Positive on the Outside Only

I made my weekly trip to Nashville Sunday. As most of you know, there haven’t been many updates lately. That’s mostly because nothing has changed. He’s still in the prison hospital. He’s still got a feeding tube attached to his stomach. He’s still got a hole in his throat where the breathing machine was hooked up. He’s still non-responsive to most things. Even less so it seems. I have such torn emotions when I go to see him. Of course, I want to go because I want to make sure he’s ok. And I want to go so he knows someone is there, but I don’t know if he knows that. I don’t know if he knows anything right now. He was making eye for a while there and I thought he was snapping out of it, but now, he’s just staring blankly at the wall. Even when I put my face in front of him to talk to him, he doesn’t seem to notice. It’s heartbreaking really. The worst part about it all, though, is the guilt I feel for wishing that I would just get the call that he is dead. I know that it is selfish. I also know that in the event that I ever end up in the situation that Joe is in, I would hope that, right from the start, somebody would be brave enough to just pull the plug. When Joe was first beaten into the coma, he was on life support. It would have been so easy to say goodbye and let him go. Not easy in the sense of without pain, but easy in the sense of not waiting every week to see if there’s been any improvement only to walk in and see a half dead man lying in the bed unchanged from the week before. It’s one of those things that makes me feel like I’m not near as strong as I claim to be. It makes me feel like a liar. And not only that, it’s almost like losing him again every time I go. It’s mentally exhausting. I decided this week that I would only go every other week from now on because I just can’t handle how helpless I feel every time I leave there and how terrible I feel when I have to get on the phone with his brother and tell him that he’s not doing well and he’d be better off dead.  And I truly feel like he would and I truly feel like a piece of shit for feeling that way. It’s a catch 22 really. I also haven’t come up with the money for a conservatorship. I’m sure the Department of Corrections is perfectly ok with that considering there’s a one year statute of limitations on a law suit for negligence, but I won’t even go into that.  Anyway, so that’s what’s been happening on the Nashville front and I’m trying to stay positive, but sometimes, I just want to be human and bawl my freaking eyes out.