My last post sounded hopeful.

And indeed sometimes it was hopeful. At the beginning of February, James was transferred to a different room, almost plush, at Emory Decatur. The surgeon and the attending doctor said his wound was in good shape for what it was, and wanted to get him up and moving as soon as possible. In fact, they said it was essential that he get on his feet as soon as possible. However, his left arm never recovered from whatever happened to it, they never put much effort into finding out what happened to it, and it was always an afterthought. Day after day, week after week, in three different places, we had to remind every new nurse, new tech, new doctor that the arm didn't work, that he couldn't grab with it. And getting up and getting moving seemed impossible without the use of two good hands. PT never came around as much as they said they would, although I tried to do exercises with him every day. The PT techs did sit him up again one day.

To cheer him up I bought him a little stuffed dog at Kroger, a brown Valentine dog with a heart on his flank and a red patch over its right eye. I told James it was to keep him company when I wasn't there. He named it Rocky and he kept it by his side.

On February 4, he was transferred to Long Term Acute Care (LTAC), just down the street a couple of miles from the hospital. He had dialysis three days a week and I couldn't be in the room during it, so we had to work my visits around that. He was supposed to have PT three times a week, but he was lucky if he had it once. I tried to keep up doing my own with him: squeezing a ball with his good right hand, pulling on a resistance band with both arms. and his moving his legs with my help (he has boots on because he already had developed pressure sores on his heels). We watched the Puppy Bowl and we celebrated Valentine's Day; I brought him a stuffed balloon dog and a stuffed Stitch.

They messed up his dialysis and weren't taking enough fluid and he began accumulating fluid, even in his legs! His legs had never, ever looked that bad, and because they wouldn't let me put his compression socks on him, the socks the Kaiser wound clinic said he had to wear all the time, they were covered in wounds, and swollen. On the 20th they had to transfer him to St. Joseph's Hospital and he had to go to the ICU because of the fluid retention.

They put him on super dialysis (real dialysis three days a week, and then two days of just sucking off fluid). His heart problems went away, but his blood pressure problems (suddenly it was too low) persisted. Once they did this, his poor arms and legs turned to sticks. His muscle tone was completely gone, and, again, only PT once a week. I would run him through the exercises I had for him, but it wasn't enough. A couple of times they sat him up, and they tried to work with his left hand. The left arm had quit trembling as much, but he still couldn't close his hand at all. He said it felt like he was making the clenching move, but his hand couldn't even make a "C."

One day we watched Star Wars films all day. Other days we stuck to a couple of channels. I never knew James liked the series 9-1-1 (but it makes sense because he likes Emergency reruns) or The Rookie. Some days I would pull out his tablet and let him watch Battlebots, but he still couldn't do anything on the tablet himself, and usually when I did pull out the tablet suddenly doctors or nurses would show up. And he had the wound cleaned twice a day.

He returned to LTAC on March 10. He still had a room on the church parking lot side of the building so I could see my car from the street and he had a nice view of the sunrise every morning. (You parked at the church lot during the week and then on the parking deck on weekends and they validated your ticket.) I had to miss a day two days later because I missed taking my heart pill; it fell out of my hand the night before and I didn't notice. For some reason the TV in James' new room didsn't get USA or WeTV (although the TV in the other room did; heck, his TV was broken when we got into the room and I had to beg to get him a new one), so he was denied the solace of 9-1-1 and his other WeTV favorites. Tried to continue with the exercises back at LTAC, but James seemed more and more weary as the days went on.

It was only late in this LTAC state that I worked out a better way to get home. I had been going through side streets, past Clifton Road and CDC (honking in support of the protestors) and through Buckhead to fight my way through Cobb County traffic. I finally realized that going through I-20 was actually faster. So I could leave later and spend more time with James, which was better, but he seemed to be in more pain than he'd been in in the past three months.

During the last week we were constantly told James was ready to go to rehab. It was about time, but I was really burned up about the mistake they had made with his dialysis. They had had it arranged that he could have gone to rehab a month ago, and then, because they didn't take enough fluid off, he had the heart problem and cough from fluid retention and had to go back to the hospital to have the fluid sucked off all at once, which really weakened him. He was going into rehab with less strength than a month ago; he was even regressing in feeding himself. The only thing I had finally worked out was a way for us to call each other, since he couldn't use both hands on his phone. I unlocked his screen and then, after I called him with a three-ring signal, he could call me back by saying, "Okay Google, call Linda Young on speakerphone" and we could talk without going through a nurse as an intermediary.

The last few days at LTAC he slept a lot.

He was transferred to "rehab," and I use the word loosely, on April 1, which should have been a harbinger. I want to say many people there were super nice. He did get PT every day and they worked him good, and were very gentle at the same time. They wanted to get him up and going. Most of the nurses were nice. No one was ever nasty. Not the social worker, or the head of PT, or even the one doctor I saw. But the place was horrible. It was noisy and awful and the window A/C (it was like a motel) was loud and instead of in-wall oxygen he had to have an oxygen pump. When you called for a nurse it seemed like the took hours to come. If they changed his meds, it had to come from a pharmacy offsite and took half a day, which meant that at least twice he ended up all day in pain. The cable channels were even worse than at LTAC. He couldn't even watch a news station or Food Network.

