[Tags: Valentine Contest Entry, Shared Wife, Heart, Valentine's Day]
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The steady beep--beep-beep of Emmy's monitor echoed through the small hospital room failing to drown out the sounds out in the hallway where staff, patients and visitors bustled past. It seemed incongruous that such a short distance away life went on normally while I sat watching my wife die. Her face had a grey pallor to it, her breathing slow, sometimes hitching and fading away in mid-breath. Every missed inhalation made me jerk figuring this might be her last.
The oxygenation percentage on the pulse oximeter screen of the monitor had showed a steady downward trend over the last few hours even with oxygen supplementation tubes up her nose. She was seldom getting above 65%. The real scary ones were the dips heading down to the threshold where death occurs.
Her body was writhing slowly on the bed, her discomfort obvious. Occasionally she regained consciousness gasping wildly, panic clearly showing in the whites of her eyes when her weakened lungs couldn't catch enough breath to satisfy her body. She would clutch my hand digging her nails in until she lost consciousness again from the lack of air and her hand went limp.
I held her cold and swollen hand, symptoms of the end stages of severe congestive heart failure she'd been diagnosed with last year. Tears traced a path down my cheek, That surprised me. I thought I had cried all them out over the last year since her diagnosis.
I was trying to be strong, to support my love with my strength in these last moments between us. The nursing staff had given me an idea of what was coming, but even knowing that, it was a horrifying vigil watching the love of your life slowly choke out her last breaths.
Worse, tonight's death watch was on Valentine's day.
A day we should have been celebrating our love together.
Today should have been about exchanging loving cards or even those humorous cards we always got a giggle out of. It should have been a day of expressing our need for each other. A night for going out on the town for a fine dinner and dancing. I'd be holding her lithe body in my arms, snuggled together in her loving warmth, enjoying the sexy rubbing of our bodies while we moved around the dance floor. I should be crooning little love songs in her ears, echoing those
'I need You'
words while she would breathily sing them right back to me.
I should have been sinking into her warm green eyes with their endless depths and colour changes that fascinated me so much. I could get lost in them making love to her. Thinking about never having her in my arms again was shaking my mental resolve.
So many
'what should be'
thoughts for tonight.
A small sob shook my body, I was trying to be strong for her, but failing so badly.
It hadn't always been like this. Emmy and I, Mark, met seven years ago at a friends party. One look was all it took. I made a beeline to my buddy's wife Sarah begging her for an introduction. Luck was with me Emmy was between relationships and somehow she took pity on me, spending the rest of the night talking to me before sharing her number and plans for another date.
Two years after we met we tied the knot at a wonderful bash. Instead of spending a ton of money on a lot of people that really weren't all that important we invited an exclusive group to join us on the beach in Hawaii for our nuptials.
With the sky a staggering plethora of oranges, reds and yellows fading away to blue, we said our vows and celebrated on the white sand and the warmth of the tropics. It had been magical and afterward we left our friends behind to fly off to Maui while they stayed in Honolulu and partied.
Sarah always claims credit for setting us up. I'm not sure it's true, but you give them the small things just in case you ever need something big. Like letting hubby Jeff come to the Stanley Cup or a guys trip to Vegas.
Despite it being the day so important to celebrating love, I knew Jeff and Sarah along with several other friends and family were holding their own vigil out in the waiting room. They'd all tiptoed through earlier, mute and somber, to say a private goodbye to Emmy. She hadn't stirred much and conversation was impossible for her, she was simply too weak to talk anymore. Even if she could suck in enough breath her failing heart was no longer moving it around like it should. People confined themselves to touching her hand or stroking her face, their sorrow obvious.
It was all over except the waiting! Tomorrow I expected to be making phone calls to announce her passing and working on funeral arrangement. Then I would be starting the first day of my new life alone and bereft of the woman I loved. I'd have gladly traded places with her to take away her pain and misery. Despite my willingness it wasn't a choice I would be offered.
Her symptoms had probably been building for years unnoticed. Momentary weaknesses or inability to catch her breath excused as something to do with her period or the lack of vitamins. The first big clue was when she stopped jogging, complaining of not being able to catch her breath at times. The second major one was when we had to stop making love because she couldn't breath. The third time that happened I told her she needed to go to the doctor. When she demurred, I got angry.
