A Case of Hoof in Mouth
23 May 2012 14 Comments
in Family, Humor, Aging, health care, Venting Tags: mothers, health care, Aging, grammar, Humor, nursing homes, cows, anatomy, clueless writers
Earlier today I read an article about a Pennsylvania man who has been sued by his mother’s former nursing home. Here’s a little background:
Pittas’ mother, Maryann, now 66, was admitted for six months to Liberty Nursing Rehabilitation Center in Allentown, Pa., in September 2007 after breaking two legs in a car accident. In March 2008, Pittas’ mother, who was born in the U.S., relocated to Greece, where her two other children live.
As the only remaining family member left in the U.S., Pittas was left to foot the $92,943.41 bill after his mother’s Medicaid application was not approved in time. The Health Care & Retirement Corp. of America, which owns Liberty Nursing & Rehabilitation Center, sued Pittas in May 2008 for the money and a trial court sided with the nursing home in 2011.
That is a disturbing story, but what really got my nit-picking grammarian goat was this passage:
Pittas’ mother, Maryann, now 66, was admitted for six months to Liberty Nursing Rehabilitation Center in Allentown, Pa., in September 2007 after breaking two legs in a car accident.
Okay. If Maryann were a cow, I could see where this would work: a cow has four legs, and broke two of them in the accident. But Maryann is fully human (I’m guessing) and humans typically have only two legs. Wouldn’t the above sentence make more sense if the writer had said “after breaking both legs”?
I’m sorry that it looks like the son is going to have to fork over some big bucks to his mother’s nursing home. My family is lucky to have money tucked away for my mother’s continuing care.
And, as you can see here, it ain’t cheap in many states.
But somebody needs to give that writer a lesson in anatomy. Please.
Human=2 legs Cow=4 legs
Say “Yesss!”
06 May 2012 8 Comments
in Aging, Family, health care, Humor, Life, religion, Women Tags: Absolutely Fabulous, Aging, Baptists, daughters, health care, Humor, Margaret Thatcher, mothers, nursing homes
Notes from the Eldercare Underground: Sage Advice Edition
Way back in October (at least it seems like a long time ago to me) when my mother was in the ER following her mild heart attack and fall in her home, she was under the care of a couple of jovial male nurses.
Since she doesn’t hear well at all, she tended to smile and agree with whatever they asked of her—and also with the doctors, radiology technicians and whomever else happened to pose a question, even though she didn’t understand them.
One of her nurses told her, jokingly, “Around here, you better be careful what you say yes to. You never know where you might end up!”
Very sound advice.
This afternoon I stopped by The Hotel to check on my mother and sat chatting with her for about a half hour.
She asked me again how old she was.
I said, “How old do you think you are?”
She thought for a bit and then said “300?”
I asked her if she knew of anybody that lived to be that old.
She said no, she didn’t.
She thought some more, smiled, and said “3,000?”
So I told her once again that she was currently 92 and would be 93 in September.
“Okay, 93. I’ll have to remember that 3.”
(Which is where, I’m guessing, she keeps getting that 300 figure.)
Then I kept thinking about the episode of “Absolutely Fabulous” where Gran is taking a magazine quiz:
”Margaret Thatcher was prime minister for A) 900 years, B) 3,000 years, C) 11 years. … Well, that’s a trick question. … It was a very long time.”
***********************************
After we got her age sorted out (for the moment) she told me about this morning when one of her aides came into the room and asked her (she thought) if she wanted to go to breakfast.
She said she did, so she got her walker and they both went into the dining room.
The aide showed her to a chair at a table with about six other people, some of them men (which should have been the tip-off because my mother eats at the same table with the same three other women for every meal.)
After a while it dawned on my mother that this wasn’t breakfast, it was some kind of religious service!
Instead of bacon and eggs, she was getting hymns and a sermon.
At that point in her story I got up and got out the calendar of events for The Hotel. She keeps it in the drawer of one of her antique dry sinks and never looks at it because she doesn’t know one day from the other any more.
I looked for Sunday, May 6, and sure enough, I found that at 9:30 the Baptists hosted a Bible study.
