Mom & Me Two Archive

    Yesterday started out not just well enough but very well, thank you. Although I notice this morning that yesterday's post may strike readers as a bit raw, when I wrote it I was feeling very good. At some point the day began sliding downhill and I slid with it.
    I can't quite put my finger on what caused the turn in my outlook. Could have been a combination of the antibiotics, which knock me for a slight loop within an hour after taking them (I take them 3 times a day), combined with realizing I somehow strained the left side of my left knee and was having shooting pain upon rising from the floor, combined with having stepped on a bee outside in the morning and spending the day hobbling on a swollen left foot, could have been that I just needed a day's vacation from not only my labors but from worrying about whether my mother was doing well while someone else labored at her needs but knew I wasn't going to get one. The bad day didn't kick in immediately. It was sometime after Mom ate breakfast and during the time we played a couple rounds of Sorry and an aborted round of Scrabble; sometime before I tried to coax her into movement and she resisted. Usually when she resists if I fix her hair, bring her slacks out, put them in front of her and "order" her to put them on by simply expecting her to begin the task, this gets her moving. Yesterday morning, although it began looking bad for getting her in the car and out with me on a few errands, I was sure the fact that the rose bush she requested in the spring, Passionate, with the deep red blooms, was finally blooming would get her at least out on the driveway for a few laps. I left her to put on her slacks while I was setting up my bathroom for a much needed shower. When I checked on her progress with the slacks, knowing that she'd be unattended for a good 20 minutes and I'd better make sure she hadn't stopped her task with her slacks around her ankles, which she'd forget and which would cause trip over trying to walk away from the table for some reason, she'd traipsed into her bedroom, put her slacks back in a dresser drawer (they actually belong on a hanger in her closet) and announced that she "didn't need them, today". I gave up.
    As I showered I shed a few tears and realized my energy had sunk to almost nothing. I decided to leave the day up to my whims. This is how a "bad day" for us begins.
    These are the typical elements of our bad days, all of which were present yesterday:

1. I lost my ability to indulge her faulty short term memory. Just so you know exactly what kinds of information I am bound to repeat day after day, sometimes hour after hour, yesterday she repeatedly asked me:
   • about the skin infection for which I'm taking antibiotics and counseled me that I "really should get that taken care of";
   • about the arrangement and number of earrings in my ears and insisted on counting them each time to confirm my count;
   • what the "R/L" on my t-shirt stood for and why my t-shirt had the word "jeans" on it;
   • to go through the entire inventory of our DVDs under the assumption that we'd just acquired the collection;
   • when the last time was that we saw each of her other daughters and their families and why we hadn't seem them "lately";
   • to "go get the mail";
   • after spotting the sun tea jar outside the front window, why it was there and what it was;
   • every time I had difficulty getting up from the floor or rising from a chair because of the strain on the left side of my left knee, she asked me what was wrong;
   • pointing out that my foot appeared to be swollen, she asked me why, then told me I'd better take something for it because I've occasionally displayed allergies to certain types of wasp and bee stings.
   Instead of explaining or reminding her again of things I've explained over and over and of which I've reminded her millions of times, on one of my bad days I tell her, bluntly, "Mom, I've gone over that many times. You don't need to know that right now and I don't want to repeat it. So I'm not going to." Of course, I end up repeating this ad infinitum, too, but on a bad day it's more personally satisfying to say this than to repeat the requested information. Her reaction to me saying this is always amiable, several times a day, when I'm having a bad day.
2. Although I couldn't get her to move I was determined, because of the loaded-with-sleep days she's had lately, to keep her up all day so, not being able to even get her dressed to get out of the house, I gave up the errands and put my shoulder to keeping her from taking a nap. I finally gave up at 1650 but not before I warned her that part of her physical mobility problem was too much sleep. As well, which often happens, once she'd headed into the bedroom for a nap she forgot where she was going and why, turned around and toddled back out to the living room.
   "Look," I told her, "I've given up and this is your chance to take a nap. Are you going to or not?"
   "No, I don't think so," she responded.
