There has been no further bleeding over the past two days. As far as medical staff are concerned, it was a mystery why the bleeding started and it was just as much a mystery why it suddenly stopped. Today's nurse reported that his stoma looks healthy, his wound is continuing to heal, he's not speaking of being in any pain now, and they're pleased that he managed to eat a little today.
One of the hardest things for us emotionally has been the way that some of the consultants seem over-zealous when it comes to giving us their negative prognosis. We understand that part of their job is to help relatives prepare for the loss of their loved ones, but surely it's enough to tell a family once or twice that a patient has the odds stacked against them. It seems unnecessarily cruel to keep coming again and again to tell us that they are amazed at the latest turnaround but they are still convinced that Dad will never get out of hospital. Even on a day where the nurse gives us a good report of how well Dad's doing, it seems there's always a consultant waiting in the background to ambush us and remind us that he's unlikely to sustain the improvement. We can still hardly believe that a doctor would go to an old man on his birthday - a man who has fought hard for five weeks and just overcome incredible odds - and tell him that he has no hope of making it anyway, and that they're not going to try to help him (with machines or surgery) if he has any more setbacks. When Dad's physiotherapist went in to do his exercises yesterday, he told her that there was no point doing it because he was going to die soon anyway. He had been wiggling his fingers every day as the physiotherapists had shown him, but he also stopped doing that when the doctor told him that he wasn't going to make it anyway.
Today we talked with him, prayed with him, and read again the best wishes and Bible promises written on his birthday cards... and he seems to be brighter again now. I asked him if he felt discouraged by what the doctor had told him, and he said,"I'm okay now that I'm feeling better again."
We don't know what the future holds, but we nonetheless feel it's important to keep speaking words of encouragement and life to Dad, and thus to counteract the words of death and hopelessness that doctors have spoken to him. Fortunately my Dad has always been the positive one in the family. (Mum says that if a doctor told her she had no hope of making it, she would just give up and not even try any more to get better.)
If we look back and compare today with this time last week or the week before, there has actually been an amazing number of improvements:
- Dad no longer needs a dialysis machine for his kidneys.
- He no longer needs the ventilator to help him with his breathing.
- He no longer needs antibiotics to help him overcome the internal infection.
- He's no longer complaining of sore muscles all the time.
- He's sleeping well at nights and no longer struggling with insomnia.
Two main improvements that still need to happen are:
- He needs to start taking more food orally. (He says he doesn't want to eat because everything is tasteless.)
- He needs to get more strength back in his arms and legs, so that he can move them more for himself and can perhaps stand up for the first time next week.
And so we continue to take one day at a time, and pray that Dad can keep his spirits up and can continue to make small steps of progress. Each time there's a setback, like this week's bleeding, it undermines the progress he's made over the previous days, and so we invite you to join us in praying that there won't be any further bizarre setbacks to impede his progress.
