A Tornado Came and Took My Mother Away

Spring blends seamlessly into summer, and my mother spends her days in a routine of helping McKenzie run errands, watch television, and walk around as my sister cleans the house.  Her love/hate relationship with mirrors leads my father to tape a giant piece of cardboard over the bathroom mirror.  A few days a week she spends time at a memory unit care facility, not only to give my sister some time to herself, but also to give Mother a chance to be around more people.  As a family, we know that eventually Mother will need to be in a facility full-time, but she has an even temperament at home and we can still take care of her.  We want to hold off on making this decision as long as possible.  I am especially hesitant because I do not want her to feel like we are abandoning her. 

Little do we know that she will make the decision for us.

On a weekend like any other*, my mother wakes up at her normal 5:30 am on Saturday and wanders around the house.  I change her into day clothes and prepare her poptart.  My sister and I coax her into taking her pills, and we notice that she seems a little more agitated than usual.  She swats us away as we hold up a glass of milk for her, and she refuses to sit down to eat her breakfast.  She stands at the table, takes a bite of the pastry, and tosses the rest onto the table. 

I ask McKenzie if this is something new, and she explains that Mother was acting restless the day before when she and my father picked her up from the memory facility.

“They said she was poking people,” McKenzie recounts in an even tone, “and that she can’t come back until we fix her medication so she won’t do that.”

“What?” I ask as a reflex before really processing this bombshell.  “Wait, this happened yesterday?  Why didn’t you tell me before?  What did they suggest?  What was she doing?”

My questions for clarification bounce off my sister with a simple shrug of her shoulders.  “They didn’t say anything.  They just told us as we were walking out the door, and they were starting supper, so Dad didn’t want to bother them.”

Mother takes another bite of her breakfast.  Her eyebrows furrow as she chews, and she drops the remaining section on the table, still chewing in disgust.  The day before, she loved that breakfast food.

“So that’s it?” I ask again, still trying to comprehend the previous day’s events.  “Has this happened before?  How was she this week?”

McKenzie shrugs again.  “She seemed okay last night at supper,” she starts, then pauses to think.  “I guess she was a little anxious, but she settled down later.” 

“Yeah.” My mind clicks back to the night before.  When I arrived at the house, my mother was asleep in her favorite recliner, and it had taken both McKenzie and me to get her up the stairs and into her pajamas.   “She was really tired by then.  Maybe she’ll be okay now that she’s home.”

But she is not.  As the day progresses, my mother’s anxiety escalates.  She refuses to sit down anywhere, including her recliner, and she stomps from one room to another.  I hand her a magazine to flip through, and she tosses it on the floor, along with the pillows she grabs from various living room furniture and every book she sees.  As the day progresses, she continues her tirade by knocking over picture frames and decorations on end tables, as well as dishes drying in the kitchen..  My father calls the neurologist’s office in Omaha, but he is not in during this weekend, so the receptionist who answered promises to contact the doctor-on-call and get back to us. 

By noon, we try to coerce Mother into having some leftover pizza for lunch.  She takes a few bites but will not settle down for any more.  We have some anxiety pills that the doctor had given us several months before in case Mother gets worked up.  Every once in a while we had given her half a pill, but on this day, I shove a whole pill into a miniature Milky Way and give it to her.  She grabs it from my fingers and eats it; her eyes are narrow slit, her nose is scrunched, and she chews the caramel in the same up-down motion as a nutcracker breaking shells.

The pill does not help.  As the afternoon progresses, she seems to forget who we are and where she is.  She continues ravaging the house, repeating with ever-greater hostility, “no, No, NO, NO,” when we ask her to sit down or calm down.  Her eyes move from McKenzie, to me, to my father, and then to her surroundings, and though she snarls at us, her eyes reveal that she is terrified. 

As if possessed by fear, she lunges at McKenzie’s throat, grabbing her target and pushing my sister backward.  She lashes at me, scratching my face before I dodge her hand.  She glares at my father before stomping into the kitchen.  The three of us are speechless as we try to figure out what to do.  Mother makes her rounds through the bedrooms, slamming doors and pushing to the floor many of the items on her nightstand. 

My father calls the doctor again, and again the receptionist tells him that the on-call doctor will contact him as soon as he can.  And so we spend the afternoon doing our best to contain my mother’s outburst by following her around and trying to prevent more destruction as she alternates between attacking various household items and us.

Still waiting for a phone call that will never come, McKenzie and I take Mother for a drive (and get her a shake at a fast food drive-thru), and she settles down.  When we get back home, she is in good spirits for a few minutes, and panic and anger take possession of her again. 

