I visit her every other day, usually right after lunch or dinner. I walk out to the smoking area with her, and walk back inside with her as she hustles to make it to her toilet. Last night we made the trip twice before her stomach would let her settle and enjoy her cigarette.
I make feeble jokes to lighten her mood. She's bored. She wants to go for a ride, but no way am I letting her get in my car. I try to persuade her to consider wearing adult diapers (she isn't against it, she just forgets).
A couple weeks ago, I got a call from Nurse Katy: “Your mother had a fall. She's headed to the hospital in an ambulance right now.” Mom had passed out and ended up on the floor outside her bathroom with her pants around her knees. That is the way she was brought into the emergency room, half-naked with a flowered sheet wrapped around her tiny skeleton.
As stints in the ER go, it wasn't bad. The techs and nurses were patient and kind. By the time Mom had some fluids in her, she was feeling better. She motored to the bathroom three times using a walker, head down, hospital gown flapping in her wake. Three hours later, she walked out under her own steam, wearing little orange skid-proof socks they give people in the ER who have somehow managed to arrive with no shoes. The tech said, “So long, Slugger.”
Since then, we've been doing tests, trying to figure out why the food she eats runs straight through her. Well, when I say we, I mean, she poops in a bucket and the staff at the retirement place send it to a lab, where some poor schmuck (probably a graduate of the healthcare program offered by the barely functional for-profit vocational college I used to work for) pokes around in the poop, looking for the pony (germs). I don't know, I'm guessing.
The lab tests came back negative. No pony.
My brother, who has lately been experiencing some diarrhea of his own, blames it on “a bug” going around. How Mom managed to get the bug when none of her neighbors have is a stretch, but whatever. We all have our theories. My brother's is a bug. I blame the food. After my five-year slow-motion train wreck with Dr. Tony the Naturopath, it is understandable I might see food as both the culprit and the remedy.
The only person who has no theory is my mother.
She can complain of feeling bad, but she can't form a theory or undertake a regimen to address the problem. That mother is gone. In her place is this new mother who lives completely in the moment (or sometimes in the past). Thoughts are heavy things to carry into the future. She prefers to leave them behind. She's like my cat. Whatever is happening right now is her reality. Don't they say we should all try to live more in the moment? Instead of trying to live for a better past or trying to control the future? So Zen. Who knew all you need is dementia!
