Sunday, 4 December 2011
Sunday update...
Medical staff decided to do another endoscopy today, and also to put the scope through the stoma - just to see if they could get any further explanation for the night time bleeds my Dad has had over the past week. What they found was just a very small irritation in the lining of the bowel, and so they hope that it'll be only a matter of time until it will heal itself. They suspect that it isn't actually bleeding heavily, but it probably only oozing slowly, and the blood seems to be collecting in the bowel and then flooding. The doctors are aware that there could be more bleeding until this heals, but these night time bleeds have been exhausting for my Dad and we're really hoping and praying that his body can rest and that he can get a good night's sleep.
Another new day....
Concerned about Dad's bleeding, medical staff gave him another transfusion just before midnight last night, and the bleeding seemed to stop again after that. The night nurse told me this morning that she'd been checking his stoma regularly during the night and there was hardly any sign of blood any more. She says, as far as hospital staff are concerned, this seems to be one of those situations where you simply need to ride out the storm, and "wait and see."
And so it's another new day. Tomorrow will mark exactly six weeks since Dad first went into hospital, and they've not been easy weeks. None of us wants to see Dad suffer and struggle, or to be tortured by ongoing setbacks and medical procedures. And yet, superficially at least, so many things are doing better than they were five weeks ago, and there have been so many "close calls" that ended in turnarounds which could only be explained as miraculous. The question my Mum asks is, "If he's not going to make it anyway, why is this dragging on for such a long time, and why are the horrendous setbacks interspersed with such encouraging improvements?" Perhaps that's just the way things go with a patient who's in intensive care with a critical, life threatening illness.
It gets hard to know what to expect, and sometimes it's even hard to know exactly how to pray. At times I have a clear sense of a Bible verse or a word from the Lord that I should pray for my Dad; at other times, I don't have any understanding at all and I can only pray for God's mercy, grace and goodness to surround Dad in his hospital bed.
And so it's another new day. Tomorrow will mark exactly six weeks since Dad first went into hospital, and they've not been easy weeks. None of us wants to see Dad suffer and struggle, or to be tortured by ongoing setbacks and medical procedures. And yet, superficially at least, so many things are doing better than they were five weeks ago, and there have been so many "close calls" that ended in turnarounds which could only be explained as miraculous. The question my Mum asks is, "If he's not going to make it anyway, why is this dragging on for such a long time, and why are the horrendous setbacks interspersed with such encouraging improvements?" Perhaps that's just the way things go with a patient who's in intensive care with a critical, life threatening illness.
It gets hard to know what to expect, and sometimes it's even hard to know exactly how to pray. At times I have a clear sense of a Bible verse or a word from the Lord that I should pray for my Dad; at other times, I don't have any understanding at all and I can only pray for God's mercy, grace and goodness to surround Dad in his hospital bed.
Saturday, 3 December 2011
Good news, bad news...
The good news is that Dad reported one or two little encouraging steps of progress today: he can hold a cup to drink by himself, and drank a glass of banana milk this afternoon; he can move his arms a little more, and move his head to adjust his position on the pillow.
The bad news is that he had another bleed during the night. Though not as heavy or as long as the previous one, it is still a cause for concern. They have stopped the anti-coagulant drug he was taking (he was on heparin during the two weeks he was hooked up to the the dialysis machine, and since then has been on a milder anti-coagulant that is given to long term hospital patients in order to prevent blood clots in their legs) and in its place they are giving him a mild dose of a coagulant drug instead.
Interestingly, when a couple of friends heard that he'd been bleeding again, they asked themselves whether it might be due to a blood-thinning drug that he's been on over the past weeks. Anti-coagulants slow down blood clotting time and can cause more bleeding than normal from cuts or lesions. Only time will tell if this is part of the reason for Dad's bleeding. Obviously, the presence of ongoing bleeding would also suggest that its source is somewhere within the bowel.
