Our Patient is Trying...Very

"Get me out!"

My mother's voice quavers with indignation on her end of the phone.

"What's wrong, Mom?" I ask, my heart thumping.

"Can't talk," she whispers. I take that to mean that Midge, her white-haired diminutive roommate is awake.


"I'll be there soon," I promise. But first, I think, the gym. Without certain routines - meditation, Qi Gong and exercise - it's difficult to stay present.

*

Last week my mother fell at home. She slipped on some mail and pitched forward face first. Luckily, two of her caregivers were there, changing shifts, and heard the thump.


They exhorted her to lie still, offered reassurance while an ambulance was summoned. She had been taking the drug Coumadin for a blood clot in her groin; there was imminent danger of excessive bleeding. A plastic surgeon stitched her forehead, two places under her right eye, and her left hand. She sustained a concussion.


I drove straight from northern Vermont to the hospital in Glen Cove, New York the following day, hooked on CD after CD of The Time Traveler's Wife, traveling through time zones myself of the interior kind: past and present, hurtling toward an unknown future.

My mother looked frail in her hospital bed, surrounded by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, her phone book, the phone, and small spiral bound notebooks. A yellow begonia, a tiny basket of primroses, and a St. Patrick's Day arrangement of shamrocks lined the windowsill. I glanced at one open notebook page where she'd written the names of her neurologist, her plastic surgeon, the vascular specialist, and the head nurse. My mother thrives on information. She makes lists: 
                                                   
                                                     Willy's b-day! 
                                                     Call Rosie, M.L. and Gloria. 
                                                     Find out what to do about Debbie's granddaughter - gets headaches during the winter, but not in the summer - wi-fi in the school?

A scarf decorated with shamrocks was draped over a pillow. A tiny open ceramic box held hearing aids, nestled together like cashews.

"Hi, Mom," I said. 

She grimaced ruefully at me beneath a mosaic of angry purplish bruises and a blackened right eye - like she'd been ko'd by boxer Micky Ward.


"I was just so stupid," she began.


"It was an accident, Mom. What happened? How are you?" I pushed papers aside and perched on her bed.


"It was the strangest thing, as if the rug just came rushing up to meet me..." Mom said dreamily, gesticulating with her hands for emphasis. She had a headache and felt dizzy; her hospital tray appeared to be sliding away from her. The neurologist explained this was a normal reaction to concussion.

Frail, but feisty.


"How do you get this damn thing to work?" she interrupted herself mid-tale, brandishing the white phone receiver. "They tell you to push 9, I push 9, and nothing happens!" 


Frail, but bossy.


"Why didn't anybody get me anything to drink last night?" she snapped. "I asked that one nurse for some water, and it seemed she just couldn't be bothered! It takes these people ages to respond." She made the haughty face - the one that used to instill terror - and glowered.


"I don't think you were allowed to have anything by mouth," I reminded her. Earlier in the day, she had undergone an inferior vena cava  filtration procedure to prevent the clot in her groin from moving.


"Well, no one explains anything to you here. I'm going to call B and complain!" I translated this to mean she feels trapped in alien surroundings, anxious, no longer calling the shots. Here, they don't serve 5 prunes in a crystal bowl for breakfast.

*

My two sisters and I confer by phone. We speak to doctors. We arrange for our mother's caregivers to be with her when we can't, and throughout the night. It's the best we can do. We bring flowers, organic chocolate bars, life savers, her green quilted bathrobe, cookies. We convey phone messages.

After several days, she's deemed too wobbly to return home, but gets the okay to be released to a nearby rehabilitation facility, from which this morning's frantic phone call originated. My youngest sister, who arrived last night from Florida and I are staying at our mother's house on Long Island. We are sitting in the kitchen drinking black tea with soy milk, and eating bowls of raw oats soaked in cider topped with yogurt and sliced apples. It's delicious. 

The phone call reins us back abruptly from strategizing a coverage schedule for our mother in the new facility during the day, between bouts of physical therapy. 

"What did she say?" my sister asks.


"She wants out."


"Mmmm, how about more tea?" she offers.