A Phone Call Away

We’re down at our cabin in Arkansas this week, some 240 miles and 6 hours away from home. When we’re out of town, I maintain the same routines with Mom every day with the exception of going to see her everyday. We talk by phone at least every morning, and sometimes twice, as I like to know when she gets back from the beauty shop, for example. But I worry, maybe not as much as I did when she really lived by herself in her duplex, but the worry is there.
I know my mother, she doesn’t like to admit illness, nor does she like to worry those around her and she sometimes goes to great pains to hide her pain.
And a lot more can be hidden by phone.
On the morning of her near fatal heart attack, I talked with her at our usual 8:30 morning call. She told me she felt fine (she had been experiencing severe shortness of breath and other symptoms we now know was the prelude, but were blamed on the COPD). But she really wasn’t fine. By the time I talked to her, she was already having shooting pains in her back. She waited 4 hours from the time the first symptoms appeared to call me and tell me something was terribly wrong. It was a wait that nearly cost her life. She later told me in the hospital, “Well, I wanted to feel fine.”
After her second fall last autumn, the nurse at her doctor’s office put a brace on her badly swollen and bruised foot. It looked pretty tight to me and I kept asking Mom about it, but she insisted in keeping it on. A sore eventually formed on her foot that I knew nothing about until gangrene had set in. It took months of visits from a home nurse to get the sore healed.
I’ve learned to read her voice pretty well, there’s not many times she can hide things from me anymore, but when we’re gone I still worry she may hide something in order to protect our time away. If it’s not worrying that she might be concealing an illness, I’m worried if something did happen, we wouldn’t be able to get back to the city in time to help her through the process of a hospital admission. After dealing with doctors, hospitals, Medicare and all of the others involved in elderly care for nearly three years, I take a very active role in Mom’s care, from knowing what goes on at each “routine” check up, to researching possible side effects for each new medication.
After her heart attack, I wouldn’t come down to the cabin for nearly 6 months afterward.
Now when I leave, I make sure our phone call times are set (we get no cell phone reception in these remote mountains), I make sure her neighbors know I’m leaving and how to reach me in case of emergency. I leave Mom with leftovers and dinners I start freezing weeks in advance.
Mom is so vulnerable. I guess I now know how she probably felt each day I walked out the door to school or anywhere when I was a child. Yet, Mom isn’t a child and (Thank God), she has her full mental capabilities. There’s a balance of respecting what she wants and can manage and where I feel I need to step in.
Yesterday, we took an unexpected trip to town and I missed our usual morning call. We forgot our cell phones, which do work in town, and it was nearly 1 p.m. before I could get a call into her. I don’t know who was more panicked, her or me. She says its worry about us, that I don’t doubt, but I also think for her, it is a little knowing I’m still only a phone call away.
I know all the experts in care giving are right. My friends are right and even my mother is right when they all tell me we do need time away from all of our daily responsibilities and worries.
But sometimes I wonder if I worry more when we’re at home or when we’re away.

