Saturday, July 19, 2008

Last Breath


The day my sister died I was a senior in high school.

The day before my sister died I was called out of class by a phone call from my brother Joe. "Carrie is at Riverview Hospital and I am going to pick you up at school in a few minutes."

I wasn't shocked by those words, I was accustomed to emergency trips to the hospital. I was familiar with dangerous medical procedures. Emotionally difficult revelations had become common occurrences in my life. At a early age, three or four, I became aware that that one of my sisters had died not long after I was born and that one other had died before I was born.

In the fall of my eighth year, on the day after my brother Joe celebrated his eighteenth birthday, I awoke to an empty house and the information that my brother Joe had been rushed to the hospital after experiencing a seizure. That day the diagnosis was that Joe had a mass in the right frontal lobe of his brain, but it was operable. Joe continued to receive operations, chemotherapy, and radiation in that region of his brain until his death at the age of twenty nine.

The summer after Joes first seizure, my brother Danny, who was twenty, fell to the floor in our family dinning room with a seizure.
He was found to have brain cancer as well. He would sustain extremely heavy doses of drug cocktails and prescriptions until surgical technology advanced enough to allow operations on the cancer that had nested in his brain. Danny would succumb to death three months short of his thirtieth birthday.

The summer of my tenth year my uncle William smuggled a revolver into the hospital where he was to receive treatment for shingles.
He had suffered for years with diabetes and organ transplants.
Uncle Bill met death with his own hands that night.

The winter of my thirteenth year my Grandmother was lowered into the ground.


Carrie was twenty nine when she died. She had a husband and three children, one had died late term, after the birth of her first child.
My sister Carrie was my surrogate mother when I was a child. I think my mother had her fill of kids by the time I came toddling around with my giant head. Carrie took upon herself my education in religious extremes at the local, extreme right wing, paramilitary, Pentecostal church.
Unfortunately watching my brothers , on a Sunday morning, ride off in the back of Dad’s pick-up truck on their way to a deer hunt, fishing creek, or tromp through the woods didn’t fare well on my sisters intentions.

When she married into life on a farm she would host the largest family gatherings we had ever experienced and always cooked too much food.
She was kind and could be rude. She normally wore a big smile, but never failed to rain down Hell upon the slightest miss-step.
I loved her. She was always sweet to me.

She entered the hospital on a Friday with flu-like symptoms, these symptoms happened to be the first signs that her immune system was failing.
She had many health problems the previous year and had been treated with many different antibiotics. The treatments had destroyed the normal flora of her bowels. Her body had been dumping toxins into her bloodstream, producing tremendous infection throughout her body.
Numerous antibiotics, many experimental, were pumped into her throughout the day.
Her blood pressure dropped, she retained large amounts of fluid, and her breathing became labored.
While she was semiconcious I stood by her bed as she gasped for breath. "I love you, Carrie."
Her response came between rapid breaths.. "I - love-- you." I was mortified by causing her to strain in responding to me.
She later slipped into unconsiousness and was placed on a ventilator. By Saturday afternoon the decision was made to remove her from life support.
We all stood in the room and listened to the solo performed by the ventilator. The check valves and pneumatics pumped and clicked in unison. The seal in the diaphram fell as my sisters chest rose. Once the nurse shut the system down we listened to my sister wheeze in and watched her chest rise. She would gurgle and her chest would fall.
Eternities passed between the last gurgle and the next wheeze. I knew what would happen, eventually one of these breaths would be her final. The room was sick with waiting and hope and prayer and promise and pain and tears and the next last breath followed by the next last breath, more eternities, and finally she was silent.

My sisters last breath would be the first of many, many, more I would bear witness to.
I now know it is never a good thing to wish for better things, because eventually you will wish your life away. I used to wonder what the world would look like without those thousands of 'last breaths' behind my eyes.

I couldn't say this then or for years afterward, but now, I wouldn't trade those breaths for anything.

No comments: