Hello my friends,
Yesterday, I thought I would be The Good Daughter and take My Old Mother to visit a Boyfriend down the mountain, who is in the hospital.
We don’t let Mother drive herself out of town and for good reason. She gets Mixed Up.
The Hospital visit goes as well as can be expected between an 84 year old woman who can’t hear and an even older man who is hanging on to life by a wrinkled thread.
As we enter The Boyfriend’s room my mother immediately gets ahold of and smacks the railing on the side of bed down so she can get closer to the man in order to hear him. This maneuver yanks all the tubes out of the man’s neck and causes a great wailing and some swearing from The Boyfriend.
I jump to assist, trying to both push the railing up and grab and re-attach what appears to be the man’s plastic lines to life.
Since my mother can’t hear us shouting, she keeps snatching the railing from me and slapping it down, again. She’s old, but she’s strong.
The Boyfriend continues protesting (“Honey! Owwww! Owww! Don’t do that!”) while waving and swinging his good arm at her.
The rest of the visit isn’t much better. Mother has made a list before she came in, of things she could talk about to The Boyfriend.
“We don’t really have much in common,” she had told me over lunch before our hospital visit, “so what am I going to say? I’ll tell him how my cat, Silk keeps bringing live squirrels into the house and eating them on the floor of my shower. And my dog has another fox tail, I think, in his foot. And I had fire ants in my house and one bit me. And the squirrels ate all the broccoli plants in the garden.”
She looks at me for help. “What else can I tell him? Oh, I know what I can tell him, I can’t find his computer screen at his house. It just disappeared. Where would a computer screen go to?”
“Well,” I say, “as I keep telling you, that so-called friend of his that is now living in his house since he has been in the hospital, is on drugs; crystal meth, I think. You might ask her about that missing computer screen.”
“What?!” my mother says. “I can’t hear you.”
I sigh.
“Promise me,” my mother says, “that after about 45 minutes of visiting, you will say we have to leave the hospital, that you have something to do. I need you to do this because I can’t think of any more things to talk to him about.”
I am only too happy to make that promise as I have Major Hospital Phobia. Being a Sensitive, I feel everyone’s ailments in my body and I also feel their fears and terrors in my mind when I am in that atmosphere. I am thinking now that I should have brought a bottle of wine with me so I can steadily anesthetize myself, while the Old Folks try and chat, but drinking isn’t good for driving. And, well, it wouldn’t look good, either.
Once in the hospital room and having gotten a nurse to re-attach mom’s friend to his tubes, the hour progresses slooowly. We sit through The Boyfriend’s late lunch fed to him by a nurse, a boring silent TV game program, some breathing in total silence by all of us and a bit of chit chat that Mom can’t hear.
Mother and The Boyfriend DO manage, for no logical reason that I can think of, to announce the year I was born, two or three times, (maybe four) to the MUCH YOUNGER, handsome, male X-Ray technician who comes into the room at one point to X-Ray The Boyfriend’s arm.
Finally, we leave.
Mother is relieved as now she doesn’t have to think of things to say and listen for answers she can’t really hear.
As we exit The Boyfriend’s room, almost immediately we get lost in the maze of the hospital’s dreary corridors. It’s my fault. I’m younger then my mother, supposedly my mind is better and I should have been paying attention.
We finally find what we think is the correct elevator and take it down to the underground parking garage. We emerge, congratulating ourselves on our maze-unraveling brilliance and find that there is a white car where my green one should be.
Dang.
Neither one of us remembers what level we parked on, what color the sign-age was or anything else. And, most disturbing, we had made a conscious effort to do that. What we thought we had memorized, however, is gone from our heads.
We try different elevators and different floors in the parking garage. We wander in and out of the hospital.
Finally, after a lot of begging with hospital personal and visitors and much whining on my part, someone tells us to use one of the red phones in the garage to get help from Security.
I find a phone and call, with mother at my side.
As the man at the other end of the phone attempts to give me possible directions to my car, my mother chatters on and on. Now, I can’t hear. I’m flapping my arms for her to be quiet. She chatters more. I yell, “Stop it! Stop it! I can’t hear!”
My mother, offended, wanders off, zigzagging slowly through the car lanes.
“Mother! Come back! Don’t walk there! You’ll be killed!”
She can’t hear me so I have to drop the phone and run off and get her.
Clutching the hem of her old red sweater, I hold Mother close to me as I pick up the dangling phone and get detailed instructions for finding my car.
After I hang up the phone I have to be rude again to my mother. “Don’t say a word! I have to keep these instructions in my head!”
We finally find the car and make our way home.
However, close to home, we are turned back because of a car accident and have to re-trace our route. We end up going miles and miles and miles and several extra hours to find the right roads and reach a freeway that is going in the direction we need to go.
Mother sees a lot of the county and she is tired!
Finally, with both of us, feeling just a teensy bit peevish as we near Mom’s home I say, “I’m sorry about my getting mixed up and all the getting lost and all the driving around, Mom.”
She says, “And you say I’M fuddled and confused.”
I have to agree, “Yes, I am only slightly less confused then you are.”
When I drop her off at home, she says, “I really appreciate you taking me to see my friend, Venus but, don’t take me, again. I’ll have your sister Polly take me next time. She has all her wits.”