Giftwrapping: No Extra Charge

Mom is a creative and wrapping presents was a creative outlet for her. Not unlike many Depression era parents, our parents wanted us to have the Christmases they missed out on as children. But our packages were more than what was inside; they were lavishly decorated with package ornaments and ribbons. Gold paper with Merry Christmas in plastic cursive attached to a beautiful ribbon; Santa paper with elf ornaments dangling from the bows; blue paper with tiny silver bells. Mom’s packages were works of art.
Our home was the same way, always decorated from front to back, inside and out. We had a huge Christmas tree adorned with all the trimmings, including WWII era balls and an angel on top. The Christmas tree in my room was one of those 60s white trees trimmed in pink and when my nephews came along, they had a tree of their own – the boys tree, my mom always called it.
And Mom’s pumpkin pies….well, I still haven’t found a pie like hers.
So many of my friends lost their parents in the past two years. One of them lost her mother last year and her father this year. It seemed that one moment she was emailing me about getting her mother to an appointment and the next moment, my friend was trying to figure out new traditions for her family – how to make the holidays she shared with her parents as happy now that they were gone.
She told me recently she would give anything for just one more Christmas with her mother.
As we were leaving Mom’s apartment last night after our Christmas Eve celebration, we encountered one of her neighbors in the lobby. It was obvious she was unhappy, maybe even had been crying. I asked her what she was doing out so late, “I just have a case of the blues, you know we all get them,” she told me. I said I hoped she had a better day today, on Christmas day, and wished her well. I imagined she was dwelling on some of the old traditions she missed in her family.
Holidays seem to bring on nostalgia. But this year, I tried to keep my mind from that.
We cleared a spot for Mom’s tabletop tree in her little apartment and decorated as we could. Mom can’t make her pies, but I found a coffee shop, The Pie Lady, that does a pretty close imitation. One thing I did learn from Mom was her recipe for mashed sweet potatoes (the secret is in the marshmallows) and so we had a nice Christmas dinner last night, on Christmas Eve, as we’ve always celebrated. We united old tradition with new when I cooked and took it all over to her apartment because she wasn’t feeling up to the trip to my house.
I know our new traditions are hard for my mother. I know she would rather be spending the whole month designing beautiful packages while Bing crooned “White Christmas” on the stereo. I know she would rather be cooking a huge meal and rolling out her piecrusts. I know she wished she even felt like coming to my house last night. I wish all those things too. I wish Mom’s neighbor wasn’t so sad and lonely and I wish I could give my friend another Christmas with her mother, neatly wrapped with pretty decorations and a beautiful ribbon.
But we live in the moments we have, uniting what tradition we can, enjoying those we have with us and making new traditions along the way.
That’s the best presents we can give our loved ones and ourselves.
And I learned this year that if it is done right, it is a very pretty package.

Room in Our Minds

I greeted the social worker at my mother’s door yesterday afternoon and realized this was not the same woman who visited us last year, but she quickly put my mind at ease. Like the last one, this woman was warm and knew how to talk to my mother without seeming condescending. She didn’t know Mom, but looked at her when she spoke to her, ensuring she was better understood. Unlike last year, I was more relaxed. Although I had allowed myself to fret over the visit after our big celebration Thursday night, at least I knew what to expect.
But it was more than that. Gone was the clutter between me and my mother that last year was as thick as the dust that gathered on too many of her things that surrounded us in a home she could no longer care for.
The physical clutter was absent for sure, but also gone was the mental clutter and the sense of being overwhelmed I felt this time last year. Overwhelmed at home, having just lost a beloved senior dog we dearly loved. Overwhelmed by a house I struggle to keep clean with 3 dogs, 2 cats and a husband who has a pack-rat mentality that even outdoes me and my mother’s. Overwhelmed by keeping up my writing business while marketing a book. Finally, I was overwhelmed with my mother’s care, which all of a sudden included her not being able to walk or get out of her home on her own. It was a split-level duplex and she had fallen not once, but twice last autumn. And with that clutter, came the sense of regret for backing down from an earlier move and the guilt of not being able to keep up on the chores in her home.
It was a juggling act and I felt as though I was losing control of all of the balls.
Although unspoken between us, gone from the clutter of my mother’s mind was her fears that she was going to a nursing home. The social worker last year tried to explain that she could still live independently in a clean, safe environment sans stairs. But the mental images of being placed in a nursing home and left alone without any visitors overwhelmed her. I told her she could live with me, but the social worker discouraged that because we have the same split level floor plan in our house that she had in her duplex – with less square footage – and just as much physical clutter.
If it wasn’t a nursing home or mine, she knew where she would go and the idea of living in subsidized housing made her shutter.
Also gone was the clutter of a serious physical injury that kept her off her feet for nearly 5 months last year, the clutter of losing control of your life plays terrible havoc with your mind.
Yesterday, we sat in the building subsidized by the government where many of her neighbors from our small community are her neighbors again. With the exception of having to put a ring on her door before bed and remove it in the morning to signal she is alright, she is still completely independent. She has a tidy apartment that is cleaned by a woman my mother truly enjoys visiting with once a week. Instead of being sequestered in a dark, unkempt home, she can grab her walker and head down to the lobby of her building to get her mail and visit with others when she feels those tinges of loneliness. She can get herself down to the beauty shop once a week and have her hair done for a price workable into her budget. Although she has yet to do it, she has the option of church in the building on Sundays or vespers on Thursdays. There are crafts, dances and parties.
And she is still close enough for me to bring her home-cooked meals.
Yesterday when the social worker asked her to remember words and phrases or place hands on a paper clock to test her mental faculties, she shook her head and made jokes instead of yelling. The social worker and I both had tears by the end of the session, but they were from laughter, not anger. And when the social worker asked me if I felt overwhelmed with her care, I could truly answer, “No, not at this moment.”
A new sense of place, sans the stairs and clutter.

