He is still in the hospital, but he is alive and not on life support.
He went downhill very suddenly. I was up all night Wednesday. By 5 in the morning Thursday I was trying to talk him into going to the hospital. He refused, seemed feisty, and around 8 he enjoyed breakfast. By 9 he was being hauled away on a stretcher, responsive but completely incoherent. Away he went. A few minutes later I got a phone call asking if they had permission to put him on life support if it came to that. I saw him Thursday night and they had him coherent again. I did not get to speak to a doctor, and neither did he all day as far as he could remember, though he doesn't remember much.
He's been adamant about not going back to the hospital because he's been feeling very close to the edge, and he had a feeling that if he went back he wouldn't come home again. Yesterday morning when the paramedics lifted him out of his seat he looked right at me. There was hardly anybody home. He was completely delirious and couldn't tell what was happening anymore, but I could tell he remembered that he didn't want to go. That still hurts.
I visited all day today. Yesterday morning his blood sugar was dangerously low. Critically low. This hospital has never seen it so low in someone who wasn't already in a coma. He's a freak. They have it stabilized now, and they want him off insulin. It was hurting more than it was helping, if it even was helping. He's conscious and grumpy and wants to go home, but they're keeping him for observation. So I'll be visiting all day every day like last time.
This is his third stay in this hospital and every time all they've had to do to fix his symptoms is fix something the first hospital did.
The root of it all is that the first hospital never though he'd live this long. They refused to tell him how long he'd live, and when they told him to make a followup appointment and he asked if that meant he'd at least live that long they clammed up like they'd been caught in a lie. They thought he was already done for. So they didn't care if their treatments were right for him, or if the treatments would cause problems down the road. They didn't think it would matter. They just wanted to ease his pain so he could die comfortably in a few days or whatever.
That's why he's been so reluctant to go back to a hospital. Any hospital. He doesn't want to be sent off to die. That's why he looked at me the way he did yesterday morning when the paramedics started carrying him away. He couldn't remember why he was afraid of that moment but he knew that he was.