DAY 7: Life Routines
I didn't write yesterday because I was busy researching, writing, and sending The Kelly Letter. It felt strange to leave the hospital and head off in search of a wireless internet connection at a place where I could refocus on the stock market and decent writing for my subscribers.
I went to "There Coffee House" on East Colfax, a place I found using Google. It had a wireless connection as advertised, but it was a gay bar. Not exactly the atmosphere I was seeking, but I found a place in the corner by myself with a cup of cappuccino and a laser focus on my work. I was out of place with my calculator, notebook, and determination. All around me people were flirting, guffawing, whistling, poking at each other, turning all comments into sexual ones, and otherwise carrying on. I stayed off the gaydar, evidently, because aside from a friendly and funny black man, everybody left me alone.
I got my work mostly done, and then finished it back at the Yaffe House which, much to my elation, has a cable internet connection that I can use with my laptop. Eureka! No more gay bars for me. From midnight to 4:00 this morning, I worked at the house in complete comfort and SILENCE. A perfectly fine Kelly Letter went out to subscribers, not one of whom will ever know the circumstances under which it was prepared.
For historical reference, during Mom's first week in the hospital, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 0.9% to finish at 11,986 while the Nasdaq also lost 0.9% to finish at 2,331. The market was doing just fine until her accident. It fell in sympathy with her. Last month, the Dow rose 3.4% and the Nasdaq rose 4.8%. Mom was a bad omen for Wall Street. It felt good to stop thinking about hematomas for a while to think about stocks instead.
I took a break from writing at the gay bar and returned to the hospital a little past 8:00 last night. Colleen was despairing again. She said, "I might not ever get my mother back." Dain told her to stop thinking that way.
Emily stood in her usual recent daze, staring nowhere but in Mom's direction while her hands stroke Mom's feet or arms on autopilot. Her eyes teared over during Colleen's public airing.
Kevin had retreated to his chair in front of the sink in the corner, where he often sits and reads, checks cell phone mail, or rests his ball-capped head in his hands. He made eye contact with me, rolled his eyes, and made a face that said, "Not again." It wasn't mean, though, just an acknowledgment that the worm had turned once more.
In the morning, before I left to work, Mom had returned from surgery on her broken arm. They put in pins and a plate over her elbow. Cindy, one of our favorite nurses, showed us the x-ray films. I dubbed Mom the "Lizinator" and the term stuck. We couldn't wait to tell Charlie that Mom would now be backhanding him with hardware once she got better.
Everybody went home for the night. Kevin was the last to leave and said he'd be absent the next day, today now, because he had to get ready for work on Monday. We'd been joking all week about who'd be the best child on Mom's list. I told him he was definitely out of the running now. He would forever be the son who didn't come to see his mother every day.
We were joking, of course, but as the de facto leader of our support group I'd been thinking for some time that people would need to get back to their routines eventually. This first week I expected to be what it was: everybody here all the time and never wanting to leave Mom's side. However, part of my plan in coming from Japan with an open ticket and everything I need to stay indefinitely was that I would be able to keep the family functioning so they could all return to work and just visit and take care of Mom during their free time. There's a certain amount of practicality that just can't be refused forever. Besides, as I discovered when writing my newsletter, getting back to normalcy now and then is good.
I had a chance to enforce this idea today, more quickly than I'd expected. Colleen was down again. Dain said she'd been restless all night. She got up at 3:00 a.m. to check MySpace. She ate something. He couldn't sleep, either, because of her moving around. Early this morning, she told him that she wanted to quit her job because she couldn't focus on anything except her mother being in the hospital.
At Mom's bedside, I told her that she needed to keep her job. I explained that it's what Mom would want her to do. It was hard to find that job. There's nothing more for Mom that any of us can do, anyway. She's receiving the maximum amount of care available. Our big part will come later when she's recovering away from the 24-hour nursing care. In the interest of being in good shape for that, I told Colleen, she needs to take care of herself now. Quitting her job to sit around depressed at St. Andrew all the time will do neither her nor Mom any good.
