I don’t have much peace in the morning anymore because I wake up and try to figure out what to do to help my mother and I obsess about what might come next and what came before. I’m trying to find a way to go about every day while my mother remains in limbo in the ICU – will she get better? will she have to stay in the hospital? – the sad reality is that she probably will never go back to her apartment again and that’s just what I can’t get my thoughts comfortable with – what will be her quality of life? How will she live?<\/p>\n
Last night, after two full weeks in the hospital and obsessively running back and forth, I did not go to the night visiting hour, I just felt done, overdone. And yet the first thing I felt was guilt because mom can’t be an advocate for herself and I need to be there all the time interceding for lame nurses, the rogue respiratory therapists, the indifferent doctors – that’s not to say some of her care hasn’t been outstanding, but yet sadly some of it leaves a lot to be desired.<\/p>\n
As I sit here about to start my work this morning, I know I couldn’t do what the health care professionals do every day – I don’t have that gene in me even though everyone in my family was a doctor or a nurse it seems like. This one nurse, Jennifer, who was mom’s nurse on the second floor was so outstanding it made you ache to deal with anyone else after her. My hat’s off to the good doctors and nurses who are the consummate health care providers – caring about the patient as much as the disease and giving all of themselves while they are there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I don’t have much peace in the morning anymore because I wake up and try to figure out what to do to help my mother and I obsess about what might come next and what came before. I’m trying to find a way to go about every day while my mother remains in limbo in the ICU – will she get better? will she have to stay in the hospital? – the sad reality is… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1kHSD-1b4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4530"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4531,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4530\/revisions\/4531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}