Easier

Slouching Mom has a wonderful post about her aging mother that, especially as a nurse, I can relate all too well:

Instead I stared at the computer screen that blinked above my mother’s head, and I played with the numbers, the blood pressure, the heart rate, the pulse oxygen, adding, subtracting, multiplying them, the arithmetic flooding my brain until there was no room for ambiguities like love, sorrow, pain, and anger.

During my mother’s illness and eventual death, I was good at being a nurse. Nurse, I could do. Motherless daughter, not quite as much.

I monitored her oxygen set-up and her oxygen levels, careful to note when the respiratory therapist would be coming back. Every time she got up to go to the bathroom, I straightened her bed and cleaned up the bedside table. Beeping IV pump? I was on it.

It all gave me something to do. Not because I was bored, there was no time for that. But, because I didn’t know what else to do with myself as my mother was disintegrating before me.

Dissociation was, and still is, so much easier.