"I'm sure the last thing Mom wants to find when she finally wakes up is that none of her kids are working, nobody has any money, and that her accident destroyed everything that everybody had built up to now," I said. Cindy came in then and reinforced what I'd said. Colleen agreed. She'll return to work tomorrow.
Emily will go back to work on Tuesday. Kevin Tomorrow. Dain tomorrow. Karen will keep her usual schedule. Probably some time next week, I'll move up to the house to take care of Daniel and Charlie, and come down to visit Mom in the afternoons.
I'm on financial duty, naturally. Emily brought all of Mom's bills today. I'll go through them and her check registers to figure out where things stand and how best to handle them. Some kind people in Estes have donated money to the family. I told Emily to put it in an envelope and use that envelope for family shopping, gas money to Denver, and such. If the contribution money runs out, she's to tell me so that I can add more cash to the envelope. That seems a simple approach.
Mom's scheduled to get a tracheostomy tomorrow. That'll be good. The ventilator is irritating her. Sometimes she bites down on it. Other times she moves it around with her tongue and turns her head with a grimace. Because this looks like a long haul, the doctors think "it's time for a trake." I agree. They always bring forms to me and ask for my agreement. I have yet to offer any better ideas than theirs and usually wonder why they're asking me. I trust them. They're very good here. Still, it's nice to be included in the decisions and to sign the papers for Mom.
Beyond the trake, they'll finish her Lizinator arm. They have to close her stomach one of these days, too. I spoke at length with Dr. Offner this morning about keeping it open. They want to get her closed ASAP because the longer she's open the harder it is to ever close her. There's still a window of time during which they can stitch her back up. Much longer, though, and they'll have to use cadaver skin (lovely), a Whitman patch that's like two pieces of velcro sewed to each side of the incision and then pushed together, or a skin graft using Mom's own skin. I really hope they can just sew close her up soon.
She's still in a coma, but she's "pecking at the egg shell," as I like to put it. She's moving around a lot, trying to open her eyes it seems, and really focusing on her feet, just like she does when she's alert and healthy. As I type in her room right now on my laptop -- thanks to having gotten it out of my suitcase for work yesterday and discovering how nice it was to work on my own computer -- she's crossing and uncrossing her feet and turning her head a lot.
Ooh! She just lifted her left knee and nearly flopped her right leg out of bed. I'm going to raise the rail. Just a sec...
That was a lot more than a sec. It's now almost 10:00 p.m. I discovered that she was again chewing on her respirator and that it had lodged between her teeth and cheek. It looked like she had a hot dog in there. She was turned way over on her side and ready to roll right onto the floor.
I interrupted a meeting that Nurse Mary from Ireland, another excellent one, was having with the parents of the person next door. I asked her to come fix Mom's respirator. She came and saw that it was severely out of whack and called Stefanie, the respiratory therapist. They came and needed a third nurse to help re-position Mom's tubes. I hate watching that, but I stayed. Per usual, Mom gagged and resisted. Her face grimaced. They kept apologizing to her, but had to persist. Eventually, they got it re-set and re-taped to her face. They also gave her extra sedative to calm her down for the night. See what I mean about needing the trake? I can't wait to get all the tubes out of her mouth.
I have mixed emotions about the extra sedative. On the one hand, I want her calm and peaceful. On the other, I want her to wake up.
We're eager to get some spark out of her. Visiting and speaking to her unresponsive face is a little discouraging. It's what set Colleen off. Part of it is that nobody can really know how she's going to emerge from this coma. There's a hematoma at the front of her frontal lobe, behind the left eye orbit. That's the part of the brain that controls personality. That has us on edge. Kevin and I joked a little about Mom emerging crazy, freshly equipped with your Lizinator steel arm for maximum elbow damage. Then today, Cindy lent credit to that idea when she said it's not uncommon for people to emerge ornery, impatient, and with a lot of cussing.
We're nervous not knowing who's lurking on the other side of her oozing eyes.