Bright and early the next morning I phoned and made her an appointment. When I explained the symptoms I'd observed the nurse made her an appointment immediately. That should have been a major clue in itself. I took the day off work and made sure she damn well went. It took several months of tests to confirm, but the diagnosis staggered us. Congestive heart failure left undiagnosed for too many years. The doctor was blunt and straightforward. She was in the terminal stages and dying, she would be lucky to make a year.
There was always the possibility of a heart transplant, but that was unlikely. Most people getting the diagnoses had years to live and might, with any luck, make it down the list far enough to get a heart. This late in the disease he felt there was little chance.
At home after we cried and licked our wounds for a couple of weeks before deciding we weren't going to let it happen to us. We jumped into researching anything and everything that could cure, delay or help her improve. We chased down a lot of quack cures that went nowhere and talked to several support groups that gave us some hope. There had been some progress in the last few years and a lot of people suffering from the disease felt a cure or better outcome was just around the corner. They just had to survive that long. Emmy didn't have that kind of time.
I don't know, maybe facing death they were just deluding themselves, grabbing onto any hope they could. I couldn't blame them, she and I were both doing the same thing.
Gradually as her symptoms progressed her tiredness became an issue. Soon she needed a cane to help support her and that progressed to a wheelchair before she finally became bedridden. Fluid retention had at times swelled parts of her up like a balloon, her fingers and toes often looking like fat sausages. Nausea became a constant companion and it was hard to keep nutrition in her when she kept throwing up all the time. She lost weight until she looked like a skeleton of her former self. With her bones so prominent pain became a major problem for her, lying against anything, even soft, caused major pain and created sores on her skin. She was suffering terribly.
Fortunately we both had good medical programs through work that allowed her to go on long term disability and when things got worse I got nursing help to relieve me from my care giving status. Not that I begrudged a minute of it. But I still had to work and as lenient as my employers were, I still had to put in an appearance sometime.
Our social life had dwindled off too. Emmy couldn't handle going out visiting anymore. People came to see her in her bed, but it just wasn't the same. Still like good friends they'd stayed till the last. One of Emmy's requests was to throw her a hell of a party for a wake and remember her from her good times. She'd even ordered herself a huge two foot by three foot poster, with Emmy 1990-2018 in bold letters at the bottom.
She used a picture that we'd taken at a lake of her jumping off a dock into the cold water. In her bikini she looked like a million bucks. A young, vibrant, healthy woman that not many men could resist taking a second look at. It was one of those joyously sunny days, a gentle breeze and a cookout with friends. We'd partied till the late evening before settling into our tents for a little loving. It had been a perfect day with perfect friends and I could understand why she'd picked that picture, despite all the skin it showed.
I suppose in some respects having time to get prepared for what was coming brought a certain blessing. We could talk about funeral arrangements. What did she want. What music. A wake? She could plan that in advance. Still my heartfelt suffering of watching her deteriorate took it's toll on me as it did on her. There were times I wished it had been swift, an accident or heart attack. Anything but watching her suffer like this.
The oxygen meter was hovering around 61% by now and I bowed my head over her hand, rubbing it against my face and kissing it. My tears wet her swollen skin, but I doubted she'd ever know. This was it, death was hovering close by salivating at the opportunity to steal my wonderful wife. It's presence permeated the air, feeling cold and fetid around us. I knew if I turned my back for a moment it would pounce on her, stealing her away in that split second.
I prayed for her. Although not a believer I prayed that her death would be peaceful and if there was a heaven, please let her in. She deserved it. Her kindness and good spirit was legendary. She volunteered with disabled children, she loved animals and would cry if one got hurt. I remembered a bird smacking into the front window. She had picked it up and cried over it's broken neck, it's eyes already glazing over in death. She got out her gardening tools and gave the poor thing a burial deep in her garden in a special spot she picked out.
She never talked smack about a friend, not even an enemy. She had been true to me from the day we met, not once giving me cause to doubt her. She had loved me totally and completely and maybe that was her greatest achievement.
Or maybe it was mine that I managed to attract such a wonderful woman.
The machine beeped a warning a couple of times, her oxygen slipping to 58%, but then righted itself shooting up to 62% almost immediately. She was fighting her last moments I knew. Maybe she wasn't conscious of what she was doing, but she wasn't just going to walk off quietly. That was my Emmy! A fighter to the last!
But death was waiting for her somewhere between 55 to 60%. It was inevitable.
It would be minutes now, even seconds I thought when the door flew open, smashing against the door stop.
Her doctor strode in followed by a gaggle of nurses and equipment, "we've got a heart Mark. I need you out of here now so we can prep her and get her into surgery."
