On St. Patrick's Day I Celebrate Mom's 90th Birthday

This St. Patrick’s day my sweet mom is 90 years old. She is totally bed-ridden, dependent on a wheel chair. Her feet and hands have atrophied during the two years of forced lockdowns when the staff stopped any activity with the nursing home long-term residents because they were too busy putting on masks, gloves, and gowns to protect themselves from the pandemic the government called Covid-19.

Before March 14, 2020, when the health department swept in and isolated those with the flu and moved everyone else in other un-sanitized rooms, she was able to move her legs, pushing her wheelchair around the hallways, visiting with other patients, enjoying the company of other humans. Two years later, of complete isolation and no physical activity, being forced to her bed with a closed door, she is almost like a vegetable, barely able to hold or move her head, arms, legs, and hands. Her health is a far cry from the robust 72 year-old who climbed on a ladder to clean a roof covered with dead leaves.

There was not even a veneer of pretense that our loved ones were cared for properly in the nursing home. Every time I was allowed to see her through facetime, she was always in bed. The staff seldom attempted to put her in a wheel chair, or exercise her muscles, give her mental activities of any sort. Not only were they not providing anything for physical movement, the rooms were atrociously filthy, her personal belongings scattered on the floor and in garbage bags where they were initially thrown by the health department and those hired to move all patients from their rooms on the ill-fated day of March 14, 2020. As a result, her muscles have completely atrophied in two years. Her feet look like duck paddles and her hands are beginning to curl up.

The abject fear of death from Covid has become a tool of control for the masses and the socialist Democrats and globalists will never let it go, they keep inventing new variants because the initial virus and non-stop preaching to mask, distance, and hide away from people worked so well that it brought the globe’s population and their lives to a lockdown standstill.

We no longer have a government of the people, by the people, we have a government by dictates, mandates, fear, control, corporate and technocrat censorship, and policing. They have squashed our liberties so much in the last two years that it is impossible to imagine how they have cowed 330 million people in such a short period of time with constant media ginned up and government grinding and abject fear of a virus.

Children suffered long-lasting emotional effects. An entire generation is left behind in their arrested speech development, hearing impairment, as they get their cues and learn from facial expressions of adults and teachers, facial expressions and muffled voices being covered by a mask, often two.

We are still not recovered from this tyrannical intrusion into our lives. We still suffer from the lack of useful medical care provided by nurses and doctors who are indirectly responsible of killing many people who were sent home without any treatment even though alternative and cheap meds were available.

Mom was never vaccinated, was positive once, but never had any signs of illness. Yet she was kept indoors, locked in her own room many times for periods of 14 days of isolation even though she was not sick.

Quarantine has always been for sick people and lasted 40 days, but now, the globalists in control of our medical care lock down everybody. We no longer have any rights, not even the right to breathe freely outdoors. People are so terrified that they walk in the woods alone, jog, and ride their bikes with masks on, even alone in their cars.

Many times I tried to bring  my mom out on the patio, in the sunshine, yet they refused my request or brought her out masked up even though she was not sick and nobody else was within sneezing or coughing range of her.

The human body and spirit withers when locked down so thoroughly, no matter what the age. And mom was old enough to suffer irreversible damage from such neglect. I could not even demand that they bring her out – I was ignored when I did.

The nursing home and the health department were more controlling than the Nazis have ever been in their concentration camps. Nobody could go inside to see what they were doing or not doing to their loved ones. Not that they were much better before the lockdown. In seven years they have lost seven sets of dentures for my mom. There is no excuse for that.

I do not buy the “hero” status conferred on doctors, nurses, and caretakers in general. These people were cowards.  Medicine and medical care will never be the same. Virtual visits are just pretend-medical practice. Some doctors and nurse practitioners are hiding behind a camera.

Many people with serious illnesses avoided hospitals for fear of Covid death while others were denied necessary tests and cancer treatments during the forced lockdowns. The medical profession and the government have serious blood on their hands all around the world.

A few honest doctors, who bucked the corrupt government and corporatist system, still treated their patients with all available drugs and knowledge to them, saving thousands of patients in the process; they are heroes in my book. They were treated like pariahs by the government, their medical associations, hospital administrators, medical boards, and some were fired and/or lost their licenses for doing the right thing. They ARE heroes for saving lives instead of intubating them with ventilators.

Mother smiles at me from time to time, sometimes recognizing me, and asks me if her hair is still beautiful. It is soft like silk in lovely shades of grey and snow white. She has not had a haircut in a long time and I am not sure how to make that possible as her mobility is so limited and the hair dresser quit two years ago for fear of dying of Covid.

The media has drummed up this fear non-stop and is still doing it to an extent. Dr. Fauci stoked this fear from his White House platform for two years. Only when the Democrat voter confidence numbers have tanked, Fauci disappeared, and life is beginning to return to some normalcy although it will never be the same. Too many people have died unnecessarily and too many minds and souls have been altered to the point of no return.

