Be there for my mom

I want to be there for my old woman.

That’s where I’ve been with my mom. After her hip replacement surgery at the end of March, I picked her up from the hospital, took her home, and stayed with her for a week.

I cooked three times a day. She said she’s never had such good food. Well, I know she hasn’t had so much home cookin’ since I got married, cuz she doesn’t cook… well, she cooks things, but not meals. Two months later, she is now driving again and her recycle bin is full of frozen dinner boxes and starbucks cups.

I helped her pay her bills and took the checks to the post office. I massaged her poor swollen legs and feet every night until the extra fluid left her body. I called in a favor and had my RN friend come over to give her her daily anticoagulant shots for 3 weeks after surgery so she wouldn’t have to give them to herself. I did her laundry and all the cleaning, too, but that was kind of what I was there for, besides just helping her get around and making sure she didn’t do anything stupid.

She had house-call therapy for the first couple weeks of April. Then I spent the next month driving into Phoenix three times a week to tote her around. We’d go to therapy, where I would sit in the lobby for 2 hours and make friends with all the other therapy patients, write letters, or do research. After therapy, off we’d go to the grocery store. She was on a walker until the beginning of May and couldn’t push the cart, so I toddled around the store, pushing it for her. Then we’d go out to lunch, which was fun, even with the giant booster seat I had to carry along because she is (still) not allowed to bend at the hip past 90°. After lunch, we would run any other errands she wanted or needed to do.

Now, 2 months after surgery, she is doing great. She can drive again and goes out to visit my grandma by herself. We took her out to the home (about 30 miles) a couple of times during her recovery. She said sometimes she even forgets that she had hip surgery. That sounds great, but worries me that she will also forget to be as careful as she should be.

As soon as my mom got some freedom, she made appointments with all her doctors. One was a chiropractor, who on her 3rd visit, showed her her xrays and told her she needed a hip replacement. He then used her xray as a visual aid and showed her, quite graphically, what was involved in the procedure.

Of course, she got a second opinion, and then a third, and all three doctors agreed that the surgery would be the only way she would get full mobility after the injury she sustained when my grandma fought against being rolled over one day about TWO YEARS AGO.

So anyway, her first worry is how can she go to the bathroom if she is not supposed to have her hips below her knees for -possibly EVER. To answer this, she found a little potty booster at a med-supply store. It looks like a walker with a small seat in it. She had planned to use that and figured if anyone else ever needed to “go” at her house, they could either use it or move it. [[[gross]]]

My Dearest, the builder, had a better idea, so this morning we went over there while she is in the hospital and installed a handicapped toilet. A real ADA-approved one that she can use forever instead of trying to negotiate that little travel-sized thing. He also installed a safety bar in there to help her move about.

She doesn’t know yet. :) It is for a surprise!

On Thanksgiving, my brother and I and our families all converged on my mom’s house because she is stuck there. My other brother had to go to his in-laws, but it was good because one of those relatives died soon after. Anyway, we were all Thankful to be together and Mama didn’t have much to do to prepare and NO cleanup because we all pitched in and got it done fast.

At the end of the day, she mentioned to my husband that her toilet was leaking, so the next day, he went back over there with the truck and fixed it.

For Christmas, she had asked me for a birthday organizer “of some sort” because, she wanted to start sending birthday cards. Little did she know I had been working on just the thing for a while. Every time I left town during the past year or so, I had taken pictures of paths for a book I was putting together for her. It is now entitled “Steps Along the Path” and has amazing pictures on each page, with birthday lists. At the back of the book, I loaded a pencil case with birthday cards, so she doesn’t have to worry about getting out of the house to buy cards.

Little did I know at the time, that she was about to get a reprieve. She had been in contact with the nurses and insurance people and a couple days ago, the people from the care center came and carted my grandma off to the home. We are all so excited for my mom to have some freedom after 2 years.

Today, I went over and took my mom out to the facility. It’s like 30 miles away. We visited for 2 hours and then went out to lunch for Thai food. She had a great time just NOT being inside the house for a change.

After lunch, we went back to the house and cleaned out a bunch of stuff from my grandma’s room. It looks way bigger and lighter in there now. She’s going to set up an office in there, but her underlying objective was to give me a few of the crystal and porcelain pieces in grandma’s collection.

A few weeks ago, the Dearest and I went over to my mom’s and while I helped her with some inside chores, he dug up her lawn and made a sweeping pattern for a new path/walkway. She had gotten some palm tree slices and wanted to use them as stepping stones. It was a two-day job, so when her fill-in rock came, he took his crew over to spread it for her.

Then a few days ago, I was in Phoenix to pick up flowers from my wholesaler and stopped by to visit her for a bit. She put me to work with several little jobs that were much easier for me than they would have been for her. I was really glad I showed up that morning to save her the trudgery.

