Making Hard Decisions

The past 2 weeks have been hard, unusually hard. My mom has always been on the go, the one who takes care of her neighbors, lives alone and, at the age of 79, still worked 10-15 hours a week. But this summer has taken it's toll on her starting with a 5th coiling for her brain aneurysm, then terrible back pain for weeks on heavy pain killers that resulted in her back surgery in July. She was just getting some strength back when she started massive headaches and neck pain. She just spent about 6 days in the hospital on pain killers with many tests run, her blood pressure staying abnormally high most of her time there. They ruled out everything imaginable and called it hypertension issues. Once they found a medication that finally controlled the hypertension, she was sent home. At home, she went steadily and very quickly downhill. She slept all day and was barely functioning.

Yesterday we ended up back in the E.R. On the way to her doctor's office (where we started before the E.R.), she told me she didn't think she was going to make it, that her time was near. It was strange to be sitting in a car at an intersection and having your mother tell you that. What do you say to that? As I looked around the other cars driving to lunch, or to work, or wherever, I wondered how odd it was that everyone was going about their business while my mom told me she felt like she was slowly dying. Then I realized that on other normal days, when a driver has turned in front of someone else, or seemed to think they were the only driver on the road, maybe they had something else going on in their lives. Really, who thinks about that about the hundreds of other cars we encounter when driving somewhere?

My opinion on what's happened to her (of course I'm no medical expert) is that between her last procedure at UCSF (with anesthesia), then all the pain meds leading up to her long back surgery and recovery (again with anesthesia), then this crisis with the hypertension issues and more pain meds, her body had had enough and she just couldn't bounce back. I think she had no reserves, especially with eating basically nothing, and things just started shutting down. Again, a guess on my part, but it makes sense to me.

Last night we had to put my mom in a rehab hospital, basically a nursing home. Her worst fear. She's always said she never wanted to go to one. But I had to make the hard choice. I'm her daughter, I'm the one the only child of hers that lives here, so it fell to me. My brother and I, along with support from my hsuband, made the decision together, but I had to tell her, I had to explain why. She was good about it but told me she didn't want it.

I really think if I had left her at home in hopes of getting better, what she told me in the car would have come true. She has eaten less than a whole meal in the last 10-14 days. She wasn't drinking any water or liquids without me pushing. She couldn't even take her meds on her own. And I have a job I can' walk away from so she was on her own a lot, which worried me. So I had to make the hard decision and put her where she could get the medical intervention and support that I couldn't give her.

It's hard being a caretaker, and hard to make decisions about another human being when you know that's not what they want. I walked out to my car with feelings of relief and guilt, quite the strange combination. But relief was stronger because in my heart, I knew it was the right decision for her for now.

I have great respect for caretakers and hospice workers. It's a hard thing to do, it's draining...and consuming. The people who do it for months for loved ones, or the hospice workers and nursing care facilitators who do it for life, are heroes in my opinion.

I told mom last night that with this support, her job is to start eating, getting fluids down, and get her strength back so she can go back home, get back to her life. I hope this is actually possible for her. She's always rallied and gotten back to it before. I hope I didn't give her false hope but the fact is, she needed to have hope.

So we wait...