I could hear June start to wail in the background. “My ring! My precious ring. Where is it?” She sobbed loudly. “My precious ring.”
“She only has one ring. No diamonds.” I said.
Hawthorne had banned all her good jewelry when she moved there. It had been sent to Robin, the niece who never even had the good manners to say thank you, or even to say that the package had arrived at her doorstep.
“Waaa. Woo, where is my ring?” June screamed now. “My precious wedding ring.”
“I’m sorry to do this to you,” I offered as consolation to the nurse. Why couldn’t she nonchalantly hold her hand and look for the ring with out speaking. Even I knew she was asking for trouble when she said, “Hold up your hands.”
“She’s wearing the gold band.”
The howling continued.
“Thank you. I appreciate all the hard work you do to care for her.”
I hung up the phone figuring it might be time for her shot of pain medication and the nurse would now want to get to into her as soon as possible to stop the ear piercing wailing that would keep the entire floor of patients awake all night.
That weekend, Richard and I drove to Boca to see her. In the mean time I spoke with the social worker at the hospital who gave me a list of nursing homes with beds available for her. Hawthorne was an assisted living home that required her to be ambulatory in order to stay. June now needed a skilled nursing home with round the clock care.
I scoured the Internet for reviews, which were not much help. Some people loved a facility saying their parent had received wonderful care, and just as many took the other view with a one star rating and a tale of gross proportions. I finally called the director at Hawthorne for some advice. She offered that Dr. Mandel, the doctor at Hawthorne who cared for June was on staff at the Forum. At least she might recognize a familiar face or voice.
June looked like a withered tree branch in the middle of her hospital bed; small and weathered, when we arrived at her bedside. Asleep, I reached for her hand. Her eyes opened and she smiled.
“Linda.”
“Hi, June. How are you?” I asked.
“I’m getting really good care here, aren’t I?” she asked.
“I think so,” I said with a smile.
An aide arrived with her lunch tray. I raised up the head of the bed for her and helped to get her comfortable. I spread the napkin on her lap, unwrapped the flatware and removed the cover from the steaming hot chicken soup.
Suddenly my stomach growled and if I was hungry, that meant Richard must be starving. He had a perpetual hollow leg that needed to be filled on a regular schedule. June slurped down her soup and moved on to the chicken salad and pita bread.
“Who’s that man over there?” she asked with bits of chicken falling over her lips.
“That’s Richard,” I answered.
“Have I met him before?” she asked.
“He’s my husband. You came to our wedding.” Maybe a memory jolt would get her back into line mentally. Richard chuckled in the background.
“Oh. Okay.” June discovered the cup of chocolate ice cream on her tray and ripped the top of all by herself. Chocolate ice cream was her favorite. She never bought a box of cereal for herself since that would require milk. She never drank milk or ate yogurt and steered away from dairy products in general. Set a dish of chocolate ice cream in front of her and in a minute flat she licked the bowl clean. Expensive store bought or from the hospital freezer, it made no difference to her.
“Mrs. Wright, you were hungry!” The nurse scanned the empty plates on the tray before pushing it to the side. “I’m going to freshen up your sheets, so I’m going to roll you on your side. Is that okay.”
“Can you just put a bag over my head and put me out of my misery?” June asked.
“What! Do you want me to go to jail?” the woman exclaimed.
This was another laugh or cry moment for me. June only wanted help and didn’t care if someone else would go to prison. If she got assistance from anyone, she’d be dead right now instead of lying in a hospital bed wearing a skimpy gown. She’d get what she wanted and it wouldn’t matter one bit what happened to her accomplice.
I still remember vividly the day she threatened suicide. It’s a secret I’ve kept from the rest of the family all this time. It’s painful. I still can’t make sense of the sane mind or the demented mind and which is controlling what.
Obviously it’s on June’s mind. She hasn’t moved on from the bag either. I always thought she was a smart enough woman to figure out a handful of pills would complete the task much more efficiently. Somewhere in her mind she’s not able to comprehend that honest people can’t help her kill herself. Prison is not a place on our bucket list.
Richard stood in the corner giggling at the scene in front of him. He knew the story of June and her plastic bag and had kept that secret at my request. To see her lying in the hospital bed trying to find other accomplices meant she watched too many crime shows on television. Those were the shows she loved to watch the most and their impact seems to be at the forefront of her thinking process. Funny how our brains work.
In a clean bed, June promptly fell asleep. I sat by her bedside, held her hand and gently rubbed it with my thumb back and forth. A peaceful face smiled back at me.
I stopped at the nurse’s station to see if they needed anything from me and to tell them we’d be back tomorrow. One of them waved and immediately put her nose back to the task she’d been in the middle of at a computer.
Armed with my list of nursing homes, the hospital social worker had suggested, we got back in the car. First we stopped at Burger King for a Whopper before finding our way to the Forum at Deer Creek where Dr. Mandel would be the one and only familiar face. Since June spent more than three days in the hospital, Medicare would cover the first 20 days of skilled nursing care. I’d managed not to dig too deeply into her savings during her year and half at Hawthorne, but this would be a whole new ballgame as far as finances were concerned.
