Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [92]
She went from a walker to a wheelchair, her hair had thinned considerably and fluid oozed from her legs when they swelled. Her feet ballooned and were as puffy as pink foam slippers. She had lived her entire life with a single functioning kidney, and that lone organ now was insufficient to the demands that were being put on it. She required heavy elastic stockings to compress her legs, and either Paul or his children would sit on the floor in front of her and do the work of putting them on or taking them off. She was unpredictably flatulent then. If their help with those elastic stockings wasn’t a demonstration of love, I don’t know what is.
One night I got a call from Paul telling me that she had gotten the flu, and it was bad enough, in the context of all her other problems, that she needed to be hospitalized. My heart froze. Had the end arrived? I said I would immediately come back to Maine. He said I could wait if I wanted to, and he would let me know if the situation worsened. His voice was subdued, and it seemed to come from a place very far away. “No,” I said. “I’m on my way.”
The flu came under control, but something worse happened: she picked up an infection in the hospital. She already had it when I arrived the next day from Philadelphia. It had begun as a fever. Its source was a virulent strain of hospital bacteria, and soon it raged through her body. Her temperature spiked and she lost consciousness. Let this stand as a definition of irony: she picked up the illness that would kill her in the place she had gone to be healed. Maybe a doctor had neglected to wash his hands. Maybe a nurse had forgotten to sterilize an instrument. It’s impossible to know. No one at the hospital was in a big hurry to find out.
Paul and I stayed at the hospital around the clock during the six days she struggled against fever and failing organs. We slept on the floor of the waiting room. The many ailments that had conspired decades ago to swell her body finally had converged and undercut her ability to fight the infection. She did not let go easily. She had always plunged into life, often recklessly, and now she was clinging to it tenaciously between the stainless steel rails of her hospital bed. Even with her gut ravaged by some implacable microbe, she wasn’t willing to leave this world without a battle. With the help of machines she had fought death to a stalemate. At one point, swollen from the liquids that had been pumped into her to maintain her blood pressure, which had dropped precipitously, she regained consciousness for a few seconds. Weakly she asked me, “Louis, am I going to die?” I said, “No, Mom. Hold on.” So my last conversation with my mother contained a lie: let this stand as a second definition of irony. Her kidney failed, and the antibiotics dripping into her arm through an IV tube were powerless to suppress the infection. Two days later, a young doctor, a woman with a long white coat, clipboard and crisp professional manner, took Paul and me into a waiting room and said the situation was hopeless.
“I would like your permission to withdraw support,” she said.
“What will happen if we don’t?” either Paul or I asked.
“We will continue to keep her alive, but I don’t think she will recover. The chance is very slight, perhaps one or two percent. We will have to put her through a lot of pain to try to get to that point. If she does recover, her life afterward will not be good. She will spend a lot of time in the hospital.