Gone, but Never Forgotten

On Monday, November 29, 2010, at 9:08pm PST, Mom passed away.


She'd been having a hard time, and even though she was getting as much hydration as she was, she was dehydrated. She had just started on another 500mL of TPN to help counter balance that. Saturday morning at 5:30am, her ostomy bag was emptied (she started leaking the day before), and that was the last time she had output. We changed her bag that night, and I was concerned that there hadn't been anything out of the bag, so I called her doctor and one of her nurses from the infusion center to try and figure out what could be going on. They both said it sounded like a complete bowel obstruction.

I called the home health nurse, because I wanted someone to physically look at Mom, so the next morning (Sunday) the nurse came out. She confirmed that it was a complete obstruction, and said to just make Mom as comfortable as possible. All three of them, when asked how this would affect Mom's longevity of life, they all gave her a week or less. There is only one thing more heartbreaking than hearing that your mom only has about a week to live.

Monday morning, Mom's regular home health nurse came in, took labs, and checked Mom out for things like edema, bed sores, temp, BP, and pulse... the usual. Mom was in excruciating pain, probably from the obstruction. When she wasn't sleeping, she was throwing up. I'd change her bed linens, comforters and pillows (not just their cases) three times a night sometimes. Liquid morphine under her tongue was her only saving grace. The nurse took Mom off the TPN because all the nutrients were making her body work to process them, and that was putting too much of a strain on her system.

We made plans to get their hospice in, which was different than the other hospice organization we had been talking to. This one that does home health will use IVs in their hospice care, including a 24-hour morphine drip, so I just had to talk to the pharmacist Monday evening to figure out what dose of morphine to give her, based on what she'd been taking under her tongue. She'd also have a bolus for breakthrough pain, and she could have a piggyback of saline, just in case she needed a little bit of hydration. The nurse was scheduled to arrive 9am Tuesday morning.

I was sitting downstairs, talking to my cousin and listening to Mom on the baby monitor. Brooke got this brilliant idea that, since Mom tends to get a little wobbly sometimes when she walks, to get a baby monitor so she can just say our names and we'd hear her so we could help her do whatever it was she needed. This particular model has one baby unit (in Mom's room), and two parent units (we kept one in the family room and one upstairs in whatever bedroom we were sleeping in). Mom was sounding a bit congested in her breathing, like she'd been all night, and morphine slows you down to about 8 breaths per minute (try doing that... it's not easy), so things were status quo. Then her breathing sped up a bit... not fast for a normal person, but fast for her. By the time I got upstairs, she was quiet. I checked to see if she was breathing, tried waking her up, nothing worked. I was crying, screaming, shaking her with all my might, trying to get her to open her eyes, to no avail. My cousin came up, pulled me off of her, and told me that she's gone. THAT is the most heartbreaking thing a person can hear.

The fire department came, confirmed things medically. The police came, because they have to investigate every in-home death just to check for foul play, and later on, the crematorium came to pick her up. We went to bed around 4am. Is it creepy that I slept in Mom's bed, on her side?

So the memorial service in California will be on Saturday, 12/11/10 at 11am. It will be held at Trinity Lutheran Church, 1225 Hopyard Road, Pleasanton. And yes, we'd love for you to come, even if we don't know you, you care enough about Mom to keep up with her status.

I'll update this post with the info for the Ovarian Cancer Research Foundation that donations can be made to. I also have a Facebook page that I update (Olivia Mensing), I maintain Mom's Facebook page (Pat Mensing), and there's an event on Facebook for the memorial, not that an RSVP is needed. =)