Ash Wednesday

So Lent began on Wednesday, the first full day I spent in the hospital with my mom since arriving in Idaho the night before. I typically try to give up a bad habit or character flaw for Lent, but apparently this year I’m giving up sanity, because let me tell you… This stuff is completely nuts.

All of this started a month ago when (we thought) mom threw out her back. She’s had a bad back for decades so it wasn’t unusual, but after four days of complete immobility my dad called an ambulance to take her to the hospital. She was admitted and spent a week there. The hospital ran a bunch of tests and couldn’t find anything wrong from a skeletal standpoint, so they concluded this was a muscular problem and mom just needed to toughen up and get through it. (I spoke to the doc myself and that’s darn near to a quote.) They sent her home after 7 days, still completely immobile. She tried to push through the pain and to regain some movement, but it was just too much and she couldn’t. She and my dad spent a week doing their best, but eventually they weren’t making any progress and dad called another ambulance to take mom back to the hospital. She was admitted on the 16th.

This time, they found a doctor who wanted to figure this out. They gave mom steroid shots in her back, which didn’t do much. More tests. More negative results. Mom was increasingly agitated, teary, combative. The hospital ended up sending in a psychiatrist who diagnosed her with a personality disorder and used a whole bunch of fancy words to essentially tell us that mom was making this up to get attention. He ordered a CT scan of her head and, by doing so, changed everything.

The scan showed evidence of stroke. This led to an MRI of the brain, which showed over 30 spots of damage to mom’s brain from multiple small strokes. This led to several other tests to find the source of the strokes, which revealed a massive infection not just in her spine but also inside her heart. The infection has caused the strokes and hey, guess what? All of these cold-hearted bastards who told my mom she was crazy and making this up can go pound sand and should be prepared to speak to a lawyer. My mother has been completely unable to even sit upright for over a month, half of which was spent in an actual hospital, while they did absolutely nothing to diagnose or treat the core issues. Painkillers are not the solution to every issue.

So now we’re looking at a steep upward climb. Mom needs open heart surgery to repair the damage from this infection. The docs don’t know if her extreme confusion and emotional instability is from the infection or the strokes, so it’s impossible to say if it’ll get better. She is absolutely miserable and hates the world right now, for which I really can’t fault her. She won’t eat and is probably getting a feeding tube today – and, let me tell you, that is probably the equivalent of hell to my mother and will likely require sedation. She’s being moved to ICU today in preparation for heart surgery next week once the infection is more controlled via antibiotics. She keeps asking to die, so the hospital has her on suicide watch around the clock.

I’m willing to give up sanity for Lent if it means I don’t have to give up my mom. I am a thousand miles from ready for any of this. I got here four days ago and have absolutely no idea when this will get better. I don’t the recognize the person in that bed, the person who loves me more than the world but yesterday told me over and over that she hated me and hated my dad because he was the reason she’d given birth to me. I don’t really like this lady much. I want my mom back. Please God, let her still be in there somewhere. The idea that this is her life now is just more than I can stand. How can I miss her so badly when I’m sitting right beside her? It feels like my heart is breaking on repeat all day long. I don’t know if I can bear this.