A year and a few weeks ago I had a wife. Then I bought a car over the Internet...
A special welcome to anyone who is new to The Grieving Room. We meet every Monday evening. Whether your loss is recent or many years ago, whether you have lost a person or a pet, or even if the person you are "mourning" is still alive ("pre-grief" can be a very lonely and confusing time) you can come to this diary and process your grieving in whatever way works for you. Share whatever you need to share. We can't solve each other's problems, but we can be a sounding board and a place of connection. To those of you who are suffering, I can only say, "Take the love that is offered, it is not a cure, but it is a balm to ease you through." To those who are further down the road, "Thank you for hanging out to help the suffering." And to all of you, "Thank you for being online, wherever and whoever you are. You are precious." h/t nancelot
Here is a link to previous diaries in the series:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
I met Donna about a dozen years ago. Some of the circumstances aren't that pretty--she helped me out of a bad marriage and into her life. You know how one of Murphy's Laws says (roughly) that you shouldn't fall for anyone who has more problems than you do?
I never followed that rule.
Sometimes they don't recover.
When I met her Donna was already legally blind and in kidney failure from juvenile diabetes, in the process of getting on the transplant list. She'd come from a fairly bad childhood which complicated her medical condition. She had more reason than most to be bitter, and I found she was the least bitter person I knew. She was fond of Christmas Club accounts, saving part of her disability pay through the year to buy extravagant, just-the-thing presents at Christmastime. Either Thanksgiving was at her place, or she brought the turkey. She slept on the sofa of her tiny apartment many nights because she'd given her bedroom to a friend or family member, usually more than one, who otherwise wouldn't have anywhere to go. I counted a dozen people at her memorial service who'd spent weeks at the Hotel Donna.
So I learned to give shots and check blood sugar, and what to do when it was low or high. We never went anywhere without the pager for the transplant hospital, a 90 minute drive away. During Labor Day weekend in 2000 the pager went off as we came back from a Chinese restaurant--Donna, me, and two of her neices whom we were sheltering from two different bad family situations. Someone else's misfortune had given her a kidney and a pancreas, staving off dialysis and (we hoped) diabetes.
(I watched part of the operation through a small window in the OR door. It looked just like TV: the sheets draped hid any details of the surgery except when a surgeon pulled the suture needle high. The anesthesiologist was reading the local newspaper; I figured things must be going well.)
Four days later we lost the pancreas--probably due to surgical error, but what can you do? I came back from a quick trip home to catch her on the way into surgery again. She was weeks recovering from the ordeal, and a diabetic again. During those weeks her beloved stepfather, in a veterans' hospital just a few miles away, died unexpectedly. She couldn't attend the funeral.
Somehow she recovered enough to come home. She was shaky and needed help with everything but Thanksgiving and Christmas were coming and she wasn't going to miss it.
A year ago this morning we were singing classic rock (off key) in the cab of a borrowed pickup truck as we drove to Lake Tahoe. The many setbacks on the way to picking up the car--a 1971 Triumph Spitfire convertible--should've told me something. But she loved old cars, and this one I'd found on eBay was the same make and model as her first high-school car. We were getting ready to have my dad's old MG convertible professionally restored; the Spitfire was for us to play with, something to sand and tinker with in the evenings. Lake Tahoe was a compromise. One of the few vices she could still enjoy was gambling, and it wasn't far off our route...
Without the pancreas Donna was still at the mercy of her blood sugar, but in March 2002 we got a call that a second transplant was available. Once again we schlepped over the Grapevine and into LA. The surgeon assured us he'd anchored the pancreas more securely so that it wouldn't shift position. That was presumably what had gone wrong the last time.
And it worked. That pancreas pumped out insulin on cue, and her blood sugars were rock steady. We signed up for college classes in Russian, combed junkyards for car parts, ate what we wanted. Oh, the antirejection drugs made her horribly sick--even caused a blood clot that caused a lung embolism. But she recovered from that, somehow.
Until one Sunday night in October, 2002, when she looked up from her large-print Russian textbook and said "I've got the worst gas pains ever." It was the last thing she would remember before waking up two weeks later in the ICU of her transplant hospital.
Those two weeks included surgeries to repair damage when that securely-anchored pancreas tore away from the small intestine, twice. They included her pulmonologist's assessment that she had a bad viral infection, probably encephalitis, little hope. Knowing her wishes I signed a "do not resuscitate" order. On my birthday.
And then her nephrologist bet that the other doctor was wrong and arranged a Hallowe'en ambulance ride those 90 miles to the transplant hospital--full code, fully covered. Don't tell ME about the faults of single-payer government insurance.
