The Medicine Works Too Well

November 15, 2010

The days seem to run together, all very much the same.  The conversations are the same.  Mother makes progress, then we find her on the floor, and we have to start all over again. 

“Who are you?  Where am I?  Who am I?”

This morning when Jerry got up, he walked by her room.  She wasn’t on her potty, so he just assumed she was in bed.  He started the coffee, went outside to get the newspaper and to smoke a cigarette.  When he came back in, it was lighter, and he could see she wasn’t in her bed.

He looked in the chair in the living room, in the bathroom, even in Chloe’s room.  “Where’s Grandma?” he asked Chloe.

He finally found her curled up in a little ball underneath the dining table.

He thought she was dead.  But when he touched her, she woke up and giggled a little like a guilty child.  “How did I get here?” she wanted to know.   He did, too.  Had she gotten up in the night, made it to her chair at the table, and not been able to get back out of it?  How long had she been there under the table, wearing only her little nightie?  How were we going to be able to keep her in bed at night?

November 19, 2010

I haven’t done a good job of writing.  There’s hardly any point to our conversations when she doesn’t remember them ten minutes later.  I’m so frustrated with the constant repetition.

I can always tell we’re starting over when she figures out that she’s staying at my house, and I hear, “Oh, honey, honey, honey.  I’m so ashamed.  I’m so sorry.”

I look at her—so old, so feeble, so wrinkled, so shrunken—and think of all her stories about her Great Grandma Black, how she was kind of scared of her.  I imagine Chloe feels the same way about Mother.

 

I look at Mother and  know I must write them down all those stories, or they’ll eventually be lost forever.  Is that what happens to all of us?  Are we gone when our stories are no longer retold?  She’s gone now.  We won’t be hearing those stories again, not from her.

Sometimes she asks me if I’m her mama.  Other days she thinks I’m her aunt of the same age, calls me Nada.    I’ve been Lily, too, Nada’s sister.  She played with them when she was a child. 

She has dreams—is worried about catching the train, missing school.  This morning she told me she had had a terrible accident.  Two cars.  “Someone needs to tell the cops,” she said.  I thought she’d forget it, but ten minutes later she asked me, “Are the cops out there?  Will you call them?  There were two cars.”

I think her body is sore from all the times she’s fallen in the last week.  For the last two days, she has just slept, just wanted to go back to bed after she ate.  I don’t think she has pooped for at least three days.  She hasn’t wanted to eat, maybe a half cup of tomato soup and a few crackers. 

The other day, I had to run errands so took her to Arby’s.  She loved the onion rings.  I knew she would.  By the time we got home, she had forgotten she ate them.  Now, two days later, I don’t think she could stay awake long enough to make it to Arby’s.

It is so scary to wake up and find her in the floor.  Sometimtes I know she must have been there an hour or two by how cold her feet are.  I feel so sorry for her.  But she is so tough.  She wants to pull herself up.  Jerry is good with her, helping her off the floor, coaxing her gently.  She loves him so much. 

“I love you,” I’ve heard her tell him with that little smile lifting her cheeks, and I know it’s all worth it to Jerry.

I’m wondering if Mom is starting the dying process:  sleeping all the time, getting up only to pee and eat, not really eating.  She has even cut way back on her jabbering, almost giving up trying to communicate.  It scares me to think so.  I've wondered if I should call the relatives, but I feel like she'll hold on until Thanksgiving.  Besides, so many times we’ve thought she was close to death and have watched her resurrect like a cat with nine lives.

In the last week, her legs have become so weak she can’t lift them into bed.  She can’t sit up out of bed—holds out her hands for you to pull her up.  She can barely push herself up from the toilet, can barely transfer from bed to toilet.  Trying to make her understand that we want her to move from one place to another takes forever.  Words don’t really work anymore.

I wish she could just die in her sleep.  She can’t.  Her medicine works too well.  The high blood pressure medicine and Coumadin keep her from having a fatal stroke.  The Lasix takes the load off her heart, keeps her lungs clear.  She looks at me with such sad eyes.  I wish I could take the sadness away.