Still Alive in Surf City

On Sunday,  I entered Mel's room to find him comatose -- or it seemed that way. I could not have been more shocked. I thought he might be dead. No matter how hard I tried to elicit a response, there was none.
   I called in a LVN to take Mel's vital signs and was told she would come in about thirty minutes. Mel's dinner plate of two hot dogs had gone uneaten. The nurse came in and told me his blood pressure was normal.
   "Earlier I asked him to take his medication and he refused."
    "Now how can he take his medication if he is out cold?!"
   Mel could not speak. I left him at about seven and returned my apartment. I wondered if I would be called when the coroner showed up and prepared for a cremation. I read that the cheapest one could cost about six hundred dollars. Of course my sleep had been fractured. Back early the next morning at the Sea Cliff Health Center, I moved to room 235 B. He could speak and I was able to help him sit up.
   "What day is this?"
    "Monday Mel."
    "I am through!"
     "Mel, if you can sit up and eat, their is still life in you."
    His hands could barely hold a fork and they twitched. AGAIN HE REPEATED THAT HE WAS "THROUGH".
    He went back to sleep, all alone in his room. I knew it had to be the revisit of brain cancer or just too many pills...or maybe a severe depression perhaps. When he had been admitted over seven months ago, a nurse told me he had brain cancer. I asked the head nurse at the head of the hospice.
    "Can you tell me what pills my brother Melvyn is taking?" It did not take him long to review his monitor.
     He told me that one that began with a B was ten milligrams and quite high. He also told me Mel had been taking Norco for pain. I scampered to the library and on the computer it noted that these two drugs together could cause a coma and even death together.

But what really irked me was that Mel had been celebrating his birthday. Yes he was born on the 27th of May and to honor him, I fed him t-bones and corn for a week. He was strolling,singing and even  going outside. Why even his eye lid opened a bit so he could see out of his left eye...His right is totally blind. Mel was jubilant!
   Since I knew that his vital signs were OK, and I asserted my concern about his lack of care, I felt better on Tuesday and put away the phone numbers of cremation societies. Too bad that the Sea Cliff was not computerized so I could see how much and for what he had been given. I wondered how many suffered the indignity of an early exit due to too much medication.