December 27:
A stressful day. Nothing bad happened. Just a lot of talking about and thinking about the situation with my mother.
The hospital called me in the morning. It was the doc overseeing my mother's care this week, who had my brother in the room with him and wanted to talk to both of us about her care status.
When she was first brought in to the first hospital, they put her on a ventilator right away. But after we elected not to pursue surgery, they had her listed as "no code". (They did not even ask me about this. They just assumed she was no code, since they thought she was brain dead at that point. After we said no to surgery, the ER doc came to talk to me and said the next step was to decide when to withdraw life support. My brother was still on the road, driving to the hospital at that point. But when I told the ER doc I wanted them to continue providing care at least until my brother had a chance to see our mother, the ER doc looked alarmed. She said to me, "But if she codes, we won't resuscitate her! We don't want to put her through that!" I wasn't even considering that she could code at that point, since she was already on the ventilator, and her heart had presumably been fine that morning, and the new issue was with her brain, not her heart. I'd only meant not to remove the ventilator until my brother got there. But the ER doc had acted like even that was asking too much.)
Then, when it turned out our mother wasn't brain dead, and my brother authorized her transfer to the bigger hospital so she could have surgery, she was listed as "full code" at that hospital. Which the neurosurgeon seemed not to like. She mentioned our mother's code status to my brother multiple times, in a way he certainly interpreted as her nudging him to reconsider it. So we talked, and my brother decided to move our mother to R2 status (a decision which I supported and which her nurse practitioner also supported). This meant that the hospital would still administer necessary drugs, perform surgery if indicated, and use a ventilator to support our mother's life if necessary, but they would not perform chest compressions or defibrillate her. The thinking on this was that her heart had been healthy when all of this started. If it were to stop now, that would be an indication things were trending in the wrong direction. If the hospital successfully resuscitated her, she would then have to deal with heart damage and broken ribs on top of an already deteriorating neurological crisis, and it was extremely unlikely she would ever recover from that enough to enjoy any kind of quality of life at all.
Yesterday's phone call was because our mother's doc (at least the one who is on-call this week) wanted my brother to withdraw the request to use a ventilator or any other kind of forced breathing on our mother. At the moment her vitals remain stable. She is breathing on her own. But if something were to happen now that required forced ventilation to sustain her life, this doc was now telling us that would be something she would not recover from. She is very much weaker now than she was two and a half weeks ago, simply because she has been lying in an ICU bed doing nothing for herself for those two and a half weeks. So now this doc is saying, if our mother were to develop breathing issues, say from pneumonia or some such, she is no longer strong enough to recover from that, and we should just let her go.
My brother and his wife stopped in to see me (and to collect some documents and visit my mother's bank to establish my brother's PoA to control her finances) on their way home in the afternoon. We talked about the current recommendation from the hospital, which my brother said he was inclined to agree with. I told him I trust his judgement better than the hospital staff's at this point, considering all of the conflicting messages we have been given already. (Today's doc even acknowledged we have good reason to distrust what medical personnel tell us at this point.)
So our mother's care status will now change again. But this may not mean anything since the change only applies to care she doesn't currently need anyhow.
The other things my brother wanted to discuss with me were actually mostly good news for me. He's still in no hurry to sell the house. So long as our mother remains in hospital, her living expenses are essentially zero, and her income is far more than is necessary to cover the costs of maintaining the house with only me living in it. (He's hoping she will recover enough to be able to have a meaningful conversation with him about what she wants to do with the house before he has to make a decision on it. But this is months away from being possible at this point, and may never be. We just don't know at this point.) He has also decided to keep the insurance on the car (good for me, because I would not be able to continue to live here without one) and even to keep our mother's name on it as one of the insured drivers. (The hospital staff have told us multiple times she will never drive again, but my brother figured it's not too expensive to insure her for another year, just in case they're wrong about this too.)
When they left, my brother and SIL took with them all the food from the pantry I won't eat. They will donate what they can and dispose of the rest (possibly after keeping one bag of coffee for their son, and one box of tea for themselves--my mother had had at least 4 of each stockpiled). This means there is no longer any food being stored in our living room, and I should be able to move most of what has been stored on our two kitchen tables into the pantry cupboard where it belongs.
Secret Santa
Fit December
Power Squats Challenge
Fighter's Codex - on hiatus until January 2
3km run
6km with Shelby
Couldn't get out for running or walking in the AM due to rain. Then had to wait at the house to talk with my brother. So Shelby's walk and my run happened late in the day. I was too tired to do anything else afterward.
writing: 514 words
French: Netflix
GOBOT
GBOT
FC report:
On hiatus until January 2.