Sitting in ICU

My Experience Sitting in ICU

I am sitting in ICU, at Waterloo Regional Hospital in Canada. My younger sister is lying in the bed in front of me. She has been on a ventilator for more than three weeks, sedated the whole time. Kidney failure, pancreatitis, and other things I don’t fully understand.

We haven’t seen her open her eyes. She hasn’t moved, or spoken, or made a single gesture to any of us.

Before they sedated her, she managed a few words. I will keep those between us.

I have spent a lot of my life in hospitals. My dad. My mum. My own cancer in 2007, and ten days with Covid in 2021, not knowing if I’d come home. Then my wife, who was in and out of hospital for most of our marriage until she passed away in 2019. My sister is a month younger than my wife would have been. Her kidneys first failed in 1993. I flew out with my wife and our two children and spent ten days with her. Back in England, we heard a quarter of her kidney function had come back. Years later she had a transplant, and it lasted sixteen years. Last year it failed. I spent eight weeks here while she recovered in hospital and learned to do her own dialysis at home. Then I went back to England.

Now I’m back. And I’m trying to work out what I’m feeling.

The honest answer is that I feel lost.

Trying To Understand my feelings

I can’t get emotional. I don’t understand why. My sister is fighting for her life, and the feeling I would normally have isn’t coming. I sit here and watch a woman lying in a bed with a tube in her mouth, tubes in her nose, tubes in her stomach, and tubes I can’t see. At one point there were seventeen bottles hanging above her bed. Protein, sedatives, antibiotics, saline. What a human body can go through is amazing. What they can pump into a person to keep them alive is amazing. And I’m still waiting to feel it.

My brother-in-law is a very optimistic man. I love him for it. He hasn’t said a negative word since he came into this hospital. Every day he arrives believing she’ll be home soon.

The doctors are more careful. If she recovers, she moves to a ward, then rehab. They talk about twelve to fourteen months. Three or four in hospital before she even goes home. The first step is getting her out of ICU and breathing on her own again, which starts with a tracheotomy.

I think about the number of times they’ve put needles and tubes into her. The CT scans. The drains for the fluid leaking into her gut. It hurts me just thinking about it.

Yesterday was my birthday. I spent it here.

Someone offered to buy me a muffin and put a candle in it. How could I do that? Tell me, how could I blow out a candle with my sister lying on that bed, not even breathing for herself?

Someone brought me a muffin anyway. We didn’t light a candle and nobody sang. I took it home, and out of respect for the person who brought it, I ate it.

My daughter sent me a video. My life with her, my son, my grandchildren. A happy birthday video. It made me very happy and very sad at the same time.

Seven years without my wife. My eldest sister gone too. A big family, a lot going on, a lot of opinions. Some people always want to put their pennies’ worth into every conversation, without understanding what we’re living through in this room.

So I sit here and wait for the feeling to come.

Help me, God. I don’t know what to do.