So, we continued to make it happen. But if I had to be completely honest, I felt like I was filling a dog bowl for a pet every time I left her a sandwich to go to work. And her hygiene was poor despite us giving her a sponge bath a couple of times a week, and her toenails had become Guinness World Records qualifying in length.
One of my less proud moments was when an assessment nurse visited the house, pointed toward my mother’s feet, and began to shame me for the condition of her toenails. She insisted that I needed to get my mother a referral from her primary care physician for a specialist.
It was 79 A.D. in Pompeii and Herculaneum all over again. My mouth suddenly erupted with lethal and fiery venom that had been unknowingly brewing inside me for months. Before my brain could take accountability, crazed words started to fly out of me into the Febrezed air around my mother’s bed.
“You’re a nurse, right?” I started. “And you’re here, in our home. You say my mother needs her toenails to be trimmed. Why can’t you trim them?” I knew I was being absurdly unrealistic, as my mother’s toenails had reached the point of needing not just a podiatrist but a blowtorch and chainsaw. Still, I couldn’t stop myself.
She laughed. “I know that you know I can’t do that. You know that’s not what I’m here for.”
“Look, we can’t get help for my mother!” I yelled. “I tried to get her a doctor’s referral for her toenails two or three weeks ago and no one ever got back to me!”
“You have to calm down,” the nurse said.
I stared at her.
“We’re both adults here, right?” she said.
I stared at her some more.
“There’s no reason why we can’t discuss this as one adult to another,” she said.
The pyroclastic flow began.
“I’m trying to give you some background!” I hollered. “I’m telling you this so you can understand our situation!”
She stared down at the floor, smirking.
“When we’ve asked for in-home services, we were forced to pay out the ass for nothing! Or if it didn’t cost too much it still amounted to a big nothing!”
The nurse continued smirking and not saying anything.
I continued. “Palliative or end-of-life hospice wouldn’t go near my mother because she was on a ‘life-saving’ medication, and they also didn’t want their precious childbearing aged staff to risk being around someone on chemotherapy and after weeks of phone calls back and forth the hospice director completely ghosted me! When we placed her in an assisted living facility, the cost was high enough for us to need to take out a second mortgage on our home and contemplate prostitution or drug dealing just to afford it! We’re talking $7,500 a month for lousy food and shitty care!”
The nurse rolled her eyes. She then scribbled a few things on a pamphlet and handed it to me. “Here are some numbers for services for you to try.” She then pivoted to face my mother, who was in her bed. “I’ve seen people get upset, but this was the worst,” she said to my mother.
“The worst? Really?” I followed her into the kitchen. “Well let me tell you, it goes both ways and I’ve never met anyone so patronizing in my life!” I yelled, “I’ve been trying to explain things to you, and all you’ve done is roll your eyes and smirk!” I supposed I was having another “Karen” moment.
She quietly let herself out. I never saw her again.
My husband set my mother up with a friend of his who was a podiatrist. Her appointment was a couple of days later. No referral was required.
I noticed my mother was short of breath a lot when I took her out of the house for drives. She called out for me late one night after everyone had gone to sleep, and I ran down the stairs to see what was wrong.
“I can’t breathe,” she said.
I had heard her say this several times before.
“Should we take you to the emergency room?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I’m OK. I’m OK now.”
This was the same answer she had also given me in the past.
I thought about the moaning sounds she had started making several months before this, when she was eating or taking steps to her commode. I had asked her if she was in any pain.
“No, I’m not,” she said.
“You’re making sounds like you are, though,” I said.
“I’m OK.”
She had also started talking to us with a shrill, theatrical voice that made her sound like she was extremely sick and weak. I had habitually reminded her to “use her strong voice.” Her response every time was to immediately readjust her pitch and tone and sound like her regular self.
Looking back, it pains me to admit that “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” came to mind with a lot of my mother’s habits and complaints. I wasn’t sure how much was genuine and how much of it was wanting attention.
(stay tuned for part 8 of “Foxtrot: My Mother’s Last Dance”)