Little Bit Frayed

Yesterday morning was pretty difficult. We got in about the usual time and Mom seemed awake and reasonably aware but we weren't talking to her long before it became clear to me (or at least it seemed to me) that she was pretty much no less confused than she was the night before. She could answer questions with an appropriate response if you asked her something specific, but left to her own, she could almost never come up with the words she wanted when she wanted to say something and she tended to get fixated on ideas or phrases. The first of these I really noticed was 'hush puppies'. We said it a couple of times in reference to my shoes and Christine's shoes and after that Mom kept repeating it over and over. She would stare up at the ceiling and say 'hush puppies' for no particular reason, fall silent for perhaps a minute then say it again. Or when we'd ask her if she wanted some water she'd nod and say "yeah, some hush puppies."

The nurse we spoke to last night said that we should expect this, that it's a normal part of the letting go process and she's moving further away from us. She also said we would likely see it more often before she eventually would slip into a kind of coma right before the end. Today I'm torn between missing that level of communication and happy that we seem to be taking a different path than the one she predicted.

I didn't sleep well last night. That's not to say I didn't sleep at all, I did, but it was close to 2:00am the last time I looked at the clock on my cell phone and the first time I saw it this morning was 7:15am (exactly, which seemed a little odd at the time, but it had to be some time, why not then?) so while I'm operating on much the same total number of hours of sleep I get at home, I'm feeling a lot more ragged now than I ever do at work. Probably a lot to do with the contents of the rest of the day. It's showing, too. I'm snapping more than usual and my regular level of patience (ie. very low) is much higher than I've got right now for anything. The real problem with that is even though I see that I'm a little bit of a raw nerve right now, I don't seem to be able to do anything about it except apologize afterward. Luckily for me Christine understands me well enough to know it's just the stress and my frustration with being so completely helpless here that's doing it to me. A week of real sleep in my own bed would probably set a lot of things right.

So yesterday afternoon we did actually take a break and get away from the hospital. We took a drive down to Charlottetown with Steve and Brenda and just wandered around for a bit. Visited two comic shops, bought some cards, basically just did the same as Steve and I used to do back in high school and university when I was home for a break. It was good, I came back feeling a lot better. Except by the time we got back to the house I was already feeling guilty again for being away so long (close to five hours) and all I could focus on was getting back to the hospital. When we got there we found Mom deep asleep and Gregory and Zita said that she'd been like that most of the time they were there.

This morning we'd planned to meet Dad for breakfast. I've also felt bad about not spending so much time with him lately, but let's face it, when I was staying with him I'd only see him in the morning and the last evening conversation with him still makes me kind of angry. He so desperately wants to blame someone for this that he can't understand I don't want to spend an evening with him ranting about how all of the doctors on the Island are incompetent and lazy because they only order a half-dozen tests to be run when they take blood. Anyway, I suggested we meet for breakfast this morning and thought that would make both of us feel a bit better.

Oh, when I mentioned that we were meeting Dad for breakfast to Mom yesterday she was able to ask if she was invited too. I told her that of course she would be if she felt up to it, but I didn't realize at the time that she was getting confused about her current situation. A little later in the morning she told me that she was going to go now and started trying to get out of bed. She's far too weak to even sit up on her own now but that didn't stop her from trying to roll out of bed and take her nightgown off. I grabbed a nurse -- thank God there was one nearby -- and she came in to try to help. The first thing Mom said to her, though, was "My son thinks I'm going somewhere, I guess." That kind of stings a little, it feels like she thinks I betrayed her, because she told me not to get the nurse, that she'd just growl at her. I know I did the right thing and I know the nurse didn't growl at her, but it still doesn't feel great.

Back to this morning. Breakfast was good enough, Dad only got off on a couple of mini-rants but Christine managed to derail him before he got to me too much -- I'm just not sharp enough now to do that myself and honestly I'm not sure I can anymore, I'm so used to just shutting down the switches when I hear him starting to go off -- and we were in to the hospital by about 9:00am or so. This morning we found Mom in pretty much the same state we left her, sleeping by able to be roused, but unable to communicate in anything more than soft moans and the occasional, whispered 'no' and 'yeah'.

That's where she's been all day.

She opens her eyes and looks around and she still knows us, but that's about it. We seem to have skipped over the 'fixation' stage and landed somewhere that is not really 'coma' but not really awake either. Christine was scratching her head a back a little and when she asked Mom to squeeze her hand if she wanted her to keep going, Mom gave an undeniably affirmative response, so there's no doubt she's still in there, but she's so weak and so distant now that it's hard to believe there's much time left at all. Except I've thought that before, probably written almost exactly that same phrase here before, and I've been wrong.