pyewacketsworld

Part 3:

Before I go into the details of what happened beginning March of 2006, I have to backtrack to around June of 2005. While my mother had been seeing a therapist for about four years, I really felt she wasn’t being helped, and no doubt, she never told everything she should have to him as she wasn’t exactly verbally communicative, not even to me. I knew she had depression issues, and perhaps a whole lot of other personality disorders. I had no say in her “clinical care” as she never signed an authorization proxy. Maybe a smart move on her part, since I would let not only her therapist, but doctors and social worker know the truth of what was going on, including the cat issue. Had she truly mentioned how many cats we had at the time, I think that would have sent a red flag up that her therapist was dealing with a hoarder person, but usually when asked how many cats we had, she most often say, “Oh, just a few” Then I desperately tried to get the attention of her therapist, doctors, social worker about a new issue that cropped up. My mother was demonstrating bulimic behavior. Here I’d cook wonderful meals for the two of us, and a few minutes after she ate, I’d watch her rush into the kitchen, where she would stick her finger down her throat to make herself throw up. Great! Now I was dealing with another problem with my mother.

I even wrote several long paged letters to the Executive Director of he hospital where my mother was getting all her medical and psychiatric needs met, and told him about my mother’s bulimia. All I ever got were letters of a few sentences long back to me saying “Due to the Hipaa Privacy Laws, we may not discuss your mother’s clinical care with you. Thank you for sharing your concerns with us.” That was it…nice, huh? God knows just what my mother would tell her therapist…she was a pathological liar and a great actress. And she told scores of lies about me making me sound like I was a blithering idiot..I was to learn the lies she was telling sometime later. I found out much later too, that what everyone was doing was in effect wrong, they may not have been able to discuss my mother’s clinical care with me, but they should have at least investigated whether my mother’s bulimia was indeed psychological or physiological…it turned out to be the later.

On a rather hot Monday, June evening around 11:30 p.m. my mother went to take her bath. On and off I would check in on her as she had a habit of falling asleep while taking her bath…Well, no on this occasion she didn’t fall asleep, but when she tried to get out of the tub, she couldn’t. I tried to help her out, but she became like dead weight despite her being very thin. I just couldn’t lift her or help her out. Well, since I knew my neighbor next door was a night owl, I decided to ask her to help me. I had to wait a few minutes as my neighbor got some clothes on, about fifteen minutes. By the time the two of us came back into my apartment and into the bathroom, my mother was out cold. I yelled out her name several times…slapped her on the face…nothing. She wasn’t responsive at all. So there was only one thing I could do. Call 911.

Once the paramedics arrived, even they had a hard time helping my mother out of the tub, but finally they did and my mother, myself and the neighbor were taken by ambulance to the hospital’s emergency room. It would prove a total eight hour wait for her to get officially admitted and have a room. One of the great things that was to occur however, was that I finally was able to have some kind of say in things, as a whole host of doctors were asking a battery of questions about my mother and I mentioned her bulimic behavior. Even a psychiatrist came and asked me questions. It turned out however her bulimia wasn’t a psychological thing…one of the procedures they did on my mother was to insert one of those cameras down her throat. It was discovered that she had esophageal cancer and no doubt she did her bulimic behavior due to the food irritating the tumor. Now if the jerk therapist or anyone had listened to me when I first tried to get in contact and get someone to take note of what my mother was doing a year prior, then they may have caught the tumor in time, as it may not have been cancerous yet.

Her being diagnosed with cancer though was like a wake up call for me…the idea that my mother may not be around much longer. The only problem was, my mother was refusing any outside help. Rather than going to a rehab place so she could get all her nutrition built up and getting her cancer treatments, she would have none of it…now I became her caregiver, and quite frankly she became a further pain in the butt to me. As if I didn’t have enough to contend with, with my sill continual daily cleaning of all the cats we still had, I now had to be practically a 24/7 nurse to my mother. She had an operation in which a G-Tube was inserted, since she couldn’t eat by mouth, but had to have “feeding” of things like Ensure. Also annoying was that she kept tugging at the feeding tube…the result being she yanked it out not once, not twice, but three times. Lovely. And you better believe she took advantage of the entire situation by becoming a full time woe is me martyr.

Well will stop this for now and continue my story tomorrow.
©2009~Melanie Neer aka pyewacket

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