His pain's over..

... and I feel a great burden lifted. He had wanted to make it to my birthday and his anniversary the week after next, but his body just wouldn’t get there. God called him home Friday morning, but I got to spend all Thursday with him, watching over him at home while his wife went to work. It was actually his first day of real hospice care, with visits from a nurse, a home health aide, and the delivery of his hospital bed. He hadn’t slept in a bed in six months because of the severity of the angle he had to sit up at just to breathe. They had just switched him from Vicodin to methadone, but it hadn’t really built up enough to be effective and he was needing his maximum amount of morphine to just deal with the pain, but he still had his sense of humor and his smile, which he gave me a few times during the visit. I think he’ll still be around for my birthday in a way, checking to make sure everything’s okay, and he won’t be in pain, so he can enjoy it.

See more progress on: spend time with my Dad before he dies