Dad was tired this evening, after having had another disturbed night last night, and we pray that he'll be able to get a good night's sleep tonight. All the drama is extremely wearying for him, as you can imagine.
It's quite stressful for the other family members too, as we never know what news awaits us when we enter the hospital doors and make our way upstairs to the intensive care unit. Please would you pray for my Mum too; this is a really difficult time for her.
The bad news is that he had another bleed during the night. Though not as heavy or as long as the previous one, it is still a cause for concern. They have stopped the anti-coagulant drug he was taking (he was on heparin during the two weeks he was hooked up to the the dialysis machine, and since then has been on a milder anti-coagulant that is given to long term hospital patients in order to prevent blood clots in their legs) and in its place they are giving him a mild dose of a coagulant drug instead.
Interestingly, when a couple of friends heard that he'd been bleeding again, they asked themselves whether it might be due to a blood-thinning drug that he's been on over the past weeks. Anti-coagulants slow down blood clotting time and can cause more bleeding than normal from cuts or lesions. Only time will tell if this is part of the reason for Dad's bleeding. Obviously, the presence of ongoing bleeding would also suggest that its source is somewhere within the bowel.
Dad was tired this evening, after having had another disturbed night last night, and we pray that he'll be able to get a good night's sleep tonight. All the drama is extremely wearying for him, as you can imagine.
It's quite stressful for the other family members too, as we never know what news awaits us when we enter the hospital doors and make our way upstairs to the intensive care unit. Please would you pray for my Mum too; this is a really difficult time for her.
Friday, 2 December 2011
Ernie talks about dying...
Dad continued to look brighter when we went in to see him today. He's a little tired after yesterday's drama, but beginning to pick up again, and this evening he ate a bowl of soup - the first thing he's finished eating orally in several weeks. (Until now, he's only eaten two or three spoonfuls of whatever was offered to him.) He talked today about how he was feeling during the night time vigil that marked the early hours of his birthday: "I'd accepted that I was just going to die," he said, "And every time I took a breath, I wondered if it was going to be my last one, and wondered what it was going to feel like to die."
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:
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.
Thursday, 1 December 2011
Not yet his "time" - Dad was 83 today!
But what about that other common belief: that the day of our death is pre-determined and therefore it is pointless to pray for people when they are sick? Well, I don't agree with that either. The Bible does tell us that none of us has the power to prevent the day of our death (Eccl 8:8) but it also tells us to lay hands on sick people and pray for them to be healed. (James 5: 16)
Last night, I was reading an Old Testament story (Isaiah 38) that suggests it might sometimes be possible for people to ask for an extension and to live beyond their "time." At the beginning of this account, King Hezekiah is "at the point of death" and God's message to him is, "Put your house in order because you are going to die; you will not recover." And yet, in response to Hezekiah's tears and heartfelt prayer, God heals him and adds fifteen more years to his life. God says to him, "I have heard your prayer and seen your tears."
Because of the way my Dad became ill - because the life threatening sepsis was a complication possibly due to human error - I have fought hard in prayer for him not to die in circumstances that snatch him away "before his time," or that could be attributed to someone's "fault." It's been amazing to see how God has spoken words of scripture and has preserved Dad's life, even in the face of some bizarre setbacks and some very close brushes with death. So last night, when I read Hezekiah's story, I prayed, "Lord, you have also seen our tears and heard our prayers. If this is not yet Dad's "time;" if his continuing to live would not mean even more pain and suffering, please would you add some more years to his life - perhaps so that he can be around for his 60th wedding anniversary."
It was midnight, but I was still praying and writing in my journal when the telephone rang and it was the nurse from the hospital to tell us that Dad was "at the point of death" - he was bleeding heavily and doctors didn't think he could survive much longer. So how do you pray in such a situation? Was this Dad's "time"... or was it time to pray in faith and to trust in a word from the Lord? When we arrived at the hospital, I continued to reflect on the story about the woman who was bleeding (see here) for twelve years and the way that Jesus had instantly stopped the bleeding and healed its cause. I began to feel faith growing in my heart and I had a sense that I was supposed to ask God to touch Dad and to stop the bleeding.
