It was 7:30 a.m. when I received a call from Sandy, said
caregiver. I steadied myself to hear some challenging news, as was usually the
case when she called. She did not disappoint. From that point forward to today
has been a whirlwind of activity which included: a quiet ride in the ambulance
to the local hospital (mom didn’t want the neighbors to know), a nine-minute
surgery to cinch the two bones back to function as one by an orthopedist who
bragged about his record for this type of surgery being seven minutes (I
assured him pre-surgery that we weren’t necessarily eager for a record-setting
procedure), a three day recovery stay at the hospital where mom appeared to be
in an altered state of sudden on-set dementia and finally the move to a local
rehab facility to get her back to her semi-independent, non-dementia status via
physical therapy, rest and recuperation. All the while, woven into this
whirling dervish time bubble was a fast trip to Los Angeles to take my daughter
and her boyfriend out to dinner for her birthday, bring her home for Christmas(
just two days away), entertain the in-laws for Christmas Eve dinner (I slammed
out lasagna in record time but not nearly as fast as the surgeon repaired my
mom’s hip), construction of the beloved Christmas side dish of Mushrooms
Berkeley for the following day’s festivities at my sister’s compound and, of
course, hours at the rehab trying to reconstruct a sense of Christmas for mom,
the only person in the family who even cares a hoot about this ridiculously
overblown family holiday. My sister (the older one who luckily lives in the
area or I would be in this alone) and I were emotional wrecks throughout this
holiday season. My little sister, up in the Bay Area, was also a wreck, sobbing
on the phone and torn between immediately hopping on a plane to visit mom and
staying to have Christmas with her family which included her freshman son home for the holidays. We encouraged her to stay with the family. Our brother, outposted in the mountains outside Reno in his enormous log cabin, wasn't able to travel until after the Christmas holiday rush. So my older sister and I ran shotgun for one another.
What initially looked like a monumental hill that had to be
climbed ended up being a long and winding path of switchbacks. You climb, then
pause and catch your breath, then tackle the next part of the climb. Little by
little you trudge ahead. Mom recovered from her altered state (caused by an
overly zealous pain medication regimen) and returned to the planet with her
usual wits about her, the Christmas goings on came and went, the in-laws left,
the daughter escaped for an East Coast vacation, and the frequent trips to the
rehab continued, each visit seeming less odious than the one before. The
facility itself is part of an elder/senior community, the type that has full-service
and one-stop shopping. The rehab facility is for the residents who either
temporarily or permanently need health care and monitored medical and living
assistance but also open to outsiders who need care as they rehabilitate body
parts, many of which seem to be hip-oriented, or shall we say, upper femur.
She was put into a room with another elderly female roommate who
suffered from dementia but in a quiet and passive way. As I sat by mom’s bed,
holding her hand and talking about how soon she would be home and reassuring her that I had refilled her
numerous hummingbird feeders with the properly prepared sugar water, her
roommate’s husband came to visit with their dog, Zack the schnauzer, in tow. A
curtain of privacy separated us but I heard him chatting with the wife who
day-by-day was getting further and further removed from him. He told her how
beautiful she was, how this was the best part of his day, seeing her, his
beautiful girl that he loved so much. He
filled her in on his and Zack’s daily tasks and adventures and she responded
the only way she could, detached and other worldly. I was grateful that mom was
not fully cognizant of the tragedy ensuing behind the curtain. We needed to get
her a private room and fast. The care facility is a well-oiled machine that
runs 24/7 dispensing pills, meals, fresh sheets, baths, daily care to broken bodies
and runaway minds. An army of attendants are needed round the clock and it
looked as though that army was primarily made up of those of Filipino descent.
Caring, patient, sweet, encouraging…the adjectives attributable to the
caregiving crew is limitless. But, no matter the quality of care, there was no
getting away from the tragedy of a warehoused elderly population waiting to
die. Determined that was not to be our mother’s fate, that she would walk out
of this place and get back home to feed her own birds, my older sister managed
to wrangle a private room the very next day, Christmas Eve, and we wheeled mom
down the hall, past a gauntlet of wheelchairs holding slumped souls, past the
nurse’s station, overrun by a number of dementia patients looking as though
they worked there but just hanging out to be somewhere, down to room 145. I
brought along two poinsettias, a Christmas cactus and a tiny flocked pine that
followed mom from facility to facility during this Christmas season adventure
with a broken upper femur. The room was bright and large and extremely livable
with a nice window looking out into a courtyard filled with hummingbird feeders
and empty visitation benches. The attendants knew just how to transfer mom from
wheelchair to bed without too much of a ruckus being made as her bum leg, the
left one, moved gingerly and carefully with her wincing kept to a minimum. This
was to be her home, her life for the next who knows how many weeks and she
seemed both resigned to this fate and up to the challenge of bucking what the
statistics say about a 94-year old woman with a broken upper-femur. I mentioned
to her that this challenge was similar to those training to make the Olympic
team, a thought she cogitated over with more than a quizzical look, although I
quite like the comparison and have grown more and more to believe in it. Of
course, the venue is hard to look at without a sense of horror and its
comparison to Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon for the upcoming Track and Field
Olympic Tryouts is certainly a stretch, but gritty determination is gritty
determination. My mother has amongst her most admirable traits, grit. TO BE CONTINUED...
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