Monday, August 29, 2005
Yesterday we got into it again over a proposed exercise session.
"I don't need to exercise! You go ahead and do them alone!"
Exasperating, to say the least. As usual, as you've read before, I catalogued all the reasons for her why she needs to move at least a little, then started pleading with her, inventing what I hoped would be scary scenarios in which she, voluntarily because of her refusal to move, loses the use of her legs and I am no longer able to care for her adequately and she ends up in a nursing home. I became so dramatic about the dire possibilities that I brought tears to my own eyes.
Which amused my mother.
"I can walk just fine!"
I became so angry at her insistence that I began a series of, "Yeah, you can walk so well that..." ripostes, cataloguing a lot of her history of difficult, risky, sometimes disastrous walking.
Her response was disgust. With me.
The only thing that stopped me was a re-run of the Robin Williams Interview on Inside the Actors Studio.
This morning, as we readied her for her trip to the lab, I asked her, truly innocently, completely forgetting my harassment last night, "So, do you want to ride into the lab in your wheel chair or walker in?"
"Neither," she stated, glaring at me over her shoulder (I was washing her back).
"Well, I'm not going to carry you in and it doesn't work for me supporting you and juggling your oxygen and your emergency supplies (in case she has an eliminatory accident of either type) while you shuffle in. So, which do you want to use; wheelchair or walker?"
"Neither." Her back straightened. She didn't look at me over her shoulder this time. Her voice was more than firm.
"Okay. That means I get to make the choice. I chooooooose...hmmmm....let's see....since you're Ms. I Can Walk Just Fine Thank You, I choose walker."
"I'm not going to use it."
"Then I guess I'm going to have to have a lab tech take your blood in the car." No, there's no possibility of this but I was beginning to feel nasty.
I still wasn't over our altercation last night, apparently. With a minor reminder, she discovered she wasn't over it, either.
As it turned out, even with her knee brace she almost collapsed negotiating the low one-step stoop on her way out to the car from our house and ended up in the wheelchair for safety's sake. I wasn't going to take any chances.
On the way home I tried, sneakily, to take her side. "Mom," I said, "I know you feel like not using the walker or the wheelchair or a cane (which I've proposed and which I'm going to explore with her doctor next visit) because you feel as though you make a better presence in public without them and you feel more independent. But let me describe a likely "independent" scenario. You shuffling; me holding you up while you slowly negotiate the distance between where you are and where you're going; me loaded down with your trip supplies, struggling to keep stuff out of your way and cars from running us over; people watching us thinking, 'Oh that poor old woman, oh that wonderful, dutiful daughter; I wonder why she hasn't looked into getting a wheelchair/walker/cane for her poor old mother?' That's not independence, nor is that the kind of impression you wish to project. Although you think a walker or a cane diminishes your public persona, I can guarantee that people respect those who they see are absolutely determined to walk 'independently' (I made quotes in the air) by any means necessary."
Usually she has some sort of gently dismissive retort to these conversations. Today she said nothing. She also didn't look at me.
So I continued, expressing, yet again, my concern that if she doesn't use it she's going to lose it. I assured her that if this happens I will try my damnedest to continue taking care of her. I only hope, I expressed, that I'll be up to it. I probably will be, I tell her, but, what if I'm not? What then?
No reply. Old age is hard to face, even, maybe especially, for the old.
