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Permalink Reply by Paula Marie on March 6, 2016 at 11:49am

I'm so sorry for your great loss! I lost the love of my life when he was in a hospital doing very well and expecting to go home. The doctors said he had aspirated during the night and his heart stopped. It took over ten minutes for the hospital staff to even realize it. I got "the call" early in the morning when it was still dark outside. The doctor woke me up from my exhausted sleep and I wasn't really even thinking. I thought, okay, his heart has stopped, but the doctor will get it to beat again. I raced to the hospital and, sure enough, they had resuscitated him. But not in the way I would have wanted. The nurse was crying and I could sense something awful had happened. He was unconscious and immediately put on a ventilator. After a few days he opened his eyes, and then started to look around the room, though showed no reaction to me or to anyone. He wasn't brain dead, but in a "waking coma." Years ago, I had a nightmare about a frightening monument in the likeness of a granite baby carriage, which stood inside of a cemetery where everything was stone. The baby inside the nightmare was also made of immovable stone and it could only move its eyes. This nightmarish experience reminded me of that eerie dream so long ago. The doctors fought with me to take him off life support, but I fought them back as if I were a tiger protecting its cub. I wanted to give him a little time, since he had come out of every bad thing before. A rude medical person clapped her hand right in front of his face and said, "look, there's nothing there!" I was so sickened by her brutal thoughtlessness; she treated him like a mere object yet he still was my precious, precious love. At the same time, his doctor fought against my wishes to have him transported to a better hospital, making me feel they might be hiding something from me. I felt as if I were walking inside of the pages of a medical mystery novel, it was so traumatic. Finally, after two weeks, a lawyer friend came and helped get him out of there into another hospital for better care, but it was two late. He died in the second hospital a week later. At least I know they did everything they could at the second hospital. He was the only man who ever deeply loved me, and I will honor his memory to the end of my days. That was six years ago. My mother died not long afterwards (several years later) and I really have fallen to pieces. How does one heal from such enormous loss?