While mom sleeps, I watch “Ballroom Bootcamp” on TLC. Three women, who have never danced before and who are variously overweight, are learning to Tango. One is a lesbian mother, one a stay at home mom, and one a chubby young woman in her twenties.
Before I stopped ballroom dancing three years ago and started gaining weight, I was learning the Tango. Watching these women embrace their poise and grace and, as the young woman explained –her “Diva Attitudel” — I am missing mine. It is torture to watch them doing what I still want to do. They become exquisite.
As they dance competitively, dressed and made-up to the nines, I sit here in the same pajama pants and big shirt I’ve been wearing and sleeping in for two days now. I am reminded how much clothes often — if not make the woman — make the woman’s attitude.
I think I’ll send for the magic omelette maker that was advertised during the commerical break.
So mujch for Diva Attitude.
My time will come again.
But for now, here’s hoping for a Happy Hogmanay.

It’s 3 a.m. She’s up. Wants us both with her. Wants to sit at the table and talk and eat. I think she thinks she’s going to die before morning. The cat is sleeping somewhere, hidden, in her room.
So we sit with her, at the kitchen table, and listen as she talks, non-stop, in a voice so weak that we can hardly hear. She wants me to have her hats and some suit that she seems to be fond of. She talks of the past, of people in her past. She cries a little. Thanks us. Says we are angels; knows we’re her kids making up for all the rotten things we’ve done over the years. We give her a Tylenol. She takes nothing stronger than that for pain.
In an hour, she’s ready to go to sleep again. I know that she will be up, every hour on the hour, to go to the bathroom, and we will have to help her. Yawn. So much for a good night’s sleep.
When she wakes close to noon, she seems surprised to find that she’s still alive. She is weak. Unsteady on her feet. She gets up and sits in her recliner for a while, eats some eggs, and goes back to sleep.
I get on the phone to find out how we might be able to get medical help at home. Other kind of help is easier to get, but it’s the medical support that we really need. She doesn’t want to have to go back to a hospital, and we don’t want her to either. We’ll take advantage of the caregiving help, too.
I finally find someone who can explain the process. But, of course, it’s the holidays, so I can’t get to anyone in charge until Tuesday. She has a neurologist appointment on Tuesday, and I have no idea how we will get her dressed and out of the house and into a car.
My cat, Calli, keeps trying to sleep next to my mom, but she doesn’t want my chubby feline on her bed. Calli eats a little, follows me around, keeps trying to sneak into my mother’s bedroom.
I read. I knit. I sit and blog while my brother sits with her. Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve.
This is the way the year ends; this is the way the year ends. This is the way the year ends — not with a bang, but a whimper.

I knew it was there; I just kept ingoring it, figuring, you know, manana.
I did the daring deed today — opened up the container, scooped it all out with a paper towel, tossed it in the trash. Some things only get worse manana.
And then there are some things that just sit there, static and staionary, until you finally tackle them. Like the boxes of odds and ends I upturned looking for extension cords, heating pads, velcro, hooks — all in an effort to facilitate my mom’s life at this point. It will be a while before they get tackled, I’m afraid.
And then there’s the rosemary and wine marinated boneless leg of lamb that I was suppoed to cook for Christmas Day. Oy! No manana. Do it now or freeze it, and it just won’t be as tender after it’s defrosted. So, I put the roast on a spit in the rotisserie/convection/double burner table-top oven I bought when I moved. (Huh! NOW it’s on sale; I paid a third again more when I bought it. )
Oy! So lambdelcious. Crispy outside, succulent inside, redolent of rosemary. I sit down by myself (my mother is barely eating anything and my brother is a vegetarian) and stuff myself with lamb and sweet potatoes and salad. Went through all that trouble just for myself. And it was worth it.
How can I stuff my face while my mom is lying in the next room, barely able to get up and eat a little soup every once in a while, you might wonder. (I made a big pot of beef oxtail soup with all kinds of veggies, including potato skins for the potassium and [my secret to great beef soup] a can of V-8 juice instead of tomatoes. Then I strain it all out and wind up with a most nutritious broth.) Food is love.
While I’m engrossed in food today, my cat has not eaten at all. Instead, she finds places to hide in my mother’s room. When I carry her back to my space and put her in front of food, she runs back to my mom’s. Is she sick too, or is she super empathetic? My first cat, an independent and non-affectionate male, would come and snuggle up next to me and purr whenever I wasn’t feeling well. Somehow they know.
Lamb on a spit and moldy guacamole. A little delight and a lot of entropy. Ah, life.

