Although the doctors didn't say it, this call was basically about whether we would end Dad's life.
Friday, April 17, we had the 11:00 a.m. teleconference call with the hospital doctors, my mom, brother, our pastor, and Dad’s primary care physician. The doctor told us that on Wednesday when they set up the meeting, they were expecting to give us different news. But over the past 16 hours Dad had gone from just being in limbo to actually making progress! Now, they were cautiously optimistic about Dad's recovery, even though his condition was still critical.
Because he was doing better, the doctors wanted to take him off the ventilator. They felt that if his numbers were good (they didn’t exactly explain what that meant), they would use that time to take him off and see what happened. We were asked to decide what we wanted to do once he was off the ventilator if his breathing became labored. Did we want them to perform a tracheostomy, which would mean being able to remove the tube from going down his throat by making a small incision on his neck to which the ventilator tubing could be hooked up? If we chose this path, the doctor cautioned us that it would be a “long road.” My brother and his wife, who is a doctor, both thought this was the best thing to do. The other option was that if Dad couldn’t breathe on his own, they would simply give him meds to make him comfortable and let Mom sit beside him while he died.
How could we make a decision like this? For Mom’s sake, I wanted Dad to live. For Dad’s sake, I didn’t want him to end up in a nursing home on a ventilator for the rest of his life. Dad had lived a good, long life. He was ready to go to Heaven. Was it right to keep him down here with the chance that he would never return to us as Dad and spend his life hooked up to a machine away from Mom in a nursing home? But Mom wasn’t ready to give up and neither was my brother, so I didn’t want to say anything. Besides, life and death should be in God’s hands, not ours!
The doctor then asked us if we’d like to see Dad, and he brought his computer over to Dad’s bed. It was the first time any of us had seen him since he was admitted on March 30. And there he was, lying in his hospital bed, looking old and thin. There were white mittens on his hands so he couldn’t pull out the tubes and as he heard Mom’s voice, Dad raised his arms and waved them. When their pastor, who is a dear family friend, talked to Dad, he raised his arms and waved them back and forth again. I wanted to cry, seeing him like that.
Then the hospital doctors left Dad's room as well as the call, and we basically needed to decide Dad’s fate if he couldn’t breathe on his own—would we opt for the tracheostomy or would we let him die?
We decided to request the tracheostomy, knowing that as early as that afternoon, Dad could be taken off the ventilator, and hoping against hope that Dad's lungs were strong enough now to breathe on their own so that the tracheostomy was unnecessary.
I wrote to our praying friends, “I sincerely believe that God has shown up in the last 16 hours to give Dad this good progress! Thank you for your prayers! Please don't stop!"
I concluded with Daniel 9:18-19 "We do not make requests of You because we are righteous, but because of Your great mercy. O Lord, listen! O Lord, forgive! O Lord, hear and act!"
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