Day 60, The Hardest Yet

Tuesday night before club I got a phone call from Leigh’s dad, asking me to come with her to the hospital on Wednesday night. He didn’t go into any real details, but simply said it was going to be a hard night for Leigh and that she would need me there. It wasn’t too hard to read between the lines.

When we got there around 5:30 yesterday, we made small talk for a bit before Chuck sort of dove in. Apparently, since this past weekend, they’ve been running some tests on Lynne’s brain. With these, the doctors had new information to share. Since the last EEG they did, Lynne’s brain has been degenerating further and further. When they were fighting so hard to save certain regions of the brain that affect consciousness, the ability to understand language, and motor control, they were unsuccessful. There have been more strokes in those areas, and using the tests they are able to predict that there will be more strokes as well. And there’s nothing they can do to stop them.

Lynne is in a type of vegetative state now. She responds to noise, movement, light, but it isn’t any sort of conscious response. She cannot move or control her body, and she does not experience any sensation of pain now. Also, she’s slipping more every day into a place where she is sleeping without waking.

As of yesterday, the decision was made to stop sustaining her life. Sometime today they will move her to a different floor where the goal is to keep the patient and family as comfortable as possible. Then they will remove the protein bottle that has been sustaining her through her feeding tube. This won’t result in starvation; instead, it will cause her brain to revert back to where it would have been 60 days ago without medical intervention. Different areas will begin to “turn off” and sometime between one and two weeks she will pass away.

Last night was really hard. Today has been really hard. Leigh has cried a lot, and is out shopping for a dress for my grandmother's funeral (what an awful thing to have to do) with Sabrina (thank you Jesus for her.) I went to a concert at the high school today and fought off crying through it all (to be fair, it’s sort of moving to see black and white kids dancing to Beatles songs at the foot of the stage.) Up until now we had hope for recovery, even if it was tiny. Now that’s gone, and we have to figure out how to function with this in a new way.

God is still in this. He’s doing good, hard things in my heart. And in Leigh’s. Some of it we can tell. Others it isn’t so easy. It’s hard to trust and have faith right now, but at the same time I don’t know where else we’d turn. What I do know is that being around people today, I don’t know if I’ve loved people this deeply in a while. For that I’m grateful.

Thanks for the prayers and support. I’ll keep you posted as things move forward.