More Snippets on Life
By: Sam
In 1983, after 11 years alone with my two sons, I found my high school friend Richard, actually he found me. I had thought that love was no longer a factor in my life but we got married and after the kids left home life just seemed to be getting better as we grew older together. Regretfully he died at age 60 after a two-year battle with an inoperable brain tumor. My life as I knew it ended.
Right before Richard was diagnosed, my mother had taken her first fall off a chair while dusting the top of her refrigerator; she broke her hip. The anesthesia from her hip surgery took its toll on her memory and for three days she did not know any of us when we went to visit her. She did regain most of her cognitive powers and recovered from the hip surgery in time. She had gotten her driving privileges back and was home again and things went well until the second fall she took while walking home from my house with her beloved companion, Beauregard, her Bassett hound.
This happened a month after Richard died. She fractured her pelvis. During this hospitalization she developed a condition called “sundowner syndrome”. She remembered us but after the sun went down she became totally disoriented and would call my sister and me in the wee hours of the morning. She would be crying and begged us to come get her. They were holding her prisoner and she just had to escape. She sounded so desperate and pitiful. It actually caused me physical pain to hear her pleading with me to come get her. I would hang up and cry myself back to sleep.
My son Robin was a paramedic with the Pinellas Park FD at that time and she started calling 911 and asking them to send Robin to come take her home. Of course the 911 operators had caller ID and would check with the hospital to see what was going on. These calls were so disturbing to everyone; the hospital personnel put her in restraints at night, sedated her and moved the phone out of her reach. That really pissed her off. She would desperately try to crawl over the guardrails with the restraints on her arms and darn near killed herself trying to “escape”.
I stopped by after work every day to visit her and she would be sitting sullenly in the hall and refused to go back to her room. The nurses would wait until she fell asleep in the chair and carry her to bed for the night. During that time it seemed like I could not stop crying, for her, for Richard and for myself.
Finally she got through her hospital rehab and she was released to my sister’s care. Mom was unable to go home since no one was there to take care of her. My sister’s husband, who refused to hold down a real job, supposedly would be home to watch her, feed her and help her with her walker, that is if she could wake him up. That’s another story.
Mom was very unhappy at Linda’s and wanted to go home. Mark slept all the time and she had to do things for herself. She was also homesick for her own bed; her own things and she wanted to drive her car. Finally one day, while Mark was sleeping, she went outside and fell down while feeding the birds. She really jarred her spine as she sat down hard and the pain scared her. She called for Mark but he never heard her so she crawled back into the house and dialed 911. When the paramedics came she told them she wanted to go home. That was not an option but she finally allowed them to take her back to the hospital. She had displaced her pelvic fracture but it was decided that because of her age they would not operate. She was to rest and use the walker all the time.
Linda was really angry at Mom for calling 911. I think it embarrassed her that everyone found out how useless Mark was. She was also miffed at me because I told Mark in a very ugly way just exactly what I thought of him and how he allowed my mother to fend for herself when he was supposed to be taking care of her. Times were tense for quite a while.
Linda refused to visit Mom in the hospital. Fortunately they kept Mom hospitalized for only the weekend and then she was ready to be released to a rehab center. I had made arrangements for my mother to go to Westminster Shores, a graduating retirement community. She would be in their rehab section for 18 days, the allowed time of Medicare, to have some additional physical therapy and then go into an assisted living villa.
One Saturday, my sons, Linda and I moved as much of her stuff as would fit into this small room, along with her dog. I got custody of her very elderly incontinent cat and Linda took Clucky, Mom’s chicken. Now, here she was in this one room assisted living villa having given up all her lifelong possessions, her independence and what she misses to this day, her car. Her house was put on the market. She grieved.
As I walked away that first day of her new life I will never forget the desolate look on her face. I know she felt we had betrayed her. We had dumped her into this controlled living situation and she hated it. Once again I went home and cried.
When we left her there Linda promised that nothing would change. She would still come over and take Mom out to dinner every Wednesday night. We would all go shopping together on Saturdays just like before.
Regrettably, five weeks after Mom went into assisted living, my sister and her family moved to north Georgia with no notice. Mom was again heart broken. Linda had always been the daughter that was most compatible and agreeable with her. I, on the other hand, had always been the daughter who was the rebel, argumentative and always questioned establishment. I was stubborn and independent. Actually, I was just like my mother.
Now I was the sole responsible person for Mom’s care. I was scared at first but I took the job with a sense of privilege. I loved my mother and she had always been there for me through the black holes in my life. She was my rock. How could I do any less for her? While it was a taxing and sometimes frustrating responsibility I never even gave a thought of getting someone else to do this job.
However, life has a way of changing and there will be more to come on my wonderful mother and what life had dealt her.
