I Want to Go Home, Part 1
After my mother broke her shoulder, we had to move her to an inpatient, physical rehabilitation center/ nursing home which could take better care of her than we could while the break healed. She would get physical therapy on a regular basis, as well as nursing/medical care, which was supposed to help her heal. Though there were at least six such facilities in the area where my parents lived, most of them were full. Where she ended up, her care was so bad that her condition became worse. Her dementia progressed rapidly, much more so than it had been before her accident. She became weaker physically, and we discovered after we took her out of there that the break in her shoulder actually grew larger instead of healing. She was in constant pain the entire time.
The transport ambulance was late arriving at the hospital to get my mother and take her to the rehab center, which I’m going to refer to as R from now on. This, apparently, was common with such transport services. “They’ll get here,” a nurse told us. “But they’re unreliable about getting here when they say they will.” (These are not emergency medical services ambulances. These are just transport services.)
While we waited, my mother would say, periodically, “They must’ve forgotten us. We should just go home,” or, “They’re not coming. Let’s just go home.” Two hours after it was scheduled to be there, the ambulance service arrived. The EMTs carefully moved her from the hospital bed to the stretcher and then into the ambulance. She clutched a rosary in her hands. She was devoted to rosaries and insisted on having one with her the entire time she was in the hospital and R. It brought her comfort. My father and I drove the twenty-minute ride in my car behind it. At R, they wheeled her on a stretcher into the front foyer. My mother said to me, “They wouldn’t use the siren. What kind of ambulance won’t use a siren? Why are we here? This isn’t home.”
It took about ten minutes for the woman at the front desk to find someone who knew where we were supposed to go. She gave the EMTs a room number, and we went up the elevator. After the EMTs put her in her bed and left, we tried to make the room sound great, pointing out the checkered curtains, the large TV on the wall, the bureau and closet, the night stand next to her bed with a phone. “I want to go home,” she said. I put some of her clothes into the bureau drawer. I promised to bring her a bag of her favorite teas the next day. “Bring me another rosary,” she said. “The one on my dresser, next to my hair brush, and a bag of Ricola lozenges.” She always had a bag of those on the nightstand at home because she claimed she had a constant sore throat from allergies. She ate them like candy.
The room was set up for two patients, but there was no one else in it then. We stayed till about 11:00 p.m. when she seemed to be falling asleep. My father could barely stay awake. “Come get me in the morning,” she said as we left.
In the morning, we arrived in time to help her eat breakfast. The aide delivered the food, but didn’t stay to help her eat it. She couldn’t move the small hospital bed-table with the tray on it close enough and couldn’t move her injured shoulder with her arm in a sling, so she couldn’t reach most of what was on the tray. She had spilled her tea and was upset. I cleaned it up, moved the stand closer and helped her eat. I took the tea cup and found where they keep the hot water along with extra cups, tea bags, and cold water. In her room, I showed her the plastic bag filled with her tea bags that I’d brought and made her a cup of tea “that tastes better, anyway,” I told her. We spent the day there, taking a break for lunch at a place down the road while she was at physical therapy (PT).
When we asked her how the PT went, she told us, “I like the one therapist. He was very nice and made me laugh. I think he’s Filipino or something like that. He told me the exercise would help me have a bowel movement, but it didn’t work.” The oxycodone the hospital and R gave her for the pain had caused serious constipation, and the light laxatives they gave her for it weren’t helping. “Bring me some of those dates in the fridge, tomorrow. They usually help,” she said. My father promised he would bring them, then left late in the afternoon to go home. He was exhausted, so I told him I’d stay but he should go. We decided we’d take shifts from then on; he would be there in the morning and afternoon, and I would be there from late afternoon till late at night, when she was less lucid.
As I sat with her while she fell asleep, one of the aides came in to check on her. He asked me, “Did the day nurse tell you about how badly she was sundowning last night?”
“No,” I said. “No one said anything.”
He frowned. “They were supposed to say something. She was up most of the night, very confused and upset. She didn’t know where she was and kept crying to go home. I tried to stay with her and comfort her as much as I could, but I have to take care of a lot of other patients, too. If you give me your phone number, can I have her call you if she gets like that again?”
“Of course,” I said. “Thank you for taking care of her.” I wrote my phone number on a napkin left on her hospital bed-table. “She can call any time of the night.” He nodded, pocketed the number, and left.
I waited to leave till I was sure she was asleep, around midnight. He called around 2:00 a.m. “Your mother wants to talk to you.” He gave her the phone. “Hello?” She said.
“Hi Mom. It’s Patty. You’re at the hospital. Are you okay?”
Silence. “Yes,” she said after a minute. “Take me home.”
“I can’t,” I said. “You have to get better there.”
“Why?” she asked. I didn’t know what to say. “Because social services thinks it’s the best way for you to heal,” I said; that was as good of a scapegoat as anything else. It was the social worker at the hospital who had told us we needed to do this and found her a bed at R.
“The government has too much power!” she said. “It’s not right. The Republicans need to change that.”
“Okay Mom,” I said, rubbing the side of my temple. “Can you go back to sleep? Dad will be there tomorrow morning.”
“Tell him to come now,” she said. “I want to go home.”
“He can’t, Mom. Visiting hours are over. It’s night time. He’s asleep.” My father could sleep through a hurricane. (He has, actually.) He hadn’t heard the phone ring. I could him snoring down the hall.
“If you go to sleep, he’ll be there sooner,” I said, at a loss for what to say that made any sense.
“Okay,” she said, and hung up.
The next afternoon, I brought her a big piece of paper with a note on it written in large, black letters: “You broke your shoulder. You are in a hospital to help you get better. Call home anytime you want to talk to us” with our phone number there. “Love, your daughter, Patty.” I taped it flat onto the hospital bed-table, then showed her where the phone was, next to her on the nightstand.
It was going to be a long healing process for all of us, I thought, though I had no idea just how awful it would get.