Friday check in: a brief trip and in extremis

 On Tuesday I drove 430 miles to Paducah, Kentucky, for my first-ever AQS show.  My librarian friend Terri lives in Paducah and invited me to stay at her house in town.  

En route I got a call from the nursing home telling me that Stevens had very low blood pressure so they were sending him to the hospital.   

Anna, my Magpie friend, and I signed up for the AQS Awards Ceremony to start the show. We had gotten our food and were chatting with people at our table. My phone rang. I went out to the lobby to talk to the ER doctor who said S had a pulmonary embolism (blood clot in the lung) with two courses of treatment: surgery or blood thinners. I opted for surgery subject to the ER consultation with lung specialists.  

Awards over (wow, seeing so many Well-Known Quilters in one room!)  Anna and I went to the convention center for the Sneak Peek (=early opening).  On the show floor, as I was viewing a quilt called Colorful Chaos, the ER doctor called.  Due to co-morbidity (=dementia) surgery was not advised plus they found

Colorful Chaos

metastasizing tumors in S's pelvis.  They would move S from the ER to a regular hospital room.  I asked the ER doctor to have S's primary care physician call me.   That doctor happened to be on call that evening and he called me (still on the show floor).  He was so reassuring and said that S would be admitted for in-hospital hospice.

I actually slept well at Terri's.  I left at 6 a.m. and drove the 430 miles back home.  The weather was beautiful and once I reached Chicago the traffic was mercifully light.  

At home I had time to unload the car before going to the hospital.  Stevens is in a hospice suite.  He is unresponsive.  Any movement is only reflexive, not voluntary.  No food or water.  (His digestive system no longer works. He would choke on food and might aspirate water into his lungs.)  (A person in this state can live as long as ten days without water, I learned.)    I could stay overnight in the suite but I'm not -- better to be home where I can rest comfortably.   Yesterday afternoon (I was there) our pastor gave him communion.  (Dipping a sponge into the grape juice and passing the wafer over his tongue.) 

I picked up his clothes from the nursing home. As I was hanging the shirts in his closet and putting the socks in his dresser it hit me that he will never wear any of them again.  And I cried.

I am okay.  Sad, but okay.  I will write more later.