On his deathbed, Zhang Baotong 2018.7.9

In the past, I have seen the dying condition of people in movies and movies, and the overall feeling is that the process of dying is very short, about only a few minutes, but recently, I was nursing my father-in-law, who is nearly 90 years old and suffering from liver cancer, in the hospital, and I have a very deep understanding of a person's dying condition, which has also changed my impression of people at the end of life.

My father-in-law was sent to the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine by ambulance two days ago, and this is the second time he has been admitted to the liver department after a week. But. This time, he was in the emergency room, and he was upgraded from ordinary care to special care last time. After being sent to the hospital, the person was in a semi-comatose state, and after rescue, it has stabilized.

When we arrived at the ward at eight o'clock, the eldest sister and brother-in-law on the night shift looked tired, and they said that my father-in-law had tossed all night and made them not blink an eye all night. I believe this because my father-in-law used to have insomnia at night, and after being hospitalized, he lay in bed all day, constantly taking injections and medicines, and the insomnia at night worsened. Therefore, everyone who works the night shift complains about it.

The eldest sister especially emphasized that the urinary catheter is very difficult to insert, but it is necessary to find a surgeon to insert it, so you must be careful not to let your father-in-law get the urinary catheter out. Then my brother-in-law asked me to open the urinary catheter every half an hour to drain the urine.

As soon as I took over, I first took the urine from the catheter into a large cup, recorded the amount of urine in a notebook, and poured the urine into the toilet bowl in the bathroom. I thought that my father-in-law would toss all night at night, and he would sleep during the day, and he would be relatively stable. Still, he couldn't settle down.

Although his eyes were closed, he did not sleep, and his body writhed all the time. Because he had some leather tubes in his body, a urinary catheter in his urine, and some needles pressed on his arm. In particular, he had been lying in bed for a month or two, and his flesh and skin were already in a state of extreme fatigue, so he was uncomfortable all over his body, so he kept turning his body. And he can't leave people every minute by his side. As soon as you leave for a moment, even if there is not even the slightest movement, he can feel it, and immediately opens his eyes wide, showing a look of panic. The caregiver is to sit by his bedside at all times.

When his wife and I sat on the edge of the bed, he kept muttering to us, "Let the pony come and sit for a while." His words were so vague that I couldn't hear them a few times, so I asked my wife to come and listen. His wife put her ear to his mouth and listened, and it took her several times to understand. So he coaxed him and said, "Dad, I'll just sit here." But he kept saying, "Come and sit, come and sit." I knew he was afraid of being alone, so I took him by the hand and comforted him. He took my hand and didn't let go. From time to time, I stroked his arm. He looked at me for a while, then smiled at me, and smiled heartily and relaxedly, and with a sense of sincerity, and said, "Thank you, Baotong." "This is the first time I've seen him smile in days, and I think it's very kind. So, I smiled at him too.

After a while, the doctor came to examine him and said loudly, "Old Ma, do you hurt?" He looked at the doctor and shook his head to show that it didn't hurt. The doctor asked the nurse to start hanging the bottle on him. I asked the doctor how many bottles to fill. The doctor said a lot. I looked at the records in the notebook, there were cephalosporins, amino acids, anti-inflammatory drugs, human blood albumin, painkillers, diuretics, etc., and it was said that it would take a whole day. Because the needle is buried in the arm, the leather tube is directly inserted into the needle to start the infusion.

At this time, his wife fed him medicine, and as soon as he saw the medicine, he waved his hand and put the medicine in his mouth, and he gritted his teeth and did not open his mouth. Then his wife asked him if he had eaten. He said he wanted to eat. His wife heated the millet porridge in the microwave to feed him. He asked me to sit him up, but when his wife fed him, he waved his hand and said he didn't want to eat. Actually, he really wanted to eat, but he had lost his appetite and wanted to vomit at the sight of food.

Not only did he not want to take medicine, he didn't want to eat, he didn't want to get injections, and his hands often unconsciously touched the needles and needles. After such a long hospital stay and injections, his hands, arms and feet were already densely packed with needle holes. While rinsing his bladder, his reaction was noticeably worse, restless, painful, and his hands kept trying to remove the catheter that had been inserted into the urine. I grabbed his two hands and stared at the hanging bottle with a very anxious gaze. For a while he was so frantic that he wanted to sit up, and he kept stretching out his hand to me and shouting at me, "Pull me up, pull me up." I pointed to the two hanging bottles that were hanging at the same time and said, "Look, the doctor won't let me move." But he didn't listen, and kept shouting, "Get up, get up." And as he spoke, he propped himself up with his arms. It seems that if you don't sit up from the bed, you will be suffocated. Because the bladder was being flushed, the doctor wouldn't let him move, so I comforted him and didn't let him get up. He opened his mouth wide, his tongue exposed, and a thick layer of white moss accumulated on the surface of his tongue, and he kept moaning "ahhh After about twenty minutes, the hanging bottle that rinsed his bladder was finished, and he began to feel relieved and his mood stabilized. He kept stretching out his arms and shouting at me like a drowning man calling for help, "Lala, get up." Seeing his pitiful and anxious look, I couldn't help but pick him up and sit on the bed. However, he could only sit on the bed for half a minute before he lay down. Because his physical strength has made him unable to support it. He lay on the bed, panting sharply, feeling like he had exhausted all his strength.

However, as soon as he lay down, he began to writhe his whole body again, as if his body was curled up in a small cage, which made him feel very uncomfortable and uncomfortable, so he wanted to break free, wanted to stretch. He gasped sharply, as if he was suffocating. Only by sitting up can you soothe and stretch a little. I helped him sit several times, but because I was worried that the catheter would fall off, my wife wouldn't let me help him up again. But he didn't care about that, and continued to shout, "Pull me up." When he saw that I would not lift him up, he said angrily, "I always think about you, but you don't think about me." Then he tried to sit up from the bed. With all his strength, he propped himself up on the bed with his arms and pressed his feet on the edge of the bed, trying to sit up, as if he were using this method to measure how long his life would last. However, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't sit up. Trying, failing, trying hard, failing again, a few times I almost sat up, but in the end, I still failed, until all the strength in my body was exhausted, and I had to give up. He lay on the bed, gasping for breath, showing a sad despair.

In the past, even just half a month ago, sitting up from bed was nothing, but now, it is so far away. Of course, he was not reconciled, so he lay down on the bed, panting vigorously with his mouth wide open, so that he could wait for a while, and when he had gathered enough strength, he tried to sit up from the bed with all his might. Because that's the hope of his life. In fact, compared with half a month ago, he has lost a lot of weight, he has stopped eating since yesterday, and he can't even swallow the very thin millet porridge. All that was left of his body was a handful of bones. The skin on his arms and legs is rough like fish scales. He doesn't have any strength!

For a while, he would open his eyes and look straight out the window, and a tear or two would ooze from his sockets. I know he's longing for the world outside the house, he hasn't been out for a month or two, and in the past, his mother-in-law and mother used to walk on the street. He likes to look at the mundane and lively scenes of the world. However, because it was on the upper floor, I couldn't see anything outside the window except the gray sky. But he was just staring out the window. Maybe he's thinking about his past, the things that make him feel happy and happy, comforted and beautiful. However, those smoke-like memories were slowly drifting away farther and farther away, never to wave or nod to him again. Thinking like this, tears poured out of his eyes until they blurred his eyes.