Tomorrow it will have been a week since the accident. What a week! To think that just seven days ago at this time I was hiking in the mountains of Gunma Prefecture, drinking wine, and having a picnic under beautiful autumn leaves. You know what preoccupied me? The stock market. I lamented to myself that I couldn't get away from it. Even in those beautiful mountains it was on my mind, if just a little. Now, it's my salvation, providing time away from what truly haunts the mind. Mom re-set my perspective.
I'm about done for the night. Mom's quiet now and it seems a good time to slip out. Maybe I'll go get some good American fast food. That's been another diversion for me. Last night, on Emily's suggestion, I went to Sonic at 11:45 p.m. I listened to Crosby, Stills, & Nash while I ate in the car. Em was right. It's good food.
Speaking of CSN, I've been listening to the CDs in Mom's car all week. They've provided the soundtrack to this experience and it's added another dimension. The melodious voices of CSN bring back memories of growing up listening to Mom's music. I thought remembered doing dishes after dinner. I thought of how the music of the 60s and 70s is my music, too, despite its coming before my time. That's thanks to Mom. It made me sad to see the pictures of young Crosby, Stills, & Nash on the CD booklet. They're Mom's age. The people of that era are ending up in ICUs, fighting to stay alive. The harmonies have given way to respirator rhythms. Is the spirit of Woodstock on IVs and a heart monitor? I hope not.
I'm a foot man, myself. Not in the usual meaning of that phrase. I tend toward Mom's feet because they're unspoiled. There are no needles in them, they're not damaged, they're warm, and they're so cutely active already. I rub them and they move and if I close my eyes I can imagine that we're right back in the living room and I have lotion and Mom's leaning back in her chair and telling me that only I can do it this well. Emily also lingers near Mom's feet. Once she fell asleep across the bed with her hands around Mom's feet. So charming, but so sad.
A couple of days ago, they put IVs in Mom's feet. We didn't like that. Suddenly, she was 100% covered. Luckily, the foot needles were out this morning, but she still has holes and bruises there. I'm down to just her big toes being untouched by all of this. Tomorrow, I'll clamp my fingers around them.
I went to "There Coffee House" on East Colfax, a place I found using Google. It had a wireless connection as advertised, but it was a gay bar. Not exactly the atmosphere I was seeking, but I found a place in the corner by myself with a cup of cappuccino and a laser focus on my work. I was out of place with my calculator, notebook, and determination. All around me people were flirting, guffawing, whistling, poking at each other, turning all comments into sexual ones, and otherwise carrying on. I stayed off the gaydar, evidently, because aside from a friendly and funny black man, everybody left me alone.
I got my work mostly done, and then finished it back at the Yaffe House which, much to my elation, has a cable internet connection that I can use with my laptop. Eureka! No more gay bars for me. From midnight to 4:00 this morning, I worked at the house in complete comfort and SILENCE. A perfectly fine Kelly Letter went out to subscribers, not one of whom will ever know the circumstances under which it was prepared.
For historical reference, during Mom's first week in the hospital, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 0.9% to finish at 11,986 while the Nasdaq also lost 0.9% to finish at 2,331. The market was doing just fine until her accident. It fell in sympathy with her. Last month, the Dow rose 3.4% and the Nasdaq rose 4.8%. Mom was a bad omen for Wall Street. It felt good to stop thinking about hematomas for a while to think about stocks instead.
I took a break from writing at the gay bar and returned to the hospital a little past 8:00 last night. Colleen was despairing again. She said, "I might not ever get my mother back." Dain told her to stop thinking that way.
Emily stood in her usual recent daze, staring nowhere but in Mom's direction while her hands stroke Mom's feet or arms on autopilot. Her eyes teared over during Colleen's public airing.
Kevin had retreated to his chair in front of the sink in the corner, where he often sits and reads, checks cell phone mail, or rests his ball-capped head in his hands. He made eye contact with me, rolled his eyes, and made a face that said, "Not again." It wasn't mean, though, just an acknowledgment that the worm had turned once more.
In the morning, before I left to work, Mom had returned from surgery on her broken arm. They put in pins and a plate over her elbow. Cindy, one of our favorite nurses, showed us the x-ray films. I dubbed Mom the "Lizinator" and the term stuck. We couldn't wait to tell Charlie that Mom would now be backhanding him with hardware once she got better.