“That Elaine was shit, she says.”
“I’m Elaine, Ma,” I say.
“No,” she says. “I mean the other Elaine. She wants to be with her four girlfriends. She has no use for me. You’re good to me. You are like my mother.”
Before we moved here, before she began declining so rapidly, I used to try to get out at least a couple of times a month– meet friends for dinner or a movie. I could tell that she wanted to go with me, but I ignored her hints and grabbed whatever time for myself that I could. Since I wasn’t totally dedicated to her, apparently she thought I was a shit.
That “other” Elaine — the one who had a life. In her mind, the Evil Twin.
She’s rallied a bit, but the hospital experience has left her with residual aches and pains. So I still sleep in the next room. My brother has rigged up an alarm that sounds when she gets out of bed. She’s still a bit unstable on her feet, so I get up at night to help her get to the bathroom.
This is the good Elaine, the one whose life revolves around her mother. Just what my mother always wanted.
Meanwhile, I’m getting the hang of my bread machine — made a delicious loaf of Russian Sweet Bread, which is similar to the bread my mother used to make around the holidays. Half of the loaf is gone already. Tomorrow I will make more and also roast the marinated boneless leg of lamb that was supposed to be for Christmas Day dinner. Good thing I like to cook.

so then there’s b!X, having a very Hunter S. Thompsonesque Xmas.

