I feel so helpless when people I care about are dealing with
painful situations and I can do nothing to help them through it. It has been a rough week. I have had two loved ones dealing with
relatives in the hospital.
My father-in-law has been in the hospital for over a
week. His heart was failing and not
pumping the way it should, which caused fluid to back up into his lungs, which
caused him trouble breathing, which caused an oxygen shortage to his brain,
which caused a very sick and confused person.
They got the fluid drained out of his lungs and installed an implantable
cardioverter defibrillator. He was
released but ended up in the emergency room not even two days later. Now he has blood clots in his legs and his
lungs. They performed surgery to clear
those out. He will be there for another
week and possibly longer. Prognosis is
not great. My father-in-law has not
taken care of himself over the years, and his body is not strong enough to
fight effectively. The doctor has
supposedly said (all third hand information through my husband) that if my
father-in-law quits every vice and follows every instruction to the letter, he
is still probably only looking at a couple of years. It is more likely that he will throw those
instructions out the window as soon as he is strong enough to do it though, so
we are looking at an unpredictable route of complications that will likely end
in death sooner rather than later.
My husband is not handling this whole situation well at
all. He does not have a good
relationship with his family. The
strongest tie is to his father, with a neutral stance on his sister and a
volatile bond with his mother and brother.
So now, he is sad that his father is dying. He is angry that his father has done so much
to destroy himself. He is even angrier
at his mother and brother who are completely dependent on his father, and in
his view have caused his father more work than necessary to support them. He is afraid of what is going to happen to
them when/if his father dies, and he feels guilty that he does not want to help
them in that situation. My husband deals
with this by alternating between bottling emotions up inside to pretend that
nothing is bothering him and lashing out in yelling, crying fits about how
awful and unfair everything is. I feel
completely helpless to help him out with any of it. All his emotions are reasonable. I do not have a much of a relationship with
his family, but a big part of that is because they are so completely
dysfunctional. It is unhealthy to be
around them and their drama. Now he is
forced to deal with it in an unpleasant way and with very little predictability
about what will happen next. He will not talk to me at all half the time
and he scares me with crazy raving the other half. I also have no practical advice. There is no way to make his father
behave. We are probably going to have a
weird and difficult time figuring out how to deal with his mother and brother
when his father dies, regardless of whether it is tomorrow or five years from
now.
On top of that situation, one of my best friends’ mother has
also had a recent hospital stay. I have
gotten very few details from her though, so I do not at this moment what the
status is. A week ago her mother was in
the hospital for a few days with severe anemia.
They gave her more blood and started her on iron supplements. However, they could not figure out what went
wrong to cause her blood count to drop so low in the first place. The last I heard was that she was being
released to go home. I have reached out
to my friend a few times to get an update since then, but she has not replied. She could just be really busy, but I worry
that there have been additional problems with her mother. I live several hours away, and I feel
completely unable to offer her any kind of help. Given the situation with my husband’s family,
I cannot go up there to check on her, visit her mother (who is a wonderful
woman who always treated me like part of the family), or offer any kind of
assistance to her. Plus, there is always
the possibility that I am overreacting and everything is fine with her mother
recovering nicely at home.
I know that many people feel helpless when the people they
care about are experiencing pain. There
are often situations where there just is not much anyone can do to ease the
burden. I know that my husband and my
friend both know that I am here to listen and lend support to the best of my
ability. I just cannot help but feel
that I should be doing more for both of them.
What about you? Do
any of you have any sage advice on how to get through these situations and how
to help my loved ones out?
See you next week!
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