February 08, 2016

The Gentle Savage

I feel I need to write this, yes, in the middle of it all. During the night we took turns, inserting a finger into my son's mouth and pulling his lower jaw forward, allowing him to breathe. Yes, without doing this he would have died. Suffocating. Slowly or quickly, I didn't know, but the natural thing to do was to fight for him, when he couldn't fight for himself.

The why and how of his deteriorating health, and the repeated incidents over the last few weeks of status epilepticus and no longer being able to breathe on his own, seems almost irrelevant. My mind still races though, even as I write this and he lies next to me on his side to allow his lungs to drain better, to try and understand the possibilities, the causality. And we've made decisions based on how we interpret that information. We've decided that if this happens again we will most likely take him in for an emergency tracheotomy. Because even when there is no air coming into his lungs, you can see him making the effort to breath. He's not ready yet to leave this plane of existence.

I slept for three hours on the couch at his mother's, while she held his jaw. My daughter suggested a position for him to lie in to force his airway open with enough success that the need to manually help him to breathe became less frequent. The seizures, which started in the evening and have continued through this morning have been reduced with massive sedation. His lungs have filled up again, despite the constant treatment and all these things have blended into a fireball of destruction.

The good times have been there, I have pictures to prove it for when my memory fails me, and I assumed they should give us the strength needed now, but in a somewhat bitterly farcical sense, those moments stand in stark contrast and offer little help.

To be honest, it's eating at our resolve, or perhaps to put it into a more positive light, we are simply recognizing that this is the natural course of things in my son's fragile and savage life.