My mum, who was readmitted for meningitis, seizures, and strokes on the has now been in the Neuro ICU at Anschutz for three weeks, remains in a coma. We are now sure that she is responding to stimulus; ask her to give a thumbs-up, and she does … sometimes. Or sometimes she’s asked to wiggle her toes, open her eyes, and so on and so forth. When she does respond, the response is concrete and definite. No one could mistake a solid thumbs-up for a reflex to scratch at an electrode or reach for a picc line, so in some ways this kind of response is very good news, indeed. Especially as her left side has begun to show some movement, too. She may still prove to be somewhat impaired on that side, but even partial movement on that side will assist in the difficult work ahead.
The frustrating part about watching a coma patient slowly come out of their personal twilight zone is that the soundtrack isn’t nearly as dramatic, and neither is the occasional achievement or benchmark achieved. We can’t even be sure if she recognizes the voices of her loved ones as it is impossible for her to speak around the respirator. (Which may be converted into a trach––a possibility which is instinctively frightening, as cancer patients with trachs were routinely used to scare kids off of smoking in public service ads when I was growing up. To stigmatize tracheotomies that way seems irresponsible, now, as I’m coming to realize their sheer usefulness as an option available to surgeons.) In any case, although she has occasionally opened her eyes and seems to turn her head toward voices in the room or hallway, we haven’t an inkling of what’s going on in her head. And with extensive muscle weakness as a result of both strokes and extended medical bedrest, it will be some time before she can type or write on a whiteboard, much less speak. I’m not sure exactly how many muscles are required to contort the mouth into a standard consonant, but it’s far too many for her brain to manage just now.
I have been running a CaringBridge site for her as this unexpected set of knock-on complications unfold. I had the post office back home hold my mail for a month, thinking I would be back in around three weeks with some good stories to tell as I spent Thanksgiving with friends. As it is, I don’t currently and doubt I will anytime soon feel that I can leave my father in this alone. Mum will require a lengthy period of rehabilitation, with trained professionals, and an even longer period of adjustment and assistance, a process with which many friends and family members have offered to help, but which realistically will fall to those who live here, in the house, with her. It’s skills like showering and turning pages and navigating the stairs which will take the most work to reacquire––assuming she can reacquire them.
In the few days between being sent home early from the hospital in the first place and being readmitted with much more frightening prospects, mum was rarely and decreasingly able to move from her bed to the bathroom, and used a wall and her bed as supports on the way. Unbeknownst to us, the infection had already set in, with the only early sign a slow increase in the weakness on her left side (the side of the tumor and surgery). She had been doing well enough early on to take a shower sitting down, but within days of the surgery she could no longer manage, and when dad tried to give her a bath, he wasn’t able to get her out of the tub unassisted. This next round of recovery will be exponentially more difficult.
Another reason to stick around is food. Several of mum and dad’s friends have been bringing a meal by twice a weak, which has been absolutely lovely, and my eldest sister “sponsored” our Thanksgiving meal by way of a Whole Foods precooked feast. Other than reheating the meals provided for him, dad has shown no desire or ability to actually cook anything. He recently went to Costco and purchased frozen hamburgers that one reheats on a grill. Before mum’s surgery, she had him on a fairly strict Keto diet, which … well.I’m not much of a fan. But still, he was eating fresh food multiple times a day, lovingly cooked by mum. Now that she’s in hospital, he cannot summon the energy to cook, or to learn a few beginner skills. I certainly understand this urge, as I’m a breakfast = cereal person myself, and I’ve been known to eat plain tortillas rather than cook. Still, I feel as though this is not the time to go completely cold-turkey off of such an intense diet as dad’s Keto has been. The shock to his body must already have been extreme, and we’re only weeks in.
So at least through the holidays, I’ll be staying in Denver. Both parents have birthdays in January, so I may even stay for those. Or … and this is something I haven’t told many people … I may be postponing my five year plan for a year or so in order to provide support throughout the recovery process. This is dependent on my finding a job to pay my way in the meantime, so I’ve been taking a very close look at temporary (up to a year) full and part-time library jobs, particularly in nearby university libraries as that is my training and ultimate goal. Ironically, there is a position with the University of Colorado Denver that is located on the very same Anschutz campus where mum has been the last few weeks, and it immediately felt like I belonged there. If that makes sense. Even when mum moves to an acute care facility offsite, a part of me has been completely reshaped at Anschutz already. Wouldn’t it be such a thing if I were to be able to invest in the place the way it has invested in me? (I know it’s a long shot that I would be considered, given the surfeit of phenomenal librarians without work just now, but I couldn’t help it; I applied.)
I’m sure mum would be disappointed to learn I’m putting a dream on hold for her; she’s that kind of person. But as the only child able to pick up my life and whisk it over state lines at the drop of a hat, I feel there are too many reasons for me to stay and far too few reasons for me to return to Montana in the next little bit. My roving childhood may not have prepared me for much else, but it certainly set me up well for caregiving and the setting aside of personal ambitions for a loved one’s wellbeing.
My main wish at this point, besides mum waking fully and coming home, and besides receiving a callback from the job I applied to several days ago, is that my parents would consent to move to a one-storey house. I’m in the unfinished basement just now, which is where I spent about six months between my MFA and taking the library job in Polson, and while I’m exactly the kind of basement-dwelling millennial we were all warned we’d become, I don’t dislike the room and privacy I have down there, among the piles of boxes and et cetera. Sputnik, who is not strictly permitted here, has enough room to breathe down there without causing any damage, even if she has spurned the tent I set up exclusively for her benefit. But the stairs. The stairs, my friends. Not only are the stairs from the basement to the ground floor unnecessarily steep, but they are angled away from the stairs to the second floor, where the sewing area, guest bedroom, and master are situated. My primary reason for taking the basement room is that I only have to face one staircase in order to spend quality time with Sput, rather than two that require sprinting across the entire living area in order to access the second half. Both staircases are unnecessarily steep and narrow, actually. It was quite something watching the EMTs carry mum down when they took her to the ambulance; the stretcher would not fit, and they had to carry her down by lifting her under the arms like a child.
The main thing is that I don’t want to leave all of my furniture and books and … well, everything … in storage for another eighteen months. But I also don’t want to move it all to Denver only to move it all back northwards later. It’s the kind of conundrum that I most dread, in that it’s the most quintessentially Kend problem in the universe. What to do with thirty-five boxes of books …..
What must happen will happen, I suppose. And right now I just don’t see any way around it: I need to stay in southern Denver for the time being. It’s not my dream and it’s not my favorite suburban sprawl in the universe, but it just may be both the right thing to do and the one thing that the entire universe has been trying to tell me I need to do over the last year. Leaving work the way I did, when I did, and living week-to-week as I have done, I was ready for a change and then change came along and shook me by the scruff of my neck. This being the year I have finally rediscovered what it means to be wholly and entirely mentally stable, and also the year I had determined to work hard on building bridges with family, I can’t turn my back on the dovetailing of so very many coincidences. The need is here, so I am here. Everything else will follow as it may.