Everybody went home for the night. Kevin was the last to leave and said he'd be absent the next day, today now, because he had to get ready for work on Monday. We'd been joking all week about who'd be the best child on Mom's list. I told him he was definitely out of the running now. He would forever be the son who didn't come to see his mother every day.
We were joking, of course, but as the de facto leader of our support group I'd been thinking for some time that people would need to get back to their routines eventually. This first week I expected to be what it was: everybody here all the time and never wanting to leave Mom's side. However, part of my plan in coming from Japan with an open ticket and everything I need to stay indefinitely was that I would be able to keep the family functioning so they could all return to work and just visit and take care of Mom during their free time. There's a certain amount of practicality that just can't be refused forever. Besides, as I discovered when writing my newsletter, getting back to normalcy now and then is good.
I had a chance to enforce this idea today, more quickly than I'd expected. Colleen was down again. Dain said she'd been restless all night. She got up at 3:00 a.m. to check MySpace. She ate something. He couldn't sleep, either, because of her moving around. Early this morning, she told him that she wanted to quit her job because she couldn't focus on anything except her mother being in the hospital.
At Mom's bedside, I told her that she needed to keep her job. I explained that it's what Mom would want her to do. It was hard to find that job. There's nothing more for Mom that any of us can do, anyway. She's receiving the maximum amount of care available. Our big part will come later when she's recovering away from the 24-hour nursing care. In the interest of being in good shape for that, I told Colleen, she needs to take care of herself now. Quitting her job to sit around depressed at St. Andrew all the time will do neither her nor Mom any good.
"I'm sure the last thing Mom wants to find when she finally wakes up is that none of her kids are working, nobody has any money, and that her accident destroyed everything that everybody had built up to now," I said. Cindy came in then and reinforced what I'd said. Colleen agreed. She'll return to work tomorrow.
Emily will go back to work on Tuesday. Kevin Tomorrow. Dain tomorrow. Karen will keep her usual schedule. Probably some time next week, I'll move up to the house to take care of Daniel and Charlie, and come down to visit Mom in the afternoons.
I'm on financial duty, naturally. Emily brought all of Mom's bills today. I'll go through them and her check registers to figure out where things stand and how best to handle them. Some kind people in Estes have donated money to the family. I told Emily to put it in an envelope and use that envelope for family shopping, gas money to Denver, and such. If the contribution money runs out, she's to tell me so that I can add more cash to the envelope. That seems a simple approach.
Mom's scheduled to get a tracheostomy tomorrow. That'll be good. The ventilator is irritating her. Sometimes she bites down on it. Other times she moves it around with her tongue and turns her head with a grimace. Because this looks like a long haul, the doctors think "it's time for a trake." I agree. They always bring forms to me and ask for my agreement. I have yet to offer any better ideas than theirs and usually wonder why they're asking me. I trust them. They're very good here. Still, it's nice to be included in the decisions and to sign the papers for Mom.
Beyond the trake, they'll finish her Lizinator arm. They have to close her stomach one of these days, too. I spoke at length with Dr. Offner this morning about keeping it open. They want to get her closed ASAP because the longer she's open the harder it is to ever close her. There's still a window of time during which they can stitch her back up. Much longer, though, and they'll have to use cadaver skin (lovely), a Whitman patch that's like two pieces of velcro sewed to each side of the incision and then pushed together, or a skin graft using Mom's own skin. I really hope they can just sew close her up soon.
She's still in a coma, but she's "pecking at the egg shell," as I like to put it. She's moving around a lot, trying to open her eyes it seems, and really focusing on her feet, just like she does when she's alert and healthy. As I type in her room right now on my laptop -- thanks to having gotten it out of my suitcase for work yesterday and discovering how nice it was to work on my own computer -- she's crossing and uncrossing her feet and turning her head a lot.
Ooh! She just lifted her left knee and nearly flopped her right leg out of bed. I'm going to raise the rail. Just a sec...
