Hugs and Bones

(This is the 2nd entry in a continuing series telling the story of my experience caring for my very ill elderly mother who is attempting to recover from surgery in a healthcare center. If you would like to read the story in chronological order, start with the entry entitled "The Other Side".)

Hugs and Bones
I got to my mom's room and Rose, my mom's roommate greeted me and immediately began talking   "You must be Susan. Jane's been telling me you were coming. You're the fourth one I've met. You've got the broken knee don't you. Well, let me tell you, don't do what I done and let your knee get all bent. Walk straight or you'll be in big trouble and one leg'll end up 2-inches shorter than the other..." she continued happy to have a visitor. A nurse went by the door so Rose yelled "Nurse, nurse where are my pain pills I been asking for. This pain is killin me...."  I politely disengaged and pushed past the curtain to get to my mom's half of the room.

There lay my dear mother, beyond-belief thin, grey skin, dark eyes, grey hair in a muss, sitting with her eyes closed in her hospital bed while CNN on TV reported on the Pope's ill health. Her eyes opened with my arrival and a smile crossed her dried, cracked lips as I gave her a hug and kissed her cheek where her wrinkled skin seemed to have been pulled taut by her gauntness. I felt her bones in my arms while I fought back tears. A wave of relief and happiness at being there hit me.

My mom was happy to see us and became engaged in quiet conversation telling me what a good job her kids were doing at nursing her. She joked about how I was going to go into training under head nurse Jane. I promised her I was ready.  I noticed immediately that her head was bobbing and she was having the wave of repeated, uncontrollable motions associated with Parkinson's.This was new to me as she hadn't had this in the past. Her mind wasn't altogether clear either. She kept telling me "Susan, when you move in here you've got to watch out for this. Or Susan, just wait until they take you to give you a shower. Boy are you gonna hate that. Mohammed took me in yesterday" and she would just shutter and become quiet.  Apparently, an earlier joke I had made that I might just get my knee surgery done and settle in with my mom to make my recovery had lodged in her mind as a reality and she was ready to warn me about what I was in for based on her own experience.

Only a few minutes into our conversation, my mom announced that she had to go to the bathroom and immediately my nurse's training began as Jane whipped into action. She pulled over my mom's walker  to the bed. My mom grabbed hold of the railings on her bed and very slowly and with what appeared to be all the strength she could muster attempted to swing her legs off the bed and pull herself up into the sitting position. Jane lifted my mom from her bottom to the standing position as my mom grabbed her walker. I tried to lend a hand by putting my hand on my mother's back to guide her up but my mom waved me off and said that hurt her back and I could see in the pained expression on her face that her back was really bothering her. I couldn't believe how weak my mother was. Her legs were like  toothpicks, the muscle having melted away.

Jane helped my mom in the bathroom and demonstrated to me how to protect her from falling and change her pull-ups. This experience of helping your helpless parent with their diapers is a passage in itself. As I bent down to pull off the pull-ups and put on fresh ones as my mom sat on the toilet, memories began cascading in from childhood and all the babies and diapers my mother cared for seemed present. A tremendous flood of tenderness and love engulfed me as I kneeled at her feet to help and I let out a sigh of relief to be there with my mother in her time of suffering instead of thousands of miles away. My mom commented "I bet you never thought in a million years you'd have to change your mother's diapers." as if she had never thought her life would come to this.  And I answered weakly and fighting back the tears "Oh mom, it's just a little payback for all those diapers you changed for me."

Jane later explained that my mother had to go to the bathroom about 20 times a day because of her urinary and bowel infections. This seemed like pure torture for my mother given the wincing, searing pain she experienced getting up and down and it was pure torture for us to have to help her through it and see the pain. But she insisted on going and if we weren't there, my mom would try to go on her own because she didn't want to wait for the aide to come, and then Rose, who had taken on the role of my mother's protector and verbal agent,  would kick into action and start yelling out the hall for the aids to come and my mom would get mad at Rose because she'd get caught and get scolded by the staff because they didn't want her to go by herself for fear she would fall and injure herself. We were secretly glad our mother had a watchdog for a roommate but my mom complained to us. I wondered why does my mother insist on going to the bathroom when she could just use her pull-up. The answer is dignity I suppose. She didn't want to give in to the exigencies of age. Not yet anyway.

Once back in her chair, my mother, while her head bobbed and weaved, explained that her back hurt because in the hospital two big orderlies grabbed her under her arms and by the legs swung her like a sack of potatoes from the gurney to her bed and she screamed with pain as they pulled and injured her back in the process. The way she related the story and she told it to me several times that night, it sounded like a bad dream and it was hard to know what really happened. I wished what she said wasn't true. But the pain was there as a nagging reminder that something had happened. Visions of elderly folks being treated roughly by busy, overworked healthworkers danced like nagging gnats in my head.

I was getting dizzy and exhausted just watching my mother as her exaggerated movements continued and I wondered what had happened to cause them. My mother's tv blared the depressing news as we sat together, and Rose's tv blared from another channel and from the hall I heard another tv. The noise was enough to drive one batty but the tvs seemed to be one of the few remaining tethers for these folks to the outside world and one they desperately held onto. After a couple more trips to the bathroom and some continued pope news watching, my mother said she was ready to go to bed and so we tucked her in for the night and left. Jane explained on the way back to the apartment that my mom's movements were caused because the nurses had given our mother the wrong dosage of her parkinson's medication and they weren't giving it to her at the right time either. Thus began my education in the travails of the medicare and healthcare system and the almost impossible job of keeping elderly folks medications straight.

to be continued...

Comments

[liz]

A very moving post. I didn't care for my mother (in this manner, I mean), but I (and my sisters) did care for my father.

I learned my nursing care from a wonderful woman we had found to help Dad as he was getting frailer. She had the ability to keep Dad's dignity intact as he lost his independence.