My life with the Sullivan boys

 2:15 a.m. December 8th This is my hospital journal You have been actively dying for almost ten hours. I never imagined it would be this slow. I checked Chat GPT to find out what's happening to your body. It is the slowest shutdown ever. Heart rate is all over the place. O2 is up, down, way down, now back up. 40%? Your breaths are almost ten seconds apart. The death rattle is ever-present. It sounds exactly like when you needed to cough to get your stats up, only now you have lost the ability to swallow. Your body is shutting down. I don't know the order, but I know the heart is the last thing to go. I have such a sense of gratitude for being your mother. So challenging, painful, and genuine. It is impossible for me to pretend to be anyone but myself because of you. These nineteen years have stripped me of pretenses, superficial relationships, and my expectations of who I was supposed to be. You forced me to love before anything else. I loved you through my shame, my fear, and ...

Stryker. That's the brand of all the hospital beds at Children's Hospitals and Clinics of Minneapolis. I know because that's what I was staring at when the pain and palliative doctor told us we had hours left with Dermot. We had discussed his healthcare directive, how aggressive we wanted his care to be, and what was off the table. The whole time, my gaze was fixed on the bottom of the bed frame. STRYKER. The doctor told us of the insane off-the-chart Procalitonin reading of 143.10, how he and his colleagues had never seen a number so high, and his CRP was 17.02, also off the charts. We discussed our options: do we say goodbye now, or give him  Norepinephrine   to  buy us some time to bring his brothers in to say goodbye? What? What the fuck is happening right now? Is this really happening right now? Wait, this is happening right now.  I thought about the house we're building. We'll have to change the design now, cut out the other half of the house that's dedica...