As the title says, I'm feeling rather sad because my mate, housemate and carer passed away on Sunday morning at 2.30am.  I was awoken around 1.00am by a call for help.  When I got to Steve's room he was delirious, incoherent and unresponsive, very agitated and unable to breathe properly.  I tried to calm him down and relax but he was not responsive to anything I said or did to ease his panic, etc.  In the meantime Shaunna had called for an ambulance

I'm not a doctor but I believe he was having an asthma attack when I got there and I tried to apply his inhaler but he was too delirious by then to take it.  It seemed like he was having a massive stroke because whatever he was trying to say was slurred and garbled, and movement down his left side had ceased.

When the paramedics arrived they asked if I would perform CPR while they set up their equipment and one of them could take over.  By this time Steve lost consciousness and had gone into cardiac arrest.  That was the scariest thing.  I'd never performed CPR on a person before, just a practice dummy, and here I was doing it on my mate, a bloke I'd become rather close with and didn't want to lose. 

There were 5 paramedics and they worked on him for an hour or more, giving him 3 shots of adrenaline while continuing the CPR. Sadly, they were unable to revive him and called time of death as 2.30am. 

That's when the reality of it all hit me... my mate had gone despite all the efforts to revive him.  In fact I'm still trying to process it.  I know it is true but it still feels so unreal.  About the only comfort is that the lead paramedic told Shaunna, Karrolleanne [our new housemate] and I is that if they could have brought Steve back, he would have been significantly impaired due to the stroke and lack of oxygen to his brain for almost 2 hours.

That makes it a little easier to bear but I'm still going to miss him like crazy... our chats about cricket, rugby league, music and movies over a couple of beers on our back patio.

Anyhow, I'll take a few days away from WC to process it all, and I'll be back, probably after the funeral next Thursday afternoon at 2.00pm