A surgeon there removed the pancreas entirely, wrote off the transplanted kidney, and consigned her to an ICU bed where she lay and fought for five months. I worked full time and drove three nights a week to be with her when I could. Somehow she recovered, tied to thrice-weekly dialysis, on a ventilator and with IV feeding. I knew she'd make it one day when she started telling me what I had to do to arrange Thanksgiving dinner.
A year ago this afternoon we were climbing on Hwy 395 into the Sierra, dodging a flood that closed part of the highway. Another bad omen. Donna wasn't handling the altitude well, but if I could just get her to a bed she could rest and we'd write off the casino visit if we had to. Of course, I could've just turned back home...
Donna fought her way out of that ICU and into a regular hospital bed, then into a rehab hospital in Bakersfield. She was there about a month, long enough to acquire scars from bedsores. Soon she was back in our bed...
...a bed she literally rolled out of one night, hitting the floor and breaking her hip. Back to the ER. The stress of the broken hip triggered a "code blue" in the ER and another when the nursing staff got hold of her and overdosed her on insulin. Somehow she recovered from both.
I visited her in the ICU after the orthopedic surgery to find they'd forgotten a condensation trap in her oxygen line. Her blood O2 level was half normal. But she recovered. Again.
And she had a stroke somewhere along the line, but recovered somehow. Blood thinners got added to her daily regimen, and antiseizure drugs.
Cataracts, and hearing loss from antibiotics, and stents to hold open blocked arteries. They overdosed her with insulin again during an ICU visit and only luck let me figure it out in time. Normal blood sugar is somewhere around 100. She would start to get shaky around 70. Hers had dropped to 14.
All in all she'd collect and recover from eight Code Blue episodes that I counted, not including the ones before I met her. It seemed she could survive anything. Her brothers nicknamed her "cockroach" for recovering from so many attempts on her life.
In 2004 she entered a nursing home for a five-month stay when her blood pressure became unstable. I remembered her first recovery years before and got her doctor to try the steroids that had rallied her then. The nurses who'd predicted she would never leave the nursing home alive hugged her as I pushed her wheelchair out the door.
A year ago this evening the stress of the trip caused one of those blood-pressure swoons as we neared Mammoth Mountain. One of her doctors had discontinued the steroids, something he did periodically. But it would be all right--we'd gotten him to reverse his decision just that morning. I gave her the pill. She had always recovered before...
It wasn't all hospitals, of couse. She attended two of her neices' weddings and another one's graduation, barely 98 pounds and in a wheelchair. We took a three-day cruise to Mexico, in-between dialysis sessions. We finally got married ourselves (twice), once in the living room of a former boyfriend (for the IRS) and a second time--her dream wedding in 2006--at a Renaissance Faire in full garb. She'd wanted to walk down the aisle on her own...but broke her foot a week before the ceremony.
And she bought me extravagent Christmas presents.
We manned a table together to try to get Al Gore's name on the 2008 ballot in California. I got her enrolled in the wheelchair PE program at a local college, and she was diligent about her workouts. We applied again for the transplant list, but her surgeon--who'd twice failed her--now thought she was too great a risk. Everything we did from then on would have to fit between dialysis treatments.
A year ago tomorrow, we woke up in a South Lake Tahoe motel after a bad night. She felt lousy but OK'd going to pick up the car. She needed to stop frequently to rest--though she still didn't want to eat--as we drove back home. I felt if I could just get her back down to thicker air she'd be OK. In Bishop, halfway home, she asked to stop at a motel rather than continuing on. She refused the hamburger I got for her dinner.
It was a restless night for both of us. I was constantly being prodded awake with requests to help her change position in the bed. If we'd been home I would have moved her to the hospital bed we kept set up in a spare bedroom. About four am, a year ago this Wednesday, she asked me to help her sit up on the edge of the bed. She slumped in my arms and I thought somewhat groggily that she'd finally gone to sleep. I laid her back down on the bed, too dumb to figure it out. I found her there two hours later, in the same position, when I woke up...
I made three promises to Donna while she was alive that I'm trying to carry out. She wanted me to finish restoring the old MGB we'd started on. If I can do that, I'll give her the first ride. She wanted our ashes spread together after my death, somewhere on the California coast. I've arranged for that. And she was worried about whether I could make it without her. She may have been the only person who knew how much I leaned on her. I promised her I'd at least stick it out a year, no matter what. Wednesday, day after tomorrow, will be the end of that year.
I've read of spouses--usually husbands--who remarry within just a few months of losing their mates. I've read of others--usually wives--who rebuild things somehow and carry on alone.
And sometimes, of course, they don't recover.