My mother had forgotten she’d already had breakfast and unwittingly bumbled into the study group because she misheard what the aide had asked her.
She didn’t know how to get out of it, so she just sat there until they were done.
“I didn’t understand a word of what they were saying,” she told me, “but the men were very nice looking.”
Before they were through, it sounds like they offered her Communion. She took the little glass and drank it. “It tasted like wine,” she said, “pretty good, too.”
Only thing is, Baptists use grape juice, not wine in their Communion services.
So, that nurse’s word to the wise still holds true.
Be careful what you agree to—instead of eating bacon and eggs for breakfast with your friends, you could end up drinking grape juice shots with the Baptists.
My Mother, the Competitor
30 Apr 2012 18 Comments
in Aging, Family, health care, Humor, Life, Women Tags: Aging, daughters, health care, Humor, koo-koo land, mothers, nursing homes, third base, trash talking
Quick note from the Eldercare Underground: Trash talking edition
I stopped by The Hotel for a brief visit today to drop off some laundry for my mother and also a twelve-pack of the Boost energy drink her doctor has her taking twice a day.
When I gave the RN at the nurses’ desk the Boost, the aide seated next to her pointed to the dining room and said, “Your mother is in there having a cup of coffee.”
It was about 3:30—too early for dinner, so she was in there of her own volition.
I blurted out, “That’s a shock!” and we all laughed.
It turns out the manager had her and some other ladies play some kind of game and my mother won a pretty glass photo frame. I asked her what she had to do to win, but all she could come up with was that she had to say a number when she was asked to by Sandra, the manager.
I think probably everyone won a prize at some point in the game. Kind of like how little kids get “Participant” trophies.
Everybody wins! Yay!
We took it back to her room and then she proceeded to run down her competition.
“There were four other ladies, and I think they’re all really dumb. They didn’t know their asses from third base.”
Then she said, “Who used to say that?”
I replied, “Dad did.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right.”
Then she said that the women didn’t know what they were doing most of the time.
Her next observation made me chuckle to myself since she’s most likely several years older than that “Gang of Four”:
“I hope if I get to be that old, I’m not in koo-koo land like they are.”
At least she knows where her ass is.
ASS, MEET.....
...THIRD BASE.
Nepenthe and George
27 Apr 2012 17 Comments
in Aging, cats, Family, health care, Life, Nostalgia, Pets, Poetry, Thoughts, Women Tags: Aging, cats, daughters, dementia, Edgar Allan Poe, health care, Laguna Beach, mothers, Nepenthe, nursing homes, photos
Nepenthe: (Greek: Νηπενθές) is a medicine for sorrow, literally an anti-depressant – a “drug of forgetfulness” mentioned in ancient Greek literature and Greek mythology, depicted as originating in Egypt.
Figuratively, it means “that which chases away sorrow,” or grief and mourning. So, literally, it means ‘not-sorrow’ or ‘anti-sorrow’. In the Odyssey, Nepenthes pharmakon (i.e. an anti-sorrow drug) is a magical potion given to Helen by the Egyptian queen Polidamma. It quells all sorrows with forgetfulness.
In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven“:
“Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!”
My mother has been living at The Hotel (basically assisted living with nicer furniture) since just before Christmas. She’s adjusted pretty well, given the fact that she’s not a social butterfly.
More like a reclusive caterpillar who’d like to cling to her favorite chair like it was her personal cocoon.
I visit her every couple of days to pick up her laundry and attempt a chat. Her memory has been coming and going like the Spanish language Tejano music station signal I try to get on my car radio.
Some days it comes in strong, other days it gets mixed up with a hard rock station. Makes for some interesting song segues.
So it is with my mother’s memory. People and places get jumbled up in her mind and some get forgotten altogether in the neural pathways of her aging brain.
Last week she was somewhat agitated and confused when I came to see her. She asked me if I had a boyfriend. I’ve been married to the same man for almost 36 years now but even with prompting on my part, she drew a blank.
Didn’t seem to bother her though. To use her favorite catch-phrase: “Whatever.”
At that same visit I found her almost obsessively pouring over some baby pictures my nephew had sent her of his new baby girl. I’d looked at them the last few visits, but she must have asked me about five times during this visit if I’d seen them.