By late afternoon, we are all exhausted and feel utterly helpless as to how to help Mother.  I fill a small glass with NyQuil and add a straw, and she stands still long enough to drink most of it.  When the medicine finally kicks in, she stays asleep all night, her body completely worn out from a day of fear-induced adrenaline.

My father calls the doctor’s office three times that day—an increasingly-desperate plea for help and guidance for dealing with a wife and mother who is attacking her family.  He calls two more times the next day, and by then the office stops answering altogether. 

When my mother wakes up at 5:30 a.m. on Sunday, she is already agitated.  So much so that I cannot change her out of her pajamas; she throws a potted orchid at me when I try.  The only food she eats during the day is the bite-sized candy bars stuffed with anti-anxiety pills, which do nothing to calm her down.  She finally drinks some more NyQuil mid-morning and settles down for a four-hour nap.  As a family, we now worry that her outburst is a sign of something else happening in her body that she is unable to articulate with her ever-shrinking vocabulary. 

Upon waking, my mother switches almost immediately to attack-mode.  Trying to replicate the results of the day before, I coerce her out the door and into my car, and we drive around town and on the highway for almost an hour.  During this time, she not only settles down, but she smiles and laughs and points at blooming trees and farmhouses and other cars. 

Instead of returning to the house, I stop at the local urgent-care office.  My dad and both sisters meet us there, and we explain to the staff the events of the previous forty-eight hours.  We are there for twenty minutes, and my mother will not let anyone take any samples of her fluids.  The staff explains that they are not equipped to handle this kind of situation and suggests that we take Mother across the street to the hospital emergency room.  We thank them for their time and leave, and they send us a bill for $140.

We are the only people in the waiting area of the emergency room, and the four of us make a loose circle around Mother as she tries to punch the television and rip up the months-old magazines littering the room.  After about twenty minutes, a nurse escorts us to a hallway where she takes Mother’s vitals, all the while two of us hold Mother by the arms to prevent her from lashing out at the nurse. 

The nurse explains that since this is a weekend, the ER is busy and the beds are full.  We will have to wait for something to become available.

We resume our positions in the protective circle for about twenty more minutes until the nurse leads us to a room that contains three chairs, a sink, counter, and mechanical apparatus on the wall.  The nurse promises that the doctor will be in soon, and she will see about finding a bed.

Almost immediately, Mother goes after the devices on the wall and the supplies on the counter.  We take turns, in pairs, holding her arms, like we are human safety pads. 

Nurses check in sporadically and give Mother some medication to put her to sleep so they can take tests, but she does not go to sleep.  She continues grabbing at our throats, scratching faces, and punching my father’s stomach.  A bed finally arrives over 90 minutes later, and though we get her to lie down, she still does not sleep.  She holds onto consciousness as stubbornly as we hold onto her, even as nurses collect various fluid samples and run tests.

We hold onto Mother for over three hours before a doctor stops in to tell us that the test results show nothing physically wrong with her.  He advises that we work with our neurologist, since Mother has special circumstances and we have been taking her to Omaha for regular checkups over the last few years.  We thank him and the nurses, and escort Mother to the car.  Though she is still awake, the drugs slow her ability to walk.  This does not stop her from growling and swatting at us.

When we arrive home, Mother falls into bed almost immediately and sleeps for fourteen hours.  When she wakes, she returns to ‘terror mode.’

And so, Monday is another day of cyclonic violence, drug-filled candy bars, NyQuil, and increasingly-frustrating dead-end calls to the doctor and Alzheimer’s Association about what my father should do to help is wife. He finally reaches the neurologist on Monday evening, explaining again what has been happening, and the office tells him they can see Mother the following day at 1:00 pm. 

During the ride to Omaha the next day, Mother laughs and McKenzie gets her to eat a sandwich.  Her mood quickly deteriorates when the car stops. Within twenty minutes my family’s arrival, staff members have Mother secured in a bed with restraints and start pumping her with medication.  Again, she does not settle down enough for an MRI, and the staff finally gives up for the day at 1:00 am, when Mother is still awake and still trying to strike anyone in her general proximity.

My mother will spend the next three days in the hospital.  I will look back on this week as one of the worst in my life and actually contemplate the idea that if my mother were ready to die, maybe that would be okay, especially if she had to spend the rest of her days possessed by a disease that tricks her into attacking the people who love her.

But the disease is not that merciful, and my mother is stubborn.  When she is discharged from the hospital, she finds new life as a full-time resident of the memory facility she used to visit.

[Tune in soon for Part 2: The Incredible Shrinking Woman]

*A cruel irony —this took place on the weekend “Practice Hugs” was posted.