   "Okay," I said, "final answer." At which point she arose and headed into her bedroom for a nap while, giving up once again, I steered her into the bathroom to pad her with three pairs of paper underwear so I wouldn't have to wash two sets of bed linens in one day.
3. Earlier in the day after breakfast during our Sorry tournament I found myself increasingly irritated with having to remind her of the rules throughout the game. After two sets, one win each, I suggested we switch to Scrabble. That didn't work for me. Her usual lag to figure out how to make a word from her letters and the constant reminders that she can't spell a word backwards or diagonally, can't reuse a "Triple Letter Score" space that's been used toward a previous score all irritated me. Finally, 20 minutes into the game I said, "I can't do this today, Mom. I just can't play a game with you today and continually remind you how to play it. I just don't have the energy." That was okay with her.
4. During dinner she couldn't keep her mind on eating, which is not unusual. As well, dinner had been preceded by a day of constantly reminding her to drink liquids, "Pick up the glass and take another swig, Mom," which also is not unusual. On a bad day, though, it's water torture for me as well as her. Finally, in frustration after flicking off the television (she'd wanted to watch something, I can't remember what, on TMC) and steering her from studying yet another spat between our cats so she would concentrate on eating I said, "Mom, look, I'm getting sick of having to 'eat' your dinner and mine, I'm getting sick of having to 'drink' your liquids and mine. You have enough presence of mind to concentrate on eating and drinking and you need to eat and drink. Tonight I'm tired of you relying on me to remind you to eat your dinner, drink your liquids. I'm not up to it. I think you can handle eating and drinking yourself for one night." My tone was not pleasant. The funny thing is, expressing my frustration is all it took. She finished her dinner and liquid on her own. The only other reminder necessary was that the pieces of chicken she was leaving in the bottom of her bowl were not pieces of potato, which she hates in soup that isn't potato soup, they were chicken, and she'd want to eat those. She appreciated the reminder and she ate them.
   There was one other frustration connected with dinner. She left a fair amount of soupy liquid in her bowl and I could not convince her to eat/drink it so, for the first time in our sojourn together (and, I hope, the last, for a long time), I fed it to her "nursing home style", as I called it, spoon by spoon, an activity which neither she nor I appreciated.
5. Since she was going on her fourth day without a bowel movement I administered a mild laxative dose of Phillip's Milk of Magnesia in the morning. This was another reason why I wanted to keep her up: I didn't want her to shit accidentally while she was napping and risk another E. Coli infection. Keeping her up generally helps stimulate a bowel movement when it is much needed. Although I finally gave up and let her nap, she did have a bowel movement after dinner. When she headed for the bathroom I set the scene, as I usually do, with cigarettes. After giving her time to smoke the first of two I went into the bathroom to see how she was doing. "Bowel movement yet?" I asked. Usually I can smell it but last night, for some reason, maybe because of the medication, I couldn't.
   "No," she responded.
   "Well, then, I guess we'd better get you up."
   "No, she said, I'm having a little trouble."
   "Trouble having a bowel movement?" I asked.
   "No..."
   "Well, then, trouble peeing?"
   "Yes," she said.
   My anxiety level shot up and my mind started calculating: 'only' three days of Cipro XR; maybe, even though it's powerful, that wasn't enough; I haven't noticed any cloudiness in her urine lately and it's smelling normal again but maybe she isn't completely over the urinary tract infection; we're headed into a weekend, I wonder if the urgent care clinic is open or if we'll have to go into the ER if it becomes obvious that her infection needs more treatment; I guess I'd better make sure that I have supplies handy for a long wait, etc., etc., etc...
   I began questioning her, "Are you saying you're having trouble urinating?"
   "Yes."
   "Does it hurt when you try to urinate?"
   "No."
   "But, you can't urinate even though you feel as though you need to?"
   "Yes."
   "And you aren't having a bowel movement?" Sometimes when she has a load to evacuate, as she surely did last night, she feels the bearing down pressure on her bladder and interprets it as difficulty urinating even though her bladder is empty.
   "No."
