You Have Two Options

On the day of my retirement party, my dad called 911. They took him to the hospital closest to the house. It's protocol. Carmi jumped in her car and went to the hospital where he usually stays. It took her a couple of hours to find him. The beauty of that hospital is that it's close-by. The ugly of that hospital is a laundry list, not the least of which is that it smells like excrement and the rooms are not only tiny but house two patients each. There is more to say about that experience but I'll pass. He came home five days later sounding worse than ever. There was an audible rattle when he breathed, and two days after that he had Carmi drive him to the hospital he loves, his home-away-from-home. The cardiologist's assistant asked me to call her. She said, "He has aspirational pneumonia again. This is the third time.I know this is hard for you but you have two choices: we can give him a feeding tube or we can make him comfortable, put him on palliative care, and wait for him to die." "I can't make that choice for him! And I don't want to make that choice by myself." A friend suggested I call my sister and ask her if she could come down. I even offered to pay for it. She said she'd help me any way she could. She would be glad to come down for four days and do whatever I needed; she'd even help me clean out Bill's. I gave her my credit card number and told her not to tell me how much it cost.