The worst part was that at the hospital they brought him down to dialysis in his bed. At LTAC the dialysis came to him.

At "Rehab" they put him IN A SLING so all the weight was on his wound and then lifted him into a hard chair which he had to sit in for three hours. And the sling for coming back. He would have a pain level of three before the sling and a pain level of 10 once they dumped him in the chair. And no one had ordered pain meds for this.

He went from weak to worse in just seven damn days.

Monday the seventh I was frantic. I'd woken up feeling something was wrong: James hadn't called the previous night (the nurse at the 3rd floor desk told me he was asleep) and never called that morning like he always did. A few days earlier he had called me from when I got up all through breakfast and even during my commute because he said he missed me so much. The doctor had come on Sunday and said he was "okay," but he never looked at the wound, just at photos the wound nurse had taken. The wound nurse was nice and very gentle, but I noticed that, even before he left LTAC, when they cleaned the wound, I could smell it. From when they first debrided him to when he got back to LTAC the second time, I could never smell the wound. For the last two weeks I could, and here at "Rehab" the smell was obvious from when you walked into the room! But no one ever said anything. Anything.

Anyway, he was in pain all day Monday. They told me he was having a "reaction" to the pain medications previously prescribed, and they had ordered new ones, but, of course, it had to come from the pharmacy so he had to wait. They gave him Tylenol. They sympathized with me. The head nurse said she had put a rush on the new pain meds. I went to talk with the social worker. I said something was wrong, he was getting incoherent again. I was told it was the pain. I tried shifting him multiple times; he'd lost so much weight I could practically turn him over myself. There was no position where he didn't hurt.

Then at five o'clock they turned up with that damn sling again. He was screaming by the time they put him in the chair. I couldn't stay with him. They promised me he'd get pain meds. He told me to go home. I went home. I couldn't eat. I cried.

At 9:30 p.m. on April 7 they told me his blood pressure was too low for him to have dialysis at the rehab facility. They were going to take him to St. Joseph's, minutes away, for the dialysis, which he needed to have because he was accumulating fluid, then bring him back. I asked if I should go to the hospital, and they said no, he would be at the hospital just for dialysis and be coming back. They said they'd see me in the morning.

They didn't. And if I never see that place again it will be too soon.

Instead I got a call from St. Joseph's. They said they hadn't been able to give him dialysis; his blood pressure was too low. They were transferring him to ICU. They would call me back. I waited. The doctor called me back about a half hour later. He said James was in tremendous pain, sort of lucid, as he knew who he was and who I was and that he was in the hospital, but that was about it. And that...

...in less than a half hour I was dressed, out of bed, and heading headlong to St. Joseph's. I called Alice on the way there because I needed to talk to someone, and James' sister Sherii.

The doctor was blunt. The wound was infected again, and it was enlarged. (It enlarged at Rehab and no one noticed???? The doctor said "everything was okay"!) If I wanted it treated, they'd have to take him to the operating room. He probably wouldn't survive the surgery. The only thing keeping him alive at that point was the two different blood pressure drugs keeping his BP up. He was moaning in pain and didn't even squeeze my hand when I talked to him.

On Sunday, when things had been starting to deteriorate, I had asked him again, did he want to go on pallative care? They had offered it several times. He could come home, have a home nurse, pain medication, see Tucker, which he kept desperately talking about. But he fixed his big blue eyes on me and said he wanted to keep trying to get well.

The PA told me the other recourse was to put him on "comfort care." They would give him morphine, and when that took effect they would stop the blood pressure meds.

It was all I could do, but I didn't do it alone. Alice had called Juanita, and Juanita had gotten out of her bed at 3 a.m. and driven to St. Joseph's to be with me. She was there when they administered the morphine, when they stopped the blood pressure meds, when the chaplain came by and prayed with us, as we sat and watched...as James stopped moaning and settled, as his blood pressure crept lower, as his heart stuttered and stopped and then started again (Dr. Shash did such a good job with the stents; his heart didn't want to give up) and stuttered again...and again...and then not again.

James died at 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday April 8.

Lots more has happened. People have propped me up. They've been here for me. They made me eat, hugged me, helped me with first steps, hugged me again. Jerry practically tuned up my poor car. I've been furious, I've been sad, I've been...here.

But the simple fact is that I've been a widow for two weeks, two days, 14 hours, and 21 minutes. And that nothing is going to change that fact. Tucker's daddy will never come home. Piper only knew him for one week, and then as a voice on the phone and a disembodied face on Alexa. There's no one to help, no one to tell silly jokes and show me Facebook videos, no warm body to snuggle up to at night and listen to breathe in the dead of night.