Welcome to Gaia! ::

I ask for prayer for the comfort of a man named Paul who lost his wife, and a friend of mine, last night. He trusts fully in the Lord, but he is still very sad to be separated from his wife. And prayers for his family, that they will also all recover.

Following is TL;DR

Yesterday I spent the whole day watching a friend die slowly in the hospital, and her husband stand by her side without ever leaving.
Her name was Julia Ives, and she was 66 years old, and she was a firm believer in Christ and what He did for her. The day before, her husband left to buy her some lovely new clothes, and when he returned he found her unconscious. No one knew how long she had been laying there.
So he stayed with her at the hospital, and sadly, she went into cardiac arrest that night. The staff resuscitated her, but when I looked at the monitor that had her vitals, her BP was 52/40 with a slowly narrowing pulse pressure. Even though the heart rate part was consistent, I could clearly see evidence of a major heart attack and damage to either one or both of the ventricles (they're a really important part of the heart, since they do most of the pumping work), and her fingers were blue and starting to become mottled. At this point, I knew for sure that she had no chance of recovery without some kind of divine intervention.

A few hours later, I asked her husband what her favorite Bible story was, and asked if perhaps she would like it for me to read it out loud to her before she passed away. He said that she would like that, and I drove home to their house to grab Julia's Bible off the kitchen counter. The pages were worn and falling apart, and I could tell from just the first glance that she didn't neglect the Good Book at all. : )

Soon after I returned to the hospital and read her favorite story of Balaam and his talking donkey, her pulse pressure had narrowed significantly, and her heart rate was quickly dropping and becoming very irregular. I'm glad I had the opportunity that I did to read her passages from the Bible before she passed away.

She had cancer and was often in pain, but she was too stubborn to take her pain pills because she was a tough one. In a way God was being extremely merciful on her to end her life suddenly, instead of dragging her life out in the pain and misery of the cancer. And because she was in the ICU on life support with a breathing machine and everything, there was the possibility that Paul and his family would have to make a decision regarding "pulling the plug" if there was no EEG activity. God was also merciful to Paul and his family, taking his wife the way He did because it did not require Paul to make that difficult decision.

Too much medical talk, sorry. TL;DR. Just read the first paragraph. :c