progression to heart failure available, it just took longer than anyone would have liked, him most of all.

Hospice doctor hadn’t worked with that situation before, I don’t think. He kept saying it would be within 24 hours and then it would be days more and he would come back and eventually said he just didn’t know.

I don’t know if turning off the LVAD was an option, but it wasn’t presented as one. We weren’t supposed to do it until he had been long enough without breathing that we could be reasonably sure he had “died” (He had Cheyne-Stokes breathing for sooooooo long). It seems like it’s the same as otherwise “pulling the plug” but it feels different when the “plug” had been part of him and keeping him alive for years when he was still ambulatory and bright and witty etc.