My quiet Mother's Day breakfast was interrupted by a call from someone at Mom's church. She had passed out and was being taken by ambulance to the hospital.
Mom spends the next few days in the hospital, being tested, questioned, and tested some more.
No, she can't tell them how tall she is or what year it is. She can't remember the names of the nurses or even the name of her primary care doctor.
Tuesday I had to make a decision, does she go to a nursing home or home? I scramble around with the help of the hospital staff to find more support services for my mom, and I take her home. More support for her daily living - more "strangers" coming into her home to pester her to eat and bathe.
Dementia is a horrible disease.
When she gets home, she is so excited to see her cats, she cries and hugs them. "I've missed you so much, you are the only family I have."
My heart aches. Who sat with you in ICU for the past three days? I'm the meddlesome woman who makes you do things you don't want to do. I am your nemesis.
I'm the one who cleaned your kitchen and bathroom, did your laundry, listen to you tell the same story over and over, bought you groceries, fed your cats, made sure that support services were coming, listen to you tell the same story again, filled your pill boxes, talked to nurses, doctors, and social workers, renewed your prescriptions, listen to you tell the same story again, paid your bills, went to the dump, chiseled six piles of cat-sick off the floor, watered your plants, found books for you to read and puzzles to put together. I am nobody I am invisible.
Dementia is a horrible disease.
Mom keeps saying "that will be a Mother's Day to remember", but will she? Do I have to?
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