It’s been 3+ months since I wrote about how I am feeling about my mom. I thought I’d provide an update on how things have been going and where we are.
Mom is still in the hospital, but has been added to several lists for care homes. It might be a long wait, but at least when the time comes she can go into a place designed to take care of people with her condition.
Trying to deal with all of the peripherals around her condition has been a task unto itself. But of all the things that have been the hardest is the false sense of hope I keep experiencing.
I recently learned that often patients like mom experience a sort of staircase effect when it comes to their condition. A trauma or illness sort of pushes them off a cliff and they seem really bad. But then as things calm down, they start to improve and often can seem as if they are almost back to normal. They don’t ever get back to exactly where they were but it can get close. The one common thing however is that everyone in this condition progresses downward on the stairs, not upwards.
So every time I go in, I have this little bit of hope that she’s back to herself. And each time she’s doing good, that hope grows a little more, and a little more. You cannot help but feel like things are truly improving. Yet inevitably, the time always comes when I go in, have a visit, and realize, no, she’s not really getting better.
I went to see her on Easter Friday and again, she was doing really good and that hope surfaced inside of me. Then the family and I went to see her on Sunday and that hope was crushed.
Mom told us a story about something she believed happened the night prior. Her story didn’t make a lot of sense until one of the nurses pulled Tamara and I aside. She explained the specifics and my heart sunk. Without going into details, I’ll just say that at around 2am in the morning, mom had got pretty worked up about something she thought was real but was in fact not the case at all.
The situation worsened the next day when she had to moved to a different floor due to a need for her bed to be freed up. This resulted in … let’s just call it… a confrontation between her and the staff. I got a call that afternoon letting me know what had happened.
With both of these incidents now in recent memory, it’s a further reminder of the severity of my mother’s condition. Even when she seems like she’s doing OK, she really isn’t.
And the reality is, doctors, nurses, hospital staff, social development individuals, and even the materials I have read and watched on the internet all say the same thing: it is a degenerative condition that will just get worse as time progresses.
As someone who has spent the last few years working VERY hard on trying to change from seeing the bad in everything to seeing the good, this is even more difficult. My mind wants to try and be optimistic about things and every time I visit her and things seem “normal”, that sense of hope returns.
So for me, I’m riding a line between trying to maintain an optimistic attitude in other aspects of my life, and confronting the reality of what is happening to mom.
For those who know her, she does love having visitors so feel free to pop in and see her at the Moncton Hospital. I would suggest a morning or early afternoon visit as that is when she is at her best. Either way, be prepared that who you talk to may not be the Sandie you remember.
