In a strange bed, last day

Feel like shit. All I want to do is sleep. I'm in a hospital. My liver's crapping out on me. Cirrhosis. What the hell does the liver do, anyway?

I need a drink, but I doubt I'll get one here.

The TV's on. Sports channel. How many games have I seen in my life? More than I can count. I'm fifty-eight now and started watching when I was ten. So that's ... a lot of games. I can't remember more than a few incidents from all of them, and even those aren't clear. They were always drinking times.

Let me alone. Shit. Every five minutes women are coming in and bugging me. They pull me up higher in the bed. Why? One takes measurements, one takes blood, one looks at the machines I'm hooked up to. Another tests my swallowing to see if well enough to eat. I hear her say I'm not. Will I be soon? I've been catheterized. I'm glad I wasn't awake when it was going in. I'm not going to look at it.

These women speak loudly to me and use my name a lot. It hurts to hear them. It makes me frown. I have tubes in my nose, for oxygen. I try to remember to inhale deeply through my nose. That should help me feel better. I do it, but it doesn't.

There's a girl here. I'm not sure who she is. She's nice. She's not wearing a uniform and doesn't talk like the other women, but she helps me do things. Who the hell is she? There's something about her face. Wait. She's holding my hand. Wait. She just called me Dad. That can't be right. I haven't seen daughters for years. No, scratch that. I have seen one of them. The oldest. Her name is ... now why can't I remember her name? I think it's her.

More women are here. It just never stops. Christ. There are two of them. And my daughter. The two are speaking to me, loud, and asking me things. I keep hearing the word "up." They want me to get up. Now? Shit. They're swinging my legs over the side of the bed and lifting me into a sitting position. The one of the two who seems to be in charge is kneeling in front of me and telling me to open my eyes. I do. She's so young. I can tell she doesn't take any crap from anybody. She's pretty. I lean forward and put my hands on her shoulders. They're firm, taut. "You want to hold on to me?" she says. There's a walker behind her. What am I, ninety-five?

I try to get up, but the thought's not getting to the body. I feel my left side give up, and sag. "You want to lie down?" the woman says. I try to say yes but it comes out as a grunt. The two help me lie down and cover me up again.

More people, more stuff going on around me. They're all doing lots, but I feel worse and worse every hour anyway. Doctors and others ask me questions. Do I know where I am? Do I know my birthday? The TV is off. My daughter's holding my hand. I can hear her. I want to open my eyes and look at her, but I feel so awful I can't. When can I go home? 

It's dark. No one's here, but the door's open and I can hear people doing things across the hall. I hear talking, laughing, fingers rattling on computer keyboards, phone calls being made, carts wheeling down the hall. I feel worse. Everything hurts. Two women come in. Different from the ones I saw during the day. One is teaching the other how to do something. I try to tell them how bad I feel, but words aren't coming. I moan. I moan again. They say things to me. The one teaching the other goes to one of the machines. I hear her telling the new one how to adjust the drip. Adjust the drip. I don't know what that means, but soon after she does it, I feel OK and go back to sleep.
     

Death Surprises

Having both parents die in under two months has brought some surprises to The Complete and Total Loser.

My father two days before his death.

• Even with palliative care and a high number of morphine doses, there is pain when dying.
• They have to turn you every now and then in a hospital bed even when there is zero chance you'll ever leave that bed. If they don't, your bones will push through your skin and you'll bleed and ooze and die horribly. As gentle as nurses can be, this jars the patient and upsets him even when you think he's completely unaware of physical sensation.
• When dying, you often breathe through your mouth and it gets dry. In my father's case, it got so dry his tongue split open. The nurses do what they can with their sponge swabs and ointments but there are limits. Too much water and the patient can aspirate. I was telling a nurse that I was surprised no one has come up with a better way to hydrate a mouth. She said, cheerfully, that this was my chance to change that.
• You won't see many doctors but you will see lots of nurses. If the hospital is at all good, nurses are gold. Where I was the nurses were fine about being addressed by their first names. Be good to them and don't treat them like their hotel maids. Not that you should treat hotel maids with any less respect than you treat anyone else, but you know what I mean. 
• They say the last thing to go is hearing, so talk to each other and the dying as if he can hear you. I slept in the room with my father on his last night and talked and sang songs. I spoke in normal conversational tones. Told him things like how pretty his nurse was (true) and that the house was being well looked after (also true). Everyday stuff like that, and memories.
• You might find that you can do things you wouldn't have thought you could. Like feed your father ice cream, put a straw in his mouth, hold his hand, touch his face. I didn't do the body washing and things like that but I have no training and I'm not sure if I could have done it well. If the nurses weren't there, I think I'd have figured it out.
• When with the dying, at the end it's all about the breathing. When it gets down to under ten times a minute the end is near. Counting the respiration rate gives you something to do and makes you feel involved. At some point they disconnect the monitors.
• You'll feel awful if you chat on your cell phone or use your iPad to check your Facebook page. Maybe not for years, but you will one day.
• Bring something dry to read. Serious fiction or, better, nonfiction. I read "Longitude," which is about how the first clocks accurate enough to take to sea and use in calculating longitude were made. A fascinating book, by the way. I'm not done it yet.
• Bring something to write in and a pen or pencil. You'll have thoughts you'll want to remember and writing them down is still the best way. For example, I realized for the first time how best to measure someone's worth to you and it's also the simplest way to do so.
• That method is this: How do you feel when that person comes home from work or wherever he or she was? In my father's case, we were always happy.