It can’t have just all happened in three days! I guess having a total of ten hours’ sleep over three nights tends to distort one’s sense of time.
I’ll begin at the end. It is 3 p.m.. My mother is back home, sleeping in her bed, exhausted and sore from Christmas in the ICU nightmare. A the moment I’m sitting in her electric recliner, my laptop warming my thighs and a heating pad warming my lower back.
Did you know that when you get a blood transfusion, they also give you, intravenously, a diuretic named “Lasix,” which releases the body’s stored potassium along with the urine. I didn’t know that, and they didn’t tell us. I do know that a low level of potassium in the body can cause traumatically painful leg cramps. I did give them a list of the medications that my mother takes, a list that includes several prescriptions for neurological problems — hers being severe leg cramps. So much for informed consent.
So, after the barium swallow etc., the CAT scan, and the X-ray, after the unsuccessful attempt to stick a tube down my mother’s nose into her stomach, after all the colonoscopy discomfort and intrusive exploration of her upper GI tract, after the countless blood tests that turned her into a human pincushion, they concluded that
1.Her “blood count” was a little more than half of what it should be
2. She is bleeding internally somewhere.
3. She has diverticulosis but no obvious place where that condition would result in internal bleeding.
4. The rest of her GI system is fine.
With not “enough” blood to fuel normal physical and mental functions, no wonder she was too weak to walk and talk coherently.
So they gave her blood– four IV bags of it and added the Lasix and saline. And they stuck a catheter in her to catch and measure her urine and wires all over her chest to measure her heart and oxygen levels.
And then the leg cramps started. Excruciating cramps that exhausted her and us as we held her almost dead weight while she tried to stand. Everytime she sat down, the cramps would start again. She thrashed with pain, irritating the places where the IV and catheter and electrones were attached.
In the middle of all of this, they held her down and gave her another blood test to check her potassium levels (duh), and then, procedures followed, they finally gave her a few potassium IVs But it was too late. Nothing would stop the spasms in her leg muscles that went on and on despite various drugs and finally morphine. Even the morphine couldn’t knock her out. For two days, she was in a living hell of pain.
They finally allowed her to take her Quinine prescription, but they told her not to take one of the other meds she was taking for the cramping problem.
And so, at 5:30 this morning, we announced that we wanted all tubes and wires off her and we were taking her home, against medical advice. I signed the papers that had me take full responsibility for whatever happened next, and we wheeled her out to the car. She slept in my arms all the way home. We pretty much had to carry her out of the car and onto the chair in which I now sit.
Shaking with cold with morphine withdrawl, she managed to get into bed, and I covered her with two fleece blankets and a quilt and put a heating pad on her feet.
I headed for her electric reclining chair, where I also fell asleep for a short while..
When I woke up, she was up and dressed. Teary-eyed, she hugged me and said she loved me. She still ached all over from the residue muscle pain of the leg cramps.
What happened to me, she asked. Do you remember being the in hospital, I asked. No, she said. What happened?
She doesn’t remember the hospital nightmare, which is all for the best.
I get onto Google and search for foods that contain potassium — foods that she can eat, given her current GI state and her diverticulosis. Chicken and potato skins, I find.
I peel two potatoes and boil the skins in some homemade chicken broth that I defrost. I dice the potatoes and microwave them with a little water. I add the potatoes to the strained chicken broth and toss out the cooked skins. The minerals from the skin are now all in the broth anyway.
She eats the whole bowl and goes back to sleep.
And so I end this post where I began, typing into my laptop.
I add this warning to all those who have older parents who wind up in the hospital. If you don’t stay with them, you don’t know what is being done to them. Hospitals have procedures that must be followed, and sometimes those procedures wind up causing more problems than you brought them in to have fixed. You expect the doctors and nurses to truly treat each patient as an individual and carefully integrate what they plan to do with what the patient is already dealing with, including meds. Don’t count on it.
Modern medicine saves many lives. One of my cousins just got diagnosed with cancer that must be operated on. I hope it saves hers.
And I’m still hoping we will find out how it can alleviate my mother’s pain.
ADDENDUM
I thought I was done with this post, but here it is, 2 a.m., and we just got her back to bed after a run to a larger hospital’s emergency room because her leg cramps again became so unbearable. By the time we got there, the cramps had subsided, but she was barely able to stand up after not really having slept for three days. They ran blood tests, which came out fine. Told me to put her back on the meds that the other hospital ignored, gave her a muscle relaxant, and gave me the name of a neurologist so that we can figure out all that is causing the leg cramps.
Finding the right and good doctor is such a crapshoot (as is everything else in life, I guess).
So, now, finally to bed, with a heating pad for my own spasmed back muscles. I don’t think any of us will be getting up early today.

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.
—————————–
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.

He made a digital slide show for her of the people who have fed into her life — from her grandparents riding in a haywagon in Poland to her great grandson toddling in Massachusetts. He thought it might help to ground her after several days of episodes that seem awfully like mini-strokes. She has been adamant about not going to the hospital — no tests, no prodding, no surgeries. Whatever will happen will happen.
So, we take turns staying with her as she goes through bouts of crying and panting and starting mumbled sentences that she never finishes. Sometimes she seems to rally, tells us she loves us, repeats “I’ve been a good mother, haven’t I?”
We tell her yes, she has, and we love her too.
“Where are you going?” she asks, afraid she will be abandoned. We’re not going anywhere, we say. We’re staying here with you.
Here I am, ensconed on a pull-out bed in the next room so that I can hear her if she wakes up and needs help. I balance my laptop on my lap while my cat warms my feet.
This will be my holiday — lying with my laptop and my cat, listening for noises from the next room.
It’s a little too much deja vu for us. Our Dad died on the day after Christmas 25 years ago.

It’s all over the news — the picture of the Pope wearing what looks awfully like a Santa Claus hat. Actually, it’s the kind of warm red and ermine winter hat that popes and kings and other nobility wore in cold climates way way back in the olden days. And, from what I understand, the pope still carries on that tradition. I’m wondering if this pope was astute enough to wear that hat as a reminder of just where the Santa hat — and the Santa legend — came from. It’s probably just the kind of hat that the European version of the original St. Nicholas, who was an actual Catholic bishop, wore.
Somehow the hat just doesn’t work without the beard.

