Hurricane Meg Makes Landfall in North Georgia and Stalls
This is a long, drawn-out story with lots of twist and turns. Just like a hurricane making its way through the Caribbean.
It wasn’t long after my mother moved in with us that the trouble began. We needed to get her set up with all new health providers and she had a lot of them. A general doctor, a Parkinson’s doctor, a cardiologist, a dentist; just to name a few. I figured I would give her the information on my general practitioner and then she could take it from there.
That wasn’t the case. First, she wanted me to call the doctor to set up the appointment and I had to go with her to the appointment to confirm she didn’t miss anything, and I heard the same information as she did, in case she forgot something. That didn’t matter anyway because if we heard two different things, she wouldn’t believe me anyway. And what about how family members were claiming how sharp her mind was? Either way, I can do that, one day out of work, no problem. But then she wanted me to call all her referral doctors to set up appointments and take her to each and every one, since she couldn’t drive the car she just had to bring down from Michigan, just in case.
What?? I had to work somewhere in there too. Not just spend my time carting her around from doctor to doctor all day. That is why we hired someone to take her to these appointments, so I wouldn’t miss work. No, she wanted me to go and got mad at me and pouted when I initially told her I couldn’t take her every time. I was no longer sway-able to her tantrums and told her; I can’t – I have got to work.
We also had to get her a new hairdresser and a nail salon. This should be easy; she can just go with me to my regular places.
As expected, nothing is easy with my mother. I would make nail or hair appointments for both of us, and she would cancel at the last minute and make me call to tell them. Or it would be so last minute, I told them when I went for my scheduled appointment. Later, she would turn around and ask me if I could call and reschedule her appointment during the week. I didn’t have time to take her – I had to work. Give her an inch and she would take a mile.
As for a hairdresser, she didn’t like mine or any of the others at the salon my husband, Ron, and I had been going to for the last 15 years. I don’t know what the problem was. Every time she had her hair colored and cut; it looked the same to me. After the third hairdresser, I told her she was on her own, I didn’t know anybody else. Luckily, the lady who took her to the doctor’s appointments had a lady my mother finally liked and would bring her to her appointments. Whew, one crisis averted!
It was at that moment I suspected she wanted me to be her personal secretary. To make all her doctor and personal appointments, manage her pill schedule (and she had a lot of pills she took at least 6 times a day), and I am sure if she pushed it; pay all her bills for her. I couldn’t do that; I had a hard enough time trying to keep my own appointments and bank book straight.
Oh, and I didn’t tell you yet, during this time I was having some sort of heart issue. It felt to me like it was fluttering and skipping a beat every now and then. This really scared me especially being so soon after my brother’s passing from a massive heart attack. I was sent to a cardiologist for a slew of tests, but everything came back normal. Looking back on it now, I can chalk it up to massive stress.
The Great Escape (Part 2)
My mother wasn’t even here two months when she had a hallucination in the middle of the night, after Ron and I had gone to bed, that scared the hell out of her and us. She started screaming at the top of her lungs; running through her bedroom and the house, saying men with knives were coming through her bedroom window trying to kill her. After calming her down a little, we got her into the car to take her to the hospital. Before we even left, she asked us if we could see the girl in the garage staring at her through the car window. Huh?!? And on the way to the hospital, she was wondering when all the snow had fallen on the ground. Double Huh?!? We are in Georgia, in November, there is no snow.
When we got to the emergency room, she started picking things out of the air and eating them. Since she lived in Michigan, I got the notion that she was picking blueberries and eating them instead of putting them into the bucket. Because we brought her to the hospital and started talking about sending her somewhere to get professional help; my mother started becoming belligerent and accusing me of trying to get rid of her and she was going to call my cousin’s wife to come get her and take her back to Michigan. This really hurt my feelings. I love my mother very much and would do just about anything for her. All I was trying to do what get her help so she could get well, and this is the way I get treated? I knew she was trying to manipulate me into getting what she wanted, but it still hurt. I ran out of the hospital so I could cry out of her sight. I didn’t want her to see how she affected me.
