The Incredible Shrinking Woman and the Husband Always by her Side

My mother spends three days in an Omaha hospital, surrounded by her daughters and husband, and yet scared and alone as she is pumped with antipsychotics and saline.  She is released on a Friday and moves into the memory unit at a local facility by supper time.  When she arrives, she can barely walk.  Her arm is swollen to twice its normal size, and one of the unit’s nurses asks if the hospital staff just pumped fluids into her without checking on the vein.  My mother was so restless and confused, I am not really surprised if she had pushed her IV needle further in by accident.  Even after three days of tests, pokes, prods, and disorientation, the doctors do not give us any answers for her severe agitation other than the dementia has “turned a corner” in its progression.  Thus, the only solution they give is to put her on medication at dosages so high they make her feet swell and the muscles in her neck give out. 

When I visit my mother at the memory unit a few days later, I almost do not recognize her, and when I do, my heart skips a beat.  She is wandering around the main room, her feet so big they only fit into men’s-size house shoes. Her head has fallen forward so that her chin looks like it is attached to her chest.  The staff have her hair pulled into a ponytail to keep it out of her face, and due to the angle of her hunched shoulders, the hairs look like a fountain on the top of her head, each strand reaching toward the ceiling.  Though her hair defies gravity, her cheeks and chin do not and the skin sags toward the floor accompanied by q constant stream of saliva that drips down her shirt.  Any words she used to say are now replaced with “no” and “yeah,” but mostly “no.”  Because her neck has fallen so severely, she can barely drink from a glass, especially since she does not remember how to use a straw, and she has trouble figuring out how to eat even when my family and staff try to help her. The doctor’s plan for my mother’s medication is to start her on high doses and back off as needed.  The director of the memory unit proposes an opposite plan to start with a low dose and adjust her medication through incrementally increasing the amount.  Thus, my mother is weaned off of the meds to a level one-fifth the amount the doctor prescribed.  This takes time, and the side affects take their toll.  Despite our best efforts, we watch over the next few weeks as my mother loses thirty pounds.  Her jeans are so loose they fall passed her hips without being unbuttoned.  She refuses to sleep in a bed, so she spends her nights in the chairs in the commons area. 

We visit her every day, and sometimes she pays us special attention, but more often than not, she keeps to her wandering, her head bowed.

***

When I am a teenager, my mother explains that she and my father met through mutual friends when they attended the same college in the middle of the state.  My father asserts, on several occasions, that she had caught his attention at the school library before they formally met.  With a sly smile at every retelling, he says that he remembered her because she spent more time talking with her friends than studying.

***

My father and sister visit Mother every day, and we all hold onto the hope that as the medication is reduced her neck will straighten.  Sara and I visit on weekends, and as the first few weeks pass, Mother continues to shrink, though her feet remain too swollen to fit shoes.  What little food she does eat – ice cream, she always figures out how to eat her ice cream—winds up on the front of her shirt along with the spills of other attempted bites, and because the facility has a “no bib” policy, she wears these stains around all day, every day.  I wonder if she is going to shrink to nothingness before our eyes.  Based on her unwavering affinity for ice cream, we start mixing her normal food with ice cream to get her to eat.  This works just as until the scoops melt to soup.

***

My parents were married in a central Nebraska park as summer wound to a close over thirty years ago.  My mother was accompanied by her brother across the grass path, at the end of which they stood with my mother’s sister, my father, and his best man.  The day was sunny, the couple was surrounded by friends and family, and the park’s cottonwood trees were bright green. 

And so the photos of that day show.

Twenty five years later, my family visits the park and my parents reminisce on that day.  Mother explains that she and her brother had to walk behind several trees and foliage in order to avoid being seen, and then the “aisle” of grass was a quarter-mile long.  She reiterates several times that the trek down the “aisle” took forever.

My father remembers that as he watched his bride slowly get closer, she was harassed by a lone bee that apparently enjoyed her perfume.

After the ceremony, friends and family enjoyed a meal prepared by my mother’s aunts at a shelter in the park.  My father states with a hint of pride (and an eye toward his three yet-unmarried daughters) that the whole wedding cost only $250.   What he does not seem to remember, but my mother mentions several times during the course of my life, is that the best man took my father to a bar during the reception, and my mother drove around downtown, a woman in a wedding dress driving a Volkswagen, a bride searching for her husband.

