My Beloved Mom |
A week ago I
was planning to take Mom on a flight to Romania to see her siblings one last
time. As I attempted to renew her passport, I remember wondering if the
bureaucratic wheels will turn fast enough in sixty days. Would she still be
able to travel then? How prophetic those words have become! Now she is locked
inside a body that can no longer move. One moment she was vibrant and mobile,
and the next moment her life was turned upside down.
The doctors ordered
tests and more tests but were unable to find what caused her ataxia. The
hospital staff operated a tight business around the elderly “units” of Obama Care.
Everyone wore a cardio monitor and the beds were fitted with alarms in case the
patients decided to wonder unauthorized. The goal was to have as few accidents and
falls as possible and an ideal infection control.
The nursing
staff was fantastic, well trained, and highly dedicated. The doctors, hailing
from many third world nations, were too busy with private practices to meet
with patients’ families. Their orders for tests, drugs, and charts were relayed
through third parties. Most did not even make eye contact with other humans,
keeping their faces down in the elevator.
It seemed to
a keen observer that the lost art of humane face to face medicine has been
replaced by mounds of paperwork, electronic dictation, and non-medically
trained baby sitters.
How would
they function if the entire Obama Care-mandated electronic system crashes?
Would they still be able to write down the patient’s name, medical history, the
type of drugs administered, and do simple math to calculate medicine dosage?
Who will control and share the patients’ sensitive data and how will it be used
to help them or against them?
I had to
fill out tons of Medicare paperwork with some highly intrusive and unnecessary
questions. Mom had to sign one sheet herself. With shaky hands, she was able to
muster the first four letters of her name; the rest became a blob of black ink,
a far cry from the beautiful cursive writing of the past.
Without a
stroke, a heart attack, or any obvious cause for her distress, Mom was a
patient in urgent need of discharge. Her “case worker,” a very cold and
businesslike individual, made arrangements to discharge this “unit” before the infection
cleared up. The last antibiotic IV dose was finished 15 minutes before she was
whisked away in an ambulance. Her bed was needed for the next case.
I wished I
could carry mom to the deck, and sit her on her favorite glider. Her colorful
straw hat that shielded her eyes from the sun is still resting on the floor. Mom’s
usual eagle eyes are dim and clouded with fear and confusion now. She sat in
this chair for hours every day, watching the birds, the squirrels, the
occasional blue heron, the resident pair of red foxes, the regular deer family
grazing in our back yard, and the beaver running from the pond into the woods.
On this
beautiful first day of fall, Mom became resident in a rehab nursing home,
hoping to relearn how to walk. My eyes filled with tears as Mom scanned my face
for answers and I had none, just words of encouragement. She misses Bogart, our
Snowshoe Siamese. A highly co-dependent cat, Bogart senses her absence. Meowing
at her closed bedroom door, he decides to sleep on the floor as if waiting for
her immediate return.
Few well
established and desirable rehab nursing homes take Medicare patients. Most are
now private enterprises or advertised as faith-based, keeping unwanted
individuals away.
Mom survived
communism, the drab life there, and socialized medicine. She is making a full
circle back to the drab life of survival in a nursing home in the most
civilized nation on earth that chose to replace its stellar medical care with the
failed socialist model a la Castro Care, in which rationing and “death panels” force
Americans past the age of 70 into “unit” status.
I am not
sure if Mom will every walk again. God only knows and we pray that she does. It
is scary enough being old and sick, but even more frightening for someone who
does not speak much English, having to function in an unfamiliar environment,
among total strangers who are paid to help her survive, far away from home, far
from everything and everyone she holds familiar and dear.
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