Difficult Choices

"What was the most difficult choice you were ever forced to make?" was a question I saw yesterday on Curious as a Cat. It really resonated with me because I've had to make several choices in my life which have been difficult. There are two that I'd say tie for the most difficult though. One was a choice about which parent to live with and the other a choice that needed to be made by the entire family. They were equally hard because of the emotions that were connected to both choices, and the guilt that I feel now for making them.

As a Junior in high school, my parents decided after 17 years of an unhappy marriage to go ahead and call it quits. However, my mom was already in another relationship, and preparing to move 1200 miles away, taking my much younger brother with her. I was torn between staying in school with my local support system and uprooting to be with my brother. You would think that I was more concerned with which parent to be with, but truth be told I was very angry with my mom at the time. She had been living in her own little world because she was unhappy with her situation, and I'd been picking up the slack around the house. In the end, I decided to stay where I had friends, and continue living with my dad. The whole process though was hard on me. I had to weigh out all the options and decide what was best for me. Now, I feel guilty that I stayed where I was, like I was being selfish. I know it was the best choice, but there is still that guilt.

A few months ago, my dad's mom had a sudden internal bleed in her belly. She was taken from one hospital to another because her local hospital wasn't equipped to deal with her internal bleeding. She decided to go ahead and have surgery to see if they could repair the damage. In pre-op she coded and they had to resuscitate her. That should have been an indicator for us of the likely outcome. She survived the surgery, and the docs took about two liters of blood out of her belly. About a week later, with her on a ventilator the entire time, there had been virtually no improvement, and she'd developed vent-induced pneumonia on top of everything else. I spoke to the doctors and nurses and determined that long-term she wasn't likely to recover enough to have any real quality of life. We gathered the family together, and made the decision to take her off of the ventilator. I know it was what she wanted, my dad actually asked her when she was alert enough to respond, but I still feel an incredible amount of guilt because of the "what ifs."