So I got to thinking that maybe she might enjoy looking at some photos of the house she and my Dad lived in together in Laguna Beach for over 25 years. (No, they weren’t rich. They bought the house for a whopping $22,000 in 1967 when Laguna was still an artist colony, soon to be a hippie enclave.)
The photos were in some of those horrid magnetic photo albums popular about twenty years ago. You know, the kind where the cover was all poufy and padded and hand-done in material with lace around the edges?
I’d methodically gone through each one and carefully stripped the photos out before they became permanently affixed to the pages like fossils trapped in amber.
I bought a small, modern photo album with transparent pockets to slide the photos in and brought it and a stack of the Laguna Beach photos over to The Hotel earlier this week when I went to visit my mother.
I handed her the stack of photos and after she looked at each one I slid it into a pocket in the album.
Now, when I was concocting this little experiment, I’d had some twinges of misgivings about the whole thing.
What if seeing the photos of her lush flowery garden, with her and Dad smiling as they sat there together, brings back the sadness she must have felt when he died?
(A year later she sold that house to move to Texas, a place she does not like.)
At first, she wasn’t sure whose house and garden she was looking at, but bit by bit, some of it came back to her. She recognized my father, but didn’t really comment on him. In one of the photos of them together, she thought I was her, although we don’t especially resemble each other. (At least, I tell myself that.)
So I left the album with her and after a couple of days I returned for another visit.
The housekeeping gal wanted to clean her room, so we went out to the spacious living room in the front of The Hotel and parked ourselves on a couch and a comfy wing-chair. I had suggested we take the album along so we could look through it again.
There was one photo of George, my parents’ cat, who lived to be something like 17 or 18, although his exact age was never known. My folks had gotten him at the Bluebell Cattery in Laguna Canyon Road, a cat boarding place that was run by a little old white-haired lady who always wore a gray cardigan covered in cat hair.
She looked like a cat herself. Guess it takes one to know one.
George had been left there by his previous owners who’d gone off on a trip to Europe and never came back to get him. His former name had been “Sundance,” so maybe that gives you a clue about the mind-set of the people who callously left him.
But The Cat Lady kept him and my parents adopted him and changed his moniker to “George.” It seemed to suit him.
My father was particularly devoted to George, but my mother was almost as attached. One time, after my parents had given a small dinner for friends, George went missing. There were coyote sightings in the hills above their house and my mother was frantic.
About eighteen hours after George disappeared, my mother decided she better put the dishes from the dinner away in the low credenza in the living room. When she opened the cupboard door, there was George, lying on some napkins, blinking in the light as if to say “What?”
He’d gone in there when she took out the dishes and she’d accidentally closed the door on him. So he just took a nap until he was eventually discovered.
When my Dad died, George was her constant companion. She would sleep with my Dad’s bathrobe on the bed and George would sleep on top of it. I know that cat missed my Dad as much as she did.
During the next six months, George started to lose a lot of weight and the vets couldn’t find a reason why. Finally he became so weak that my nephew had to take George in to be euthanized.
Personally, I think George died of a broken heart.
When my mother saw the photo of George, in his cat collar and I.D. tag (which was still in my mother’s jewelry box when we packed her things), I thought there would be a rush of recognition and sad feelings. I cringed, waiting.
But, nothing. “Oh, a pussycat,” was all she said.
I asked her if she remembered George at all, the cat she and Dad had for so long, but again she drew a blank.
She just went on turning the pages. She did remark that the neighbor just down from them was drunk most of the time. That she can recall!
Maybe it’s just as well. You can’t be sad about something you don’t remember.
Dementia, for her, is not unlike Nepenthe: “That which chases away sorrow.”
The Queen Is in Da House
21 Apr 2012 20 Comments
in Family, Life, Women Tags: "Queen for a Day", 1950's, daughters, Jack Bailey, mothers, royalty, William the Conqueror
Note from the Eldercare Underground: Royalty Edition
There used to be a television program in the 1950′s called “Queen for a Day,” hosted by Jack Bailey. Here’s what good old Wikipedia says about it:
The show opened with host Jack Bailey asking the audience—mostly women—”Would YOU like to be Queen for a day?” After this, the contestants were introduced and interviewed, one at a time, with commercials and fashion commentary interspersed between each contestant.
