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Lut passed away on June 10.
That wasn't part of May but I don't want to leave any suspense about where this ends.
He went to the hospital on May 9, after being in too much pain to stand for two days, and in so much pain that we could not even maneuver him to sit on a bed pan.
On May 11, he was doing much better; the nurses would not let him stand without one of them to watch him, but his pain was well-controlled and he didn't need assistance to stand or walk.
Unfortunately, this was a very short-term reprieve. Within a few days, he took on the confusion I associated with long hospital stays and/or a failure to wear his bi-pap while sleeping, and it soon grew worse. At the same time, the pain worsened; by May 15, his pain was completely out of control again. But they got it back under control on May 18, and while he still had issues with confusion, he was much closer to lucid.
While he was in the hospital, pain management asked us if he wanted him to enter hospice. They knew at that time that it was likely Lut would never return to his previous level of function, and that he might be in increased levels of pain for the rest of his life. They were very clear about this: "we can give him palliative radiation and that might reduce the pain but it's not a cure." I tried to find out if this was happening because his cancer was out of control and would kill him soon, but could not find anyone able to answer this question. Absent any information about his long-term prognosis, Lut told me he wanted to try rehab. I also wanted him to try rehab.
On May 30, the hospital discharged him to a long-term care facility, where the plan was to get him whatever physical therapy he could manage while we got together everything needed to bring him home. I told the LTC facility that "whether he gets better or not, I want him to come home. I will do and pay whatever it takes to bring him home."
I tried reaching his regular oncologist at this point, because I still hadn't talked to any oncologist about his condition since his last appointment in March, when they'd considered the cancer under control. This didn't work.
On June 5, the LTC facility sent him back to the hospital ER because he couldn't get enough oxygen even with an oxygen cannula. The ER intubated him to save his life.
The LTC called me at 11PM to tell me they were sending him to the ER. The nurse at the ER met me outside his room when they finally let me back to see him at, I don't know, 12:30AM. "I want you to know that he's just fine," she said. "We've intubated him and he's sedated so it looks scary. But he's fine."
I might have laughed. The absurdity of saying he was fine, with tumors in his spine and a compression fracture and so much pain from his leg that he could put no weight on it, was too much. He was not fine.
On June 6, I once again complained to pain management that I had no idea what was going on with his long-term prognosis and hadn't talked to an oncologist all month. She got an oncologist to come see him in the hospital on June 7 and told me when so I could be there.
That oncologist told me: "it doesn't matter what his multiple myeloma numbers are. He is too weak to resume treatment. If he were my relative, I would move him to hospice care."
I asked pain management if I could bring him home for hospice.
"Of course," she said.
The hospice service moved very quickly to get him home -- originally they were planning on Saturday, but bumped it to Sunday because he needed a low-air-loss bariatric mattress and the equipment supplier had to get it from a warehouse instead of having one on hand. All the logistics barriers that had felt so insurmountable all month were swept away by the word "hospice."
On Sunday, June 9, he came home. The hospice people cleared out by 12:30PM, and we spent the day together. I got to cuddle next to him on one side with Lyric on the other. He still had issues with delirium, but he was much more like himself than he'd been in the hospital. He knew he was home. He knew who I was, and who the cat was, and who he was. He watched Warhammer 40k videos on his Chromebook.
It was a good day.
Around 9PM, he was dozing but sounded uncomfortable, so I woke him to ask if he wanted painkillers. He told me he did, so I gave him some, then put the bi-pap mask back on him.
That was the last time he was responsive. On June 10, he passed away.
It's been almost three weeks. I have been okayish. I cry sometimes; I am crying now, writing this post. Mostly I read fantasy romance manwha, play Time Princess, pet the cat, and drift through the days. Every now and then, I do something else. I've worked 19.5 of the 21 planned day job hours in that time frame. I've continued to post Apothecaria entries daily. I've edited A Dragonling's Family a little. I actually exercised to an exercise video once, for the first time since April.
I wrote a great deal about what happened as it was happening, in locked Fediverse posts. I copied them into a file but I don't know that I'll ever post it on Dreamwidth. Probably at some point, in backdated entries for my own reference.
Sometimes I am angry about the way the last month and a half of Lut's life went, as I expect is obvious in this post. Sometimes I am regretful. Mostly I am okayish.
"Okayish" here means: not crying, not feeling miserable, able to enjoy some activities, taking care of myself and my cat, completing necessary tasks. That sort of thing. I am not up to Normal Functionality. Time feels meaningless. Motivation is low.
At some point, I will get back to Doing Things and Tracking Things. Not in May, and not this month. Probably not in July, either. I am fine with that. It is what it is. (Lut always hated that phrase.)
When Bard passed away last April, I managed to write a post about them. I never did write one for Terrycloth, who passed away in August. Lut's passing keeps making me think of the two of them again. I am not done grieving for any of them. Maybe I never will be.
