First, I want to thank you all for the outpouring of love from this community. I am deeply touched, as I always am, by the caring this community shows to its members.
Today, his twin brother, older brother and sister, nephew, dad and other family members arrived in Portland. We were together most of the day. I have just left the hospital as I need to get some rest, and I encouraged them to settle in to their hotel rooms as well. There is very little we can do tonight.
GMB02's liver has essentially stopped functioning, and they still don't know what is causing it. The team we met with today is enormous, it is excellent, it is busy. He's on dialysis and a ventilator and just about everything else you could imagine. Total life support.
The prognosis is not good. For a variety of reasons which I don't want to go into here he is not a candidate for a liver transplant. If they can get his liver working again it is possible that he will live but his liver function will never be very high. His quality of life will be very low, and there is not really much hope on the part of the doctors that this will happen. The only reason he is alive tonight is because of life support. He is stable, however, and they think there is a good chance that he will make it through the night. Tomorrow, however, we are going to have to start talking seriously about letting him go. It is my decision to make, but I have asked the family to help me make this decision. He has such an awesome family. I am so lucky to have them and I know they love me though some of them I have just met for the first time.
I want to be clear that while they do not know what is causing this, there are some possibilities. Our of respect for his privacy and dignity, all I will say is that while his overall health has been good, he does have a number of health problems and has been on many medications--some of them pretty heavy duty--for many years. Vexing to the doctors and to us is that to look at his liver, it should be functioning. It's not.
There is practically no chance that he is going to come out of this. Please hold us and his family in your thoughts and prayers as we begin to have the kinds of difficult conversations we have been having today. I have a great support network between family, friends, church, and his medical team. For that I am truly grateful. Today my boss basically ordered me to take two weeks off (paid). I didn't argue with her. This is going to be a tough time. I'm going to need you all to help me get through it.
I want to thank Sara R and the quilting team and the many people who have sent such healing, loving vibes, and especially Dave in Northridge who just went through this himself for being especially supportive.
GMB02 at The Rock, which he loved so much, with Geoffrey, whom he loved and groomed and talked: those two could stare into eachother's eyes for an hour and he'd say "I'm learning a lot from what this cat has to tell me".
I will be around in the comments for a while. It's so surreal: I have to start thinking about writing his obituary.