Before I left, she asked me to help her take out my grandma’s trash. I started to head down the hall, but my mom went out to the back yard. The “trash” was several large garbage bags, filled with old-lady diapers! Gross. They were tightly tied, but still stunk to high heaven. Of course I did it anyway. The big barrel in her alley is giant. I’m not sure she could have lifted the bags that high. Something might have fallen out and onto her head. Ewwwww!!!

Phoenix is having its first real monsoon season in 12 or 13 years! Yay! Except that the storms are tearing up the city. The night before last, the wind uprooted my mom’s mulberry tree and the rain found its way into the house.

Today, my husband and I went over to assess the damage. It wasn’t really all that bad. The tree was clear out by its roots, so the removal service only has to chop it up and tote it away, and the tree was dead anyway because of the 12-year drought we’ve had.

The place she said was leaking showed no signs of water damage, but it does lie under a valley on the roof, so we marched up there to check things out. Nothing!

All the seams were sealed just as tightly as they had ever been, but my Dearest stayed up there and pulled off some of the aged, cracked stuff and put new sealant on. Then, finally, as he was finishing up, he got to the edge of the roof, looked around the corner and found a little spot where water could get in. It wasn’t even part of the roof, really, but now it isn’t part of the problem, either.

We also took her some Chinese Food for dinner so she wouldn’t have to cook. Then we went to the baseball game knowing that if it rained, she would stay dry.

When I was a little kid, my mom knew this lady who had kids the same ages as us and we would meet occasionally at the park. I remember one night they came over to our house and while the grown-ups visited, all the kids spent the evening running, screaming, jumping on the beds, squealing and generally being as wild as possible. It was fun.

Anyway, the youngest child of this other poor woman grew up to be a deviant and is now on death row. My mom found out about his history and wanted to use some of it as a basis for a character in a book she’s been writing for a couple years. I want her to get it done and published, so I try to encourage her in any way I can. Last night, that proved to be a mistake.

She asked me to look up some stuff about him and read it to her. I found the court documents. They were graphic and gruesome. They were also 42 pages long. It took me until after one o’clock in the frickin’ morning to read that highly disturbing tale of tragedy to her!

She was astounded at how bad it was. I was completely grossed out—and then I had to go to bed.

I was very thankful to have someone already in that bed whose arm around me makes me feel safe. I am also thankful for having an uplifting, positive life in general. I love my mom and of course I want to be there for her, but some of her requests are definitely harder than others!

Yesterday, there was a serious traffic accident in my mom’s neighborhood involving an off-duty police officer who fell asleep at the wheel. The photo on the news website looked completely turned around from where they said the accident was. My mom wanted me to drive into the city and find the tall building in the background of the picture. I opened MapQuest while I was on the phone to her and saw how the intersection was situated, but I couldn’t find that building.

I know it’s silly, but she can’t leave the house to go look for herself, so of course I did it.

I could see the tall building as soon as I got off the freeway and went to it before showing up at my mom’s house with the info she wanted. She was happy that I had straightened out the confusion.

There were a couple other things she wanted me to do “as long as I was there anyway.”

First of all, the streetlight across from her house has been burned out for a long time and they’ve never come to fix it, so I called the city and put in a work order to repair the streetlight.

Then she wanted grilled pineapple and pulled a fresh one out of her fridge. I cleaned the pineapple the way I learned in Hawaii, cut it into planks and went outside in the 100+ degree heat to grill it for her. It turned out perfect and we both enjoyed some before she stored it away for her next few lunches. My Dearest was not so pleased because pineapple is his favorite and I didn’t bring him any. Oh well—the next job to do over there is for him to service the AC unit. Maybe she’ll have another pineapple for him to grill. ;)

I didn’t really get to see much of my mom during May because of teaching and tutoring and going to Florida, but I talked to her on the phone a lot.

Her birthday was June 8th. The Dearest and I filled up a picnic basket with all sorts of goodies, along with a fruit-filled cake and a bottle of sparkling cider, and off to Grandmother’s house we went. It was fun.

My brother wanted to take her out to dinner, but only had time to see her on the 14th. She couldn’t go because her normal nearby babysitter was in Pennsylvania at a family reunion. I told her I would do it. I didn’t tell her that we had a party at church to go to that night. I just let my husband go by himself and I went over to babysit Grandma so my mom could get out of the house.

She actually hurried back so she could spend more time with me before I had to come home. To me, that means it meant a lot to her for me to be there and I’m glad I was.

My sister was in town this week. She was staying in downtown Phoenix for some convention thing her husband had, but while he was busy with that, she borrowed my car and ran a bunch of errands.

As soon as I got off work, we went running all over the Valley doing whatever stuff she needed to get done while she was down here.

Last night, in order to get my car back, I had to drop her off at the hotel, so we went out to dinner and then stopped by my mom’s house for a short visit.

1. My mom hasn’t seen my sister in months, so part of my “being there” for her included taking my sister by to see her.

2. I also took her half my dinner from the restaurant. She never gets to go out anymore, so I thought she might like something she didn’t have to fix herself.

We even helped her hang her laundry out to dry.