Her mom is in a nursing home and once again, I could have written much of this myself when my mother was in a nursing home for a while, especially about meal time. For some reason, that’s one of the hardest parts:

Stepping out of the elevator and onto my mother’s floor, I spy her and the other patients eating dinner in the dining room. It is a peculiar and wrenching sight. Fifty people in wheelchairs pulled up to tables. All wearing bibs so they don’t spill on themselves. The bibs cue me to expect child-like babbling — happy noises. But instead there is absolute silence.

There’s nothing like having a parent in a nursing home, and that’s not a “nursing homes are all bad” statement, either. It’s just an experience you’ll never forget. Like her mother, mine was among the youngest patients in the nursing home, and whatever it was that I saw in her when she allowed them to put a bib on her will stay with me forever.

Read the rest.

Post from: Blisstree

Elderly parents in nursing homes

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.

Post from: Blisstree

Easier