So it’s been a stressful week. I mean, really stressful. Mom in ICU, four days later blood counts too low to release her, no solution in sight. My days are dizzying: Visit Mom, try to remember what three nurses and two doctors said and all their names, decipher nursespeak like FFP and POA, determine which cellphone in the room is ringing, pick up sister from train, pick up Mom’s mail, visit Dad at nursing home, e-mail updates to family … you get the picture.
People use the word zoo to describe weeks like this, though
every zoo I’ve ever been to is a sea of tranquility compared with this. An
elephant languidly swinging its trunk and emitting the occasional bellow? Yes,
much calmer than nurses, aides, orderlies, and doctors madly sprinting past
each other, then sliding to Mom’s bedside for an earnest heart-to-heart.
Mid-sentence, they fumble in their vibrating pocket to grab the cellphone whose
ring has been programmed to ironically mellow Yanni-like keyboard riffs. Then
they dash off, phone plastered to ear. I can’t help but think of scenes from
the Jim Carrey movie Mr. Popper’s
Penguins: Flippers flapping, penguins speedily slip-sliding on wet hallway
floors.
Which brings me to
Dad’s Alzheimer’s unit. Believe me, I mean no offense to dear folks with
Alzheimer’s, but my visit to Dad right after the ICU zoo, struck me as funny.
Their bubbly activities director had lined up some folks in wheelchairs in the
sunroom to watch the Doris Day movie Please
Don’t Eat the Daisies. While Doris Day’s four mischievous boys
dropped water balloons out a second-story window onto pedestrians below and
tangled her phone cord and asked a million questions, a lady two wheelchairs
down from Dad’s constantly repeated, “Hail Mary, Hail Mary, Hail Mary …” Maybe
she was praying for Doris Day, who knows? In the middle of on-screen chaos,
Doris Day’s doorbell rang. At the nursing home, bubbly activities director’s
pocket rang, so she grabbed her phone and began to yell into it, which I
suppose she had to do since the TV volume had to be loud enough for residents
to hear the movie. Just then, the one lady in Dad’s hall who still walks
hobbled to the sunroom’s aviary and began pounding flat-palmed on the glass to
get the birds to fly around. Ten colorful little birds flitted and swooped but
as soon as they lit on a branch, the lady pounded on the glass again. I laughed
and thought, “Oh, this is perfect.”
But I was wrong.
On my drive back to the hospital to check in again on Mom, I passed a man
riding a bicycle. On top of his parka hood was a beanie with a propeller
whirring. He was too bundled up for me to see his face, but I’m pretty sure it
would have looked like Alfred E. Newman’s of MAD magazine. A propeller beanie?
Okay, now it's perfect.
No comments:
Post a Comment