I Am 3,000 Miles Away And Can Do Nothing
“She’s totally incoherent, in pain, and unresponsive,” said the email, now two and a half hours old. “We’re taking her to her doctor’s and then to the hospital. He’ll get her admitted and it will be less traumatic than the emergency room.”
Something of a followup to this where my Mom talks about her Mom, who in essence has been in The Long Descent for years now.
My Mom has no cellphone, and my Dad and sister do not appear to be home, so I have no idea what’s happening since 10:00 AM and that email.
It’s been no secret, amongst friends anyway, that I’ve long since wished that my Grandmother had reached the point where the “awareness switch” had been thrown and she never had any conception that something was off, that she was losing the age fight, that various bits of her were going.
I had a telephone conversation with her a couple months back where at times it seemed maybe that switch finally had flipped over. And then came the moments where she realized something about her end of the conversation had not been going quite right.
That awareness drives me crazy, because it seems so annoyingly unfair to her. I have no idea what it’s been like since then.
As my Mom points out in the linked post above, my Grandfather (her Dad) died the day after Christmas twenty-five years ago. This is the only grandparent I have left, never having known my Dad’s parents.
I am 3,000 miles away and can do nothing, not that there’s much I could do even if I were there. So, I write this.
December 23rd, 2005 at 3:43 pm
And we read it, and say a prayer for you, your grandmother, and the rest of your family.
December 23rd, 2005 at 4:17 pm
FWIW, I did eventually here from my Sister, but there wasn’t anything actually new she had to report beyond what was in our Mom’s email this morning.
December 24th, 2005 at 5:38 pm
Even if you were here, there’s nothing you would be able to do. She’s been in the ICU since 3 p.m. Friday and has been put through a battery of painful tests to try to find out why she is consistently losing blood. I don’t know when it all really started, but as of three days ago, she was so weak she couldn’t stand and couldn’t understand enough to communicate. As of now, they have put four bags of blood in her and it just comes out the bottom end with whatever else is in there. And the tests have not shown anything definitive as to the cause. And it seems to have stopped.
Chances are that we will bring her home in a few days and just wait and see. If it all starts again, I will expercise my option as her health care proxy to keep her home and as pain-free as possible until nature takes its course.
The hospital procedures have been very painful and traumatic for her, escalating her growing dimentia.
After being up and at her side for 28 of the past 30 hours, I’m sitting here eating the pierogi we were all going to have tonight and watching the “Triangle” I taped off Sci Fi a week ago. And then it’s to bed so that I can get up early and go back to the hospital.
Staroszcz nie radoszcz, as my grandmother used to say — which, loosely translated, means getting old sucks.
December 24th, 2005 at 7:45 pm
I am, as we speak, finishing up my dinner of pieorgi and kielbasa. Alas, the store had no Polish beer to round out the theme.