Not long after this incident, the ER doctor checked her out and found nothing physically wrong, so they were going to have a psychiatrist come and evaluate her. Now we are getting somewhere. However, after the psychiatrist visited with her, he came out and told us she appeared fine and lucid. She could go home. Oh no!! I couldn’t bring her home the way she was, I couldn’t handle that and there was no way I could control her. We tried to explain what had been happening and how she was behaving; pleading our case to have her committed for at least a 72-hour observation. At that moment, we saw a nurse walking down the hallway with my mother by the arm; still in her hospital gown; carrying her clothes and shoes.
She had tried to escape!!
No more pleading our case, they were sending her to a local mental hospital for help. By the time Ron and I finally left the hospital, it was 4:00 am. We were there all night, but by the time we got home neither one of us could sleep from all the chaos we just went through. I think it was almost 6:00 am before we were able to at least take a nap before the dogs got up at 8:00 am.
Now because this was a mental institution, I had no rights to call and talk with her. They couldn’t even say if my mother was there or not. I had to leave a message for her to call me and if she was there, and if she wanted to talk with me, she would call. So, I waited. After the events at the hospital, I figured she would call someone from Michigan to come get her. But she did call and sounded much, much better. It was determined she was taking too many prescription pills at too high of a dosage. The excess and combination of the different medication were the cause of her hallucinations.
She was in the facility a week when I finally was able to bring her home. She looked more like the mother I remembered; hair done nice, make up on, and clear bright eyes. To ruin her homecoming though, my mother had the nerve to accuse me of threatening to call my cousin’s wife to come take her back to Michigan. I did no such thing! She always had a habit of doing things like that; twisting stories around to suit her needs and to make herself look like the victim if her original threats didn’t work. Par for the course with her, so I let it slide.
Maybe now we can get into a rhythm of living together.
It ended up being more like a disaster.
A Sign of Things to Come
At the beginning of 2020, I became very, very sick. My head was pounding, and it felt like my throat was closing in and on fire. I just kept going; working, taking care of my mother, the house, the dogs, and trying not to ignore Ron. It went on like this for weeks until it got so bad, Ron had to take me to an Urgent Care facility. It was Super Bowl Sunday and no doctor’s offices were open. The clinic doctor said that it was a bacterial infection on top of something else he didn’t recognize. He prescribed antibiotics and steroids to clear up the infection. I did get well enough to continue my chaotic life, but still didn’t feel right. I was functioning at about 50% and was expected by all in the household to keep going regardless of how sick or tired I felt. This illness lasted about six weeks, when finally, the sore throat ended. The exhaustion, however, never really went away, but no one seemed to care as long as I was doing what I was supposed to be doing for them.
So, what was this unknown illness that the doctor couldn’t recognize? About three weeks later, I and the whole world found out.
Pandemic Pandemonium
While everyone else was on lock down and getting bored, I was still working my full-time job, dealing with my mother’s demands 24/7, taking care of the dogs and cat, housework, yard work, and now Ron was home all day from his job as an airline mechanic. No one was flying now anyway.
Three people, animals, and a housekeeper 4 days a week, in the house all day, every day; this definitely was not a “break” for me.
First off, let me say that I am amazed at how an 80-year-old lady could be so much work! She more than tripled the amount of our normal everyday home care. Prior to her moving in, we had about two bags of garbage a week, now it was at least six. We would run the dishwasher one or two times a week and now it was every other day. We also use a food composting system and Ron would empty the scrap bucket maybe once a week, now it was almost every day. That woman knew how to eat and make trash!
Laundry is another story, and I am glad she never asked me to do that for her. Of course, I would offer anytime I did laundry once a week and sometimes she would add a piece or two. That was because she was doing her laundry at least every other day. What made me mad is whenever she tried to close the front-loading doors of our washer and dryer. All you had to do was to click it closed. No, she had to slam it three or four times before it latched. Was she going to break those now? We can’t afford a new washer and dryer because she wasn’t careful enough to use it the way it was designed. It wasn’t like I didn’t try to explain how to use them correctly a couple dozen times.
