I had this very vivid dream last night. My mother was decked to the nines as she was always want to do – even when she was mostly crippled from the peripheral neuropathy she was teeter tottering on high heels that she should have thrown away a million years ago. In the dream, she appeared at my front door, her hair perfectly coifed, her nails manicured, her clothes crisp white linens. And she had on red lipstick. I asked her what she was doing and she said, “I know what I’m doing” and I said, “Good, that makes one of us.”
They are transferring her to a skilled nursing unit this week – she was supposed to be transferred tomorrow but she keeps yanking out lines and so they keep having to restrain her. She can’t leave the long term acute care facility until she has been out of restraints for five days. I asked them a couple of days ago why she wasn’t in restraints and they said because she didn’t need them. And I said but she keeps trying to get out of the bed? Now I found out the requirements today and it puts everything in perspective.
My mother is painfully aware of most everything that is going on around her. She was a nurse for all my life. So when the doctor says, your blood pressure is good, she always asks, what is it?
She’s been keeping up this feisty, hell bent on doing it her way attitude every time she can muster the strength to and just like in real life, her stubborn need to do the opposite of what everyone tells her to do doesn’t always serve her but you can bet at this juncture she is not giving up the ghost.
A friend writes me that she’s glad to hear that mom’s brattiness hasn’t dissipated. The doctor too, likes her spirit, even when it is wrong directed.
I was standing near her today and the nurse told me to have a talk with her about pulling her catheter out, I turned to her and said did you hear him, you have to quit doing that, and she rolled her eyes at me.