After 2 days of being at the hospital with Billy, my boyfriend has arrived to take me home. Billy is in I guess for lack of better term, like the news says, a serious but stable condition. I have to go back home to work. I am an advertising manager at a real estate company in town. Although my bosses were more than understanding, there is no one else to do my job so I must return home.
My mother and father are staying around the corner from the hospital at this point as we have absolutely no idea how long etc Billy will be there. Leaving someone in this condition is a very hard thing to do. Even if it's to get a cup of coffee and fresh air. How do you know that the minute you leave something won't happen. He should have someone he knows with him when he wakes, what if he doesn't wake and, in fact, he passes away. Again, shouldn't we be there when this happens. Conflicting feelings really hurt.
Driving home in a car on the highway, away from your critically ill brother after he has just had a car accident was a very traumatic experience. The thoughts that enter your mind are not nice. I kept imagining the accident as I had formed it from the information we were given. I kept feeling his panic and then his pain, then my own pain as the emptiness inside my body couldn't be filled with any relief. He wasn't alright, and he certainly wasn't lucky to escape without injury. At this point, it was a matter of breathing when i needed to and attempting to function as each moment passed.
I called mum as soon as I waked in the door to let her know we had arrived safe. Because really, we didn't need a family discount of two patients in the same hospital did we! Billy is still as he was before I left.
Days went by and nothing changed. The doctors began taking to my parents about different scenarios. He has had extreme swelling from the head trauma. His body had begun to swell.
The next few weeks I cannot describe in detail or, perhaps not even in order. They were a blur and I felt so far away. My parents moved into one of the on site cottages for family that didn't live in town. They spent each day by Billy's side. As a result mum had to resign from her new job which was easy to do given the circumstances but heartbreaking as she was beginning a new career, a new chapter in her life and was loving it. Of course she has no regrets or ill feelings towards anyone in particular just anger at the cruelty of life and timing i guess.
What followed in the next few weeks may have been harder for my parents than the initial accident, although that would need to be clarified with them. Billy, still in a coma, needed a tracheotomy (the cut in your throat and a breathing pipe inserted), his brain still had serious swelling and the doctors began to talk about the strong likelihood of him being either brain dead or near vegetative state. In this position they had options, none of which you would call even mildly positive.
Option one: Turn off the machines. Let him go, make peace with a very sick human who seems not to have a fair or easy road ahead of him let alone a future for them without involving a heavily cared for son.
Option two: A new method they were trialling at the time, without any data or statistical evidence that it even works. Go to surgery, remove a decent size of skull around his forehead area. This would allow more room for the brain that is swollen to expand reducing the pressure inside the brain at the moment. Outcome being, it would help the brain tea and the swelling would reduce… So they hoped.
Option three: Do nothing at this moment other than what is already being done. Continue to monitor him and wait and watch.
Before I give you the option they chose, picture them. Living by the side of their 24 year old sons bedside in ICU.
Now if you have never been to an ICU (happy for those who say they have not) It isn't like a normal hospital room. It isn't like emergency. It is rooms with glass windows so that the patients can be monitored and visible at all times. You have a nurse that has one or two patients depending on the care needed and the severity of the patient. There are machines everywhere. It is not a happy place to be. People are either very ill or dying. The staff however are amazing and I can never express to them my gratitude and awe I have for them.
This is the space they have lived in for weeks. They know the staff and the staff know them. This doesn't really help though does it as you don't get some miracle cure that they were keeping a secret for the people they like. It does help though to talk. My family are talkers, and are very good at it!
Mum and dad, faced with their options, spoke to everyone they could to gather information and respected opinions but in the end what it came down to was; no one else can make this decision, it was entirely up to them alone.
Option 1 at this point was not an option. And I am very pleased that was the case. Option 2 was a tricky one. The concept was simple and in theory it made sense. Yet here is a guy that's had his head smashed and crushed and, who knew what damage was to come from it. Does it really make sense to make another big whole in his already fragile skull. Would it in fact even work? what if the brain continued to swell and more pressure arose from this, too much pressure. Perhaps the skull was still protecting the brain regardless of the pressure.
Option 3 at this point in time was the only one that made any sense. If Billy wasn't going to survive it wouldn't be because we either pulled the plug so to speak, or because we allowed doctors to knock more holes into his head than was already there. So that is what they decided. Option 3. More watching and more waiting.
