In the last couple of weeks I've stumbled on two separate articles that talk about how we are dying differently, as humans.

Basically, both articles state the same thing:  That our quality of medical care has gotten so good that we can people alive who would have succumbed much sooner to natural causes if this were twenty or thirty years earlier.

You may wonder why I'm writing about this.  It's because I watched a family member die this way.  A few years ago, my grandmother tripped over a footstool in her apartment and fell, breaking one of her ribs.  She couldn't get up again, so she scooted on her bum across the floor to let EMS in.  She was taken to the hospital, where we expected her ribs to be taped up or whatever.

Instead she became deathly ill with pulmonary edema.  Fluid was accumulating outside of her lungs.  It had something to do with the rib.  But her condition worsened.  She was sent to a rehab hospital in Fort Worth, then sent to another hospital.  During one of her hospital stays, she evidently suffered a stroke, because she lost the ability to speak, and she began curling up in a fetal position.  Her brain was damaged.

She also developed an intestinal blockage.  She was sent to hospice care at one facility, where her dental care equipment was stolen and her teeth weren't cared for.  I bought more and made sure she was clean.  It wasn't a job for the faint hearted.

We finally found a place where she could rest and be looked after, and we were given an option to withhold food from her or have her fed with a tube.  The thought of starving her to death was too much.  We opted for tube feeding.  A couple of weeks went by and her body stopped using the food.  It had to be removed.  From then on it was a waiting game where we were called almost every day and told, You better come now, she won't be here much longer.  Only to get there and wait and wait.  It was emotionally draining.

There's something in us that wants us to go to extraordinary measures to save our loved ones.  I think, in my grandmother's case, we made the best possible decisions of the options open to us.  But I read about so many cases like this, where people become old and frail and sick, and they are kept alive when they aren't really alive anymore.  I don't want to go like that.

I love life too much to live like a dead woman.

My hope is that I live a long, long time. Long enough to see my children grown and happy, to be with the people I love, to squeeze every last drop out of this life that I can.  But what I do not want is to be saddled with tubes that pump food into my stomach and air into my lungs.  If I'm at that point already, if I can't talk, or communicate, if there is nothing there left but a shell, then let me go.

It's heartbreaking to watch a family member die this way.  It's like watching them die over and over again.  You feel like you're in limbo, because you know that they won't get better, but you can't quite let them go.

I'm not sure what prompted me to write about this tonight.  I try not to think of my grandmother too much.  She was a complicated person.  I don't like thinking of people I've lost, I guess.  Maybe it's because it hurts too much, or because I view death very differently from a lot of people.  It's a sad event, letting go of someone.  But for me, it's just that they had somewhere else they needed to be, and I know that one day, I'll see them again, when it's time.  When my Grandma Rose passed away (different grandmother), it was hard.  She was one of those people who never gave up on life.  She suffered from severe rheumatoid arthritis and could barely walk, and lost the ability to use her hands for all the things she used to enjoy, like sewing and crocheting and making things.  But she still pushed on, and I never, ever, EVER heard her complain.  Except once.  Once, I went to visit her at her house and she stopped talking suddenly. Tears came into her eyes, and she said, Oh...I hurt so much.  But that was it.  I never heard about it again.  She was a five foot four warrior and her ilk is rare in this life.  When she died, she lingered about a week and then she was gone.  I think she was busy.  I think she had things to do.  

I think that medicine still has a long way to go in this regard.  Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should, and I think the human factor needs to be revisited in medicine..but that's just my opinion.