Oldcontroller's Blog

Well, I did go to Texas. In June. To see my mom, and help out where I could.

I’ve mentioned before, my mother was diagnosed with cancer a few months ago. Stage 4, anal cancer. There was an attempt made to do chemo and radiation. It did not go well.

Sidebar: My brother told me to go to a website and check out the information about delirium in elderly cancer patients. The site is here, and the delirium info is here. I had no idea this condition existed, had never heard of such a thing. End sidebar.

While she was undergoing treatment she moved in with my brother and his wife. She was having a very difficult time handling the effects of the treatments. Plus, she’s pretty much blind, and she has balance issues. My uncle and brother have been trying for years to get her to agree to move in with someone, or at least move so she was closer to my brother and he could check on her every day, as my uncle was doing. She resisted. She didn’t want to leave her apartment.

I understand. We all understood. The reality, though, was that she really shouldn’t have been on her own.

So she moved into my niece’s room. And that’s when things started to go badly. She felt guilty, thought she was “ruining” their home, interfering in their lives, being a burden. No one could convince her otherwise.

Add to this that she was under the care of more than one doctor. Apparently they weren’t reading what anyone else was prescribing. My brother and his wife were doing their level best to follow everyone’s instructions. The result was that she was being seriously overmedicated. She has never tolerated pain medication well, and they were slamming her with it.

The hallucinations began. They were vivid and disturbing. She described one to my sister-in-law as being outside a grey house with a fence. There were people going into the house and everytime someone entered the house she suffered severe pain in her right eye. She kept calling for the people in the house to, “Come down, come down.” She said her brother Bobby Joe, who died in infancy, was there, and it made her very sad. She said there was a little girl in a white dress with a purple sash standing right behind my sister-in-law. Of course, there was no one there. She also saw people present wearing orange suits with black stripes.

She suffered severe weakness. They took her to the ER a few times, and each time whatever was happening was enough to get her admitted to the hospital. The last time she was admitted was the start of a 2-week period of which she remembers nothing, and we’re very glad. Because she went insane.

She screamed whenever anyone came near her. The nurses had to change her diaper, clean her up, take vitals, give her medications. She would shriek that they were trying to kill her, and she fought them. My five-foot-nothing, less-than-100-pounds, 89 (at the time) year-old mother was punching and kicking nurses who were trying to help her. My brother said any time they needed to do anything with her they’d bring in 5 or 6 people, and she’d scream the entire time.

She accused my brother of being a drug dealer, and his wife also. Both of them knew she was delusional, that it wasn’t true. But there’s something about such words coming out of your mother’s mouth, in her voice, that gives them weight regardless.

One day she pulled off her diaper and threw feces at my uncle and the nurses.

This is not my mother. She would be horrified if she knew what she’d done.

Eventually the pain meds worked their way out of her system. They stopped the chemo and radiation. She came back to herself. My brother said the nurses were quick to tell him how different she was, that she was “such a sweet lady.” And she is. That person she turned into for that 2 weeks is not her.

The next step was figuring out where she was going next, as clearly moving back in with my brother was out of the question. She couldn’t move in with my uncle as he and my aunt are also elderly and have health problems themselves. So my brother found a place where there was a rehab bed available, and that’s where she was when I made it to Texas.

Of course, rehab beds are short-term, so she couldn’t stay in that room. Add to that, her roommate was a not very pleasant woman. I wasn’t present for this conversation, but it seems there was a conversation initially in which this woman issued an order to my mother, who declined to obey. It probably had a great deal to do with a) she didn’t want to, and b) she was physically unable to. The woman’s reaction was to say she thought my mother was “a Christian lady.” And she is. But she’s not strong, has trouble walking, is in danger of falling, and has never suffered fools gladly. I can’t say which attribute had the lead in this particular situation. This woman was remarkably rude to the nurses also; I witnessed that personally. And she complained whenever my mother tried to watch her television, even though hers was on constantly.

It was nice to see my mom, nice to talk to her, especially since she was herself again. I was able to check her out of the place a few times so she could get in the car and go to the apartment and look things over. My brother set up a living estate sale, and the task was to figure out what was to be saved and what sold. My younger sister had gone over before I arrived (I only missed her by a few hours, but she had to drive back home and go to work), and taken what she wanted.

I hadn’t planned to take anything. I don’t need any more stuff. So naturally when I got over there and started looking around, given the emotional attachment and history of some of the things she had (some of which I sent her during my travels in the Air Force), that resolution died quickly. I ended up shipping back 6 boxes via UPS. *sigh*

The rehab helped, although the one thing neither I nor anyone else has managed is to get her out of her room. They’ve since moved her to a long-term care bed in the same facility (which is very nice, by the way, new and clean). Her room is smaller, as is her closet (that makes no sense to me, I’d think it was the other way around). And her roommate is a very nice woman, a huge improvement over the previous one. My mother wants a private room — but there’s no way to afford it. Medicaid, whenever the paperwork is completed (my brother and his wife have the lead on this, too, God bless them) and approved, will not pay for a private room. In this place, a private room is $600 more a month. If we all pooled our resources, we still couldn’t afford it. So she’ll have a roommate.

I talked to her last week (geez, I need to call her), and she said she’s been getting out of the room and going to the library to get reading material. This is an improvement, although she still insists on taking her meals in her room. “I don’t mingle,” she told me last week. Well, I don’t either. And I get it. She’s been holed up in her own apartment for so many years, by herself, that she doesn’t want to leave her shell. I just wish she’d make a friend there. Maybe the roommate will help with that, at least give her someone to talk to.

My younger sister’s friend bought her a set of wireless headphones to go with her television, so she can listen without disturbing anyone. They’re not working properly, though, and I’m not sure why.

Now I guess what we do is wait. The cancer will continue to grow. It will close off her anus and then the toxins will begin to accumulate. It’s going to get very bad. And then it will get worse.

My uncle told me he prays that whatever God has planned for her, that He leads her gently.

In other news, my uncle told me something appalling about my father which I’ll share with you later. I knew my father was sick in every sense of the word, but this news surpassed anything I thought him capable of.

‘Til next time, then. Hopefully it won’t be another month and a half. It’s easy to get out of the habit.

Oh, one more thing. I mentioned before that we (my brother and sister and uncle and me) were very upset with my mother’s doctor, because the tumor had grown on his watch and he’d managed to be oblivious. Well, it turns out there are several documented incidents in my mother’s medical file where he begged her to get a colonoscopy, for years, and she steadfastly refused. So, that the tumor grew without anyone knowing is entirely her fault. Not that that helps, or anything. But we were unfair to her doctor. And I don’t want to run him over anymore.