Mom escaped communism 42 years ago. She was vibrant and thin then. She left everything behind and the communist government confiscated everything she has ever worked for or owned: an apartment, savings, her retirement, her small plots of land, her personal belongings, and her jewelry. She never forgot that.

She was happy for so many years in my home, our home, until seven and a half years ago when she got very sick. We still took her out to the mall weekly, to her favorite Mexican restaurant, but the dementia progressed and then her relative freedom was forced into a government lockdown that destroyed her ability to move.

I celebrate today my mom’s nine decades of life, her courage, determination to be free of communism, and her strong will to live. Mom is a survivor; she recovered from things that would have killed many people: a stroke, partial paralysis, a shattered hip and surgery to fix it, transfusions, pneumonia twice, and small bone fractures which have healed quickly. But most of all, she survived 48 years of communism in the country of her birth. It is sad that in the twilight of her life, she has to spend her last days in a tyrannical society that is quickly abandoning any pretense of freedom.

 

C-o-v-i-d-i-stan

This anecdotal true story is painful evidence of how easily people can be brought under submission to government control in a short period of time by using irrational fear of death from a flu virus.

I called my only surviving uncle to wish him a happy birthday. He was elated that I remembered his special day when he entered this world. I told him, "How could I ever forget when you were born on Lenin's birthday?"

He told me that he was doing great and was proud that he and his wife were feeling safe and healthy after being vaccinated recently. “Vaccines are such a good thing for the world,” he said. You had so many deaths in the U.S., over a million people, we were so much luckier here.” 

It was pointless to engage him in a discussion about manipulated statistics, population size, causes of death, mortality rates, morbidity rate, spread causes and stats, antibodies, herd immunity, pros and cons of masks, arbitrary lockdowns, misinformation, contradictory medical edicts, technocracy censorship, mainstream media censorship and constant misinformation and deliberate deception, and other government measures of forcing and silencing people into silent submission. He felt safe, shut away from the world in his tiny concrete block apartment the size of the average American hotel room.

"We can now go shopping in public until stores close at 6 p.m.  We must wear masks though and carry vaccination cards handy in case we get asked for proof by the patrolling police."

I said with a seemingly calm voice, "the Ceausescus’ communist tyranny ended in 1989 and now you are under a global medical tyranny. You made a lot of progress.”

I am not sure he understood my dripping sarcasm because he answered, "They should not have executed Ceausescu, he was a good man. But they did the right thing executing his wife, she was an evil person."

I was shocked at his answer especially since I knew that he fought hard for his freedom to travel abroad which he was denied, and for promotions at work that he never got because he was not a communist party member. His father was not a supporter of communism and thus he was made by anti-communist stock.

I am not sure what brought about his nostalgia for the communist tyrant, but I would like to think that it was his age, the brain surgery from 10 years ago, and the year-long 9th-floor apartment confinement with his wife in his town's C-o-v-i-d-i-stan.

I could also attribute this change to non-stop mandatory mask wearing which is a government enforced requirement in most developed countries around the world even though some people have a hard time breathing and taking in sufficient oxygen.

A friend, Heather A., told me what her theory is about forced mask wearing for over a year now, from two weeks to flatten the curve to non-stop mask policing everywhere outside of one’s home.  “They are forcing us to become a genderless and faceless Society. They are taking away our Humanity. If you cannot see someone's face, expressions, age, or sex, then you are not going to care when we are removed, expired, or exterminated.” We might as well be identical and easily disposable characters in a dreadful cartoon story.

In the meantime, suicides among teenagers and adults are on the rise. According to M. Armstrong, “Fauci, who is a disgrace to the United States, refuses to yield and to be specific about when people will get their liberty back. He is ignoring the psychological impact of people losing everything and the rise in suicides and violence.” He believes that “all of this is because of Fauci’s recommendations, which never in the history of society has any doctor ever advocated shutting down the economy and society.” We are in Real Trouble | Armstrong Economics

Referring to the forced lockdowns, masks, and the vaccination agenda, Armstrong continues, “Something is seriously wrong, and the government, in league with the media, is not protecting the population at all. It is unacceptable that anyone who utters a single word against this agenda is labeled a ‘conspiracy theorist,’ which allows everyone to simply refuse to provide any independent proof that anything is trustworthy.” We are in Real Trouble | Armstrong Economics

Rational and reliable answers are not coming in and C-o-v-i-d-i-stan is tightening its grip on our existence.

Mom Turned 86 Years Young

Mom turned 86 years young on St. Patrick’s Day. She is a skeletal figure of her former self but she has a strong will to live. Three weeks ago she fell and fractured her hip in at least three places. Dr. Reeves’ skillful surgical intervention put her bone fragments back together again and she convalesced for eleven days in the hospital, in and out of consciousness. She gained nine pounds on decent food and dedicated care. It was stellar nursing compared to ManorCare.

Maybe it was bad luck that she fell; however, if the African CNAs would have come to her help, she would not have fallen in the first place, trying to walk to get some water. Then they let her linger in pain from Wednesday afternoon until early Thursday evening when I arrived from a trip, before they sent her to a hospital to be x-rayed.

