap. A few minutes after he died, we noticed that his left hand (which was misshapen from rheumatoid arthritis) was pointed at us like a gun (with the thumb up and the index finger pointing straight out) and his right hand was "flipping us off". In life, he had a tendency to joke about shooting people and flipping people off, so his unintentional gestures (which I'm sure were purely coincidental) were so appropriate, they were very funny. But as I suggested, I don't think anyone would put things like that in a movie.
My friend defied all expectations and held on for nearly twelve hours after he was disconnected from the respirator. The nurses initially gave him oxygen through his "trach" tube and gave him regular shots of morphine to keep him comfortable. His heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration (breaths per minute) were so high, we didn't think he could keep it up for very long, but his oxygen concentration was very high (over 90%) and after a while it was obvious that his body wasn't ready to quit. All of his organs besides his lungs (and his brain) were actually very healthy. After about eight hours, the nurses decided to take him off the oxygen (because it was only prolonging his death), and just as I began to wish that we could give him some sort of drug to help speed things along (you don't want to know what his son and daughter suggested), the nurse started giving him a lot more doses of morphine, and soon it was all over. As I predicted, his heart stopped beating about two minutes after he took his last (weak) breath.
Really, the only reason he died at age 61 is because he smoked so many cigarettes. On those rare occasions when he came to his senses, he realized that he should stop smoking, but whenever he needed a nicotine "fix" he deluded himself into thinking that cigarettes don't cause any harm. By choosing to smoke, he essentially decided that cigarettes were more important than everything he left behind in this world--his family, his friends, his material comforts, and all the joy he could have experienced if he had lived a few more years, such as walking his daughter down the aisle at her wedding or meeting and getting to know his grandchildren or seeing his two youngest sons graduate from high school and college. On the last night he spent in his own home before he went to the hospital, he snuck out of the house at midnight to buy a pack of cigarettes and used a 50-foot oxygen supply line so he could smoke outside on the porch without his wife knowing about it. I mean, that's the sort of thing you'd see on Monty Python, but it goes to show how stupid people can be. I hope he enjoyed those last eleven cigarettes before he was taken to the hospital in an ambulance at 6:30 in the morning and sedated two hours later, because that was the last pleasure he ever got to experience. He left behind a wife, four children, and innumerable friends, and nobody was ready to let him go.
I'm sorry for carrying on so much, but I thought you might like to know some of the details. I'll be alright after I grieve for a little while. Watching someone die wasn't as tramautic or as creepy for me as some people might expect, and it really wasn't so bad. The pain comes from knowing that I'll never see my friend again, but I had nearly five weeks to get used to that after he went into the hospital and spent nearly the whole time he was there in an unconscious state. All of us were victims of wishful thinking at one point or another, but I figured he was never going to leave the hospital, and sadly, I was right. I like to think that witnessing such things can teach us lessons and make us stronger, so I'm trying to look on the bright side. That's certainly better than giving in to despair.
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