Bringing Martin Home

After being in the hospital for two and a half weeks, we were tired. At this point, Martin couldn’t say much and no doctor or nurse could tell me why. MRI was stable but an EEG test results show that his brain waves were changing. Now he is sleeping a lot and barely eating. When he could squeeze out a word it was “home.” He wanted to go home. There was no way I could take care of him alone and I was told to look into a skilled nursing center. WHAT? Do you mean, he can’t come home? The word “hospice,” had been mentioned more and more. Each time I adamantly said we are not ready for that. There was a thing we were going to do to try to hold off cancer as long as possible. It had worked wonderfully from January to March. So well that they were going in to do a decortication on his chest. It was a large and complicated surgery but he would no longer have meso in his chest.

The only way they would happily release us is if we had hospice waiting for us when we arrived home. At 9am I did it, I gave in and allowed them to set up hospice. By 4pm there was a hospital bed sitting in my living room. Finally, at 7 pm the ambulance shows up to drive us home. I told the nurses that had taken such good care of Martin, goodbye, and now we are walking out of the emergency area. That was where we had entered the hospital back on January 2, 2022, it is now January 20, 2022. How did he get worse instead of better? Why can they not tell me what went wrong?

Before we were wheeled down, Martin woke up enough that I tried hard to talk to him. He had heard the word hospice and the look on his face was that of confusion. I told him that was the only way I could get him home. I assured him that we would continue on the Fenben and I was most certainly NOT giving up on him. I needed Martin to talk, to tell me that this was the right decision, but that didn’t happen. I hope he understood that.