So Yeah. Hospital.

As some of you might know (from FB) my mom's been in the hospital approx 10 days, for a gall bladder attack. For normal people, they would have been in the hospital that Friday, had the GB removed and been home by, I don't know, maybe Monday the latest? Not her. Nothing with her is ever routine. Everything is potentially life threatening.

Look, I'm not made of stone. She was in the hospital by Friday, so I came down on Sunday as she turned septic, and well, NORMAL FOLKS OF REASONABLE QUALITY OF HEALTH have been known to die of sepsis. So I went to see her. And her health vacillated back and forth, and surgery was scheduled for Monday, then rescheduled due to her A-Fib. And knowing I have a finite amount of personal time (of which I'd much rather use on MY OWN SHIT), I bid my mother adieu, thinking this was the final good bye. 

Surgery came and went on (LAST) Tuesday, and despite the docs abandoning a laproscopic procedure midway and ended up cutting her gut open like a tuna fish can, she survived the surgery. Then it was ZOMG DEATH WATCH for a few more days as we all waited for her to get off the ventilator. True to form, waffling right on through this. Despite her declarations as much as she wants to die, HERE SHE IS, still converting oxygen into carbon dioxide. Still here.

And rather than have a momentary presence of MIND, and realize she could have died, no. She's not happy. She's angry and irritable, and DELUSIONAL, thinking she is fit to go home to take care of herself (which she very clearly IS NOT), and of course, will be fighting the decision to put her in a nursing facility until she is able to come home. IF she is able to come home.

I firmly support my mother being in a facility. But what I think matters very little. I am not my mother, nor am I her power of attorney. But she needs a facility:

• 3 hot meals a day on time every day;
• Medication dispensed consistently on time every day;
• Round the clock care, so if she takes a tumble, she won't be on the floor for hours, as she attempts to summon help via status updates on fucking Facebook, in the end she sat in her own waste for roughly 4 hours before help arrived;
• Back up generators in the event of another Storm Sandy knocks out the power grid again, she won't be stuck in her recline and lift chair stuck in the upright position and in her own waste for roughly 18 hours; and lastly
• She will get some measure of social interaction vis-a-vis the medicine or her food schedule which she is not getting at home.

She's obviously less than thrilled with things. And today she must be feeling better physically, because she's already reverted into her old standby habit of passive-aggressive abuse, in this case, playing the part of Pitiful Pearl, lip pooched out, quivering, voice faltering and sounding feeble-ish. Today I called and she was boo-hooing into the phone with the Pitiful Pearl voice whimpering about how horrible the care is at the hospital, and how they put her on the potty and left her there. Well fuck YOU! If you want to go home so damned bad, get yourself off the fucking potty and quit whining.

Ten days into this and I am drained of whatever empathy I am capable of. I have reverted back to MY standby of sleeping excessively to avoid stress. I haven't felt good nearly the entire month of January thanks to a bronchial thing which morphed into a sinus thing, and the overall doldrums of a thus far VERY BITTER COLD winter, plus worrying about whether she lives yet there she is feeling sorry for herself, wanting to die. And I just can't abide it.

At first, I thought it was perhaps contrived out of thin air, her allegation that a nurse or a CNA actually had the gall to say to her that she brought this all on herself. But yanno what? Even if they DID say it, and it IS INAPPROPRIATE to say, it is 100% true. 

She DID bring this on herself, and by "this" is her beyond-morbid obesity (if there even is such a category). She's like Pizza the Hut from Spaceballs, eating herself into oblivion just about. Thinking that all she has to do to manage her diabetes is to inject herself with insulin and she's good. No. She's over eating, and eating a lot of things she has no business eating as a diabetic, and as someone with diverticulitis. She's got horrendous cellulitis ravaging her legs, and she's too fat for a CAT or an MRI, and they held off on doing surgery for as long as they did because of the risks involved, but in the end they decided that either she'd die of sepsis or die under the knife. Color us all surprised when she pulled through the surgery. There she is, waffling to the end. Not sure if she wants to stay or if she wants to go... playing two ends off the middle, and she's too dull to realize that even though she did survive the surgery, by no means is she ALIVE.