Things have been pretty messed up for the last few weeks.
Ruby (my mother-in-law) has had some pretty major health issues for a while now. Lung cancer that came out of remission, long-term COVID effects, COPD, dementia, and some other things, and on top of it she smoked like a chimney. She would have coughing fits so severe sometimes I was amazed she wasn’t coughing up blood.
Here’s a timeline.
1 October, Evening: I was in my office working on stuff when I heard Mama call for Stacie, then me. Stacie was out, so she asked if I could bring her some paper towels. Grabbed a roll from the stockpile and handed it to her. She was on her knees by her bed. I didn’t think anything of it because she was cleaning something on the floor.
1 October, ~8:00: Mama goes to talk to Stacie and it comes out that she had fallen out of bed at some point. She’d cracked her head on the way down and when she woke up she saw puke on the floor. Didn’t bother telling me she’d fallen at the time, just asked for paper towels to clean up with. But that’s old farm ladies for you. They’re stubborn. Never mind that she looked like she’d gone a few rounds with Tyson.
Stacie’s commentary on the subject was that she would be going to urgent care in the morning for a possible concussion and whatever else – by the time she told us about the fall, they were closed, and the ER near us was going to be packed thanks to the anti-vax assheads coming down with the plague in droves. Plus Mama was fighting her tooth and nail on seeing a doctor. Turned out to be the right decision accidentally.
1 October, ~11:00: I heard a knock at the bedroom door. Being half asleep, I tried listening to make sure I wasn’t imagining it. Then I heard Mama ask “Stacie?” So I woke Stacie up, let her know what was going on, and she got out of bed to make sure she’s OK. Mama said she thought she needed to go to the ER. Fair enough, we’ll take her. It wouldn’t be the first time I took her to the doctor, considering I’d been her de facto medical chauffeur for the last couple years and especially since we moved.
Around 11:15 she said she thought she needed an ambulance because she was having chest pains. Stacie asked how long that had been going on, and she said around 45 minutes at that point. WTF, old woman?! So an ambulance was called. Cops showed up first to do what they could and I wound up taking the dog out onto the deck. Because the last thing we needed was him getting underfoot or biting someone and making things worse. Then the EMTs got there and told us they’d be taking her to Mercy in Coon Rapids rather than North Memorial in Maple Grove (where I end up) because North was completely full and Mercy had beds available. So even if we had taken her to the ER ourselves, they would have had to transfer her.
1 October, just before midnight: the EMTs get her down the stairs in that fancy gurney-chair thing with the tank tracks. I got to watch from the deck with Finnegan because about the only way I could be useful was sitting on the back deck with him so he couldn’t bite anyone. Finn, naturally, was losing his mind watching strangers haul his mom out of the house. None of us knew it at the time, but that was the last he ever saw of her.
2 October: the doctors told us she had fluid in the sac around her heart. They weren’t sure what the fluid was, just that it was fluid and that’s Not A Good Thing. So they were going to do a procedure to drain the fluid. They said it could just be fluid, it could be blood, or it could be fluid with cancer in it. That afternoon they got a tube in place to drain the fluid, and she was so weak the procedure almost killed her. O2 kept dropping to dangerous levels, but they kept her going. We were told the fluid was being sent to the lab for testing, and we could expect results by Wednesday.
6 October: the test results came back. It was cancer. The lung cancer had spread and they weren’t sure what they could do, but they were working on options. The next two days were spent figuring out what to do for the cancer.
8 October: after a week of going back and forth about what to do, we were told she could come home soon, likely Monday or Saturday. I left work early to help Stacie get Ruby’s room ready for her. As far as we knew, she would be coming home Saturday afternoon. Luckily my bosses are civilized, so when I told my immediate supervisor she just said “yep. Do what you need to do.”
9 October: Stacie was told there was no way she would be coming home Saturday. Her blood pressure was so messed up that getting her out of bed to use the bathroom was crashing her blood pressure to the point that she would pass out. The doctor said it was such a rapid deterioration that he would have been perfectly OK with her going home on Thursday or Friday, but he could not let her leave at this point.
At some point Saturday or Sunday, she was switched to palliative care. The decision was also made that treatment wasn’t an option – it would probably kill her faster than the cancer – and her only real option was hospice. Mama was dead-set against going to a nursing home, and private facilities are insanely expensive (our mortgage in three days), so we made plans for home hospice.
11 October: Ruby’s condition continued to deteriorate. It was bad enough that the doctors were trying to arrange a visit for Finn and had removed the restrictions on how many visitors she could have – she had been on “one visitor a day” restriction. Obviously things had gone drastically downhill. The extra visitors are one thing, but the dog? When’s the last time you heard of a non-service dog being let into a human hospital for a visit? As far as I know that only happens when a K9 handler shows up in the ER and tells the triage team “screw you, that’s Officer McRuff, not ‘a dog,’ and you are going to be treating his gunshot wound or yours. Your choice.”
We didn’t get to visit that night because the starter on the Blazer fried while I was across town. So my night went from “stop at Grainger for a part for the fridge, beat rush hour traffic home, and go to the hospital with Stacie” to “sit around the parts shop’s parking lot for three hours waiting for the tow truck.”
12 October: Stacie picked me up at work and we went to visit her at the hospital. This was the first time I’d seen her since the EMTs took her. She was really quiet and run down, but at least we brought her fudgesickles. She’d been asking for them since she got in, and we were having no end of trouble finding them. Ruby had two of them while I was there and seemed to enjoy them. From what I gathered, they had her on oxy and morphine, but even then some pain was getting through. I wound up leaving around 5 (I had prescriptions to pick up) and came back for Stacie around 8.
Ruby died around 11:30 that night. Having spent a weekend on morphine, oxy and dilaudid a few weeks before she went in, I’m certain she didn’t suffer much, and probably didn’t even know it was happening.
She was more of a mom to me than Theodora ever was.
RIP, Ruby. We’re going to miss you.