/ck/ - Food & Cooking

Saw my dying alkie uncle today, age 62. He's been in a sedated coma for about two weeks to help prevent the seizures caused by end stage alcohol epilepsy. Last one that put him into intensive care, soon to be hospice, was so bad he bit his tongue in half.

For him, it was a slow, hellish decline. He'd been a proud machinist, a farmer, and a heavy beer drinker into his early fifties. He bought a farm in the 90s for his horses and drove two hours every day to his job near Chicago to keep it. He loved those horses up until he couldn't care for them anymore, and watched the county take them away earlier this year.

Last ten years, he hit the whiskey bottle progressively harder. One day he stopped working and "retired early." The long term memory problems and bad nutrition came after that. Then the seizures began.

Slow and benign at first. Then frequent and an absolute bitch.

He hasn't driven for a year and a half. His old truck is still sitting at his farm, two tires deflated. It's eerily quiet without any animals or activity now.

His wife was the chief enabler who kept bringing him booze. She was his girlfriend forever and married him shortly after he got out of his last big hospital stint, when the ascites ballooned his legs like an elephant.

I knew he wasn't long for this world when that happened. I always thought his failing liver would get him before the brain stuff. But the constant, poorly controlled seizures are making his death slow, painful and horrifying to watch.