Mom & Me Two Archive

    Last night, after an amount of bed rest I was feeling guilty about not battling (it isn't just a matter of "allowing" her to go to bed, believe me) over the last few days, one very successful walk and what appeared to me to be very good coloring, right after we finished watching...hmmm...what was it...oh, yeah, Sister Act 2, one of my mother's perennial favorites...anyway, without any to do, so little, in fact, that I almost didn't take note of the miracle unfolding before me, she arose from her stabilized rocking chair, her left hand full of tissue trash and walked to the two stairs that lift one out of the living room area (or, I guess, what would be called a mini great room) and took the steps one after the other, foot by foot. Suddenly I realized, she's walking like she used to walk before she fell! She's doing it without thinking.
    So, without thinking that I might spoil the moment I yelled her attention to what she's doing. She was unfazed. She looked at me as though I was crazy. She splayed her hands in genuine ingenuousity. "I'm just walking," she said, "may I continue to the bathroom?" she asked in mock obeisance.
    I laughed. "That's the beauty of it! Go in peace!"
    I tell you, sometimes I am in awe of the convenience of a faulty short term memory. It is very convenient that, as one's body is forgetting to move in order to compensate for injury the mind has already forgotten the injury. I will always treasure the times during this convalescence when, after a few hours without pain or twinges (usually sedentary hours, but who's counting, at least she's awake), I ask her how her back is feeling and she looks at me like I just got back from a time warp or another quantum signature reality. She shrugs. Gets that look in her eye she always gets that says, "Oh yeah, that's right, she's the peculiar one, I have to be careful with her." She responds, "It's fine," with an implied, "why the fuck shouldn't it be?!?"
    At times like these I love not only my mother but my mother's take on old age. It's funny because earlier in the day I had a short mini-breakdown. One of the reasons I allowed my mother to sleep in until after noon (which I won't be doing today) is that suddenly, after days and weeks and months of it not making any difference, I was revolting at the thought of spending the next 45 minutes to an hour and a half smelling and cleaning my mother's urine. This daily morning task, into which I've gracefully fallen, has even allowed me to objectively rate the scent of my mother's urine: Not objectionably strong, not sweet (which is good), very mild, not concentrated, a little like the smell of the blackening flower petals on a flower left too long in an unrefreshed vase (a smell with which I'm very familiar). I now autonomically seek out sniffs to try to detect changes in her body chemistry which might be significant.
    But yesterday morning it took me a long time to face the smell of her urine. When I was finally able to enter her room to rouse her the first thing I did, in a desperately apologetic voice, was ask her not to touch me because I didn't want to have to deal with the smell of her urine on me that morning. She did a double take but complied without a loss of short term memory.
    We discussed it once more when she was washing her arms and I was washing her legs. My voice was sharper than usual as I directed her over all the parts of her arm and admonished her to scrub: "Remember, you're washing off your pee. You've been laying in it, rolling around in it, all night. Get it off."
    She looked at me like I was exaggerating.
    "I mean it, Mom! I don't care whether or not you remember. We do this every goddamn morning. This morning I'm just having a hard time dealing with it."
    She gave me a nominally sympathetic, "Yeah, well, that's you're problem," look and started on the opposite arm before she finished with the one she was working on.

    I truly do not understand the way she heals. She will go for months carrying, nursing an illness, then suddenly overnight as in the case of the accidental colonic, she'll noticeably improve or recover. I know this will not continue forever. I was beginning to wonder if this lower back sprain was going to be the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. But she's doing it again. She's getting tired of being sick so she's releasing the memory of not only the dis-ease but the condition that lead up to the trauma surrounding this dis-ease.
    I continue to recall, in response to the acupunturist's statement that contrary to my memory of no previous back injuries she'd obviously suffered a previous injury, small instances of falls from which she seemed not to need to recover but which apparently, coupled with her increasingly compensatory walking habits, weakened her back and set her up for a fall.

• There was the fall where she broke her hand.
• There was the one, when I wasn't home, where, in the middle of last summer in Mesa in the middle of the day she decided to go get the mail. Barefoot. She "lost her balance", according to our dear neighbor to the north who happened to be out (my mother is well protected in the area of needed witnesses) and was immediately restored and ushered in by another neighbor passing in a car. I didn't find out about that one until a few days later. My mother didn't remember it and didn't harbor any ill effects. I remember coming home the evening of the incident. She was sitting upright at the table drinking watered down coffee, reading tabloids, looking chipper, suggesting that we go out to eat, which we did, to Chili's.

She has been regularly x-rayed for this and that throughout the past year and a half so any breaks would have been and have been noticed. Her Mesa PCP was meticulous about this aspect of her care. Muscular and ligamental weakness is hard to detect in an x-ray, though. Easier in observation but sometimes the compensations fool you.
    Intense, directed 'prayer' (for me, this is what amounts to deep, directed meditation; my mother has a traditional relationship with god/God/All and prays in the traditional manner) on her and my behalves seemed to have only a slightly ameliorative affect. Faulty short term memory seems to have a more immediate affect.
    I have in the past few days been in a caregiver's funk. A touch of burnout, I guess. I'm not any less grateful, just tired. I look for moments of respite that I know will allow me, as well as my mother, to recharge. I'm grateful that it would be, at this time, ridiculous to take my mother on trips that involve me wielding a grocery basket while she's in a wheel chair. I take grocery trips during her naps and take full advantage of the sociality involved in these trips and the opportunity to run into people I know, which Prescott allows with generosity. Doing yardwork helps, too, but I have to be careful with this, as well. It's been too cold for her to sit out and watch me if she's awake. If she's sleeping I need to keep an eye on her to make sure I anticipate her attempts to arise so she doesn't lose her balance in the wooze of awaking and fall off the bed. Oh. Wow. That's right. About a year ago, in Mesa, she fell off the bed in the middle of the night. I heard it, immediately awoke, rushed in and by that time she was back on the bed. One cat was standing by, fluffed for battle. We never mentioned the incident again but later that afternoon the back of her left hand swelled into an egg and we had her x-rayed for breakage, of which there was none. It took a couple of months for the egg to dissolve. The discoloration still exists. The fact that she probably received this contusion by falling out of bed was not mention nor addressed. As I recall, she and I both attributed the injury to her habit of occasionally flinging her hands against the wall at the head of her bed at night, when she's rolling over in her sleep. Hmmmm.
    So, a lot of details set one up for a fall.
    An observation: It's hell to be old and heal from a fall. It's true. Old age is not for sissies. I haven't yet decided whether I'm a sissy.