This week my 73 year old mother fell. She tried to catch herself on a chair, but it was a computer seat with wheels, and it disappeared beneath her. She smashed into the floor full force. After an ambulance ride to a local hospital showed a shattered femur, she took another ambulance to a bigger hospital to have surgery to put a metal plate inside her leg.
I once had a blue bowl that a friend had gifted to me as my Secret Santa, and it was my favorite for close to 15 years. That bowl had been through every dinner, every special event, and many movie nights. The bowl broke one day a few years ago. I dropped a glass as I was washing it, and it hit the bowl and shattered it into a million tiny pieces inside the suds of the sink. It looked like a magic trick—all the bubbles were there, and then just poof! Everything was gone.
I mourned the bowl, deeply, as if all the little fragments I had to throw in the trash contained all the memories we’d made with it.
When I visited my mom the first day, she seemed to be doing okay. She was in pain, but lucid. But the next day she woke up and couldn’t remember who she was. Arguing with the doctors, she informed them she was a teacher (she isn’t.) They lowered her pain meds, assuming those were the problem. By the time I got back up to the hospital she was mostly only on Tylenol for her broken femur, but the nurse spent time telling me how she was much better.
We had a conversation, and at first, I could understand how they might think she was fine. They didn’t know her. And she is seventy-three, after all. To them, she presented how some 73 year old women could present. But my mother is, in general, more coherent than I am, and when she couldn’t figure out how to work her phone, I knew something was wrong. Our family likes to joke that she’s a Pokémon Go addict, and yet she had not tried once to catch a single Bulbasaur. She checks the internet for everything, but she couldn’t figure out how to get there, instead opening her email and typing some form of gibberish. She kept telling me she had to ask them how they moved the rooms around that way, pointing randomly into the corner of the room.
I was horrified. My mother is my closest confidante, my sounding board, my sane voice when I’m having a panic attack. To suddenly see her incoherent was frightening and upsetting. Losing her coherence would be like losing every important piece of my life, like shattering all those little memories into nothing.
I went home that night and did what writers do best—I conducted a lot of research. I deduced her memory issues stemmed from the addition of Qvar, a COPD medicine she hadn’t started taking until she was in the hospital. A recent study had shown that the medicine, when mixed with two others she happens to be on, can cause memory problems in women over 60. I insisted they stop the medicine, to take it completely out of the equation. They humored me as they prepared for MRI scans and blood tests.
I think about the blue bowl, and all its shattered memories, and I wonder if this is what children of parents with dementia feel when their parent is struggling to remember how to do tasks at which they once excelled. Does the threat of the loss of shared memories frighten them as much as it did me? The loss of the essence of the person I know and love was as jolting as the sound of shattering glass in a metal sink.
A full twenty four hours after stopping the medication, I walked into the hospital room to find my mother—my mother, the Pokémon Hunter, my mother, the Facebook surfer, my mother, my dear friend and conspirer. My heart released from the tight vise grip it had been in all night.
She was herself, all from removing the new medication. Had I not mentioned the COPD medication to my mother’s doctor, she would still be on it. She would still be looking at the buttons on her phone as if they were something else. The person I know and love would be hidden inside the incoherent one the medicine caused.
We have to be the best advocates we can be for our family members, and ourselves, for that matter. Doctors and nurses are wonderful, and harbor a wealth of knowledge; but so do we. As family members we know who our loved ones are supposed to be. We know them better than even the best health care professionals, and it’s important that we follow our instincts and make sure we get them the best course of treatment for their particular needs.
I may never find another blue bowl like the one that shattered into little pieces; but I’m so grateful my mother’s memories and faculties are back in the right place.
—
This Post is republished on Medium.
—
Photo credit: pixabay