Using the classic applause meter, as did many game and hit-parade style shows of the time, Queen for a Day had its own special twist: each contestant had to talk publicly about the recent financial and emotional hard times she had been through. The applause meter had also been used on earlier series, including Fred Allen’s Judge for Yourself a variety and game show which aired on NBC from 1953-1954.
Bailey began each interview gently, asking the contestant first about her life and family, and maintaining a positive and upbeat response no matter what she told him. For instance, when a woman said she had a crippled child, he would ask if her second child was “Okay.” On learning that the second child was not crippled, he might say, “Well, that’s good, you have one healthy child.”
The interview would climax with Bailey asking the contestant what she needed most and why she wanted to win the title of Queen for a Day. Often the request was for medical care or therapeutic equipment to help a chronically ill child, but sometimes it was as simple as the need for a hearing aid, a new washing machine, or a refrigerator. Many women broke down sobbing as they described their plights, and Bailey was always quick to comfort them and offer a clean white handkerchief to dry their eyes.
The harsher the circumstances under which the contestant labored, the likelier the studio audience was to ring the applause meter’s highest level. The winner, to the musical accompaniment of “Pomp and Circumstance”, would be draped in a sable-trimmed red velvet robe, given a glittering jeweled crown to wear, placed on a velvet-upholstered throne, and handed a dozen long-stemmed roses to hold as she wept, often uncontrollably, while her list of prizes was announced.
The prizes, many of which were donated by sponsoring companies, began with the necessary help the woman had requested, but built from there. They might include a variety of extras, such as a vacation trip, a night on the town with her husband, silver-plated flatware, an array of kitchen appliances, or a selection of fashion clothing. The losing contestants were each given smaller prizes; no one went away from the show without a meaningful gift.
Bailey’s trademark sign-off was “This is Jack Bailey, wishing we could make every woman a queen, for every single day!”
Mark Evanier, veteran television writer, has dubbed it “one of the most ghastly shows ever produced” and further stated it was “tasteless, demeaning to women, demeaning to anyone who watched it, cheap, insulting and utterly degrading to the human spirit.”
The reason I bring this up (apart from the fact that we actually watched this show when I was a kid) is that my mother has often referred to herself as “The Queen.”
Usually this would happen after we’d picked her up to take her to a family gathering. As she would get out of the car, she would stop, look around and smilingly say “The Queen has arrived.”
We were never quite sure where this self-appellation came from.
My friend, Mary, over at Merrilymarylee’s Weblog has concurred that her mother-in-law seems to hold the same high opinion of herself when it comes to making queenly requests of her grown children. Mary and I came to the conclusion that it’s probably a generational thing.
Until today.
I’ve been noodling around the genealogical website, Geni.com, and went clicking my way back through my mother’s family tree on her father’s side. Click, click, click….back and further back I went, through information that I hadn’t seen before.
What I found was a shock. We’ve got royalty in our tree.
My mother is descended from William the Conqueror of England and, as an extra added attraction, Welsh kings and Norse kings and queens. It goes without saying that probably everyone of English, French or Scandinavian extraction could claim the same thing, but….still.
Here’s the progression, starting from my mother’s great-grandmother on her father’s side:
Juliette Gillett (Head)–>Britton Head–>Britton Head–>Joseph Head–>Henry Head–>Elizabeth Head–>William Palmer–>William Palmer–>William Palmer, Sr.–>Sir John William Palmer, Dr. (bone setter, barber, and physician)–>Catherine Palmer (Stradling) (maid of honor to Henry VIII’s wife, Anne of Cleves)–>Sir Edward Stradling–>Janet Stradling–>Thomas Mathew, Esq., of Radyr, Glamorgan–>Gwenllian verch Dafydd–>Gwenllian verch Philip–>Nest verch Gwilym–>Gwilym Ap Madog–>Madog Felyn–>Sara le Sore–>Mabel de Montfort, Countess of Gloucester–>William Fitz Robert, 2nd Earl of Gloucester–>Robert de Caen, Earl of Gloucester (illegitimate, although recognized, son of)–>Henry I Beauclerc, King of England–>William the Conqueror, King of England.
