I can’t get the smell of the blood out of my awareness. I’ve showered, washed my hair, changed my clothes — but it’s still with me, sourly red and black, just as it was left at the bottom of the portable commode they placed beside her bed. As soon as they removed it, she just contributed more. I found myself gagging at the stench, but somehow I managed to block it out and help to clean her up. Yes, the daughter becomes the mother.
I have no idea when it really started, her internal bleeding. And, even after that traumatic battery of tests they administered to check out her gastro-intestinal system, they still don’t have a definitive cause. Four bags of blood later, they continue to check to see what her blood level is at. For a while, she was eliminating it almost as fast as it was IV-ing in. She is in the Intensive Care Unit and she’ll be there until they release her.
She is, literally, drained, and her disorientation and anger has escalated because of the pain and discomfort she has had to endure. After the testing procedures, the bleeding seemed to have stopped. I just got a call that it started again. .
What was my choice? To have just kept her home to begin with, weakening and in pain, not knowing exactly what was wrong, incoherent and terrified, until, just shy of her 90th birthday, she gave in, gave up, gave out?
If her blood level remains constant, they will send her home, and it’s entirely possible that she will come home and the whole thing will escalate again. If they have not found a defect, a problem that can be treated in some reasonably non-invasive way, I will be faced with the same dilemma all over again. And we will again be reeling from the stench of those red and black leavings, that smell of bloody decomposition.
And if it happens again, I think I will think that it’s time to make the hard choice.
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Meanwhile, it’s Christmas Eve, and I am home alone, having left my brother to keep vigil at my mother’s bedside. I will go back for another 28 hour stint tomorrow.
Meanwhile, it’s Christmas Eve, and I just had a plate of Polish pierogi with sauteed onions. That’s what my family always had on Christmas Eve — and also barszcz, which is a clear mushroom soup make from dried mushrooms imported from Poland. I never got to make that part. I’ve frozen the two dozen other pierogi that I bought (Millie’s are the most authentically delicious.)
Meanwhile, it’s Christmas Eve, and more than a dozen miles away, my mother is bleeding inside. And there’s not a damned thing anyone seems to be able to do about it.