That was a lot more than a sec. It's now almost 10:00 p.m. I discovered that she was again chewing on her respirator and that it had lodged between her teeth and cheek. It looked like she had a hot dog in there. She was turned way over on her side and ready to roll right onto the floor.
I interrupted a meeting that Nurse Mary from Ireland, another excellent one, was having with the parents of the person next door. I asked her to come fix Mom's respirator. She came and saw that it was severely out of whack and called Stefanie, the respiratory therapist. They came and needed a third nurse to help re-position Mom's tubes. I hate watching that, but I stayed. Per usual, Mom gagged and resisted. Her face grimaced. They kept apologizing to her, but had to persist. Eventually, they got it re-set and re-taped to her face. They also gave her extra sedative to calm her down for the night. See what I mean about needing the trake? I can't wait to get all the tubes out of her mouth.
I have mixed emotions about the extra sedative. On the one hand, I want her calm and peaceful. On the other, I want her to wake up.
We're eager to get some spark out of her. Visiting and speaking to her unresponsive face is a little discouraging. It's what set Colleen off. Part of it is that nobody can really know how she's going to emerge from this coma. There's a hematoma at the front of her frontal lobe, behind the left eye orbit. That's the part of the brain that controls personality. That has us on edge. Kevin and I joked a little about Mom emerging crazy, freshly equipped with your Lizinator steel arm for maximum elbow damage. Then today, Cindy lent credit to that idea when she said it's not uncommon for people to emerge ornery, impatient, and with a lot of cussing.
We're nervous not knowing who's lurking on the other side of her oozing eyes.
Tomorrow it will have been a week since the accident. What a week! To think that just seven days ago at this time I was hiking in the mountains of Gunma Prefecture, drinking wine, and having a picnic under beautiful autumn leaves. You know what preoccupied me? The stock market. I lamented to myself that I couldn't get away from it. Even in those beautiful mountains it was on my mind, if just a little. Now, it's my salvation, providing time away from what truly haunts the mind. Mom re-set my perspective.
I'm about done for the night. Mom's quiet now and it seems a good time to slip out. Maybe I'll go get some good American fast food. That's been another diversion for me. Last night, on Emily's suggestion, I went to Sonic at 11:45 p.m. I listened to Crosby, Stills, & Nash while I ate in the car. Em was right. It's good food.
Speaking of CSN, I've been listening to the CDs in Mom's car all week. They've provided the soundtrack to this experience and it's added another dimension. The melodious voices of CSN bring back memories of growing up listening to Mom's music. I thought remembered doing dishes after dinner. I thought of how the music of the 60s and 70s is my music, too, despite its coming before my time. That's thanks to Mom. It made me sad to see the pictures of young Crosby, Stills, & Nash on the CD booklet. They're Mom's age. The people of that era are ending up in ICUs, fighting to stay alive. The harmonies have given way to respirator rhythms. Is the spirit of Woodstock on IVs and a heart monitor? I hope not.
Come back and enjoy those good songs again! Not from a music therapist, but from your own stereo in the car and at home.
Before I go, I want to ask you if you're aware when we talk to you? As you read these words someday (oh when will that be?), can you think back to those long days in the hospital when we hopefully pushed your chest, stroked your hair so like a child's now, and spoke close to your ear? Did you feel our excitement when you turned your head? Did you enjoy the foot rubs? Did any of it do any good?
I'm a foot man, myself. Not in the usual meaning of that phrase. I tend toward Mom's feet because they're unspoiled. There are no needles in them, they're not damaged, they're warm, and they're so cutely active already. I rub them and they move and if I close my eyes I can imagine that we're right back in the living room and I have lotion and Mom's leaning back in her chair and telling me that only I can do it this well. Emily also lingers near Mom's feet. Once she fell asleep across the bed with her hands around Mom's feet. So charming, but so sad.
A couple of days ago, they put IVs in Mom's feet. We didn't like that. Suddenly, she was 100% covered. Luckily, the foot needles were out this morning, but she still has holes and bruises there. I'm down to just her big toes being untouched by all of this. Tomorrow, I'll clamp my fingers around them.
Posted by Jason Kelly | 7:33 PM
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