Losing your mom

It was a quiet year until March 21st. That's when mom went in for an angiogram and, possibly, an angioplasty. It turned out that she desperately needed something as she had blockages of 90%, 95% and 97% in her 3 coronary arteries. The cardiologist probably should have pulled out and sent her home and told her to get her affairs in order. But, he tried to do more and it didn't go well. He managed to put a stint in place in one artery, but there was another blockage down from that one and when the blood flow hit that, her artery started collapsing and that was the beginning of the end.

They came to the waiting room and got myself and 2 of my other sisters who were there. But we were taken to an office, not to mom. We knew then that something was terribly wrong. The doctor came in and explained the situation and said they needed our consent to do bypass surgery. Now, mom was 85 and not a candidate for a bypass. They would have never done this as a planned event, BUT, they didn't want her to die on their table -- it messes up their statistics.

We knew mom would not want the bypass, but they worked very hard to convince us. Our panic and their pressure resulted in our consent and they did a bypass on mom. Surprising, it was successful. She was in ICU for almost a week and they told us that they could not stabilize her heart rate without a pacemaker. She was lucid enough to decline the pacemaker and that's when things got even worse.

The hospital moved mom to a palliative care room and then things just went bad. Somehow, mom was not assigned an attending physician (that we ever saw) and the only medical orders were the ones from intensive care. So, when she was in pain they wouldn't give her pain medication if her heart rate was too low. That type of incompetence continue for another week. We struggled against this while we watched mom fail in misery. It was horrific. We finally manged to get her into hospice care and they made her comfortable for her last 12 hours anyway. And she wasn't alone when she passed -- my oldest sister was with her.

Mom died on April 6th after 17 days of awful. And now we are left trying to figure out how to make sure that never happens to anyone else's loved one and how to get along without mom.

Besides the obvious feelings of overwhelming sadness, I feel incredibly blah about life in general and lonely. I have my husband, my daughter and her family, my sisters, my friends, but I feel lonely. It doesn't seem real that I will never see mom again. I'll never call her and see how her week went and tell her about mine. I'll never get a hug and hear "I love you" with that soft, lingering southern drawl. The loss of so many little things, just leaves me feeling lonely.

The other thing that's hard is that mom was like a mother to my daughter. She didn't just loose her grandmother, she lost one of her moms. I was a single parent for several years and mom (along with my youngest sister) helped enormously. So, my daughter needs HER mom now and I'm not exactly on my game.

So I feel guilty for putting mom through what she went through (when I gave my consent for the bypass) and I feel guilty for letting Jen down. But I'm still not caring about life enough yet to feel really bad about it. How's that for a knot of psychobabble chaos?

I know it will get better. It is already a little better than it was on April 6th. And it will continue to get better. I know that in my head. It's not quite in my heart yet, but it will get there. I can't let it continue. That would make me a disappointment to mom in addition to everything else, and I can't let that happen. That's just not acceptable.

So, I keep moving forward one step at a time. Baby steps. Time is the only thing that will help. I just need more time.