Jessica, the on-call hospice nurse, arrived just in time to see Dad lurch into an episode of unendurable chest and rib pain. His vitals were good, she said, suggesting the episode was not a heart attack, and authorizing me to give four 0.25 ml morphine syringes, plus a 0.5 lorazepam syringe (“they work better together”).  After an hour, the pain suddenly let up, and he settled into a snoring sleep.  He stirred at intervals, waking slightly, but not fully, mumbling gibberish, making incomprehensible nonsensical conversation.  At bedtime, he could not sit up, let alone stand up, and I could see clearly the impossibility of getting him to bed.  But I needed to get him to bed, to confine the mess, the increase his comfort, and mostly because I suspected that once in bed he might never leave bed again alive, and that if I did not get him into bed this night I would not be able to thereafter because of his utter weakness and my insufficient strength.  He struggled to lean forward, but explained with hand motions the mechanics of how he would simply stand up and turn clockwise to sit on the walker seat, his voice strangely thick and dull and slurred, his self-perception skewed and delusional.  How would I get him up and out of his recliner and convey him to bed? I wondered.  I could not fathom how.  Following our routine–we had to try–I hooked an elbow under his good right shoulder (the left side continued to pain him terribly) and carefully lifted, while mom lifted with her hands under his butt—and all we succeeded in doing was scooting him dangerously close to the edge of the seat, within an inch of sliding irretrievably to the floor.  An idea came, and I hurried to executed it.  Phase 1 involved leaning his torso back, lifting his legs, jamming the walker seat against the recliner seat, holding the walker in place with my foot, and dangling his legs across the walker seat.  With a broad, two-handled sling, I sat him up and shimmied him from the chair and onto the walker seat, bumping his butt over a gap.  The maneuver worked, and he sat nicely on the walker seat.  As I held him upright with the sling, Mom and I managed to roll the walker backwards to the hospital bed, which I lowered as far as it would go.  Phase 2 involved leaning his torso back onto the bed, with the sling behind his back and under his arms.  Mom lifted his feet clear of the walker, and I stood on top of the bed leaning over him, my feet sinking deeply into the mattress.  I heaved with my legs and arms—trying not to strain my back—to slide him in six-inch intervals onto the bed, but perpendicular to the bed, then used the same maneuver to turn him parallel and to slide his head toward the headboard.  With each heave, his head slid backward between my feet as I stood over him on the bed.  At any point, this slapstick performance could have gone terribly wrong, with Dad crashing to the floor, with my desiccated spinal discs shattering, with me tumbling off the bed, with only half of his body in bed and half out….  But for the tragedy of Dad’s situation, and maybe in spite of it, any observer would have laughed hysterically at our antics.  Somehow, with just the right forces and angles and frictions and strengths and moves, we succeeded.  I would not want to have to do it again, and now that Dad was correctly installed in his bed, I likely would never have to.  He had cried out in pain throughout, and he eagerly accepted the morphine he had rejected for the previous 13 months, and quickly settled into sleep, a sleep from which he never fully awoke.

(Photo copywrite by Caleb Baker.)