The boat begins to rock
I'm not the only one that thought last year was weird. What happened?
My strange year started about the second week of January when my mother "panicked" because I fell asleep. She came in my bedroom and found me "unresponsive." Yes, I was dead to the world. I had decided to quit taking Ambien, a sleeping pill, a couple of days before, and had not been sleeping. Day 1 I was a zombie from lack of sleep. Mom had noticed this and decided I was high. Well, drugs haven't been a problem for me and I was not high. I was extremely tired. Day 2 I fell asleep suddenly as soon as I was horizontal. I had made up my mind that no matter how difficult it was, I would quit Ambien.
I had not discussed the Ambien withdrawal with her, since she probably wouldn't remember the conversation very long. How many times had I tried to alert her to the problems with narcolepsy to no avail? And besides, I just didn't want to trouble her with my problems. So when I fell asleep she called her doctor friend from church and told him that I took three bottles of her Tramadol, forgetting that these were old bottles that had been empty for a few months and were just not tossed out, and she didn't have any Tramadol. So he took it upon himself to convince every stinking police car in the county to surround my house, break in without a warrant, and drag me outside to put me in handcuffs and arrest me on drug charges. Problem. No drugs. When I told the man who was shouting at me about taking my mother's Tramadol that I had not taken my mother's Tramadol, and she was having a senior moment, suddenly it occurred to him that something was wrong with this picture. As the sirens wailed, and bubble gum machine flashed, suddenly the whole raid was called off and the entire sheriff's department of this county escorted me back to my bedroom. When they left, I picked up my purse and got in my car and drove away to Arizona without speaking to Mrs. Gangster.
After a few weeks in Arizona my sister contacted me and told me that my other sister and her son had been invited by our mother to move into my house. No no no. Sensing disaster, I decided to go ahead and go back before things spun more out of control. This was just when everyone was becoming alarmed about the corona virus, and so the three day trip back was a difficult one because all the rest stops, in an abundance of caution, and been closed. Therefore, I didn't eat or drink for three days so that I wouldn't need rest stops. It sounds dreadful, but it wasn't actually all that hard. It made traveling easier I think. Charlotte and Davy, her son, had been able to make the trip themselves because of the stimulus money from corona virus relief.
The visit from Charlotte was nice for me since I loved her and was happy to be around her. I wasn't close to Davy though. There was one inexplicable occurrence that coincided with their visit. Besides Charlotte and Davy, we were now being visited by a ghost cat. I began to call the ghost cat "Grimalkin." My mother and I both saw it more than once and were troubled, thinking that it could be an omen and it seemed to revolve around Charlotte and Davy. They were in a big hurry to get their own place, and found an apartment quickly. I visited them and thought it was a comfortable enough looking place. Had this actually turned out OK? How wonderful. I was suspicious though, knowing my family.
One Saturday morning about a week later, I got a call from Davy who said that his mother had fallen to the floor unconscious and was being taken to the hospital by ambulance. So I rushed over and met him at the hospital. It turned out that he wasn't allowed to enter the hospital since he was found to be running a fever, and I was the one that arranged for her admission. She was unconscious. In fact, she was comatose. I told Davy later that I was ashamed to say that when I first heard what happened, I had thought it was one of my sister's dramas. He said, "Don't feel bad, I thought the same thing. I know my mother."
It turned out that she had had a ruptured brain aneurysm, and she would not recover. Just like that, Charlotte was gone.
And so it was now August. Mother was disintegrating in every way. I began to encourage her to take walks and she went out for a walk and suddenly she too collapsed. She complained of horrific pain in her back. As it turned out, she had broken her back.
Overnight she became an invalid, unable to get out of bed. She visited her doctor. The year before the same doctor had been prescribing her 90 Vicodin a month. I told Mom at the time to be sure not to let that prescription lapse. Not wanting to "do drugs," she let it lapse. Now the doctor took less than five minutes to examine her, announced that it was bursitis, and prescribed Tramadol. In case you don't know, aspirin or Tylenol would be better at pain relief. I told the doctor that Tramadol wasn't enough, and my mother was refusing the Tramadol because of it's uselessness. The doctor turned to me and said, "You're the one that wants the Vicodin, aren't you?" So there would be no pain relief for her broken back. I said, "We'll be going to the emergency room now." "Oh no," the doctor cautioned. "There could be Covid over there. You might be exposing yourselves." "Oh bull!" I exclaimed.
So, away to the emergency room. Mom was xrayed and the broken back was not diagnosed, however, the doctor in the emergency room did say her back was in terrible shape and prescribed several Vicodin.
One morning my mother told me that she had had a dream about Charlotte. Charlotte had said, "Let's go on a trip together." "Oh no!!" I said emphatically. "You're not going on any trip with Charlotte!!" She agreed, recognizing that this had been a death dream.
After much more visiting emergency rooms and pleading with the doctor, and some doctor shopping, her regular doctor finally sent her to a "pain specialist." The appointment would be an hour's drive late in the afternoon, which meant driving home in the dark. I just refused to do it. The pain specialist's office called and gave her a one o'clock appointment, so I packed up my mother into the car and we went.
The pain specialist looked at her MRI and when he learned that her injury had been two months ago now, he said, "I just can't understand how they would not have diagnosed a broken back sooner." Truly. She was scheduled for an injection of a bone cement into her vertebra.
On the way home, I could sense that my steering was not right. We were on the interstate and it was busier than usual. I was going 75 and decided to pass a semi. While I was beside him, the steering jerked to the right, and I wasn't able to control the car. There had been an explosion. It turned out to be a blowout. "Something's wrong! Something's wrong! Something's wrong!" I was saying to Mom, as I muscled the steering wheel as best I could and slowed down, which annoyed the driver behind me. On my left, which was my only option now, was a steep embankment. I decided that if I stayed on the interstate I would endanger more people than if I went over the embankment, so away we went. And we landed safely at a 45ยบ angle about three feet from the interstate.
I was in a state of disbelief. I opened my door to look at the tires. Mom decided to jump out too, and told me she was going to run to the other side of the interstate. Cars were passing us at 75 to 85, not slowing down one little bit. If I had been thinking I would have used the child lock feature on the doors to prevent Mom from getting out and going into traffic, but I managed to talk her down. Wow. The tire was gone. There were some tatters. Now what? Usually someone stops and changes my tire. Not this time. After a few minutes It occurred to me to call my insurance company, as I have roadside service. Soon they were out with a giant wrecker with a flatbed. The doors on the driver's side wouldn't close because the steepness caused one to fall out of the car trying to reach the door to close it. The wrecker driver closed my door, as I had moved to the back seat, and then drove across the interstate with the driver's door open. On the shoulder on the other side he was very close to traffic as he changed the tire. "Don't you have the dream job?" I said. What if I had given in and gone to the appointment in the late afternoon, and then this accident had happened in the dark? I don't think it would have gone as well.
And so soon Mom was treated for the fractured vertebra with an injection of some sort of cement. I hoped this fixed things. But things weren't fixed. She improved for a few days, then suddenly broke her back a second time. And when a second injection was done, she improved some, and then again broke a third vertebra. We got together on what to do, and felt that, yes, she should have a third injection, but after that no more, no matter what.
And so we went for the third injection. I don't know how much the broken vertebrae caused the cognitive decline, but decline she did. I asked her if she had noticed that her radical health disintegration began with Charlotte's death and if she thought the trauma from her death had been a factor in her own health failure. Yes, she saw the connection.
What I wasn't prepared for was the way that she went from seeming to be in a haze psychologically for so long to an abrupt departure from reality completely.
to be continued
