My mother turned 80 this summer and rather than moving into a community of like-minded, relatively independent older adults as we had planned, she is currently living in a full care nursing facility in Atlanta.
Several months ago, when she was driving home from the grocery store and a meeting with her counselor (another chapter of this story), she ran her car off the road, down an embankment and into a creek. When she was finally located and freed, the sheer drama of the event (rather than the actual circumstances) convinced the rescue crew to have her airlifted to a trauma one center in the valley below the mountain where she lived. And so, in just minutes, she was moved from one state to another—NC to SC and from relative freedom to total dependence.
My husband and I arrived at the hospital several hours after she was delivered by the helicopter and found her in the neuro-trauma ICU, alert and apologetic about the “trouble she had caused us," but also characteristically impatient with the doctors and nurses and their invasive ministrations. This was the site of what I consider to be the second mistake (the first being the decision made by the EMS team not to simply take my mother from her wet and broken car to the local Transylvannia County hospital). The next strategic error involved our honesty in relating my mother’s recent history of alcohol-related falls, emergency room visits and locked-unit in-patient treatments to the ICU personnel. Their immediate response was to order a regimen of drugs designed to address withdrawal symptoms, a move that seemed to immediately peel away all reality for my mother. She became agitated and disconnected, entering a nightmare zone in which she struggled mightily against her circumstances and the constant pain. We told the doctors that she probably had not been drinking the morning of her accident because she had seen her counselor, who, when queried, had reported no unusual behavior. And we told them that in past hospitalizations she had never had problems with withdrawal. But they persisted and my mother’s body reacted. She had to be tied down. Protective mittens were placed on her hands. She no longer recognized relatives who came to visit and her words were infrequent and garbled. She wouldn’t eat and they eventually inserted a feeding tube. Her hip and pubic bone fractures were left untested because they refrained from standing her up, the ultimate test of her bones. She was confused and hurting and they didn’t seem to be able to do much of anything for her, or for us, except suggest patience. But after two weeks in the ICU the bruising in the pubic area, stomach and head cleared and she was moved to a private room with a 24-7 attendant. The next six weeks involved a decent and hard-working physician’s assistant, a caring palliative nurse, an utterly incompetent case worker, uncertainty and divided loyalities. The third mistake was a big one: we trusted the System to work.
This blog is my attempt to deal with the many changes in my mother's life. It is my opportunity to rant, but since I'm sharing, I'll try to lighten the load with some of the crazy stuff that accompanies this slow, and then fast, descent into the kind of old age that none of us want for ourselves. Thus the title. In a recent exchange, my husband and I attempted to explain to my mother that her roommate's name is Dottie, not Nicki, as she persists in calling her. When offered Dottie's formal name "Doris" as further clarification, it had the opposite effect, and in her bewilderment my mother pointed to her foot to ask if that is what we were trying so hard to identify. Now her foot has a new name.
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