So fried.

My friend in the hospital died last night. It was a very long day. He'd coded on Tuesday night and they had to perform CPR and shock his heart; before that, he'd pulled out his feeding tube and they had his wrists tethered to the sides of the bed to keep him from pulling anything else out. His daughter had collapsed at her stepmom's house (dad's ex-wife, but will be her stepmom for life) late that night and was heading back in and hated the thought of him being alone for even a minute.

So I waited until the early AM shift change was over and then sat with him and read to him from a book of George Macdonald fairy tales, thinking she'd be there any minute and her mom and stepmom and maybe the most recent ex-girlfriend would follow, and I'd hop the intercampus shuttle and be at work just a little late. But she didn't get there until 10, her moms were trapped in meetings in two different cities and the ex-GF was MIA, and the cardiology attending (whom I knew slightly) gave her the warning I'd known was coming for several days, that she'd have to make difficult quality-of-life decisions in the near future.

(Before that, she stepped out to go to the bathroom, and the attending, who knew I'd worked for her colleagues, gave me the most serious look I've ever seen and said, "You understand that he's very sick." But she didn't mean sick, she meant the other thing.)

And then S came back in, and the attending told her, and then I hugged her and rubbed her back, and then she remembered that she hadn't actually eaten since the day before. So I went down to the cafeteria to get her fruit and a bagel, and on the way back her stepmom called to say that she was trapped in meetings but had canceled her entire afternoon and would be there by 3 (she's also pump-and-BFing a 3-month-old and had to go home first for a feed). So I checked in at work, got the okay to stay, and stayed.

And the whole world telescoped down to us and the sleeping body in the bed, with her curled up at his side or petting his face or reading to him while I talked with the medical team and texted her stepmom with updates and got her more food because she forgot lunch. Whenever she got up for a bathroom break I'd take her place and put a hand on him, and then she'd come back and curl up again, but he never woke. Not even when the services coming in for this or that evaluation pulled his eyelids open and yelled in his ear.

The surgeon on whose opinion everything depended kept not showing up and not showing up, and the stepmom's baby got sleepy and then cranky and she was delayed again and again, and the mom couldn't get out of work at all, but there was no freaking way I was leaving a college junior alone fending off an avalanche of subspecialists and medical jargon and fear for however many more hours it'd take for family to come.

(I seriously, actually thought, "What would Buffy do?" and the answer was clearly "Not leave.")

And her stepmom finally, finally came at 4:30, and she and I huddled to talk and debrief while S and the baby (not in fact a blood relation, but still a sister, and it was clear from watching them together that she is already this kid's Emmett) snoodled each other up. Then I left to get Matilda, and an hour after that the surgeon finally came and rendered his opinion, which was that my friend was not a candidate for the ventricular assist device the other services had been considering, was not a transplant candidate, and was shutting down, system by system. So they transitioned him to comfort care, and he died while Matilda and I were watching Paget Brewster snarking it up on "Grandfathered."

And my FB flist has been CRAZED, and I just feel pithed. But I can't even imagine how S and her stepmom and her mom (who, despite being an ex, loved him dearly as a friend and respected him utterly as a coparent) are managing.

First, yay baby!!! Welcome, Alexandra!!!

And, JZ, I'm so sorry for your loss. But how wonderful for your friend's daughter that you could be there with her.

JZ, you are mostly heart, and very dear. Death and dying are part of living, we're taught, but there are no lessons in how to do it, or how to help ones we love, or even those we merely know and are our professional charges, do it. I don't believe words exist to describe the air in such a room as you're describing. Breathing it for an hour is shattering, doing it for a day in support of someone else is something almost numbing--but just below that is the quivering nerve awareness that this is universal, that everyone breathing comes to this. And sometimes, being witness to it is the only aid we can offer.

Pithed is surely an accurate term. You need someone to pull a soft blanket around you and ply you with tea and quiet music, and possibly gentle, distracting conversation. Life seeps back into those spaces that have been leached of it by the experience. Be gentle with yourself in the transition.

So hard, JZ. Dang.

Rationally, I know that if I get more sleep, my cravings for bad things are greatly reduced and therefore the best thing I can do for me health is sleep more.

Getting a 5:50AM shuttle would make that nigh impossible for me. Ew.

I'm supposed to do my benefits by tomorrow. Got billions of emails. So of course, the website is down now.

I'm so sorry, JZ

I had other things I was going to respond to, but they can wait

But I should respond to the other things before I forget. What was it about again? Oh yes, spiders!

Then there are the cellar spiders: [link]. Those are the ones we mean here in Australia, and the ones that eat redbacks.

Those are the ones I call daddy long legs and that I decided were friendly, as spiders go, when I was a little girl. We also have those crane flies in our house, only we don't call them crane flies or daddy long legs, we call them mosquito eaters, mostly I think to reassure ourselves that they aren't hugenormous mosquitos.

Where did you see the thing with the guy tracking his food? Was it a new thing, or from before?

The daytime doctor was very forthright about Hubby's expectations. The nighttime doctor waffled. I very much appreciated Daytime Doctor, I needed simple yes/no answers. Could the failing organs be saved? No. Could he get transplants? Very, very unlikely. It was hard, but simple after that.

Never mind, found the article:

[link]

Those are the ones I call daddy long legs and that I decided were friendly, as spiders go, when I was a little girl.

I am unquestionably skewing Ryan's knowledge base, but he too thinks of daddy long-legs as "the friendly spiders", because of their habit of eating more dangerous spiders. (Still and so, I don't fancy their chances against a funnelweb.)