As I am cleaning out closets and cabinets here in the Fresno house and moving items to our storage unit, I am also purging the boxes already sitting in storage. In doing so, I found a box of my mother’s financial records along with the journal I kept while she lay paralyzed in a convalescent hospital after a massive stroke only days after Thanksgiving 2000.
We had been told by her Kaiser physician that the stroke was so severe that she could no longer swallow and that the area of the brain that was unaffected did not know it was only working with half a brain now. According the doctor, it would be a matter of a few days to a week before she would die. Hard to accept as we were heading into the Christmas season.
My sister worked diligently to find a place for our mother to spend her last few days in some semblance of comfort as the Kaiser hospital wanted her gone. I went along with her and took notes. I kept writing, each time I visited my mother, in the same journal, so that I would have all the information in one place.
After almost 10 years, I have taken that journal out and read it. It brought some comfort and even closure to a very painful and difficult time in my life. I am going to share the journal here, but I will forewarn you, dear Reader, before I post an entry from it for some of you may in a place, by a bed, watching a loved one slip away, and this is not something you can read right now. I would have felt that way during December, 2000. I will only do a few entries at a time, also, because my mother held on longer than that week the doctor predicted, and some days have more words than others. Sort of like our daily life.
November 29 (These notes were written at the hospital while the doctor talked to us)
Cannot talk
Speech therapist and physical therapist cannot do anything
Feeding tube vs comfort care (at this point my sister, brother, and I told the doctor that our mother had never wanted to be “kept” alive with machines. She had always been opposed to those techniques and vehemently told us not do that to her should the time come.)
Will go to convalescent home, no matter (I even had the ability to write convalescent correctly)
Right side stroke- very difficult to recognize that the left side doesn’t work
Custodial care – patient’s responsibility; all $ worked out with Hylond; Dr. Frank’s visits covered by Kaiser
Hospice (I only wrote the word, there were no other notes, ever)
Charlotte – patient discharge; transportation costs will be pd by family
Later in the day @ Hylond
Shirley Nellon
prorated $170 daily
$5270 (that would be the monthly total)
briefs $3 daily
will provide gowns
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