***

We grow increasingly concerned that Mother’s neck will not straighten, even as the medication is adjusted.  My father hires a physical therapist to take a look at her, and we receive special instructions on ways to message her neck daily to hopefully loosen the muscles so she can use them again.  And so, every day for several weeks, one of us works out the muscles in Mother’s neck, even as she struggles in her chair because she does not understand what is happening.

We have a family dinner with my mother’s aunts and uncle a few weeks after Mother moves to the memory unit.  We discuss how she is doing, and her aunt asks about visiting the facility after the meal.  My father hesitates from across the table.  He swallows hard and says that would be fine, but, he adds, blinking back tears, “I don’t want you to be disappointed.”  The words are so quite I almost do not hear them, but they make their way across the table, laced with defeat. 

“That doesn’t matter,” my great-aunt says, recovering quickly.  “I just want to see that she is okay in the facility.”  We all nod in agreement and finish our meal.

***

When I am in middle school, my father commutes sixty miles to his office and my mother works as an aide at our town’s elementary school.  On April Fool’s Day one year, she puts rocks in the lunch she packed my father.  That morning, my father calls the school office to let the secretaries know it is my mother’s 50^th birthday.  The teachers are caught off guard to learn that they missed such a milestone in her life, and they quickly put together a giant card from construction paper and poster board, collecting signatures and all commenting on how young she looks.  When they present it to her at the end of the day, she is embarrassed, not only because it is not her birthday, but because she is only 44 years old. 

“I can’t believe he did that,” she frets before my father gets home.  “Especially since I put his real lunch behind the seat so he wouldn’t have to eat rocks.”

***

As summer drags on, a few changes begin to emerge.  My mother remembers how to use a straw, thus allowing her to drink more fluids, and as she gains more strength, she eats more as well.  The physical therapy on her neck helps her lift her head to a better angle, though the hunch is still noticeable.  She walks around the facility almost all day, poking people and dismantling fake flowers in the hallways.  This makes her feet swell, especially when she only sleeps in the sitting position.  The nurses begin coaxing her into a recliner in the evening, and when they extend the footrest, the swelling goes down by morning. 

Early one morning, before the other residents are awake, my mother is up and about.  The night nurse notices something is not right and calls the emergency number on the basis that she believes my mother is having a seizure.  Mother is taken to the doctor, who checks her out and says nothing is wrong.  She is taken back to the facility.

At breakfast three days later, my mother stands in the kitchen and then suddenly falls to the floor, rolling around and foaming at the mouth.  An ambulance takes her to the nearby hospital, and when my father arrives 30 minutes later, he finds her sitting in a bed, completely alone in a room.  He sits with her until someone stops by with answers.

He tells me on the phone that one of the medications she is on has a high potential for causing seizures.  He sounds positive as he explains that Mother will start on the same medication most of the other residents in the facility are taking, and that should help.  I am relieved we have some actual answers on the cause of the seizures, and at the same time infuriated that she was on this medication in the first place.  I will not shake this anger for a long time.

When my parents’ anniversary comes around, my mother has been a resident at the facility for almost three months.  She has not been home in all that time, and has only left the building a few times, all for medically-related reasons.  The nurses tell us that she is not allowed to go to my parents’ house, as they are worried it will “set her off” or cause more problems, even for a visit. 

Since we cannot bring her home, we take her to one of the next-best-places: the grocery store.  My father and I put her in the car and I drive the four blocks to the store.  She cannot open the door, so my father climbs out of the back seat and opens it for her.  He offers her a hand to help her out of her seat, and when she sees him, she smiles and laughs like a giddy schoolgirl.

We walk around the store for about five minutes while my father looks at the selection of ice-cream cakes in the bakery.  Mother tries to sit down on the display tables, and she is quickly disoriented.  I walk her back to the car and we drive around the parking lot for about five minutes until my father gets through the checkout line and hops in the back seat.  When we arrive back at the facility, my father again opens the door for my mother, and the apprehension she felt in the store dissolves as she smiles and laughs and reaches again for his hand.

“Hi Carol,” he says, smiling back at her.