Why am I posting this here? I really don’t know, stress therapy perhaps, an effort to shed some of my extreme anxiety and anguish, maybe, the fact that I can get more than a few words out without losing my ability to speak or that my home is now the emptiest, loneliest place on earth, that too…... Whatever the reason, if it’s of no interest, please ignore.

My wife of 32 years suffered kidney failure several years ago and received a transplant 4 years ago. Our hopes of a rosy new future were soon dashed as complications set in, the worst of which was acute osteoporosis where a sneeze was enough to break a rib. The last 3 years have been hell on earth for her, with constant pain, only the intensity varied, but she bravely fought through and somehow, still shared her boundless love with her children and I. Often she said she wished she could end it all, just go to sleep and never wake up. She made me promise that if she lost consciousness, I would let her go and not keep her alive on machines.

She developed some unknown infection over the last couple of weeks, which thrived due the actions of her immuno-suppressive, anti-rejection drugs, designed to keep her new kidney safe. However, she refused hospitalisation, determined to spend Christmas with her family and not in hospital. She didn’t make it and lost consciousness at 5am Thursday morning. I just could not sit by and watch and that’s when I broke my promise and called ER24, who were fantastic and she was admitted to hospital a short while later.

Initially in ICU, she was hooked up to multiple drips and despite the major discomfort and a cloudy brain, she started to come back. We were able to talk and I did my best to support and encourage her. When she seemed reasonably stable I left her with the children to meet a prior commitment which would take me away for an hour or two. Upon my return, I was horrified to find they had evicted the children so that they could knock her out and connect up a dialysis machine, shove a ventilator tube down her throat and hook up various other life-support instruments of horror.

Now, as I look down at her beloved sleeping face, all distorted by the tubes, feeling unnatural and clammy to the touch and her wasted frame, bruised and battered by their attentions, I’m filled with a devastation so immense I cannot bear it and I feel my heart breaking. Will I ever be able to speak to her again and hear her voice? I don’t know.

The doctor calls it multiple organ failure, recovery is unlikely. She, and my respect of her wishes, left it too late to get help. As her legal guardian, the decision to sustain life support or finally keep my promise and let her go is mine alone. God, I wish I wasn’t me, this is just too cruel!! Unlike television, where the patient is brain-dead and the decision an order of magnitude easier, she isn’t brain dead, she could return at least to partial consciousness if the morphine were stopped. However, letting her surface from her morphine world into a world of indescribable agony is unthinkable, but I really need her help with this decision.

I feel I have no choice but to break my promise again and leave things for the next few days, spend Christmas by her side, and hope for the unlikely best. Her own, much trusted doctor returns from leave next Wednesday, I need to speak to him first before I choose life or death of my beloved wife and life companion.

Thanks for listening.