It is Saturday and the next day in a turbulent time. Mom slipped on the bathroom floor and went down at 4am on Wednesday. We went back to her area to find her on her butt and elbows on the floor. This has affected her left knee more than anything else and for good reason. She broke that knee in 1986 and it never healed properly. Dr. O’Brien remarked about the misalignment on more than one occasion. The x-ray showed a hollowed out place at the top of the knob at the knee-end of the lower leg bone; the bone doctor said there was fluid in the joint as well but not a large amount and not a serious consideration. The fall, in my opinion, exacerbated an old situation.
But this is not the big problem; she is psychologically down in the dumps. Not at all responsive; refused food for two days and this morning ate a small bowl of oatmeal; but at noon she ate almost nothing. She shows glimmers of humor, but it is forced. She says nothing and feels worse; when I reminded her that our favorite program was on tonight she said, “I don’t care.” Carola and I are sitting with her every moment, one or the other of us is with her, in the room, chattering away with her, trying to break her out of her gloom but she’s persisting. She’s been like this before but not to this extreme.
She is sensitive to her being here this I know this from her behavior and her remarks on certain holidays when we tell her we love her and her being here. Then we had to cancel our trip to Virginia and Barb and Joe’s visit here to be with her. She may be feeling bad, blaming herself for causing a lot of trouble for everyone. Her spirit seems broken.
I’m not sure what to do. I could call a priest but that may send a completely wrong signal to her. She did so for my Grandpa Lina and my grandmother blamed mom for doing him in. Bob Mueller may be a good person to whom to talk. He works at Hosparus and they deal in these types of situations. Ed Causey may likewise be a person from whom to get some advice. Yes, there are some ideas here that may be worth following.
The whole thing is disturbing to me because I don’t know for sure what is going on. I remember when her leg was hurt last time that she prayed incessantly and I suspected she was praying to die. I remember thinking that she was going to wear out that rosary. Then slowly it got better and better until she was her old self again, no pun intended. I can only hope that this one is likewise a recoverable situation.
It is curious that it is always her left leg. A dog bit her, I don’t know the date anymore, and the first doctor to see her was incompetent; luckily the second one saved her leg with quick action and a skin graft from her thigh. Then she was putting up the storm windows at 8572 Oriole Avenue when the wind caught one and twisted her around. That was 1986 because we were in from Houston for Thanksgiving, and it happened in October. She sat around for the many weeks it took to heal and that idleness, along with her medical history, led to the onset of her first set of back fractures when she picked up a heavy tray of ham at Pop’s 80th birthday party in 1987.
All was quiet until earlier this year when she fell in her room. She hit her head on the marble top table and messed up her left leg. She had to have stitches in her head and fluid built up in that leg and an infection set in; that was dicey but we finally got it cleared up.
Then one day early this year, she called to me; her walker had jammed under her recliner foot rest. I reached down, pulled up on the footrest, and removed the walker. When I let go of it, her leg was crushed between the side of the chair and the footrest. No broken bones but the tissue around the lower leg was completely traumatized and it took weeks for it to get back to normal. We had her in several times because we feared infection like a previous time but the doctor prevented it with antibiotics; it healed.
Starting just a few weeks ago, she complained about that leg/knee bothering her quite a bit. She walked to the kitchen from her room several times a day, usually thrice, and her steps were about three inches at a time. Once in a while she would call for the chair because it just was too painful to walk; then the fall the other night.
Another problem is her skeleton above her waist. It is all melted together and like soft wax is settling down onto her hips. She’s lost about 8 inches of height from five feet six inches. She has almost no upper body and a huge bulge in her back where the spine is fused into a mass of bone. Dr. O’Brien’s office has a full skeletal x-ray and I saw when they were taken. Her lungs and organs are all smashed into a small volume of body cavity but somehow she keeps functioning. Her organs seem to operating just fine, her breathing is shallow, her heart rate is slow, always has been and it runs in the family with me and Theresa, and her blood pressure is absolutely normal, the envy of some nurses who take a reading. But now she has all but stopped eating and I’m worried. She may be at the end of a long and interesting life; yet I think that she will pull through this, she will get her will power back, her will to live, and we’ll be back at the table yakking away again soon. Then in December we'll celebrate her 101st.
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