Well, folks, I am back on track with a new Mac computer and that has made my computer-ing so much easier. I am feeling better though not 100%; that is OK. It is the first day of Winter and the ride will begin lightening. But, there is still my mom. After the fiasco with the ambulance bringing her to the wrong hospital, it was straightened out after a few hours on the phone. Yup, typical Mercury-in-Retrograde kind of stuff. They kept her on a medical floor a few days and moved her a floor below to a transitional unit for people who are more in need of rehabilitation. The first time I called I was asked if she was in “drug rehab or physical rehab?” There you have it.

This is the second time she has a fractured pelvis.

She has her own room, which is a plus, but it seems wherever you are in a hospital there is always too much noise right outside the room. At least, that is what my mother says.

Because I was ill, I did not go to the hospital for over a week, and, knowing my mother, she would have gone berserk had I shown up, and the reason is, she is more afraid of her catching something and dying than she is about whoever is ill. The truth.

Yesterday, I did her banking, swung around a few miles down and went to her apartment to check it out and pick up mail. I spoke to the social worker and her aide was in the building, working a few evening hours. We embraced. I love her. We are from totally different cultures but we live in the same culture: those of us who are caregivers for an aged parent. Her father has Alzheimer’s. He began to have seizures and had to be rushed to the hospital, with all his additional ailments in-tow. My mother’s aide knows how it feels to “have a head swollen with too much thinking and worry.” This is the plight, the ongoing state of mind of the “care-giver.”

We went up to my mother’s apartment together. Deliveries had been pushed in. It was dark, the blinds were drawn and the heat was off.

There was no mother sitting by the window trying to do a crossword puzzle with a big “spy-glass” that she could barely hold. There was no mother ensconced by her little cream-colored recliner, the one that my friend Joanne had picked for her when she was still in Florida and moved to “independent living.” My mother’s world is that chair. It is where she lives in her increasingly limited Universe. It’s where she tries to do those puzzles with her minimal vision and blindness in one eye. It is where she sits and “watches” television, where she sops up the news and becomes overwhelmed by the lists of evil occurrences. The little recliner is where she eats–or tries to; she sets her place using a paper napkin as a place mat, she lays out the”silverware” that almost seems too big for her small, bony hands. I might add, that when someone enters her apartment, she can’t tell who they are, she relies on their greeting. I am included in that group of someones.

Now, my mother’s world is a bed. I know. I went yesterday after the aide and I put an extra pair of pants and a blouse into a plastic bag. We also packed a box of Ensure, just in case.

Off I went,  to the hospital, her mail safely hidden in my tote, her clothes and Ensure dangling from my hands in plastic.

I made my way into the building but it was the wrong wing. A guard escorted me from the out-patient pharmacy area, past people waiting; a couple ravenously eating empanadas from plastic take-out trays. We wove our way through little kids in wool hats. I found the elevator. Once on the third floor, the directory sign pointed me in the wrong direction. No one at the nurse’s station seemed to be surprised by my presence or would have said anything had I not initiated conversation. Back to the elevator. No, don’t go left to the ICU, go right. And still I need directions, more directions, and went through another nurse’s station, again to the right and, no, wrong room, keep walking.

My mother’s last name was on the door. An ajar door. A door to a semi-dark room with a blaring television and so much distance to the window.

There she was in bed, just a head with covers pulled to her chin. She is now about eighty pounds though on the phone she said she weighed “seventy.”

“Hiya, mom, it’s me,” I proclaimed, it’s Susan. She slowly processed the information, picking the words out of the air and sorting them from TV words. “I brought you extra Ensure. I brought you extra clothes.”

But my mother wasn’t thrilled to see me. She made a hand gesture like you’d see in the Godfather, which kind of signaled, “give me a break!” Hands that were meeting in prayer and nodding in unison. Davining in prayer. My mother assumed I was still ill. I have no fever, I didn’t cough, my only crime was fatigue after three weeks of virus. But when it comes to illness my mother sees things differently. Any chance of her getting ill and facing her demise creates terror.

Call me a terrorist.

I didn’t stay. I just reinforced what I had brought. I left the Ensure on a surface and the clothes on a chair. “I’m going,” I said. And I stood near the ajar door and said, “I love you.”

“I love you,” the head in the bed said. The tiny head that is attached to the child-like eighty–or seventy–pound body that is supposed to go to physical therapy once a day. The head that is trying to figure-out if it is worth living.

The head that belongs to my mother.

This series starts here:
Part 1: And The Band Played On … a mother’s life, a daughter’s journey

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