Sunday 17 May 2020

JoAnn MacKenzie 1930-2020.

If you're truly lucky in life, as I was, you not only had the tremendous benefit of wonderful parents but also had them in your life as friends. That's how it was with JoAnn MacKenzie and Frank M. O'Dowd. With my Mom, it practically clicked from Day One, frankly, like pretty much two peas in a pod. With my Dad, it only came later after his retirement, you know, the period when you're no longer working for him. LOL.

What I hope I inherited from both of them is their incredible toughness. I marvel how tough they both were. For my Dad, my most vivid recollection is when I ran in front of him as a young kid while he was using a circular saw to cut industrial pipe. He turned to see where I was while the saw started to cut into his leg. He never uttered a word, what with his leg stuck out the rear door window of the station wagon as my uncle hurriedly went down St. Cyrille Boulevard toward the hospitals located close to there. I will remember that towel covered in blood until I die. I could give you so many other examples, but I digress.

My Mom was to the very end just as tough or even more so. It all started when she got breast cancer for the first time while only in her thirties, with four young sons at home. She would take the bus home bandaged up after her surgery and during much of her subsequent radiation treatments. Cancer would return again in the same form in her fifties. That was eventually followed with her double dementia diagnosis, part Alzheimer's and another Vascular Dementia.

She struggled with it for years, without complaint and with an almost constant smile on her face. Says something. She's didn't even complain when her first CHSLD almost killed her with their criminal negligence -- fortunately, she moved out of there as soon as she left the hospital.

But back to Saturday night: as you all know, we haven't been able to see our elderly relatives and friends for months. They finally relented last Wednesday so we got to spend four days with her. Ten days before she had lost the ability to speak and had pretty much forgotten us. (We were grateful for that part.)

What struck me most of all was her iron will, even in a truly demented state. Doped up on regular morphine doses (Thank God.), she struggled to breathe and stay alive. It was time to die but a combination of instinct and mental will seemingly had resolved that she live. And so it was until the inevitable hit on Saturday. For a person clearly in the final stages of double dementia, that was extraordinary. The lady was to private life what Thatcher was to politics. And good on her.

In closing, she would want me to help the rest of you out: the Quebec Assisted Dying Law automatically excludes all cases of cognitive impairment. Trust me, that's wrong. So, that rules out a high dose of morphine to stop the heart. So, what you end up with is serial regular doses at precise intervals with the possibility of additional doses at the same strength.

Here's what they didn't tell us: when our Mom would transition on a daily basis from slow and irregular breathing to fast and labored breathing, that meant that the morphine dose had become insufficient to maintain les soins de comfort.

Yours truly assumed that it was solely due to survival instinct and some form of mental determination that my Mom was still trying to stay with us. Apparently not. Add to the mix that the average morphine injection can take an hour to be fully effective and those circumstances are suddenly not at all like they were first cracked up to be. So, watch for deep, laboured breathing, sometimes accompanied by snoring. And then do something about it, fast.

The other thing to know is when the rubber meets the road your loved one will go into a period of apnea, which was not previously typical in her case. That was the mother of all clues that the end was near. So, as we say in the legal profession, govern yourselves accordingly.

Farewell dear Mother, and may you rest in peace. Hopefully, if there's any fairness in life, the best is yet to come for her and countless others.

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