And, as my husband reminded me about the violent nature of the English and Norse kings, it’s not too much of a stretch for my mother to tell me (as she did recently at the hospital when she was getting a chest x-ray) that she was going to “knock the crap right out of me some day.”
Oy. My mother was right. “The Queen” is in da house.
Fall Is in the Air
31 Mar 2012 15 Comments
in Humor, kids, Life, marriage, Pets, Women Tags: Birkenstocks, clogs, daughters, headers, Humor, husbands, marriage, mothers, sleep walking, stairs, wives
I guess I come from a long line of “fallers.”
As you know, my mother has fallen several times since the one that landed her in the nursing/rehab facility in October. The last time was in the dining room of The Hotel (retirement center) where she’s living now.
In that fall, she went over backward and conked her noggin on a table or chair on her way down. Amazingly, nothing bad resulted from that except a goose egg on the back of her head. The bump disappeared after a couple of days.
Now, my daughter has carried on our tradition by falling headfirst down the steep flight of stairs in her home.
(I had promised her in the past that I wouldn’t blog about any personal stuff of hers, so I’m just keeping to the bare facts here as they relate to our family propensity for not maintaining verticality.)
She and her husband had recently sold their home in town so they could move out to a place in the country on two acres. The buyer wanted a short escrow, so they had been working like maniacs getting the water, electric and septic connections hooked up, all the while packing their stuff for the move.
Needless to say, they were pretty exhausted.
And when that happens, my daughter has a tendency to sleep-walk.
Or, in her case, sleep-fall. Down the stairs of their two-story home.
At 2:00 am my son-in-law phoned to tell me she’d gotten up from bed (while still asleep) and taken a header down the stairs. She was pretty banged up, with a cut upper lip (thankfully no broken teeth) and painful bruises on her chest and scrapes on her legs.
I drove into town as fast as I could and stayed at their house with the grandkids until around 4:00 when they got back from the ER. She had a mild concussion and contusions, but nothing broken. Whew.
In an effort at full disclosure here, I will repost my own episode of falling down some stairs that I posted on this blog a couple of years ago.
It didn’t involve sleep-walking, but it did center around Birkenstock clogs, rain, two little dogs who needed to pee, and a husband who’d warned me that Birkenstocks were the work of the Devil.
Enjoy.
http://youcallthatart.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/death-by-birkenstock/
No Problemo
20 Mar 2012 18 Comments
in Aging, health care, Humor, Life, Women Tags: Aging, Boom Boom, daughters, health care, humiliation, Humor, Kumbia Kings, laundry, mothers, nursing homes, Zumba
Notes from the Eldercare Underground: Humiliation Edition
After a thoroughly enjoyable 45 minutes at Zumba this morning where I got down with the Kumbia Kings and their song “Boom Boom,” I went over to The Hotel to check on Mommy Dearest.
It was only about 12:30, so I figured she was still in the dining room finishing her lunch, which turned out to be cheese enchiladas, refried beans and tortillas.
Sounds good to me.
I set about seeing if her laundry basket was overflowing like it was recently, even though at that visit it’d only been a day and a half since I’d been there to see her.
Both times some things obviously didn’t need washing, and I suspect they just might have fallen off their hangers in the closet and then got stuffed into the basket.
My suspicions were ultimately confirmed when, after checking one of the antique dry sinks she uses to stash her cookies and crackers, I found a missing pajama top and a bra all wadded up and lying on her goodie hoard.
My husband read that you don’t have to worry that you have dementia until you find your missing pair of shoes in the refrigerator.
Do bras and pajama tops in the dry sink count?
Her laundry was a manageable pair of pants and a sweater that I could take home and bring back later this week, so I turned on her television and watched Turner Classic Movies. It was the 1936 movie “Rembrandt,” starring Charles Laughton and a youngish Elsa Lanchester.
They were a married couple at that time, although they never had any children. Various rumors circulated about the reason why they remained childless. Laughton’s friend, Maureen O’Hara, offered some thoughts of her own on this, prompting Lanchester to say:
“She looks as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, or anywhere else.”
