four weeks. two days.

My mother died last night.

I went to see her after work, having missed visiting her Monday evening because of working late. I was upset from the minute I walked in, as she was nothing like the previous visit of two days ago. She was having dreadful trouble breathing, even with the oxygen tubing (aka nasal cannula) and her mouth was bleeding a bit.

At first I thought the pnuemonia was the cause, but the hospice nurse said that she was so ill that she couldn't swallow properly and couldn't keep liquids from going into her lungs. The aspiration was also affecting her oxygen levels.

Because of this, the doctor had taken her off food and limited her intake to ice chips. She kept begging me to bring her a drink of water but all I could do was give her stupid little spoonfuls of ice chips (plus water when nobody was looking). I had brought her some banana pudding as I knew she really liked it, but I couldn't give it to her. 

She kept coughing and it sounded awful; somewhere between pneumonia and tuberculosis. She kept telling me she couldn't breathe.  So I asked the nurse what we could do. She said that she would increase my mother's oxygen when she got the okay from the doctor. I asked why we couldn't just crank up the level, and she told me that oxygen is considered a drug, and that nurses aren't allowed to increase it without a prescription. (I'm not kidding.)

I watched the oxygen monitor numbers keep dipping to below 80, but no doctor's order arrived. I waited and waited, but still nothing, and my mother kept saying she couldn't breathe. So I finally reached behind her bed and cranked up the oxygen.  It took a few minutes but she began to look better, and the coughing subsided.

Eventually she asked me to adjust the bed so she wasn't sitting up any more. I asked her if she wanted to rest a while and she said yes. She said that I needed to get home and have some dinner.

Less than two hours later, the hospital called to tell me she was gone.