In the meantime, though, because doctors were expecting Dad to die at any moment, they began reducing his care: they didn't put him back on the ventilator overnight as they usually do, and they didn't give him his usual overnight feed through the nasogastric tube. They were basically just waiting for him to die. "Lord," I prayed, "If this is Dad's "time," the kindest thing for all of us would be for him to slip away quietly in his sleep. But if you are planning to save his life and demonstrate that you are wonderfully and undeniably God, please would you do it very clearly and unambiguously; please would you touch his body at the source of the bleeding so that it stops before morning and there is a very clear turnaround." Even as I prayed, I felt a sense of confidence that the bleeding was going to stop.
Around 6 am, we headed home, exhausted after yet another sleepless night. I phoned the hospital several times during the morning, but didn't manage to get through, so when we arrived to see Dad this afternoon my first question to his nurse was, "Has the bleeding stopped?"
"Yes," she said, "It suddenly stopped early in the morning."
Just as the cardiac episodes a couple of weeks ago caused doctors to withdraw Dad's dialysis support, this bleeding episode last night caused them to withdraw his ventilator support. Ironically, the result of this is that Dad's kidneys are now working fine on their own, and that's two days now that he's been breathing on his own without help from the ventilator. When we went in to see him this afternoon, he looked brighter than we've seen him in several weeks. It was such a pleasure to see him looking peaceful and cheerful for his birthday in hospital - even if he did announce to us, "The doctors say that I'm going to die; I'm not going to make it."
Unfortunately, this is true. Even though doctors keep telling us that they are amazed at his miraculous progress, they are also holding on staunchly to their role of helping family members prepare for the worst. Most of our conversations with doctors are characterised by doom and gloom: they tell us quite candidly, and have told Dad too, that he will never get back the strength he had before coming into hospital, and they think there is only the tiniest possibility that he can improve enough to ever get out of hospital. Today, on his birthday of all days, they told him quite bluntly that they will not give him any treatment should he have any further major setbacks: they won't do further surgery or put him back on any life support machines again. They're surprised to see him making some progress at the moment, but they don't really believe that it is possible for him to sustain it.
Birthday celebrations...
Dad was looking very well this afternoon. The heavy bleeding had suddenly stopped this morning, he is now off the ventilator and breathing totally on his own, and hospital staff continue to be amazed at this "miracle man" who has astounded them by cheating death yet again. (More about that in the next posting. Watch this space for more details.) Everyone who hears the story of last night's brush with death can only say, "That is a miracle." Isn't God amazing?!
What a birthday....
Today is Dad's birthday, and so far we have spent most of it by his side. The hospital called us at midnight to say that Dad was bleeding profusely into his stoma bag, that they had given him four units of blood transfusion, but he just seemed to be bleeding it all out again. The source and cause of the bleeding are unknown, but the surgeon felt it wasn't advisable to take him into theatre and open him up to investigate; it was felt he would be too weak to survive the anaesthetic and the operation. So, basically they were expecting him to bleed to death within the next couple of hours and they were calling us to be by his side if we wanted to.
As we drove to the hospital in the cold, rainy night, I couldn't help thinking about the story told three times in the New Testament about a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years. She had been seen by many doctors, but they were not able to help her and she was growing worse rather than better. (Mark 5 vs 25 - 26) Right at the point where doctors had given up, this woman reached out to touch Jesus and the bleeding totally stopped. Jesus said that her faith had healed her. (Mark 5 vs 29 & 34) I knew that my Dad was in the same place as this woman: he was at the point where doctors were saying, "There is nothing else we can do for him." I knew that if Dad was to survive this latest setback, it would only be because of a miraculous touch from God, a touch that could stop the bleeding, even if doctors couldn't stop it and didn't even know its source. I also knew that, if this didn't happen, my Dad wouldn't have much longer to live; he would very probably die on his 83rd birthday.