Meow.
But I digress.
After a bit, Sandra, the Hotel manager, popped into the room to help set up the nebulizer my mother has been using since she developed a mild case of pneumonia a week ago. She has to sit there and breathe in the vapors from the machine a couple times a day. Rhonda, the Hotel day RN, came in also to get things rolling.
Sandra had the door open and was looking down the hall toward the dining room. She saw my mother coming and called out to her cheerfully, “You have a visitor!”
My first instinct was to say “Don’t raise her expectations! It’s only me! She’ll be disappointed!”
When she came through the doorway with her walker and got past Sandra so she could see who was sitting there, she stopped and said in a pleasant voice, “That’s my daughter.”
Then she looked pointedly at me and said,
“What’s your problem?”
Both Sandra and Rhonda let out surprised yelps, followed by nervous laughter.
Sandra put her arm around my mother and chided her with “Now, that’s not the way to greet your daughter! You should say “Hi, honey, I’m glad to see you!”
I tried to laugh along with them, but I just felt embarrassment and a degree of humiliation.
These were not new feelings.
I stayed and watched the rest of the movie while she used her breathing machine. Every once in awhile I cast a sidelong glance at her.
How does someone come by a personality like that?
You can’t blame it on dementia because she was this way long before the bra and pajama top wound up in the dry sink.
After I left with her laundry in tow, I got into my car and cranked up the volume on my Kumbia Kings CD.
Boom boom.
One of These Days, Alice…Pow!..to the Moon
08 Mar 2012 22 Comments
in Aging, Family, health care, Humor, Life, Venting, Women Tags: Aging, cold hands, daughters, health care, Humor, mothers, nursing homes, split personalities, weather, whiplash, x-rays
Notes from the Eldercare Underground: Split personalities
There’s a saying here in Texas that if you don’t like the weather, wait fifteen minutes and it’ll change. You could say the same thing about my mother’s personality.
Today was one of those days where both weather and mother collided.
I had to accompany my mother to a doctor’s appointment this afternoon because she’d had a rattling chest cough the last few days. (She’d also fallen—yet again—in The Hotel’s dining room and hit the back of her head on either a chair or a table on her way down. No major damage from that, but it didn’t help matters any.)
When I left home the temperature was approaching 80 degrees and I’d had to put the AC on in my car. By the time I left The Hotel to come home about three hours later, the temp. had dropped to 45. There was a cold wind blowing in from the north, causing me to turn the heater on.
Ah, Texas. Whiplash weather.
Also whiplashing was my mother’s personality today.
We saw the physician’s assistant at her medical clinic, who determined my mother had, at the very least, a case of bronchitis. She prescribed an antibiotic and also Mucinex to get rid of all the “gunk,” as she put it, in my mother’s lungs that was causing the awful sounding cough.
But to be on the safe side, since the weekend was coming up, she wanted my mother to go over to the hospital and have a chest x-ray to be sure that there wasn’t any pneumonia starting. If there was, she would put her on a stronger antibiotic. She didn’t want to start out with the big guns just yet because she said that antibiotic can be hard on the kidneys and she wanted to keep it in reserve, if at all possible.
Fortunately, we were being squired around by The Hotel’s van driver and I’d had the presence of mind to have my mother ride in a wheelchair instead of her Candy Apple Red Ferrari (her walker.)
It certainly made schlepping her around a lot easier.
So, over to the hospital we went and checked into the radiology lab. After a brief wait, we were ushered into the x-ray room and told to go into the dressing room, strip to the waist (her, not me) and put on one of their fashion-forward gowns that tie in the back.
All of this was to be accomplished with her still in the wheelchair. My mother complained about my cold hands while I was trying to get her pullover sweater off and even more when I was undoing her bra in the back.
But we did it, and then wheeled out to the room where I had to hold her up in a standing position so the technician could take two views of her lungs with the x-ray machine.
I got to wear ten pounds of lead apron. Not a good look, but it serves its purpose.
Then it was back into the dressing room where I reversed the process and heard more about my cold hands.
