Mom update

[mapsedge]

A quick update:

A bit more detail before I go back to pretending what I'm doing here at work is interesting enough to keep me engaged.

In April of 2003, my mother had a stroke. She'd lived as a recluse for most of her life after my father died in 1984, surfacing in 1992 only long enough to marry a man twenty years her senior, against the wishes and advice of her kids. She began living in chosen isolation, discouraging and finally forbidding visits by anyone but her sons and daughter. Eventually, even we were not welcome. We would later learn that she was abusing prescription meds with the help of a country doctor who paid little attention to it. When he wouldn't provide, she would shop.

Taken after the stroke to a hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska, she refused treatment whenever the staff would let her get away with it. She fought physical therapy, as I understand many patients do. Once stabilized, she was moved to a nursing home fifteen minutes from her home in Weeping Water, surrounded by people whose names she grew up around, Meske and Keckler and Elliot. With three square meals a day and her meds under control, she improved beyond what the original doctors predicted, regaining enough muscle control to lift her hand to her chin. Her husband, 98 years old and unable to drive himself, visited infrequently.

Mom is old. She's tired. It finally sank in, I think, that unless she were to return to the level of health she enjoyed ten years ago, her husband would never accept her back into his life. Last Spring, he ordered us kids to remove all her belongings from the house. I can't blame him, as much as I resent the old fucker. He's almost a hundred years old, for Chrissakes, and couldn't care for her any more than he could do a hundred push-ups. But I believe his actions, unfeeling and delivered with the no-nonsense brusqueness of the elderly, crushed her spirit, even with the blows softened by the intervention of her children. That, if nothing else, took away her motivation for getting better.

We've known this was coming for a long time. The home called my sister, who is a nurse herself and mom's attorney-in-fact, to recommend moving mom to a hospital for a feeding tube. Kathy refused. The order is "DNR - Palliative care only". Mom is alert and lucid: make her comfortable, but let her get on with the business of dying. The nurses at the home told Kathy not to wait until Saturday to come from Colorado. mljm and I will go Friday morning, possibly Thursday night, to join her.

Thank you all for your support and love. More updates as time and circumstances permit.

Comments

[rougewench.livejournal.com]

The thing I have found most helpful about such "catharsis" in this space is that you find that those you know/read have often been through something similar and can relate to where you are coming from. It gives one a sense of not feeling so alone in an experience, particularly a negative turn of the wheel. Sometimes just knowing there are those thinking well of you in a dark time can make the world seem not quite so dark.


D.