My father has become confused and delusional in the last day or so. He seemed to be at peace with the knowledge that his death is imminent after his pastor came to see him and give him the last rites, but now he's fighting the fact of death again. He's insisting he's going to live to 106, and demanding to know why the doctors aren't doing anything to fix his foot so he can get up and walk again, because he has things to do.
Some of those things to do have been "go to Europe," "fix the problem they're having at the Board" (he was president of his homeowners' association once, and apparently thinks he still is), and "fix the thing that goes into the other thing."
This is so hard to watch.
He's started to refuse food, with the exception of the pizza we brought him last night from the mom-and-pop place where he always got pizza for us when I was growing up. He had three bites of it, which is a huge amount of food compared to previous days, even during his rally. But the soup his partner made for his lunch yesterday... Dad ate one spoonful and stopped, and that's been more typical of his eating patterns in the last few days.
His heart rate is about two and a half times its normal rate, and his blood pressure is rising. Dad's always had blood pressure that was so low that the nurses would call for a crash cart when they took it; now it's edging up into the hypertensive range. The nurse says this means his heart is working harder and harder to get blood to the places that his body needs it. His left foot has started to develop gangrene of the toes (the right foot is horrible; I made the mistake of looking in on him while the nurse was there yesterday changing the dressing on his right foot and I almost threw up from the smell and the visual).
Essentially, he's dying by inches. The blood infection he has will be what kills him, they think; his brain is already starting to shut down in places. We can tell, because his mind's going. He's still using language at a high level, but then my dad has always used language at a high level, with lots of witty turns of phrase and big vocabulary words. I don't think my dad knows how to talk at a fifth-grade level, frankly. The problem is, the things he's talking about don't make any sense at all. He talks about "the people in the basement stealing the Rembrandt" when there's no basement and no Rembrandt - and no people, either. I'm sure he thinks he's talking about real things.
We're doing everything we can to make him comfortable, but it's hard when he keeps fighting my brother about having to take the medications that will do that. He has so many things going wrong with so many systems that it's hard to keep track of them all. He's in a lot of pain from the foot, but he also has sciatica in the other hip, a slipped disc in his back, migraines, and other problems which cause pain. He's a diabetic. He has myasthenia gravis. And then, of course, there's the cancer, which is killing his liver and blocking his esophagus and who the hell knows what else.
This is the man who made me a liberal. He's the man who has never, ever said an unkind word about anyone, for any reason, no matter how provoked he might have been. He's the man who taught me what compassion looks like. He's the man who taught me about justice and justness and ethics and morals.
And now he's turning into a babbling shell of the man he was, and I am not coping very well at all with his decline.
Your continued good thoughts and support are appreciated.