The technician said the films were good and he didn’t need to retake them so, after wandering for a bit in the labyrinthine hallways of the hospital, we made our way out to the reception area where an auxiliary made the phone call to The Hotel to let our driver know we were done and needed to be picked up.
If I’ve learned anything in dealing with my mother through her various health crises, it’s that when everything is over and she’s on her way home, she tends to make me the brunt of her barely submerged anger.
We were sitting there looking out the big windows that face the parking lot. She thought the hospital shuttle was our van and pointed it out to me a couple of times. Each time I had to correct her and tell her that, no, it wasn’t our van. I could tell she didn’t want to hear that.
When our guy did show up, he had to park back behind the shuttle. By that time we’d had the sudden temperature drop and the wind was blowing pretty hard. I didn’t see any reason to charge out the door until our driver had put the ramp down for my mother’s wheelchair.
She, however, was rarin’ to go.
If the weather can go from 80 to 40 in 30 minutes, my mother can go from pleasant to nasty in a nanosecond.
In a voice just loud enough that I knew the hospital auxiliary at her desk could overhear, my mother said
“One of these days I’m going to knock the crap right out of you.”
When we got back to The Hotel, I made sure the manager knew what meds. had been prescribed and that the chest x-ray results would be faxed to them tomorrow.
Then I picked up my mother’s laundry and got her settled in her chair with a bottle of water since the physician’s assistant said she needed to drink more fluids to get the “gunk” out.
As I went out the door, my mother blew me a kiss.
There was a twinge in my neck that I swear felt just like whiplash.
Ch-ch-ch-changes
01 Mar 2012 11 Comments
in Aging, health care, Humor, Life, Women Tags: Aging, daughters, escrow, health care, Humor, husbands, mothers, random acts of kindness, suspicion
Note from the Eldercare Underground: Escrow, Suspicion, and Random Acts of Kindness
For those of you who wished me well when I put my mother’s house on the market, I have news.
It sold—in two days. Wow.
And, we had two offers on it–both at or near the asking price. We went with a couple who had been looking at old houses in town for several years. They live on a ranch west of here and wanted a weekend get-away place in our historic area. They had no conditions attached to the offer and didn’t come back with any repair requests after they had an inspection of my mother’s 1910 era home.
Can’t beat a deal like that.
We closed escrow today, less than a month after accepting the offer.
Whew!
On the suspicion front, the manager of The Hotel (retirement center) had asked me what I thought about possibly moving my mother to another room closer to the nurses’ station in the front.
The nurses and aides have to hoof it down to her room at the end of one of the halls so often to “coax” her to do things (like eat in the dining room) and it would make their lives easier to be able to just pop into her room.
I can certainly understand their reasoning, but I knew, if asked, my mother would automatically say “no”—to me.
That’s pretty much a given with her. I don’t think I can remember many things she has acceded to right away when I’m the one asking.
The old “coax me” thing, again.
So. When I broached the topic to her last week, not surprisingly, she said she didn’t want to move.
On Tuesday I had to take her to the doctor and I stopped in first to check with Sandra. I asked her if she had spoken with my mother and she said she had asked her if she would be agreeable to moving.
She said my mother replied with:
“Was this my daughter’s idea?”
Sandra had to laugh, but she told her “No, this was my idea!”
As it turns out, the room near the nurses’ station had already been earmarked for a new gentleman, so we are in a holding pattern about switching for now.
As long as it isn’t my idea.
Random acts of kindness—My husband and I were at Walmart after closing escrow on the house today.
(No, we weren’t going on a spending spree with the proceeds.)
He had to get a new internet router for our computer after a recent lightning strike right over our house fried our modem and our satellite TV receiver. The router has been a little iffy so we figured we’d start afresh—until the next bolt from the heavens.
Maybe God isn’t a big blog fan.
We were at the checkout behind an elderly lady who was in one of their motorized scooters. I overheard her exclaim “thank you!” several times to someone, but wasn’t close enough to be in on what had occurred.
After we checked out and were walking to our car, we came upon this same lady, who was struggling to get out of her scooter. She had several bags in its basket and we offered to help her put them in her car.
