Nursing Home Blues

Two years ago in June, we moved my mother and grandmother to a nursing home in Chelmsford. Although it is a beautiful place and they have a beautiful room with two huge windows at the end of a wing, it is still a nursing home.  My grandmother is 97 and chipper.  She reads the newspapers, watches her third new team - The Red Sox (after her real home team, the San Francisco Giants, and her interim team, the Kansas City Royals), and very sadly, she watches her own daughter suffer from a stroke, seizures, and now a broken hip.  My mother fell and had "an in place fracture of the left femoral neck".  A wonderful surgeon place pins in to hold the bone in a 20 minutes surgery.  Everything looked great until an aide at the nursing home was moving my 114 pound mother from the bed to a wheelchair and somehow my mother feel on her knees.  The pins held, but the bone is now displaced and she has to have a partial hip replacement.

Now mom has to go through a major surgery.  She is aphasic and not with it much of the time.  I know she understands a lot, but how I am going to explain this to her isn't clear.  I can't leave her in the hospital by herself with strangers before the surgery, so Monday will be a long day for both of us.  I just don't want her to be afraid.  She was always a stoic person; I only saw my mother cry after she had dealt with a crisis, never in an emergency.  Who knows how she felt inside?  Who knows how she feels inside now? How I wish I could take this on for her so she didn't have to suffer.  My younger brother and I and our father were her whole life.  We can't go back, but if I could have anything for my mom, it would be to have my dad back and for them to be together again.  I have to try very hard to be in the present and not look back.  Easier said than done.

For the present, laundry is calling, so I'm off.