Dad was awake and comfortable when we arrived at the hospital. "I don't think there's any hope," he told us. "They say they can't do anything to stop the bleeding." He also told us that he was at peace with the Lord, if it was time to go home, and he told my brother and me, "Look after your Mum, because she's going to miss me." Then he took Mum's hand, saying, "You'll be all right."
The doctor on duty asked to speak to us, so off we trekked again to one of the little private rooms where they break bad news to relatives. He told us that if Dad had continued to bleed as profusely as he'd been doing an hour previously, he would probably be dead within an hour or two at the most. But the bleeding had begun to slow down, and this meant that no one really knew how long Dad might still hang in there. It was going to be a heart wrenching waiting game and another night-time vigil by his bedside.
We sat with Dad for the first six hours of his birthday; sometimes he talked to us and sometimes he fell asleep for a while. By this morning, he had been off the ventilator and breathing on his own for twenty four hours - the longest stretch since going into intensive care five weeks ago. The nurse emptied his stoma bag a couple of times during the night, and reported that there was still some fresh blood in it each time.
We're back home now to get something warm to drink; Dad told us to go home and try to get some rest, while he also has another sleep. Medical staff say they don't know what the day ahead will hold. The original plan was for us to take all Dad's birthday cards to him in the afternoon, and to give the nurses a birthday cake that has his picture on it. At this point, we are still planning to do that. Thanks for remembering us, and Dad, in your prayers today.
As we drove to the hospital in the cold, rainy night, I couldn't help thinking about the story told three times in the New Testament about a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years. She had been seen by many doctors, but they were not able to help her and she was growing worse rather than better. (Mark 5 vs 25 - 26) Right at the point where doctors had given up, this woman reached out to touch Jesus and the bleeding totally stopped. Jesus said that her faith had healed her. (Mark 5 vs 29 & 34) I knew that my Dad was in the same place as this woman: he was at the point where doctors were saying, "There is nothing else we can do for him." I knew that if Dad was to survive this latest setback, it would only be because of a miraculous touch from God, a touch that could stop the bleeding, even if doctors couldn't stop it and didn't even know its source. I also knew that, if this didn't happen, my Dad wouldn't have much longer to live; he would very probably die on his 83rd birthday.
Dad was awake and comfortable when we arrived at the hospital. "I don't think there's any hope," he told us. "They say they can't do anything to stop the bleeding." He also told us that he was at peace with the Lord, if it was time to go home, and he told my brother and me, "Look after your Mum, because she's going to miss me." Then he took Mum's hand, saying, "You'll be all right."
The doctor on duty asked to speak to us, so off we trekked again to one of the little private rooms where they break bad news to relatives. He told us that if Dad had continued to bleed as profusely as he'd been doing an hour previously, he would probably be dead within an hour or two at the most. But the bleeding had begun to slow down, and this meant that no one really knew how long Dad might still hang in there. It was going to be a heart wrenching waiting game and another night-time vigil by his bedside.
We sat with Dad for the first six hours of his birthday; sometimes he talked to us and sometimes he fell asleep for a while. By this morning, he had been off the ventilator and breathing on his own for twenty four hours - the longest stretch since going into intensive care five weeks ago. The nurse emptied his stoma bag a couple of times during the night, and reported that there was still some fresh blood in it each time.
We're back home now to get something warm to drink; Dad told us to go home and try to get some rest, while he also has another sleep. Medical staff say they don't know what the day ahead will hold. The original plan was for us to take all Dad's birthday cards to him in the afternoon, and to give the nurses a birthday cake that has his picture on it. At this point, we are still planning to do that. Thanks for remembering us, and Dad, in your prayers today.
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