Hi, I'm Jeff and my wife died last week.
I'm a little older than some/many of you; I'm 52. The other sites I've been to, however, have way too many people who are so much older than usthan me that I don't identify with the members at all.
I have 2 grown children. One is here, the other in a city pretty far away. I work from home. My wife had been home with me. There is no one to talk to during the day, no one to take a coffee break with. Aside from that, today has been a good day. I'm just trying to establish the new normal.
Karen wasn't sick for very long. She had what appeared to be food poisoning. After 10 days of throwing up, she agreed to go to the doctor. He found nothing wrong and said if she wasn't better by Monday, go to her regular doctor. On Saturday she was worse, on Sunday she was in awful shape. I took her to the ER and she was septic, in acute renal distress, her liver was failing. They did a CT scan and found she had an incarcerated hernia. Transfer to another hospital ICU, dialysis overnight, surgery in the morning. All seemed to go well, the nurse told me to go home and get some rest. Three hours later he called and said to get there right away. She aspirated. That led to a ventilator, a rotoprone bed, and transfer to another hospital for ECMO. During the transfer, her heart stopped, but they got it going again. After another week, she seemed to be doing better; the doctor was talking to us about the long term treatment plan. Then they did a CT scan of her brain. Severe brain damage incompatible with life. We don't know when it happened. In three weeks we went from planning Thanksgiving (her favorite holiday) to sitting shiva. It has been a whirlwind.