Little Victories = Big Celebrations

Yesterday was Mom’s 82nd birthday. It turned out to be a good day, unlike her past two birthdays that were marred with illness.
I called her early and she sounded like she felt ok. I made a feeble attempt to sing to her, telling her I would torture her more. She said it sounded good to her anyway. Mothers are always like that, telling you that you can do anything.
We made plans for dinner that night, at the Olive Garden. Italian is her favorite meal and her longtime local favorite Italian Gardens was long gone from the downtown Kansas City landscape.
“Call me before you come to make sure,” her voice trailed off.
When you’re 82 with congestive heart failure, COPD (the modern term for emphysema) and a very bad back, you don’t make plans too far into the future even if it is only 5 hours.
By afternoon, we were on schedule, though. I went up to her apartment in the senior high rise to give her the gifts. She’s lived here 9 months. She can get her mail and have her hair done all while never having to step into the heat or cold. She’s ok here now, but it wasn’t always this way.
I think she likes the book I bought her by Barack Obama, talking politics is one of the only hobbies she’s been able to carry with her into old age. The others being television – which I think she does just to have company - and to a lesser extent, reading. Her eyes get tired easily and her medications make it hard for her to stay awake. A book that would have taken her a couple of days to read now takes her a couple of months – at least.
The other gift, knee-high hose, was something on her wish list this year. “I don’t need anymore stuff,” and she has a storage garage full of what she couldn’t bring to her apartment and what I couldn’t sell to prove it.
She gathered her oxygen tank and coat and sat back down to catch her breath, something she has to do a lot. A 2-minute trip downstairs takes 10 minutes in between stops to rest. I could get a wheelchair as I did when she first moved here, but she doesn’t want that. The doctors told her that when she quits trying, that will be it. Her heart and lungs will no longer get the exercise they need to keep her moving and she will have to be in a wheelchair permanently.
We’ve already been through rehab – twice. The first after the heart attack was done in the hospital, three 15, then 20, then 30 minute sessions a day – until Medicare stopped paying. The second we did together this spring and summer at her apartment building. She fell twice last autumn and she needed to build her muscles and heart and lungs back up.
We measured her progress each day by the apartment doors. Next door, two doors down, three doors down, all the way to the end of the hall. Then downstairs. It took us 4 months, but by the end of July she was walking again. Now she can make it downstairs in 10 minutes.
At the restaurant, Mom ordered her favorite – spaghetti. She eats slowly these days too and she can’t eat too much, makes it hard to breathe.
The social worker from the county called in the middle of dinner. “I can’t reach your mother, and I need to come by and see her.”
She wants to come next week when I’m out of town, but I insist she come today when I can be there. I need to convince mother to have a hearing test and maybe the social worker will help me.
I shudder a little when I get off the phone, remembering the social worker’s first and last visit one year ago. My mother didn’t want the help of strangers – particularly the government, but I couldn’t live without it.
No, she didn’t want Meals on Wheels; her daughter could bring her food. No, she didn’t want free dentures. Yes, she could bathe herself. No, she didn’t need help dressing each day.
And quit acting like I’m losing my mind! Mom was rude to the woman, treating her like an intruder. I got angry; she got angry. The social worker comforted me when I broke down in the driveway. The only services Mom consented to were 2 hours of housecleaning a week. Thank God she wasn’t as stubborn about the visiting nurses or therapists the doctor ordered after her last fall.
I looked at Mom eating her spaghetti and smiling. I pushed the scene with the social worker from my mind.
Last night was for celebrating two victories, each equally as big. Her birthday and her walking out of her apartment.
I can worry about the social worker later.