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Blogs by Lori Reed
The Final Step of the Journey 9/18/2010 7:06:41 AM
My dad has been failing fast from starvation due to the chemo he has been taking since last June. A week ago last Thursday the Home Healthcare came in to see him. Mom walked her out to the car and asked how much time did she think dad had. She replied about one to two weeks. I told mom I didn't think it was going to be a week.
The hospital bed was delivered at about 4:30pm and dad got right into it. That night mom called at about 11:45 and told me that dad had crawled out over the railing and fell in the kitchen and wondered if I would go and stay all night. I live a quarter of a mile down the road. My brother lives around the corner from me. We both stayed that night and got about 3 and a half hours of sleep. He must have climbed a mountain that night. He only slept about an hour.
I called the hospice nurse and they got him started on two droppers of medicine every four hours. He slept for three hours and started to move constantly in bed again. We
did that for about 12 hours and I called her again. I explained to her that he was still moving constantly. She said that we should give him four droppers full every hour for four hours then. So we did that. I called her again and told her that he was still moving. She said your kidding. We ended up and gave him eight droppers full every hour for four hours and finally the last time we gave it on Saturday morning he quit moving.
He slept all of Saturday and at 10:45pm I was praying that he would just go, because we had lost so much sleep on Thursday and Friday night, things were all running together from lack of sleep. I was keeping medicine records and getting the syringes ready with the medicines loaded in them and I was so afraid I would make a mistake.
Mom and I was in the kitchen hanging around ready to give him morphine at 11:00. He had sleep apnea all day and just when you thought it was over he would start to breathe again. He stopped breathing at about 10:55. I told mom that I thought that it was over and she came down into the rec room where he was and took his hand and he just sighed one last time.
I called the Hospice nurse and she came immediately out to the house, she called the funeral home and they came.
We were truly blessed, because everyting went so well. It could have lasted a long time at the end, but my husband and I had been praying for a long while that when it got close to the end it would go quickly and it did just that.
He passed away on 9-11 and the day of his funeral the day looked just like 9-11 did that day. It was so pretty outside. It has been a week since he died and it seems like it has been a month. We all miss him, but know he is in a much better place then all of us. Everyone is doing fine, my mom is really doing well. Our sleep that we lost is slowly catching up and soon we will all be pretty well back to normal. I hope everybody is spiritually ready to meet Jesus, because when you wake up in the moring you never know what might happen. Until next time - Lori
