57-Me, Too!

I followed the ambulance to get Dad admitted into rehab, where his recovery went as smoothly as such things can go. Mom’s decline did its best to play counterpoint. Fortunately, their house flooded while he was staring out the window of his second-floor one-bed room, which helped add to her burden.

It was a stupid flood, instigated by a poorly positioned pipe that led to backwash into the vents, making it unsafe to stay, never mind the non-retrievable details. She packed a bag, I packed a bag, while Daughter and T, now a de facto couple, booked us a nice little suite in a suitable nearby hotel. We checked out the next morning because… no clue. Mom wanted to go home, so she checked out.

But home stunk worse than the day before, and the insurance company stood ready to cover all costs, so we went to see Dad while Baby and T booked us another room in another hotel. We couldn’t go back to the same one onaccounta… yeah. ‘Cause of that.

In all, we were in-and-out of three hotels over the same number of days—mighta been four, who cares—because Mom believed in checking out before checking with the clean-up folks. This was no might-as-well-use-the-time-to-get-closer fun adventure. Long spans of sullen interspersed with center-stage-brightness on check-ins and scowls on queries, as in, “Did you remember to bring your xxx pills?” or “Should we go back to the house for your xxx medicine?”

“Mind your own business!”

All was well by the time I checked Dad out of rehab; he’d confiscated a wheelchair and rolled himself into a waiting area to spot me the minute I walked off the elevator onto his floor. While I may not have made any headway with my mother, he and I had finally cobbled some non-porous happy between us, and he was thrilled to be going home. At ninety-two, he had one goal left in life: to die in his own house, the first place he’d ever really loved, the only abode he called home.

He had previously told me, rather earnestly, that he wanted to be the man I could come to for help with anything, any time. Maybe he hadn’t been there for me before, but he was proud of me and would be there for me from now on.

I appreciated that. Thanked him. Didn’t know what else to do with it. He’d never been self-employed; he’d never had to figure out how to keep six bodies and souls together when there was no time to market and barely enough hours to fulfill contracts. He’d been a company man all his life, dedicated to taking care of the love of his life and fulfilling her dreams.

To this day, I non-know if my mother ever told him when I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis at age fifteen. It was a secret, after all.

Dad’s doctor thought he should have an in-home caregiver, since Mom wasn’t up to taking care of him. Sis had developed a relationship with just such a service when her dad needed it. Affordable, proven reliable, so the call went out, the owner showed up to give his pitch, a done deal.

Oops.

I’d forgotten my mother could never trust Asians because the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. She’d eat Chinese food because, well, that she liked, but she wouldn’t touch Japanese, Korean, or Thai food because the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. Our assigned caregiver was Filipino, a guy strong enough to help Dad up and down if he needed it.

Anxious to return to normal life, Dad eschewed the caregiver’s help. Mom, on the other hand, couldn’t stand up straight, leaned heavily on a cane, was often dizzy, always in pain, and overall simply presented as the picture of non-okay. “She’s the one who needs help,” the caregiver said. “It looks like she’s not taking all her medications as ordered.”

Wrong answer. Mom wasn’t about to have some foreigner telling her what she should and shouldn’t do. Besides, the caregiver’s boss came around to collect payment every week—too expensive! Needless to say he was gone in time for her to have her own, ever-more minor heart attack. “We’ve lived together so long, I guess whatever he (Dad) gets, I get, too.”

Can’t beat that logic, right?

 Her insurance as good as Dad’s, she got the same recovery formula: a few days in the hospital, twenty-one days in rehab. Dad didn’t need to be wheelchaired to her bedside every day; determined to recover, he used a cane. Determined to not, Mom came out of rehab more wobbly than she went in, bent over two canes, unable to straighten up. Her legs swollen and painful, nothing could warm her up except a little brandy… and keeping the house at eighty-six degrees. Honest to Hassid.

The rest of the carnival played out strictly according to Hoyle. Dad had a stroke—hospital, rehab, home. Between said stroke and Mom’s TIA—oh, come on, ya had to have seen that coming! —Daughter/T, a lovely friend-of-a-friend I’ll call M, and I began staying at the house in eight-hour shifts because all the hospital and insurance and doctor-referred caregivers were wrong and bad and one was a thief and who could trust/want strangers in the house, anyway?

Mom especially liked it when M was on duty. Such a godsend. Mom didn’t know what she’d do without her.

I was only there eight hours a day—just the ones when I was functional enough to be productive, but non-able to be productive because I couldn’t seem to focus for some reason, Zeus only knows why. Medical marijuana was legal with a doctor’s script, so Baby & T found a doctor who saw me for a good handful of minutes, diagnosed me with caregiver stress, and wrote the magic Rx.

Stressed was likely too small a word. I was in hyper-whelm, three steps past swamped and mere inches short of total depletion. Beyond the strain of being around my mother every single, solitary day of the week and month, there were the all-too-frequent evenings and nights beside her in the ER as attending physicians ran their obligatory tests and we waited to hear the same results, time after time. High blood pressure. High cholesterol. Anxiety. Was she taking her medication? Of course. She should see her doctor—maybe she needed an adjustment.

