On Friday night, Mom had a rough night. The pain stepped up a notch, after her (assisted) shower. She also threw up after her shower — the exertion, the drugs, or just the advancing of the disease, who knows the cause? There is no certainty in cancer.
Saturday morning, the docs evaluated and increased her daily […]
Archive for May, 2008
From http://www.amitabhahospice.org/hospice/signs_of_dying.php :
Closer to death, the breathing involves the whole rib cage and is fast (up to 30-50 breaths per minute) mostly through the mouth and then may pause for even 10-15 seconds before the next in-breath. This period of no breathing is called “apnoea”. This pattern (called Cheyne-Stokes breathing) of shallow quick breaths followed by […]
I had to run an errand to Mom’s house, waiting for the pickup guy to take away the unused medical bed from the house (now that Mom’s in hospital to stay). While I was there, surrounded by her things, I got such a sense of the bits of her life that I didn’t know. We’d […]
Today, Mom was a little social butterfly. When I arrived, she was already on her second visitor of the day. And then she got a phone call, and then the OROC ladies visited. She was laughing with the OROC ladies, asked after all their families, and then joking about forgetting things. But now she has […]
(now that I’ve found out that the hospice wing has wireless, I’m retro-posting some of this…)
My letter to friends on Thursday, 5/8/2008:
You may know that my Mom, Kay, was diagnosed with cancer 5 years ago. She has been fighting it well, pushing it into remission multiple times. However, she has been declining since January, and this […]