Last night, I turned to my partner at one point and said "If I ever get like that, just shoot me."

The occasion was the arrival home of my mother from her extended hospital stay after bypass surgery. She had done well in the hospital, and was then transferred to a rehabilitation hospital. At the time, we were perplexed, because she had seemed fine -- tiring quickly, and occasionally short of breath, but nothing that seemed unduly unsettling, given the circumstances. But now, at home, after two weeks in the rehab hospital, she seems frail, easily disoriented, and prone to panic.

Just shoot me.