   At this point, I couldn't help it, I stood in the bathroom door and started to cry, thinking ...once again, medical treatment hadn't been adequate, probably because she wasn't an on-board patient with the doctors practicing through the urgent care clinic in Prescott Valley and didn't have a local PCP; and here we were, having to go back for an appointment to a place where we'd have to set up camp while waiting to be seen; go back on a course of strong antibiotics, have her stats go wild and since I didn't think I could put off the standing blood draw any later than Monday, show test results that were clearly out of whack; I'd have to wrangle yet again with her regular doctors to keep her from being over treated for temporary results due to infections and antibiotics...
   I figured, oh well, it'll probably help to cry about it for a bit, make me feel better, get rid of raucous enzymes that I'd been collecting for awhile that were "helping" me have a bad day. I left the bathroom after telling her four times to please not flush since I needed to check her urine to see if it was cloudy or pink.
   After some minutes I headed back to the bathroom. She'd finished, had headed toward her bedroom, and, thank the gods, had either remembered not to flush or forgotten to flush. I looked into the toilet. She'd actually been having a bowel movement, a healthy one which probably cleaned her out. She hadn't been able, for some reason, to sense or communicate that this was what she was doing. Or maybe she was just being contrary and wanted to preserve her personal bathroom dignity...this happens, too.
   Standing over a toilet full of shit, I resumed crying just to relieve the frustration I'd been creating over the possibility of having to seek more treatment for a badly handled urinary tract infection. In a minute I was over it, remembered that Mom had headed to her bedroom and realized I needed to deflect her from going to bed so early.
   Aside from telling her that I was not going to allow her to go to bed, I reminded her that on Friday nights Channel 38 had a two parter Deep Space Nine on from 2100 to 2300 and didn't she want to watch that?
   "Oh! I don't want to miss that," she said.
   "Besides," I said, "you're still pretty dehydrated, even more so since you went to the bathroom, you had a bowel movement, by the way..."
   To which she responded, a little indignantly, "I know I did."
   "...so I need to get a good quart of liquids down your gullet before you retire."
   She sighed. "I've had enough liquids, today."
   "Look," I responded, exasperated after a day full of everything else and coaxing and cajoling her to "drink some more, get that down, you've got another glass on the way," "I'm not going to argue. If I have to, I will stand over you and feed you the liquid myself but your only other choice is to dehydrate yourself and risk a variety of infections and death. Unless you tell me you're ready to die I'm not going to let you take that risk. Are you ready?"
   "No," she said defiantly.
   "O.K. Deep Space Nine and liquids it is."
   She was up until 2330 watching her shows and something else, I don't remember what, some half hour program, while I wearily screwed around with a template design for an adjunct food journal to compendium of sites. When she went to bed, I went to bed, hoping I'd roll out this morning on the right side.

    I'm still not sure whether I managed right side rolling this morning. That's the nature of my bad day hangovers. Mind over matter, "they" say. Well, sometimes, after weeks of days like the one above (believe me, yesterday was not unusual for my mother, I was the one whose day took a turn) all that matters to me is to sigh and ache and be contrary for awhile, to take a "bad day" vacation even while I must remain right where I am in the middle of my mother's life, so that's what I do, while carefully staying just this side of the thin line between expressed mental, emotional and physical exhaustion and elder verbal abuse and neglect.
    Time, past time, to get her up. I don't know what we'll do today. I don't know if I'll get her moving or even want to, although I'll definitely keep her up. I might need a day to recover from my bad day of yesterday. If I do, I'll take it. She'll be happy because I won't be bugging her to get out and get moving even though, as she celebrates days like this, I harbor a twinge of guilt knowing that I'm collaborating with her frailty when I don't attempt to coax her strength and immunity to higher levels of performance.
    My knee is still iffy, the swelling in my foot seems to have gone down a bit, I've taken my morning dose of antibiotics and can feel them creeping around my body pulling energy toward the infection site. Overall, I'm not on edge. I'm not feeling overwhelmed today, just hung over. I could have launched an earlier start to Mom's day but I needed to indulge myself by recording the truth about my bad days. I think I'm ready now for a somewhat better day than yesterday. We'll see.
    Later. Maybe.