Later today, while she slept off the blood draw, I contemplated the last 48 hours in our conjoined life, trying to find a alternative approach, if for no other reason than my peace of mind and spirit. The dilemma seemed to me to be between The Wondrous FNP's caution that my mother's prognosis dictates that she will become more and more lethargic (tell me about it) and, if I don't watch it, I'll become increasingly frustrated; the "versus" is is that her lab work always looks so good, so promising, that I can see no reason for her not to move a little and it seems foolhardy of me, on my mother's behalf, not to try to encourage and motivate her to move, to do exercises, even in the face of her poor attitude and lack of interest. I worked these over and over until, finally, something dawned on me: Maybe the whole point is that what my mother is living through, now, is the geography of the combination of her persistent Anemia Due to Chronic Disease, the chronic disease being Early (very early) Stage Chronic Renal Failure, both complicated with Dementia Lite (which, luckily, seems stable, waving only slightly in the rare winds of ill health that visit her). Maybe this is what it's like. Maybe, even though it appears to me, an outsider peering into The Physical Land of the Ancient, that there is no reason why she shouldn't move more, be more easily motivated, be more interested in the temptations to "go out" I place before her, maybe this is Old for my mother. This is how her "decline", precisely the decline that The Wondrous FNP described is occurring and there is nothing I can do to ameliorate or alleviate it. So, maybe what I need to do is accept how she is inclined to live her life and enjoy her while she remains alive.
How many times have I said this to myself? How many times have I written this as advice to myself or my imagined readers of this journal, thinking that I knew what I was talking about?
I didn't know. I've been fighting my mother's destined decline as though there is something I can do about it, something I can do to stave it off so that she just falls over dead in the middle of a robust existence rather than fades into "that good night".
Maybe I still don't really know all this. I can imagine that I still have a few more Movement and Getting Out Campaigns to wage before I finally Get It and Go With My Mother's Flow. This afternoon, though, some buried part of my brain reminded me that it isn't as though I haven't accomplished anything in favor of my mother's life. If I hadn't been here she probably wouldn't be alive, in her own home, surrounded by her own possessions, easily in touch with most of her immediate family, feeling secure and safe and loved and appreciated and feisty right up to whatever kind of end is in store for her. Sometimes, I think, it isn't so bad going "gentle into that good night." It is, after all, described as a "good" night.
And, who knows, maybe one of those remarkable revivals, the telling, in the name of Hope, of which people are more than willing to inflict upon caregivers of Ancient Ones, will happen to her before her final breath. You're doing it again, Gail, shut up and go on to something else.
Exasperating, to say the least. As usual, as you've read before, I catalogued all the reasons for her why she needs to move at least a little, then started pleading with her, inventing what I hoped would be scary scenarios in which she, voluntarily because of her refusal to move, loses the use of her legs and I am no longer able to care for her adequately and she ends up in a nursing home. I became so dramatic about the dire possibilities that I brought tears to my own eyes.
Which amused my mother.
"I can walk just fine!"
I became so angry at her insistence that I began a series of, "Yeah, you can walk so well that..." ripostes, cataloguing a lot of her history of difficult, risky, sometimes disastrous walking.
Her response was disgust. With me.
The only thing that stopped me was a re-run of the Robin Williams Interview on Inside the Actors Studio.
This morning, as we readied her for her trip to the lab, I asked her, truly innocently, completely forgetting my harassment last night, "So, do you want to ride into the lab in your wheel chair or walker in?"
"Neither," she stated, glaring at me over her shoulder (I was washing her back).
"Well, I'm not going to carry you in and it doesn't work for me supporting you and juggling your oxygen and your emergency supplies (in case she has an eliminatory accident of either type) while you shuffle in. So, which do you want to use; wheelchair or walker?"
"Neither." Her back straightened. She didn't look at me over her shoulder this time. Her voice was more than firm.
"Okay. That means I get to make the choice. I chooooooose...hmmmm....let's see....since you're Ms. I Can Walk Just Fine Thank You, I choose walker."
"I'm not going to use it."
"Then I guess I'm going to have to have a lab tech take your blood in the car." No, there's no possibility of this but I was beginning to feel nasty.
I still wasn't over our altercation last night, apparently. With a minor reminder, she discovered she wasn't over it, either.
As it turned out, even with her knee brace she almost collapsed negotiating the low one-step stoop on her way out to the car from our house and ended up in the wheelchair for safety's sake. I wasn't going to take any chances.
