This Sunday With Fred

This Sunday started like most other Sundays. I showed up at Fred’s at my normal time. If I’m one minute early or late, Fred’s wife is sure to let me know. When I drive up, she’s at the back door, watching for me. When I go in I find he’s still sleeping, and she tells me what the weather will be like this week, and then her mother arrives and they go off to church.

Same as every other Sunday.

Twenty minutes later I hear a cry for help from Fred, and when I go to check on him he’s awake and having trouble breathing, and he makes it known he wants help. In fact, he says so. “Help,” he manages to get out, and he points to tell me he wants his nebulizer. He can’t really speak, so desperate is he for breath, but I get the message pretty quickly. I also give him his morphine.
With the nebulizer treatment over he still struggles terribly to breathe, and he looks at me and says, “I’m going to die,” which is a fact I can’t disagree with, though I’m hoping it’s not imminent, so instead I take his hand and tell him that I’m going to get help for him.

I find the phone in the kitchen and I call the answering service for hospice and leave a message for an on-call nurse to call me.

I tell Fred they’ll get back to us, and I hold his hand and ask if there’s anything I can do for him. He holds up five fingers to indicate he wants his oxygen turned up to five, and I go out to the living room and do that, and when I return he’s thrown off his covers and is crying for help.
I take his hand and tell him I’m calling for help again, and this time I call the church where Fred’s wife and mother-in-law are, and I tell the person answering that Fred’s having a problem, and could I please speak to the mother-in-law. She comes on the phone and as I start to tell her about Fred his name completely escapes my mind. I settle for saying “he” instead of his name, because it’s not as if there’s going to be any question who I’m talking about.

She says they’ll be right there. The church is right down the street.

I go back in to Fred and tell him his wife and mother-in-law will be home soon. I raise the head of his bed a bit to make it easier for him to breathe, and I hold his hand and try to be reassuring, though I’m not sure how much use it is. He’s lost all color, the man is white as a ghost, he’s trying to suck in enough air so he won’t feel like he’s suffocating, but it’s so hard for him.
When they come in I’m still holding Fred’s hand. And then the hospice nurse calls back. She tells me to give him more morphine and an anti-anxiety pill. I give him the morphine, I let the wife give him the pill. I’m not supposed to administer drugs, I always hand them to him and let him take them himself. But this time he can’t, she has to put it in his mouth. She tries to get him to drink something, but he can’t, he just wants to breathe.

The mother-in-law is on the other side of the bed holding Fred’s hand, and I’m holding his other hand, and she tells him, “It’s not often you get pretty girls holding both your hands,” and he laughs, my god, he laughs! Or I think it was a laugh, which may not have been a good idea, for then he scritches up his face and starts gasping for air even more.

The color starts to come back to his face, and he opens his eyes and looks at us, and the mother-in-law says, “He’s here!” just about the same time I say, “There he is!” For one second there the look was not one of a desperate man gasping for air, but the look a cheerful Fred would give us when he had a big joke that we weren’t in on yet.

I’ve never had to call them back from church before. Only once before have I had to call the on-call nurse. I’ve never heard Fred say he was going to die, and I’ve never seen him so scared and desperate. I’ve been with Fred on Sundays since August. He wants to make it to his wife’s birthday, which is this next Saturday.

When I left I held his hand and told him I’d see him next Sunday, and that we’d celebrate Mother’s Day then. “We didn’t have much fun today,” I said, “But next week, watch out!” I said this knowing there was no guarantee I’d see him next Sunday, but we can only work with what we have.