She thanked us for our offer, and while we were doing that she said “Do you know, the lady who was in front of me in line paid for my groceries! I don’t even know her, but she paid $21 for everything I was buying.”
She went on to say that it made her feel good that there still were kind and caring people in the world.
Amen, sister.
Disappearing Beds and the Mexican Mafia
14 Feb 2012 9 Comments
in Aging, health care, Humor, Life Tags: Aging, daughters, dementia, floozies, health care, Humor, Mexican Mafia, mothers, nursing homes
Notes from the Eldercare Underground: High School Confidential
I went over to see my mother at The Hotel today to check up on her back pain and to see if they’d managed to get her out of bed and moving.
As I mentioned before, she’s been kind of playing the staff this last weekend so they would allow her to take her meals in her room and not have to make “the long march” down to the dining hall.
When I opened the door to her room, I found her slouched way down in one of her chairs, dozing; much like you’d expect to find a sullen teenager.
Not a good position for a back pain sufferer.
She said she’d had one good night of sleep the other night but last night her back was hurting, so I told her I would check with Sandra and see what she said.
My mother asked “Is she ‘the blonde’?”
I said “If you mean, Sandra, the manager—yes.”
“I don’t like her,” my mother countered.
“You don’t like her because she makes you work.”
As I started out the door my mother, in retaliation, pulled out the big guns:
“Pull your shirt down in back.”
I hesitated for a mere nanosecond and then kept going out the door.
It ain’t gonna work this time, old woman.
Sandra was in the dining room setting up the tables for the residents’ Valentine’s party. We chatted about my mother’s health and how switching out her antique ironwork bedstead for a lower bed frame this last weekend should help keep her from having any more episodes of falling.
Sandra has such a great attitude and is able to laugh off some of the disconcerting things that occur, mainly with the residents who suffer from varying stages of dementia.
It seems that my mother didn’t remember us changing out her bed, even though she was sitting in a chair in the room the whole time. So she went around telling all the ladies in her little circle that someone had come into her room and stolen her bed.
Well. The news traveled like wildfire and Sandra had to do some damage control to quash that rumor. Even after she’d explained things to my mother, she’d caught her repeating her story to another gal pal.
But Sandra said that wasn’t the worst rumor to be passed around.
Last year Guaranty Bank was taken over by Compass Bank and someone spread the news that the bank was going under. (Shades of the Depression.)
Then the word got out that it was really the Mexican Mafia that had taken over.
A gaggle of panicked women gathered in Sandra’s office and she actually had to have someone come out from the bank to assuage their fears, it got that bad.
And there was the story that one lady spread about another in which the lady in question was supposedly stealing things from everyone’s room. This of course was false, but the rumor persisted. The rumor monger said that the woman had been told if she didn’t stop stealing she was going to “go to jail for the rest of her life.”
The woman was 96, so I don’t think she was facing a long stint in the slammer.
The kicker was, the “burglar” had a stroke and was in rehab in another building for several months. When she came back it just confirmed to all that she’d been arrested and had been incarcerated for her wrongdoings.
On my way out I ran into Dee, the daughter of one of my mother’s tablemates. Dee was once our insurance agent, so we’ve known each other for some time.
Dee and I laughed about how The Hotel was just like high school (or even junior high school) with its cliques and catty stories.
Not long ago she was on her way to sign her mother out for a beauty appointment and walked past the group of women who hang out in the cozy wingchairs by the nurses’ station.
Her mother calls them “the knotheads,” even though she’s been known to sit there with them herself.
As Dee was signing the “furlough” sheet, she could hear the “knotheads” whispering amongst themselves about “who did she think she was, checking her out just before lunch was being served?”
Then one of them said “Oh, it’s her daughter.”
And someone else said “Yeah, she’s the one who always wears those low cut tops.”
(Note: Dee happens to occasionally wear v-necks, but not anything near what I would consider daring or racy.)
We laughed about how I need to pull my shirt down in back and she needs to stop looking like a floozy.
Then I told her about my mother and the disappearing bed.
Dee said she’d heard the story from her mother, too.
And her mother even went one better. She said,
“Do you know that someone stole Iris’ bed?
And she was in the room the whole time!”
Peyton Place has nothing on this bunch.
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