That’s what my mother watches. Sometimes all day. The other night it was a Bing Crosby Marathon. She lasted until midnight and I taped the two that came after. I have to admit that I enjoyed the simplistic, heartwarming, idealistic stories of both Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary. I know that I must have seen them as a young Catholic child, but I didn’t remember them. And those old movies sure do have sound tracks that are much clearer to the old ear than the newer films. I can’t help wondering how come, given all the new audio technology available now.
I also have to say that I do not use the word “god” in the title of this post in any literal way. It’s just an expression to me — like “go to hell.”
Which is why I am so delighted with that brilliant judge barring Intelligent Design from Pennsylvania’s Biology classrooms. You can read about and link to the specifics of that landmark ruling here.
And, speaking of going to hell — or heaven — the Barbara Walters special on what various people think “heaven” is was most encouraging because it showed just how much that idea is simply a matter of faith and belief — and, as far as I’m concerned, lots of entertaining brainwashing.
What is even more encouraging for me to hear is also quoted on the ABC “heaven” site:
For most people, proof of Heaven’s existence is not necessary. Faith is all they need. Dr. Dean Hamer, a geneticist at the National Institutes of Health, thinks he has figured out why this faith comes easily to some, but eludes others. “Whether a person is spiritual or not is not necessarily a matter of their will. It may be something innate about their personality,” Hamer tells Walters.
Hamer suspects spirituality might be a personality trait encoded in our genes. He began his research by asking more than 1,000 people to answer a series of questions about faith and spirituality. He then tested DNA from the study participants and found that those who scored highest on his survey had a mutation of at least one gene that seemed to affect their level of spirituality. He named it “the God gene.”
And, in response to the illusion that some people have about “near death” experiences:
British psychologist Susan Blackmore has spent decades searching for a scientific explanation: “When the oxygen levels fall in the brain … you get massive over-activity in the brain. … I think there is a true transformation, but not because you’ve been to heaven.
Ah. A “god gene.” I guess I was born without that.
Although, I did have a “near death” (sort of) experience in which I saw a white light toward which I felt I was flying. And I heard a strange buzzing in my ears, which — as an English major — made me think of Emily Dickinson’s poem that goes “I heard a fly buzz when I died.” I was sure I was dead.
I had just given (breech) birth to my daughter, and had gone through excruciating pain before anyone believed me enough to give me enough drugs to knock me out cold.
And so I felt myself flying toward a bright light in the center of my vision, listening to the fly buzz, sure that I was dead and regretting terribly that I would never even have a chance to see my baby.
Slowly the buzz became the voices of the doctors and nurses, and the light focused into the lights on the celing as they were wheeling me to wherever they were wheeling me.
So much for my “near death” experience.
But I have had transcendent feelings while meditating — a phenomenon also explained in Walters’ report:
Hamer also notes that researchers have been able to detect changes in the brain when people are in the midst of intense prayer or meditation.
Dr. Andrew Newberg, a neuroradiologist at the University of Pennsylvania, is one of those researchers. Newberg says his research shows a marked increase in brain activity in the frontal regions of the brain. “At the same time,” he adds, “the parts of the brain that monitor our sense of time and space became less active.”
Newberg says this contributes to an individual’s feeling of “losing that sense of self.” The feeling, he said, is “attributed to God, for example. And then they feel that God is providing them that energy, that feeling.”
Heaven… I’m in heaven,
And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak.
And I seem to find the happiness I seek,
When we’re out together dancing cheek to cheek.
Heaven… I’m in heaven,
And the cares that hung around me through the week,
Seem to vanish like a gambler’s lucky streak,
When we’re out together dancing cheek to cheek.
Oh, I love to climb a mountain,
And to reach the highest peak.
But it doesn’t thrill me half as much
As dancing cheek to cheek.
Oh, I love to go out fishing
In a river or a creek.
But I don’t enjoy it half as much
As dancing cheek to cheek.
Dance with me! I want my arms about you.
The charms about you
Will carry me through to…
Heaven… I’m in heaven,
And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak.
And I seem to find the happiness I seek,
When we’re out together dancing cheek to cheek.
I just love those Turner Classic Movies.