The doctor changed mom’s blood pressure meds two weeks ago and she had a serious reaction to the new meds – she said it rendered her almost comatose. Through a few days of up and down, the doctor then prescribed that she take both the old med and the new one simultaneously. Which she didn’t want to do, I urged her to seek a second opinion, but in the end she is taking the two together.
She went in for a follow up and the doctor thinks now she has had a TIA.
Transient Ischemic Attack – (TIA or Mini Stroke) TIA is a very small stroke that is caused by a temporary blocked blood vessel and leaves no permanent brain damage. A TIA is a warning that there is something seriously wrong with the blood flow to the brain and that you are at risk of having a full-blown stroke.
She’s going next week for an MRI to see if that is what happened. But in the meantime, her fear is palpable. She says she can’t remember words – when she’s trying to hold a staff meeting it embarrasses her to be forgetful of names of medicines, residents, and as she says, household words. I told her that I can’t remember a lot of stuff – it’s called age – but she just looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, “it’s gone by so fast, so fast.”
I try to act nonchalant because I think of 70 as young, and she has approached each decade of her life with zeal, but now it’s like the picture is getting muddier, and the fear of it all collapsing is at the ready.
She went into the bedroom and came sashaying back out and said I want to give you something. It was a five diamond band. She said “your father bought this for the woman he was seeing when I left him” [she left him for about three months thirty years ago] – “it’s from Neiman Marcus. It’s so dainty I thought it would look good on you.”
I told her I am the poster child for break up jewelry. When S and I split and he began seeing a woman he met on the internet, it was over the holidays and he got her a cool silver bracelet and a hip ashtray. When they split five weeks later, she gave it back to him and said, “give these to someone you love” – so he gave them both to me. I get so many compliments on that bracelet.
Things are things – during Katrina, we all learned that things are just things, but places are places, and it’s people who link us to life. So I say, do not go gentle into that good night my mother dear – I need you here with me.