My mother and father are my qualifiers. 

My mother is gravely ill. She's not drinking now because she's in a semi coma and bed bound. Her drinking had gotten pretty bad. She would drink from 5pm until 2 or 3am. 

At the beginning of September she went to the ER because she had the flu and wasn't getting better and then she started having stomach pains and some other complications GI related. They admitted her to the hospital to do testing on her abdomen. She went for a scan and had a panic attack in the machine. They gave her librium and a few hours later she went into cardiac arrest. She was down for 16 minutes and came out of it attached to a ventilator, on a feeding tube and with brain damage to what extent we are not sure. Pretty severe in my estimation. She also had 7 broken ribs from the cpr and had to have dialysis for a week or 2 because her body wasn't getting rid of fluids and she has a trach. She spent 2.5 months in the hospital and now she's home for 6 weeks now. My father and I are her caregivers. She's completely dependent. 

While we were in the hospital we also learned that she has cirrhosis of the liver. No one has given us a complete picture of where she stands. I have had to piece things together. Her CT scans show that the artery going to/from? the liver is damaged. She has elevated ammonia levels. I'm taking all of this to mean that she is dying of liver failure. I'm at a loss as to why none of the healthcare providers have told us this directly.

Right now the understanding between us and her doctors is that she has suffered cardiac arrest for unknown reasons and we are waiting to see what her baseline mental functioning will be. In the meantime we are caring for her at home 24/7. My father sleeps in the same room with her so he does more for her than I do. We are doing the best we can but I feel we have very little support from her healthcare providers and the support we do get is like pulling teeth. I believe it's this way because they fully expected her to die and she didn't die. So each provider is passing her off to the next expecting that she'll probably die anyway but no one is giving us a clear picture as to what is actually going on with her.

Having said all of that I'm not sure that the details of it would matter because there is nothing they can do about the liver failure. I suppose they could be very straight forward with us and tell us she's dying so we could switch our focus of care to hospice care and make her as comfortable as possible until she passes. But right now as it stands her healthcare providers are treating her as if she's going to get better so they aren't prescribing opioid pain killers which I feel like those would benefit her greatly at this point. She is suffering a great deal.

I requested a referral to palliative care for her a few weeks ago and I'm still waiting for that to come through. Everything takes so long. It's inhumane. 

As I'm writing this I'm wondering can your heart stop from alcohol withdrawal? I don't expect an answer to that. I just did a quick google and it looks like maybe? So she went in to the ER on Saturday late morning was admitted to the hospital and spent the night Saturday, no drinking. On Sunday they took her to do the CT scan she had a panic attack and they gave her librium. Sunday night comes, no drinking again. Then around 12:30-1:00am she went into cardiac arrest. I suppose thinking out loud about it...it could have been a complication of withdrawal from alcohol. 

My father was with her. I asked him if he thought she was having withdrawal. He said no and his reasoning is that sometimes they can't afford their drink of choice so they have to go without for periods of time. He said she's always been fine with that. He believes it was the librium that caused the cardiac arrest. He said she started hallucinating and then said her body was hurting all over and then her heart stopped. 

So if she's in stage 4 liver failure from drinking I can see the sequence of events go something like... she's drinking heavily every night, she gets sick with the flu and has trouble recovering because her body is dealing with the cirrhosis, she starts to retain fluids leading to a hardened abdomen and the pain in her abdomen could have been coming from her liver or the damaged artery. The large amount of extra fluid was hard on her heart and combined with the sudden withdrawal of alcohol, recovering from the flu and the cirrhosis her heart just couldn't keep going. 

Thank you for letting me think this through here. I don't have anywhere I can talk about this right now. I'm here with my dad 24/7 and can't speak openly about it. I know he desperately wants her to recover and I am supporting him the best I can. It would be cruel for me to try to convince him of anything. He is coming to terms with all of this in his own way. 

I don't know for sure but I think hospice care would be appropriate for her at this point. I don't feel I can say this to my father. I have been following his lead and supporting him the best I can. My plan is to get a palliative care provider here to help her with her pain and pray that the palliative care provider will compassionately recommend hospice care for my mother and that this will move my father another step towards acceptance. 

Thank you for letting me share.