Yes. On May 8th, 2008, my mother suffered a massive brain aneurysm. My father didn't find her for some time, but the E.R. managed to keep her alive long enough to transport to Saginaw (St. Mary's) for brain surgery. Her surgeon, Malcolm Field, did his level best to repair the damage, but, the damage was too severe. My mother would be in a vegetative state for the rest of her life. On June 2nd, 2008, my wife (fiancee at the time) was visiting my mother in intensive care when a nurse pulled me aside and told me that my mother had five more aneurysms in her brain. The one on her brain stem was coiled a few days later. She stayed at St. Mary's for some time before being sent to a rehabilitation clinic that specializes in weening patients off ventilators. I don't remember the name of the place, but they treated my absolute defenseless mother poorly. She got bed sores starting at that place.
I think towards the end of July, or maybe August '08, my mother was transferred to a long-term nursing home that was only thirty-thirty five minutes away from where my father and I were living. The two of us visited as much as we could, him more than me though. We took as best of care of her as we could, picking up the sizeable slack left by the nurses who'd ignore my silent mother for up to a documented four hours. Her bed sores got worse because the nurses would forget to rotate her. And they made her throat bleed any time they cleared her trachea. My father and I knew how to do it without hurting her or putting her into gagging fits that turned her face bright red.
It was a constant battle, and besides taking its toll on my poor mother, it was taking a heavy toll on my father and me. Starting in the fall of 2010, my father's doctor and my mother's doctor recommended to him that he needed to take care of himself and that he should consider bringing my mother home - a euphemism for letting her die. Well, he came out on the front porch one night while I was smoking a cigarette and broached the subject. I agreed; my mother had suffered enough.
So in February 2011 we went to court to petition to have all life sustaining measures performed on my mother stopped. It went through and into effect in March. While the nurses quit giving my mother food, they kept giving her water, prolonging her life and starvation. During the same time, during one of her few rotations of the day, she was dropped on the floor and her right shoulder was dislocated.
My mother passed away on April 19th, 2011.
The responsibility of being a care giver was… difficult, a long depressing road that changed me, put me on razor's edge on occasion (when the nursing staff ****ed up), gave me gray hair, ulcers, migraines and I saw nearly three years of my life just vanish and in the bitter end, the memory that I helped kill my own mother.