The worst part is that my mother was the biggest slob. For example, when we took her to the hospital back in November, I cleaned out her room because she had blood all over the bed, walls, just about any surface. I found melted chocolate and snack crumbs in the bed and that wasn’t to compare what I found under the bed: food, crumbs, food wrappers, other trash, and about a handful of her pills.
One morning I got up and there was an empty yogurt cup, napkin, and spoon laying in the middle of the hallway. How does something like that happen? The most disturbing part of her messiness was she would drop her pills everywhere and anywhere. With two dogs who like to play vacuum cleaner, Ron and I had to be extra vigilant to make sure she didn’t drop any. I told him that if one of my dogs die because of her carelessness, she was out of her.
Since she always liked to cook and eat all the time, there were constantly dirty dishes in the sink, on the counter, in her room, just about anywhere. One of Ron’s pet peeves is dirty dishes in the sink. Either wash them or put them in the dishwasher. I remember one time Ron came home from 12 hours at work and there was a pile of dirty dishes in the sink. He had a fit! I had just put in a full 10-hour day at work, and I was so tired, I just looked at him and said I wasn’t going to do them. She must have heard us arguing through her bedroom door with the TV blaring because she opened her door and said she would do them later and slammed the door.
Another issue was that Ron, and I are the biggest OCD neat freaks. We are very organized and knew where everything was located. She never put anything back where she found it. She just shoved it anywhere there was a spot open and then when either Ron or I needed something, it wasn’t where it should be and couldn’t find it.
Not only was she a slob and disorganized, but she was also very rude. She had a TV in her room that she would run all night long, at a very loud volume no less; and mind you, the door to her room was shut. Ron and I both had to get up and go to work in the morning, he especially had to get up a 4:15 am. We would ask her politely to turn it down, and she would, but then a minute later it was back up to the original volume. We tried closing our bedroom door, but that was a pain since the animals liked to go in and out of our bedroom. Plus, it got so warm in there with the door shut because there was no airflow from the rest of the house. But even that didn’t work, you could still hear the TV with both bedroom doors closed.
My mother always complained that we never talked with her. Which was not even true, it was the other way around. When we sat down for dinner, we would eat at TV trays and watch cooking shows in the living room. She would eat her food, get up and go straight to her bedroom; leaving her plate and other trash for me to pick up. No thanks for dinner, no good night, no nothing. I would also try to engage her in conversations on what we were watching, but she would mumble something and turn away. O.K., I give up.
Every week, remember this is every single week for nine months, Ron would vacuum the floor and then steam mop it. While he was vacuuming you could move around the house, just don’t get in his way. But, when he started mopping, you would need to find a spot and stay put until he was finished, and the floors were dry. My mother would do the exact opposite. She would sit and not move the whole time he vacuumed, but as soon as he went by with the mop, she was up and moving through the house tracking footprints on the wet floor. How hard is that concept to grasp? We explained this process to her numerous times, so I am not sure if she was that clueless or that spiteful.
Have I mentioned before that we have a tiny home? My mother was supposed to use a walker to get around and keep her steady on her feet to ensure she didn’t fall. Although there was enough room in the house for her to use her walker as intended, we would find that thing everywhere she wasn’t. In the galley kitchen, the hallway, in bathroom doorways; I can’t tell you how many times we stubbed our toes or ran into daily. Or the many times I heard her screaming that she fell, and I had to go pick her up because the walker was on the other side of the house.
That was just the daily life I had to deal with, and work life was a mess. I would try to get some work done and she would hang over the back of the sofa where I was working and start talking to me. What are we going to have for dinner tonight, tomorrow, this weekend or some other non-sense that didn’t matter at that moment of time. I tell you; this woman was obsessed with food. Another complaint I had, was that I would be in a meeting and she, Ron, and/or our housekeeper would be having a conversation in the kitchen as loud as they could get without shouting, which is not too far from where I worked. (Did I mention that I had a tiny home?)
This story doesn’t end here. Can you imagine there is even more than this? Stop by next week and find out how much worse it can get.
Also, you may have noticed that there aren’t any personal pictures in this blog post. That’s because during all this who had time or energy to take pictures. Plus, I wasn’t really in a smiling mood.
I am officially exhausted from this one…time to go do some coloring!