Dropping like flies…

Another entry to catch up on the OD Hiatus Period.  We really need a term for the wasteland between OD 1.0 and OD 2.0, don’t we?

It seems like people were dropping like flies in the last few years.

Dear friend AC, the antique dealer from NY, succumbed to his metastatic prostate cancer in 2014 just a few days after his 59th birthday.  The list of where the cancer hadn’t spread would be shorter than where it did metastasize.  The biggest issues were in his bones (incredibly painful) and the brain lesions which left him blind and unable to speak at the end.  Sadly, he suffered because he had family who did not want to give up, putting him through unpleasant treatments that we knew would be futile.  The last insult was that during his final hospital stay, when his kidneys began to fail and the doctor actually offered dialysis!  As if keeping him alive any longer would have been a kindness.  In the end, I convinced his partner that kidney failure is a “nice” death, and they took AC home.  He got to die in his own bed, surrounded by his beloved dogs, 3 days later.

Lady Wife’s uncle LB, who had been descending through dementia for the past three years, finally died in 2017.  He was 83, so a long life, and he also got to die at home, listening to his beloved Beethoven.  Music is what kept him settled as the dementia progressed and he became harder to manage.  In some ways, becoming bedridden was a boon to his caregivers, as they didn’t have to deal with his nocturnal mischief as he wandered the house.

During the period of LB’s decline, his son MB (Lady Wife’s cousin), received a terminal lung cancer diagnosis at 54.  No surprise there, as he smoked like a chimney.  While his final motive will forever remain a mystery, we believe he didn’t want to burden his mother with the news and his subsequent care, as she was already dealing with his father’s illness.  So he went to a hotel and committed suicide by hanging himself in the bathroom.  We weren’t exactly his biggest fans to begin with, and view his action as amazingly selfish.  His mother doesn’t drive, and he left her completely adrift dealing with her husband’s dementia.  I believe assisted suicide should be legal and accessible, and what he chose was appropriate, but his timing and method left much to be desired.  His father died 5 months later, so the second half of 2017 was rough for Lady Wife’s aunt.

I’ve already written about the sudden (but not surprising) death of morbidly obese, diabetic brother-in-law a few weeks ago at age 46.  He should be a poster boy for fast food chains everywhere.

I’m sure there were others, but those are the ones that spring to mind.

In my profession, you have to have a “healthy” relationship with death.  The patients I see have diagnoses that average about a 90% mortality rate, so many times palliative or comfort care are the only options.  Young or old, the best that can be hoped for is a “good” death.  I think the highest compliment you can offer about someone is that they lived and died well.