At some point, as I said I am unsure of the time line of all this, Billy after lying on his back for so long, began to develop fluid on his lungs. The nurses would roll him and do what they could to try and remove it but when a man is flat on his back not moving at all there is only so much that can be done. As a result, he acquired an infection in the chest. The brain swelling and trauma all of a sudden become the secondary concern, this is now what was threatening his life.
I can imagine what your thinking, really? like he needs that! And yes I distinctly remember some very unladylike words escaping my mouth at no one in particular.
I believe this was eventually cleared up after some very heavy steroids and anti biotics were given to him.
We are roughly at around 4 weeks of being in a coma. I'm am 100% sure there are a million more things that went on and happened that even I wasn't told about, not for any other reason than the fact things changed so quickly. What was a problem in one hour may not have been a few hours later and so I tended to be told what was happening at that moment in time rather than a report of everything.
I am making an assumption here as I am not completely sure, but, it makes sense with an educated guess, that the swelling managed to reduce. It was time to try and wake Billy, Bring him out of his coma. Their wasn't any specific expectations nor was there reason to believe he wouldn't wake.
Before I tell you this part I think as a side story, and for those of you who have certain beliefs, this is an interesting tale. My grandmother was very close with my brother. After our sea change, my brother hated our new town and new people. He also suffers from Tourettes like my father, and I personally believe their is a great possibility of asperges yet this has never been diagnosed nor has there been a need to. It does explain his character though. Billy doesn't like change, he is a creature of habit. A year after the big move he decided he would return to the city and live with our grandmother. Finishing school with his friends and going onto university there. So as you could easily conclude, my grandmother and him were extremely close. His accident took a very hard toll on her not unlike my parents. For some time my parents more so my father and I had been taking a strong interest in spirituality and the possibilities that go along with it. We attended weekly group meditation and made some great friends whilst gaining knowledge that seemed to make sense to us.
A now family friend, but then more of an acquaintance of ours, was a soothe Sayer (tarot cards, photos, objects and crystals were her tools). My grandmother contacted her and sent through a recent photo of Billy. I'm unsure of what she was hoping to hear from this friend and although i have my beliefs, to me the beliefs lay more in the area of reincarnation and afterlife rather than tarot readings and star signs etc.
Anyhow, unbeknown to us at the time, my grandmother had a reading done from Billy's photo. Our friend was aware of the situation and was happy to oblige. The result was her friend and her seeing both the same thing from his picture. A smile and a thumbs up.
When my grandmother phoned my parents and explained this to them, it hurt them. Badly. their response… Did she not understand the gravity of the situation. Our boy is so sick and we don't even know if he will survive let alone be fine! We don't need this right now, we need to focus on him and getting through each day. It was from there dismissed.
So as i was saying before, it was time to wake Billy. Of course I had been down and back a few times in this four week period to visit him but more than anything to see my parents. In my view, they were looking after him, I needed to look after them.
Even though Billy was in a coma, it was medically induced further so that he wouldn't come in and out of arousal and to allow his body and brain to rest. In order to bring him out of the coma they explained they would reduce the medicine that was sedating him and assess him from there. This is certainly not like the movies, the patient does not flutter their eyes a few times and awaken with a smile on their face surrounded by 10 family members with way to much makeup and very high hair.
I wasn't at the hospital when this happened so I am telling you this part second hand yet it is from the mouths of mum and dad so it is reliable i assure you!
As the medicine was reduced, the nurse, (who incidentally was also named Billy, although he was very short in stature and my Billy is over 6 foot, so they were aptly and endearingly named Big Bill and little Bill) would come in and out of the room attempting to wake Big Bill.
He would rub and beat on his chest whilst yelling his name, as you would to someone you fear may be unconscious. This may sound brutal but there was some serious drugs in Billy's system and it would take that just to get a flinch.
Mum said it reminded her of trying to wake him when he was a teenager and it was lunchtime and he was still in bed. My own kids are not yet teenagers but I'm sure those of you who have teenagers can certainly relate.
The first few times little Bill tried, big Bill murmured and sort of reacted like someone had woken him from a really good dream and he didn't want to open his eyes. This was positive. The next time after some more of the medicine had worn, Big Bill woke a little more and wait for it… raised his hand slightly and gave us a thumbs up!!! Yup, that just happened!
Now, take from that what you will. I can assure you our friend had never met Billy and Billy never was known for always giving a thumbs up. I am not saying this is evidence of anything or was it some Divine intervention. In fact what it was to us is probably private. and not something that needs to be focused on. All I can say is that it did give us hope. More than we had had the previous four weeks.
No comments:
Post a Comment