Familiar Surroundings

It was almost too normal, or maybe too familiar. Yesterday, sometime in the afternoon I wanted to call and see if my mom was making any progress in her trip from the hospital to her home. So I called my parents number, expecting my dad or maybe my sister to answer. Instead, it was my mom picking up the phone. For a few seconds, I forgot everything. I forgot about the cancer that was eating away at her body. I forgot about the all the pain and the frustration of the past few months. For a few seconds there, it was just me, calling the house and my mom picking up the phone, just like I've done a million times before that.

So mom did finally return home yesterday after nearly a month spent in the hospital. Other than the ambulance that transported her getting lost a little bit, the entire episode seemed to go pretty good. While we are still working out some of the little kinks with mom being home, things seem to be going good. When I saw mom for the first time, lying in her bed at home, I couldn't believe how much better she looked. Maybe it was just the soft lighting of her makeshift bedroom, but she definitely seemed more relaxed and happy. She spent most of the day awake and talking, so by the time the early evening came, she was pretty wiped out. It was definitely a big day for mom.

About 7:30PM last night, the nurse that my dad hired to take care of mom arrived. She will be living at the house from Sunday night to Friday night. On the weekends, it will be up to the family to make sure mom is taken care of. Very quickly, the nurse made quite an impression on us.

She is a Polish woman who speaks limited English but seems to read and understand it fairly well. However, what she lacks in the English department, she more than made up for with her assertiveness and expertise. Within 15 minutes of being at the house, she had already had mom sitting up on the edge of the bed and washing her, and quickly followed that up with a good massage. To be honest, I think mom was a little startled by it all. She even mentioned that she hasn't had that good of a "workout" since she's been in the hospital. The nurses at the hospital made sure mom was comfortable, but never really insisted that she move around or do anything really. Mom's new nurse has different ideas. In the first 16 hours that she has been at the house, the nurse (Jenny), has already gone shopping, cooked breakfast, and done laundry, in addition to getting up to speed on mom's medication and figuring out a good schedule for mom's daily activities.

As I've mentioned previously, mom hasn't been eating much lately. However, when the nurse came over last night, she declared that she would make sure mom would be consuming a minimum of 1000 calories every day. We all kind of chuckled at the comment, thinking that Nurse Jenny would be in for a surprise when it was actually time to get mom to eat. I mean we've all been encouraging mom to eat for over a month now, and it hasn't done much good. However, somehow, Jenny coaxed mom into eating a whole bowl of oatmeal, some polish lunchmeat, and some cantaloupe this morning, so it was everyone else who was in for the surprise. Apparently, this woman knows what she is doing. Maybe, just maybe, this is the kind of tough love that mom needs right now. We've got the other kind of love figured out already.