She had fallen during the three-year stay at ManorCare more than fifteen times and, thankfully, each time she walked away with a painful bruise or two. But this time her luck ran out. She was gaunt and malnourished because the nursing staff lost her dentures four times and often gave her pills on an empty stomach which caused her to vomit whatever food she did ingest. When she fell directly on her right hip, it crushed it as if she had been in a severe car accident. It was a comminuted fracture.

We could barely dress and lift her onto the wheelchair for fear that we might cause her unnecessary distress. I called a wheelchair van taxi to transport her to her favorite restaurant to celebrate her 86 years of life. I knew she would not eat much, between physical therapy and pain meds, but getting her out of the house and into the world was hope and life outside of four walls.

Mom is now a shell of her former self, frail, child-like, sweet some days, and a hellion on others. After her stroke last year, her incipient dementia had gotten worse and, on most days, she knows we are related, knows my name, but I am either her sister or her mom.

When she was 72, I found her on top of a ladder trying to clean the gutters stuffed with dry leaves. She was very active and moving about all the time. But she had slowed down after a fall on wet leaves in the driveway. She had to wear a corset for six months to repair the hairline fractures in the tailbone and ribs.

Mom took so much pleasure in raising a garden and flowers.  She took trips to Walmart with her Mimi Eileen every spring to buy plants, seeds, pots, and fertilizer. There was a sparkle in her eyes, and a sprint in her walk, as if she was going to a very important event that she did not want to miss. Spring was on its way, mom said, she could smell it in the air and hear it in the melodious birds chirping in the barren trees.

Mom had a green thumb and felt so happy and free among plants and flowers. She brought back to life potted plants our neighbors put out in the street for trash pickup and then she gave them back to the owners green and often in bloom. How did she do that? It was magic.

She was trying to make up for 48 years of living in a communist drab cinder block tiny apartment where the only concessions to a garden were a couple of red geranium plants she grew on the window sill in winter and on the balcony during the summer.

When she first arrived in the U.S., mom had such a large and beautiful garden in our faculty housing yard at MSU that people would drive by in awe watching her toil in dirt with glee, waving at them from her white wide-brim hat. When the eggplants, tomatoes, peppers, green onions, radishes, cucumbers, carrots, okra, and green beans would start coming in, all neighbors had fresh vegetables from her garden.

As mom aged, the large garden dwindled to a few tomato plants and peppers and a few roses and geraniums. I would find her picking Japanese beetle off the rose bushes and putting them in a jar filled with water. Somehow she felt that killing them this way was a more humane way to dispose of God’s creatures that dared to crawl out of dirt to shred her rose bushes.

Every spring, Anthony, our trusted lawn care man, would trim the azalea bushes and the Japanese magnolia we had planted twenty years earlier when we moved into our lovely southern home.  Mom would harass him, trim that, trim this, to my exasperation and his ever patient and smiling demeanor. Anthony had a bossy mom just like her at home and he always did their bidding with an unmistakable southern charm, “yes, ma’am.”

We still talk with love and longing about our fig tree in the back yard that would give so many figs, enough to make jars after jars of preserves each year. The tree was there when we bought the house. If the new owners have not cut it down, the tree is fifty-eight years old now. You never know who will enjoy the fruit of your labor when you plant a fruit tree or a shade tree.

We miss the gorgeous Ginkgo biloba tree in the back yard. Its leaves turned bright yellow in early fall; they blanketed the ground with a thick and beautiful yellow carpet of waxy leaves. Tiger and Bogart loved to chase moles and lizards in this impromptu playground. When Tiger passed, the yellow leaves would cover his grave.

It was mom’s first home since the communists had confiscated my parents’ apartment, their savings, and their pensions. And dad’s relatives took all their personal possessions when dad passed away in 1989. To this day, when she has no clarity, her scrambled brain remembers the confiscation and theft but I am the culprit.

Perhaps she is right, if I had not left the communist country legally, perhaps she would not have followed me here as a defector from communism and would have kept her property. Those commies did not take lightly the acts of defiance of their prison society citizens escaping from their tyranny and oppression.

Mom is 86 years young today. She came a very long way that flew by too quickly, almost nine decades of life full of good and bad experiences. She said, she did not care if she was 100 today as long as she was still alive and breathing, enjoying the sunshine and her plants. She has an assorted collection of small potted plants in her room at ManorCare. When she cannot water or tend to them, she makes sure that Alamatu does it and brings them in and out of the sun.

I have to remember Marcus Aurelius' advice to enjoy the moment because the present is a split second in eternity, minuscule, transitory, and insignificant.

Seeing mom in the outdoors again, my eyes teared up. I thank God, Mom is still with us! I was not sure she was going to make it alive from this difficult surgery. But here we are, we live another day to enjoy each other’s company in the Virginia sunshine, with bright blue skies and a blustery wind.