Was she taking her medication? I thought she was. Never once even considered she wasn’t. I certainly never called her on it, or even questioned it. I’m sure it was none of my business.

I did know she was chronically constipated. To relieve the pressure and abdominal pain after a week or so, she’d take Ex-Lax. When relief wasn’t immediate, apparently she’d take more. Then, after she’d had a movement or two, she’d take Lomotil, because she was “shitting too much. It’s not reasonable to have this many bowel movements!” When they didn’t stop immediately, she’d take another dose or two.

Now, even my mother knew she couldn’t call an ambulance for her self-induced stop-‘n-go-ness. But she could when she developed a painful hemorrhoid. If’n it didn’t bleed on its own, which it sometimes did despite theoretically using the stuff-in-the-tube to reduce its inflammation, she’d “accidentally” wipe herself with an exfoliating facial scrub. Microdermabrasion sheets in a tub.

What were they doing next to the toilet, you ask? So did I. She had no idea how they got there.

Dumbasfuck, I started making mental notes about her slow capacity loss. Dumb, dumb, dumbasfuck. I could not, would not, see my mother as self-destructive. Could she have Munchausen syndrome?

Spoiler alert: she did not. Like that politician I keep non-referring to, she knew exactly what she was doing. Boy, what she coulda accomplished with his money and penis, eh?

Moving along to the end my shift, when she could feel something up her rectum that didn’t belong there. It was said hemorrhoid, enlarged, I won’t say purposely because I didn’t see her do anything. But that’s what it was—the same hemorrhoid.

She wanted an ambulance. I said no. She insisted. I fucking stood my ground, shocking both of us. She backed down.

Stupidassity #1. I believed her.

Daughter and T showed up, I went home, almost had my shoes off when T called—they were waiting for the ambulance to arrive.

T, at this point more man than woman, had used a combination of mirrors to show Mom that it was, in fact, just a hemorrhoid, the same hemorrhoid, and it would feel much better if she’d just let T put some of the cream on it.

No, no, no!

By the time I got back to the house, the EMTs were there, strapping her to the gurney. They didn’t take me yelling at my mother well— “Back away from the gurney, lady”—and zsooped her away to the ER, her beloved home-away-from-home. But my hyper-whelm had indeed crashed over the edge, and I couldn’t even go into the room with her. I grabbed a nurse in the rotund, and said, “I need some help. Really. This has to stop.”

The nurse listened to my tale with a condescending smile and told me to wait while she checked my mother’s history. The smile was gone when she returned. “I’m going to call a social worker. You’re right; this has to stop.”

“Thank you!”

For some dumbasfuck reason, I thought we were finally on the way to reaching a sane solution. Maybe the right medication, maybe an ambulance do-not-respond alert—I had no idea what could be done but I knew I had to find a way to get back to my own life, back to work, back to not having to keep asking Dad to help me tether my ever-widening ends.

Maybe I was doing the right thing, the more important thing, as my cousin had said, but Dionysus-all-to-hell, I was literally losing my hair putting her wants/needs/whims before me, mine, clients, and students.

The social worker sat me down to explain that my mother could not keep using Emergency Medical transportation and Emergency Room resources the way she’d been these last months. I resisted the urge to rip her a new one and merely explained I’d been doing my best to discourage her—uh, I suspect I used slightly stronger wording than that, but hey, lousy memory—but I had no control, no authority over her actions.

“Who has her power of attorney?”

“My father.”

“Can’t he stop her?”

“No.”

“Well, this can’t continue. You might have to file for guardianship. That means­—”

“I know what that means,” I cut in, having recently written a book on this very subject. “I don’t think I can do that. My father or brother would have to, and I doubt either one would.”

 “In that case, the only thing you can do is arrange for her go to a facility where they know how to handle and take care of people in her condition. I’ll see to it she’s sent from here to rehab. That’ll give you three weeks to find a suitable facility.”

She put her hand on mine. “Good luck, honey. I’m afraid you’re going to need it.”

Mom went directly from the ER back to the rehab hospital she’d liked so much—the one where everyone wasn’t so Asian—while Daughter and I toured retirement, aka assisted-living facilities. There was a really nice one less than two miles from the house. We made temporary arrangements for Mom to move in.

She didn’t wanna.

Such a surprise.

More, Dad wanted her home.

We could look for another place…

No, no, no.

We could find a better agency who’d send in twenty-four/seven help.

No, no, no.

Finally Daughter, she of the big heart and sharp brain, came up with, “Why don’t T & I move into the back bedroom? Then we’d be there to take care of Grandma twenty-four/seven. You could spell us once a week. It would be a win-win all around.”

 Yeah, I heard the alarm bells, saw the red flags, felt the inarticulate tsunami of reasons why it wouldn’t work. But I said, “I’ll ask them tomorrow.”

I asked. Dad was thrilled—the perfect solution—economical, familial! Mom was… cautiously optimistic.

“I guess we could try it for a couple, three months.”

Mayday! Mayday! Danger, danger, Will Robinson! Red alert! All hands to battle stations! Abort, abort, abort! Do not ride into that valley of death, o ye 600!”

“Well, okay, then,” came out of my mouth. “D&D and I will get started moving things around.”

Stupidassity #2.