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I would be restarting College in a week and was getting ready for the
significant change in my life having a daily task would bring. I
already had my schedule and purchased my books and was starting to
page through them in anticipation. When I was out, either visiting
Daina, the downtown area, or across the street for my daily soda, I
received a phone call from my sister living at the Wyoming/Montana
border. She left a message that she was on the road driving my
mother back to town and I was to take care of her as she had a
broken pelvis. She gave me a time when she and her daughter
expected to be at my mother's mobile home that evening.
I was dumbfounded. Our mother annually made road trips to
visit my sister for a few days and this year she was going up for my
niece's high school graduation just after Memorial Day. Beyond that
I didn't have a clue what might have happened and checking the time
and bus schedule realized I'd have to leave immediately if I was
going to be to her mobile home to meet them when they arrived. At
the time, Daina was busy and not at home so I wouldn't be able to
reach her about the news until later. Getting to mother's place,
it had been two years since I had last been there during the science
fiction group's art auction and in the intervening time they had
installed lengths of asphalt curbing to act as speed bumps. I guess
they decided to save money on having actual speed bumps put in place
and had these four inch tall, abrupt rise and decline strips put
across the roads instead. As I was on foot, it wasn't an issue for
me at the time, just more of a jaw dropping curiosity. Getting in
the mobile home itself, I found little had changed other than the
water bed in my old bedroom, which I had already heard about,
otherwise everything else was as I remembered it including my
mother's old bed still in place in the master bedroom. Apparently
she slept on the waterbed then walked to her old bedroom for
everything else.
It was around an hour before the little convoy arrived, my sister
driving her SUV and her daughter driving my mother's compact car. My
mother was laying down in the back seat of my sister's car and we had
a chunk of time for my sister to tell me the gist as my mother tried
to get out. My sister rented a split level house with a half flight
of stairs from the bedroom section to the main floor. As the story
went, after being there for less than a day, my mother had tried to
go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and misjudged the
length of the hallway in the darkness, falling down the stairs. Her
cries of pain had woken up my sister and when it was clear it was
more than a bruise from the fall they had taken her to the only
hospital for evaluation. With X-rays they found she had a 'broken
pelvis' and had to be isolated in bed for the next few weeks as it
healed up.
At this point my mother had gotten herself out of the SUV, but
couldn't stand and collapsed to the driveway where she began crawling
to the steps of the mobile home. My sister and niece just watched
this while I felt we should be doing something but my sister said
this was the best way for mother to get around. Stunned, it
eventually dawned on me to open the front door of the mobile home for
her and make sure the rest of the path was clear. As my mother
crawled up the steps to the front door with grunts of pain, pausing
for a moment to rest and have a cry, she finally got herself to the
floor of the mobile home and began crawling to her bedroom. My
sister and her daughter seemed to take this situation as more of an
annoyance, describing how mother had been 'moaning & groaning'
the whole nine hour drive back to Colorado and 'put on a show' trying
to use a restroom at one of their gas stops along the way.
As 'it wouldn't be fair' for her daughter to miss her graduation the
day after Memorial Day, they would be staying that night in the
mobile home and then heading back toward Montana the following day at
which point mother would be my responsibility thereafter. When I
noted I didn't have a car of my own to visit mother each day,
they noted that mother wasn't going to be using her car
anytime soon.
Mother had finally reached the master bedroom and was crawling up
into her old, traditional, bed. With her cries of pain as she did
this, I left my sister in the living room area and went to see if I
could help. While she had gotten her chest onto the surface of the
bed, she wasn't able to lift her legs up, over the edge. She said
she had to keep her legs together because of the break and I
eventually figured that meant I should grasp both of her calves and
lift up her legs and pivot her onto the full bed while she used her
arms to turn her chest, keeping her body as straight as possible so
as to not inflame the injury. Once she was lying face down on the
bed, she next wanted my help rolling her over onto her back, then
helping to remove her dirty clothes which had become stained and
tattered during her crawls. This was my first time seeing my
mother undressed down to her undies as I undid her pants and
pulled them off, then unbuttoned her blouse and scootched it up
behind her back and past her head while she continued to lay, then
holding each sleeve taut as she pulled out her arms. She asked for
me to straighten the pillow under her head and then get her a glass
of water for her bed stand and get the bottle of prescription pain
pills out of her purse. I did and she had me take out a pill and put
it to her lips and then she tried to lean upward to drink a sip of
the water and cried in pain but fought through it until she was able
to get that sip and swallow the pill. She settled back down and
asked me to pull the blankets over her and move the bed stand phone
within her reach. With her now resting, I returned to the living
area.
My sister said that they would take care of mother for the night and
that I should move back in the following morning for the next few
weeks, if not months, until mother was better. As she couldn't leave
the bed, the hospital had given them a bed pan for mother to use when
she needed to go to the bathroom. It was at this point that I
learned mother shouldn't be moving or traveling until she was better.
I didn't point out the obvious contradiction of this given the
trip bringing mother back to Colorado and then having to crawl out of
the SUV and to her bedroom. While they couldn't stay to
help as they had to get back in time for my niece's graduation, I
mentioned that I was entering full-time college classes after
the following week. My sister thought I should then probably cancel
my college classes for the Summer so I would be at the mobile home
all the time to take care mother...
Given that they weren't
willing
to skip a graduation ceremony to care for my mother for
a handful of days, and reflecting on mother being the
person who had repeatedly abused me as a preteen and then harassed me
during my years of health problems in late nineteen eighties, I
considered the idea of canceling my return to College to take care of
her and thought: LIKE HELL!
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