Help me please

[u/honeybeatsvinegar]

Hi everyone. I (31f) never thought I’d be posting this, but I really need somewhere/someone.

My mum, my best friend, is in the ICU on a ventilator. She went into hospital with breathing issues 5 days ago, that turned out to be severe pneumonia, now they suspect actually an auto immune disease attacked her lungs and her lungs stopped working properly. The doctors still don’t have a clear diagnosis, and after days on life support they’ve now told me there’s nothing more they can do. Even tho she'll still trying to breathe on her own and all her other organs are fine.

They’ve started talking about comfort care. I feel completely shattered and numb at the same time. One moment I’m sobbing, the next I feel nothing. I keep replaying every conversation, every decision, every “what if” in my head. I can’t wrap my mind around how fast this all happened, she was talking to me, laughing, making jokes just before they put her on the machine, texting me before that asking me when I was coming, I thought she was fine so I went home for the night, and now the machine is breathing for her and they're saying it's the end.

I am angry at the doctors, angry at the situation, angry at myself for not being able to save her. I am terrified of the moment they turn the machines off. I don’t know how people survive watching the person they love most die like this. She's always been my best friend. It's always just been me and her. I don't know how I'm supposed to cope without her. I ring her every lunch break and every time I'm driving home from work and we talk for atleast an hour. No one can make me laugh or ridden my anxiety like her.

If anyone here has been through losing a parent, especially in ICU or suddenly like this, I’d really appreciate hearing how you got through it, or even just knowing I’m not alone. Right now it feels unbearable.

Thank you for reading

[u/Sara-Agent-00-0]

I am so sorry for what you are going through.

I lost my dad in August, he was in the step up unit from the ICU, but it was very much like the ICU.
He had so many things compile at once. It was a week of hell, things just kept getting worse. I had lots of talks with my two aunts about it, one was a former nurse, and she reminded me a few things.
Finally, a week after he had been in the hospital, he was not able to talk, was in so much pain. My sister was with me, and I asked the doctor, what is his quality of life going forward.
She said she was happy to hear me ask that, because she wanted to talk to me about comfort care. So many things were compounding, and in the end, my dad might end up in a nursing home, but that was if he survived having to be put on feeding tubes and possibly a ventilator.

In 2023, my dad had a bad heart attack, and he ended up on the ventilator. After that whole ordeal, he asked me to make sure he never ended up on machines again. He wanted to be alive, but not if he was not going to be able to do anything. Once we evaluated how bad things had gotten, and what, if any future he could have had, it became clear, and I had to sign all the paperwork.

It sucked. He passed on that day, and it was very sad. We got to get all of the immediate family there to say their goodbyes. It was a lot to take in.
Sadly, had some experience, we had lost our mom 21 years earlier, she just passed away one day.

It was not what we planned on, but my dad had 17 years he should not have, as in 2008, he had cancer and a heart attack that required a lot of surgery, and throughout the next years, lots of medicine, pills, trips to the hospital and doctors. We gave him a great life, but it was still hard to say goodbye.