We have decided, after consultation with her nurse last night, that we will be discontinuing the 25ml/hr of saline as soon as the resident checks her over-procedure and policy I guess. It may already have been done, or it will happen tomorrow morning. No telling for certain how long it will be after that though. She has so much fluid sitting in her legs, but whether that will be accessible or not is another story. And she will still be receiving some fluid in her medications-the ranitidine and anti-emetics are all given in 50ml of saline. I was there for most of the afternoon, from about 1:30 to 6:30. There was a period of about an hour where my mom was awake, and obviously in discomfort and confusion. She kept on trying to talk, but it came out garbled, with hardly any words even understandable. When she's like that, I tend to say uh-huh or yes a lot. I mostly just stood there holding onto her hand, reassuring her that I was there while watching one of my all-time favourite shows, M*A*S*H on tape on the tv. I must have watched about eight episodes, I think...at one point, the character Father Mulcahy utters a prayer along the lines of "if you're going to take him anyways, take him soon so that we can save the other boy". It's a different situation for my family of course, but I'm definitely feeling that way-that the longer this drags out, the harder it is for everyone involved. That's one of the reasons we have decided to discontinue the little bit of saline. My mom clearly has been getting mrore uncomfortable, even with the fentinyl patch and an additional fentinyl shot when the nurse came in after all that discomfort and confusion (unfortunately, the fentinyl did not put her immediately to sleep as it has in the past).

I did some research about death by dehydration and it is apparantly one of the most comfortable and painless ways to die in situations like this. Hospice nurses listed death by dehydration as an 8 on a scale of 1-9 or 1-10 depending on the study, where 1 is a horrible death and 9 or 10 is a 'good' death. I even read that dehydration can actually help reduce pain, because it decreases swelling in tumour sites and such.

My dad talked a bit with me and our minister about feeling like playing God in all of this, but the truth is that no matter what we do we are somewhat controlling things-whether we left the saline or not. As I read tonight, dehydration is how many animals die-it's one of nature's ways of providing a comfortable death. Although I hate to think of my mom in terms of 'animal' it makes sense-we as humans, are, in some form, an animal I guess. With soul of course, but at this point, my mom is hardly my mom anyways. The rest of us are getting exhausted.

During one of her more lucid moments with me she managed to state " I want to go" and I assured her that she'd done everything, that we would be okay, that I knew she was tired and in pain and that it was all right to go. Whether she actually MEANT that she wanted to go 'home' is another question though. Hard to stay in her state of confusion. She might have been thinking that she wanted to go home from kindergarten or off a ferris wheel for all I know, but I did want to reassure her.