On the way home I tried, sneakily, to take her side. "Mom," I said, "I know you feel like not using the walker or the wheelchair or a cane (which I've proposed and which I'm going to explore with her doctor next visit) because you feel as though you make a better presence in public without them and you feel more independent. But let me describe a likely "independent" scenario. You shuffling; me holding you up while you slowly negotiate the distance between where you are and where you're going; me loaded down with your trip supplies, struggling to keep stuff out of your way and cars from running us over; people watching us thinking, 'Oh that poor old woman, oh that wonderful, dutiful daughter; I wonder why she hasn't looked into getting a wheelchair/walker/cane for her poor old mother?' That's not independence, nor is that the kind of impression you wish to project. Although you think a walker or a cane diminishes your public persona, I can guarantee that people respect those who they see are absolutely determined to walk 'independently' (I made quotes in the air) by any means necessary."
Usually she has some sort of gently dismissive retort to these conversations. Today she said nothing. She also didn't look at me.
So I continued, expressing, yet again, my concern that if she doesn't use it she's going to lose it. I assured her that if this happens I will try my damnedest to continue taking care of her. I only hope, I expressed, that I'll be up to it. I probably will be, I tell her, but, what if I'm not? What then?
No reply. Old age is hard to face, even, maybe especially, for the old.
Later today, while she slept off the blood draw, I contemplated the last 48 hours in our conjoined life, trying to find a alternative approach, if for no other reason than my peace of mind and spirit. The dilemma seemed to me to be between The Wondrous FNP's caution that my mother's prognosis dictates that she will become more and more lethargic (tell me about it) and, if I don't watch it, I'll become increasingly frustrated; the "versus" is is that her lab work always looks so good, so promising, that I can see no reason for her not to move a little and it seems foolhardy of me, on my mother's behalf, not to try to encourage and motivate her to move, to do exercises, even in the face of her poor attitude and lack of interest. I worked these over and over until, finally, something dawned on me: Maybe the whole point is that what my mother is living through, now, is the geography of the combination of her persistent Anemia Due to Chronic Disease, the chronic disease being Early (very early) Stage Chronic Renal Failure, both complicated with Dementia Lite (which, luckily, seems stable, waving only slightly in the rare winds of ill health that visit her). Maybe this is what it's like. Maybe, even though it appears to me, an outsider peering into The Physical Land of the Ancient, that there is no reason why she shouldn't move more, be more easily motivated, be more interested in the temptations to "go out" I place before her, maybe this is Old for my mother. This is how her "decline", precisely the decline that The Wondrous FNP described is occurring and there is nothing I can do to ameliorate or alleviate it. So, maybe what I need to do is accept how she is inclined to live her life and enjoy her while she remains alive.
How many times have I said this to myself? How many times have I written this as advice to myself or my imagined readers of this journal, thinking that I knew what I was talking about?
I didn't know. I've been fighting my mother's destined decline as though there is something I can do about it, something I can do to stave it off so that she just falls over dead in the middle of a robust existence rather than fades into "that good night".
Maybe I still don't really know all this. I can imagine that I still have a few more Movement and Getting Out Campaigns to wage before I finally Get It and Go With My Mother's Flow. This afternoon, though, some buried part of my brain reminded me that it isn't as though I haven't accomplished anything in favor of my mother's life. If I hadn't been here she probably wouldn't be alive, in her own home, surrounded by her own possessions, easily in touch with most of her immediate family, feeling secure and safe and loved and appreciated and feisty right up to whatever kind of end is in store for her. Sometimes, I think, it isn't so bad going "gentle into that good night." It is, after all, described as a "good" night.
And, who knows, maybe one of those remarkable revivals, the telling, in the name of Hope, of which people are more than willing to inflict upon caregivers of Ancient Ones, will happen to her before her final breath. You're doing it again, Gail, shut up and go on to something else.
