Sadness

I have about an hour before I'm going to go back out to the hospital to sit with my mom and dad. I hate hospitals so much. It's pretty sad when you know the routine of things at a hospital, when the housekeepers come in, how they do their work, when the nurses come in. I may be out there longer today than I was yesterday.

Mom called me Wednesday to tell me that she took my brother, Billy, to the ER because he wasn't going to the bathroom. Now, if you of you have kept up on the archives, you would know that his not peeing is a bad thing. They feared that his kidneys were shut down. Without question, Billy was going to be in the Intensive Care Unit, at least for observation. If it had been just his kidneys, he'd been moved to a regular room and sent for dialysis until his kidneys began to work again. Not the case this time around. There is some sort of infection that has gotten into his system and because my brother has little to no immune system, he wasn't able to fight it off. His blood is septic and the doctors decided yesterday to put him on the ventilator for the 18th time in his life. What I can't get past is the fact he looks so good, so pink and so healthy and yet he's fighting for his life.

This is how things stand as of right now. He's on a ventilator that is trying to take fluid out of his body. He gained 20 pounds of fluid overnight even though he's been on the ventilator since early morning yesterday and he has a catheter. They have given him shots of Lasix (medication that removes excess water from the body) and he's still holding on to the fluid. The doctors have put him completely under, pretty much a medically induced coma. That way when they go to give him medication or change the IVs, he won't have a chance to wake up even a little. The conference that my mom and dad had with his doctors basically tells me that things aren't well at all. Billy isn't out of the woods by a long shot, their words. Due to the fact his Lupus has been attacking his lungs over the years and he's been on the vent so many times, his lungs are getting the worst of it.

I honestly don't know what to think or feel. I'm so damn numb right now. Part of me thinks that if I continue to think the worst, he'll pull through just like all the times before. But part of me also feels that he's so tired of fighting this stuff. He almost didn't make it the last time because he said he was just tired of fighting. I honestly don't know how much more his body will be able to take. I've told him before that he didn't need to stay on this earth for anyone, to go home and be out of pain. What if this is that time? If he makes it through this time, will he be able to do it the next time as well?

I'm going to answer a few more emails and then I have to get ready to go to the hospital. I'll be sitting out there with my mom so my dad can go home and get some rest. He didn't look good yesterday while I was out there and I'm worried that this may push him to the point of a heart attack. His own medical situation isn't good and I don't think my mom could take much more.

Love you all,
Kim