The final days were surreal, emotional, and incredibly painful to watch...

As mentioned in “Our Blog - Part 5: The Care Home” Grandma was initially in hospital due to a hematoma and to start with we genuinely believed this was potentially just another hospital visit, and she would leave the hospital again and return to the care home although probably this time into full nursing care. Her speech was deteriorating since the broken hip she was no longer mobile and during this hospital visit was struggling to feed herself. She now had to be fed with the help of family or staff.

We had been waiting for a social worker to be assigned (two weeks in it still hadn’t happened) and safeguarding to visit and confirm if it was safe for her to return to the care home she had been at or whether we needed to find a new one. This was all very up in the air.

Whilst in hospital Grandma took a downward turn. On one visit I had whilst she was in hospital her knee had become incredibly hot, and she was in pain and quite distressed. On pointing this out to the nurse she said it was probably an infection but would get the doctor to have a look and they agreed. A week later she was sent for another scan as she had been struggling to breath over the weekend. DVT was found, she has two clots one in each lung, due to the hematoma they could not treat the clots in both lungs. Having read up on this we wondered if the pain she had felt in her knee had been from DVT and if it had now travelled to her lungs, again a moment of hindsight is a wonderful thing, and you trust that the doctors and medical staff know what they are talking about at the time. It may be a theory on our part but something undoubtedly, we will never truly know the answer to.

As Grandma still had a hematoma that was bleeding, they could not treat the blood clots in the lungs as this would worsen the bleed in the brain. The hospital made the decision within days, as she had deteriorated further, to withdraw any medical care. I raced to the hospital to see her. I did not realise until a couple of days later that withdrawing the medical care also meant she was totally Nil by mouth as well. They were waiting for her organs to completely shut down on average this can take 10 days potentially up to 2 weeks.

Waiting for someone to die is a strange, numbing experience. Knowing she was Nil by mouth seemed cruel and heartless. It was something I had to force myself to read up on and understand why they had done this. Watching her sleep, wondering if she’s aware – can she hear or sense your presence, especially with Lewy - is she in constant pain. Watching this, I found myself wishing there was a way to ease her suffering more quickly. I questioned why such options aren’t available for people in these stages of illness. I wouldn’t want any loved one, human or animal, to endure this drawn-out struggle, and it felt cruel to have to watch her go through it. Something that will haunt me forever. 

Nurses cared for her as best they could - cleaning her mouth, tending to her skin, turning her over and keeping her as comfortable as they could. But seeing her, skin and bones, bruised, turning into a barely living corpse, hearing the “death rattle” as she breathed, her holding onto these small, knitted hearts… tiny signs of comfort in a life that was increasingly out of her control. It’s a memory that will stay with me forever.

It took a total of 7 days for her to pass on. I don’t know what she understood in her last days or last moments. I don’t know if that single tear that escaped her eye when they cleaned her mouth was pain… recognition… or simply just a reflex her body could no longer control. But I do know that love was there, and that I was there, her family was there holding space for her and hope that she finally found peace.