Last Friday, I received a call that my mother was being taken to the hospital from the nursing home where she lives. I called the emergency room to check on her status and was told that she was in critical condition with severe dehydration and a blood infection that had gone septic or spreading throughout her body.
I spoke with the emergency room physician who told me that my mother’s condition was critical as infection once in the bloodstream has a 50 percent mortality rate. He confirmed with me that my mother’s status was DNR — do not resuscitate.
My sister and I knew that this day would come when we placed Mom in the nursing home a year and a half ago, but the decisions that we might be facing are still daunting no matter how much you prepare yourself for them.
On seeing my mother in the hospital bed with three different antibiotics running through her IV, I thought that this was most certainly the beginning of the end.
What’s more, she looked horribly gaunt and unconscious. Over the weekend, she remained unconscious and unresponsive until she rallied a bit Sunday.
I sat with her for several hours and would talk with her knowing that she could hear me and know that someone was with her. My sister and niece did the same in various shifts.
A person has a lot of time to think about the circle of life. As I held her hand, I realized that it wasn’t so long ago that Mom did the same for me.
When I was a little boy of 5, I was extremely sickly. I spent a good part of a year in and out of the hospital with pneumonia and double pneumonia under and oxygen tent. It was my mother who worked all day long and slept on a cot next to my bed.
During the day, my grandparents or my aunts would take turns staying with me. But at night, it was my mom who reached through the oxygen tent and held my hand until I went to sleep.
As a 5 year old, I was dependent on her to make decisions for me. Now, at the end of her life, she is dependent on my sister and me to make decisions for her.
When it comes to your parent, and they are terribly ill, those decisions are hard to separate from emotion. Even the most logical decisions are clouded with the storm of emotion.
On Saturday, I noticed that while Mom was being bombarded with strong antibiotics, there were no nutrients for her in the mix. In my logic I believed that how could her body fight the infection ravaging it without nutrients and protein for strength?
I over-reacted and went to the nurse’s station and asked to page the doctor. The nurses have probably seen family members like me before; taking charge of the situation and doing what they think is right for their loved one.
The funny thing about nurses, they are not only professionals, but they are extremely patient angels of mercy. They also understand human nature and emotion as they see it on a day to day basis.
Such are the nurses taking care of my mother. King’s Daughter’s Hospital should be proud to employ nurses like Jamie and Linda, who are professional in every measure of the word and are extremely compassionate.
My mother has been treated with dignity, respect and extreme kindness as if she were the nurses’ own mother. For that I am forever grateful.
Someone once said that “Caring is the essence of nursing.” A truer statement has never been made.
Nursing is a calling to care and to serve those who are at their most vulnerable. My mother’s angels of mercy, Jamie and Linda, exemplify the calling.
Tim McDonald can be reached at timothy.mcdonald@agsfaculty.indwes.edu
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McDONALD: Columnist grateful to King’s Daughter’s nurses
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