I, too, know the awfulness of ‘keeping vigil’…I did it after my husband had his cancer op, and sat with him after his (very long) surgery, all through the night in intensive care, until he surfaced.
Then I did it all over again, eight months later, when the cancer finally ‘got’ him…
You sit and wait and talk and hope and hope and hope and fear and fear and fear…
In your situation, though, there IS hope (there really wasn’t for my husband, it truly was ‘a question of when not if’…), but what makes it so difficult is that the doctors can’t really put any ‘meat’ on that hope. They simply don’t know…
That said, I do, personally speaking, think that the BEST you can do is ‘root for him’…human health is a strange, mysterious entity, and we know from all those Victorian novels how ‘unknowable’ it was when someone had a fever…sometimes the fever broke, and they lived, and sometimes it did not, and they died…
But giving your husband the WILL to live is surely vital for him? The human body is incredibly strong and resilient in many, many ways, and we have been bred for millions of years to triumph over the constant war we wage against microbes. Yes, antibiotics are an incredibly powerful weapon - but so is our own body, too…
If he can ‘keep the bugs at bay’, so they don’t flood out into his system, if he can ‘go on fighting from inside his own body’, if the mysterious interaction between body/mind/brain can help to tilt that balance, turn that tide in HIS favour…that is what you hope and pray for…
Is he on antibiotics ‘alone’? I only ask, because (sorry, here goes, full of ‘advice’ from ‘things someone read somewhere in a newspaper…’), I DO remember a year or two back reading about a doctor visiting from Africa, who encountered an English patient in hospital who had an infection that was simply not responding to antibiotics, and the visiting doctor basically poured a bag of sugar (a kilo or so) over the wound…and it healed. He said it was all they could do in African villages, and that it COULD sometimes work… (I guess it’s like how jam doesn’t go off, the sugar is just ‘too sweet’ for the bugs)(it sucks the bacteria dry by osmosis I guess, and kills them?)
Slightly less ‘fancifully’, how ‘on the case’ do you think the hospital is? Are they in touch with the latest findings on resistant infections, who is the UK’s expert, where is the UK ‘centre of excellence’ for such thigns?
I found it, myself, incredibly ‘vulnerable’ being the wife of a severely ill man, as I felt I HAD to ‘fight’ the system, and it is so hard to know when things COULD be improved, treatment-wise, and when simply to ‘accept’ what they say.
But always, whatever the above, be with your husband, and fight WITH him, so he knows you are ‘on side’ and ‘there’…we don’t know if it can help, but it can’t ‘not help’ if you see what I mean. Like I say, there is powerful but mysterious interaction between mind/brain/body, and we might as well ‘err on the side of hope’…
And I do hope that this will be, for you and your husband, ‘hope fulfilled’…
He seems to have turned a bit of a corner the past couple of weeks. Things are looking slightly more positive. I find it hard though - I daren’t hope because things always seem to come along to massively set him back again.