I introduced myself at the front desk explaining why I was there and asked for a tour.
“Absolutely. Let me call someone to show you around,” the receptionist said.
Richard and I wandered uncomfortably around the reception area. A bulletin board posted upcoming events, a potluck on Tuesday, a bus trip to the mall and a note to say good-bye to a long time worker in the kitchen.
The sound of a woman’s voice reading caught my attention. She sat at the head of a long table with about ten elderly residents seated around it. A book was open and she read out loud with inflection and passion. No one listened. The women mainly hung their heads forward, chin resting on chest. The men tilted their heads back; mouths wide open, exerting a small snort every now and then.
“Is this what we should look forward to?” Richard snuck up behind me and assessed the scene in front of us.
“Don’t worry. I’m going to start stockpiling the pills as soon as we get home,” I told him.
We both laughed. We were getting a lesson in how to plan for our own end of life care as difficult as it appeared.
If I learned anything so far walking down this path with June, it was that I didn’t want to be in her shoes when I got to be her age. I wanted to take care of myself before I got to the point of no return and unable to think clearly. Everything would be in place. Like June, I have a stepdaughter but since she lives a thousand miles away, I’ve no hopes of her coming to my rescue in my old age. Unlike June and me, and due to the difference in age of Richard and me, Pam is only eleven years younger. We’ll be headed to the old folks home about the same time. June assumed someone would watch out for her, and no one did. For myself, I wanted to make sure I didn’t hang a ten-ton guilt trip on anyone else, like June had on me.
We’re all on a train and everyone knows the last stop is Death Valley. The conductor
collected our ticket on the day we were born. There are no other stops between here and the end of the line, so we can’t pull the cord alerting the driver to stop. We’re stuck. It’s beginning to become hot and dusty, the grit and grime fills our eyes, leaving us unable to see the beauty of the life we once knew. Death Valley’s a welcome stop any way we look at it, but I’m anxious for us to arrive, as is June. So we sit and wait. We can’t speed up the train and there’s no arrival time on the timetable to look forward to.
A family member told me once I had no obligation to take care June. Don’t I have a moral responsibility to take care of someone who’s been a part of my life for fifty years? As a society, shouldn’t we make a commitment to protect others, young or old when they’re unable to care for themselves regardless of who they are or whether their blood runs through our veins? The distinction we make between ourselves and other people is made in our minds, choosing what we want to believe. In the end we all want the same thing out of life, food, clothing, shelter and safety. With safety comes love.
Are the families of the men and women sleeping through the book club, agonizing any less than I am because they had to put their parents in a nursing home? I doubt it. They are passengers on the slow train too. No one comes to this decision lightly. I could only hope wherever I did send her, she would be cared for in a way I was unable to do.
A cheerful young woman appeared to give us our tour, allowing me escape from my dreary thoughts if even for only a few minutes.
“Here’s our physical therapy room.”
Richard and I looked around at the weights and balls, treadmills and stationery bicycles and nodded to each other with approval. We did the same at the dining room, television lounge, and card room.
“Here is one of our patient rooms.” She raised her arm indicating we could go in.
The room was spacious, with a large window allowing in the sunlight. The beds were neatly made with blue and green matching bedspreads. Each had a nightstand and an overhead lamp. I wouldn’t want to live here but it seemed pleasant enough for a nursing home.
With our tour over, we thanked our guide and left.
“What do you think?” I asked Richard. “It didn’t smell like pee.”
“I can’t smell remember?” he answered. “It’s fine.”
The decision was made. June would come here to recuperate from her hip replacement.
“Forget the mistake. Remember the lesson.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
“Does she need clothes?” I asked the too young sounding to have such a job, hospital social worker while making the arrangements to move June to the nursing home.
“No, she doesn’t need any clothes,” she answered.
Through all this I always worried whether she had clothes to wear. She certainly wasn’t any kind of fashion plate in these later years with her pull on pants ordered from an old ladies catalog and pull over t-shirts in every color of the rainbow. All the items on sale in the mail order catalog she loved were plain and button-less. Not a button appeared on any page, only an occasional snap but lots of elastic, on waistbands and cuffs. Pullovers and pull ons were all the rage according to the full color advertisements I now found in my mailbox after having her mail forwarded to my home address.
One of the selling points of the Hawthorne Assisted Living was once weekly laundry service. I paid attention to that because June, who had spent her career buying dresses for a variety of department stores, had stopped worrying about how she looked. Her morning coffee usually found its way down the front of her shirt. I had no way of knowing if it was this morning’s coffee or last week’s. She wore the same shirt over and over again.
When I visited and looked in the closet, I saw all kinds of fancy, colorful print tops and I had no idea where they’d come from.
June brushed off my questions. “Every time they take my laundry, different clothes come back. They’re not mine.”
