Turning Liz down when she asked me for drugs plagued me with
guilt. She had asked me for help, and I had turned her down. It wasn’t because
I was afraid of being hauled before a court that I had turned her down, because I would
have done anything for her, I had refused her because I didn’t want to lose
her. She was the focus of my life, such as my life was, and without her what
did I have? But turning her down was a heavy burden to carry, and I couldn’t
bring myself to share it with anyone until long after Liz’s death.
I learned from the nursing staff that she was in constant
pain: nerve pain extending throughout her body. When I heard this it made me
question whether I had been right in turning down her request for help,
especially since I could probably have cobbled together enough drugs from old
prescriptions in my medicine cabinet to do the job. But when I found myself
thinking this way, I forced myself to think of something else. It was hard
enough watching her wasting away before my eyes, without finding something else
to torment myself with.
While they had brought the seizures under control at the
hospice, they were now coming back and when the staff were aware one was coming
on they would hustle their trainees into the room to watch and learn. I have to say
they did it apologetically, but they did it all the same. I hated it. As I saw
it, they were turning Liz into a sideshow. But I realised these young people
had to learn.
Experienced though the nursing staff at the home was,
neither they, her doctor, or her McMillan nurse, could get her cocktail of
drugs right. They were always chasing her pain; they never managed to catch up
with it. She was taking fifteen different medications, including three
different types of morphine, and some of these were reacting against each other.
But no one really knew what was going on, because she couldn’t tell them.
They did their best, employing the system of posing
questions for a ‘yes’ or a ‘no answer that I had employed for so long, but they
didn’t get the results I got and for this reason Sue, her doctor, started to schedule
her visits for when she knew I would be there.
I knew when Liz was in pain; I could see it in her eyes. And
when I could see she was in pain I would go off to the nursing station on the
ground floor and ask them to give her a shot of oral morphine. They never
refused. What did it matter if she was taking more morphine than she should been
taking if it helped ease her pain?
Extract from my book WILL YOU TELL HER, OR SHALL I? A true story.
My story. The story of how I lived with the ten-year terminal illness of my
wife. Available on www.bookstheublishersmissed.com
Twitter: Maximillian19
FB: facebook.com/Booksthepublishersmissedcom
No comments:
Post a Comment