A hard path to travel

To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.

Ecclesiastes 3:1

Although my blog is mainly my opinions about politics and culture war issues, this post is a personal one. I’ve mentioned in other posts that my husband has been on home hospice care since late January 2020. He couldn’t even sit up in the bed by himself after suffering acute respiratory failure. To me it seems miraculous that he has survived this long. He’s been completely bed bound for over a year.

There was never any hope that he would regain, in any real sense, anything remotely resembling, “quality of life.” He has late stage COPD and he’s had, normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH) for well over a decade. It’s been years of declines, then he’d work to regain his strength, but never recover to the point he had been before the latest set-back.

He liked to read novels, work in our yard, do home fix-it and home improvement projects. He used to have a wicked sense of humor and there were still occasional glimmers of that over this past year.

During the past decade he went from a cane, to a walker, to a wheelchair, to being bed-bound. The most devastating part wasn’t losing his mobility, it was the dementia caused by the NPH. that increased along the way.

My husband is a fighter. He believes, “The mind controls the body; the body does not control the mind.” When faced with being bed bound and unable to even sit up on his own, he fought to regain his strength, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, until he managed to pull himself up to a sitting position, holding onto the bedrails.

This past year has been a rollercoaster, where there’d be a few small improvements and then the unrealistic hopes, that maybe he’d get better would start popping into my head, even though I knew that wasn’t going to happen. Those hopes would quickly be followed by another decline. There were declines, with several infections, but he kept fighting back to being able to sit up and he’d try to eat and regain his strength.

Everything sounds so clinical with the terms used to explain what’s happening in the dying process. He’s now in the end stretch, the hospice nurses referred to it as a transition to the final stage of his disease progression with COPD, barely moving any air, stopped eating, barely drinking and I felt like writing this.

With all these ups and downs, it’s often felt like being on a “death watch” each time he declined. He’s sleeping almost constantly now. The hospice nurses are keeping careful watch, guiding me on how to care for him and keep him comfortable. They visit daily now to check on my husband and guide me through this. I could not have made it through the past year, of this level of caregiving, without their support. These hospice nurses are truly angels.

People keep asking me, “Are you okay?” Yes, I’m “okay,” whatever that means. My husband and I have been married 40 years. He has fought harder to keep going than I ever imagined anyone would fight. There’s a whole lot of pain, but after watching him lose control of his body and the memory loss, where from one minute to the next, he usually can’t remember what he wanted to say, there’s also a feeling of hoping he finds peace when his suffering is done.

Oddly enough my husband never went on any social media and has no idea what a blog even is and he’s never read a single post, even though he’s inspired many of my posts. By the time I started blogging he was already suffering from serious memory problems.

Unlike many people monetizing or taking donations to support their blogs, I pay for my WordPress account. I never want to make a cent off of anything I write on this blog and only hope to continue having this small space online to express my opinions.

I’ll be back to blogging about politics, culture war issues and yes, likely the corrupt spin information war too, after my husband’s final journey is done.

Thanks for taking the time to read this personal blog post.

I will be back.