“Do you wear them?”
June turned her head toward the blaring television and pretended not to hear me.
The pants hanging in the closet, however, were the same stretch waist, polyester in boring colors of black, gray and navy. How the staff could keep the pants straight but not the tops mystified me. Maybe they washed the pants separately because of all the pee and poop the Depends didn’t catch. I’m sure there had to be something clinging to the fabric.
After I hung up my call with the teenager masquerading as an adult with a college degree in social work, I called Yvette. I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t need anything to wear. June would not be happy lying around in a hospital gown all day.
“Yvette, how can I get some clothes for June over to the Forum? June’s going there for rehab,” I asked in a calm, sweet voice.
“I think Cindy, one of our volunteers, lives near there. I’ll see what I can arrange for you,” she said.
As soon as I hung up the phone, I put two Visa gift cards in the mail to say thank you. Money talks, I learned, when it came to elder care. Since I couldn’t be close to do these chores for her, I had no choice but to rely on the power of money. These workers I had come to know over time, were happy to help because they knew the generous check was in the mail.
***
June had been in rehab for about two weeks when I got a call late at night from the on-duty nurse.
“Mom’s okay. She’s going back to the hospital. Her incision is infected and antibiotics are not clearing it up,” she said.
“Is she going back to West Boca Medical Center?” I asked. In the back of my mind, I hoped I wouldn’t have to fax the power of attorney again.
“Yes. They will start her on intravenous antibiotics. The doctor will call you in the morning.”
I thanked her and tried to get back to sleep. Tomorrow would turn out to be a very long day.
The orthopedic doctor was the first to call.
“She has an infection. I need to operate and clean it up.” He went into all the medical reasons for the additional surgery and they flew right over my head. “This is not uncommon in people her age.”
Did I pick incorrectly? Maybe a bedsore might be less traumatic for her than two surgeries in the span of two weeks and a festering infection.
I agreed to the surgery. Within minutes a nurse called.
“Can you fax me your power of attorney?”
I literally carried the document wherever I went these days. She had her fax in a matter of minutes and I was safe to make appropriate decisions for June once again. Proper choices or not, I was once again in charge.
The surgery went well and that night I did the teeth and ring check again with a different nurse who knew enough to look for these items rather than ask a loud, demented old woman to show them to her.
Five o’clock the next morning a ringing phone woke me out of the sound sleep I had only been in for an hour. From two until after four, I stared at the clock wondering when sleep would come. Counting sheep was no help these days.
“Mom’s okay. She needs a blood transfusion.”
I began to understand that health care workers were trained to start every call concerning elderly patients with the phrase “Mom’s okay” or “Dad’s okay” to dispel panic during early morning or late night calls.
“Why?” I asked in my half awake stupor.
“Her blood count is very low due to the infection. Dr Mandel ordered it,” the nurse said.
“Is it necessary? I don’t want any heroic measures.” I said.
“It’s necessary according to the doctor,” she responded.
“Can you ask the doctor to call me? I want to talk to him first before I give the authorization.” I suddenly felt important and in charge by not agreeing right off the bat with the forceful and demanding health care professional.
She took down my cell number and my head fell back on the pillo
w. I stared at the ceiling wondering if this would be the day, all of this could end for June. I’m certain that’s what she would want. How many hospital workers would she ask to put a bag over her head before that would happen naturally? Mother Nature had been given plenty of clues but so far had refused to give June what she wanted. That remained in my control, exactly where I didn’t want it to be.
Driving to work, the phone rang. My car has Bluetooth so I was able to answer and talk through the car speakers. Even though Florida doesn’t have a cell phone law, hands free talking is a technological miracle for a baby boomer like me.
“Linda, Dr. Mandel here. How are you?” He spoke with an accent so I knew English wasn’t his first language. He was pleasant no matter what the conversation was about.
“I’m fine. More importantly, how’s June?” I asked.
“She needs a blood transfusion. Her blood count is very low,” he answered.
“I don’t want any heroic measure for her. She’s suffered enough.”
Dr. Mandel’s voice took on a different tone, like I was being ridiculous even saying such a thing.
“There is nothing heroic about a blood transfusion. Her blood count is very low. It will help her fight the infection,” he said.
I backed down and agreed to the treatment. I felt worn down and frankly; I was tired of playing God. It’s God’s turn to play God.
Then the doctor said, “Did you know she has a mass on her lungs? Do you want to treat it?”
“How did you find that?” I asked.
“We did an MRI. Was she a smoker?” he responded.
When she moved into the assisted living apartment and her cigarettes were no longer accessible to her, I begged the nurse to get her something for the withdrawal. Here I am speaking to the same doctor who has been caring for her all this time, almost two years and nothing in her chart says she smoked. Anger began to boil up inside me but I couldn’t decide who to direct it to, the forgetful or unsympathetic nurse, our fractured healthcare system or an unprepared doctor who doesn’t have all the information he needs to properly treat his patients.
A Bittersweet Goodnight Page 21
