Lost it. I lost it. Again. I can't take this--I can't deal with this. My mother. I invited her to come and live with me back in March, because she was having serious health issues and getting the run-around from doctors. She's 88-years-old and she was living alone in Prescott, Arizona, where she and my father had lived for more than forty years until his death. He died on May 1, 2006: a date I'll always remember because it was my son's 21st birthday. Shoot me for thinking: just like my father to steal the thunder.
My mother was living alone and declining, mentally, and she needed hip replacement surgery that was denied her because of a bad aortic valve. She was really suffering from the pain in her hip, and if the requirement for being a minimally qualified decent human being is that one cannot simply sit back and watch another suffer without doing something about it, then I passed. I could not stand what she was going through--I had to do something. So I invited her to move to Virginia to live with me and start over here with new doctors.
Medically it has been a success, so far: she had open heart surgery on May 13th and made quite a remarkable recovery. She was cleared for hip replacement on July 26th and is scheduled to go under the knife on August 15th--next Monday, six days from now. We are six days away from hip replacement; six days from the holy grail.
If the requirement for attaining the next level of human achievement is that "something about it" be done with patience and grace, I fail. I will forever be a minimally qualified human. I can't deal with my mother's cognitive decline; I can't deal with it. I've never been driven nuts the way I've been driven nuts by my mother. I've never gotten so angry before. I keep thinking: she can't POSSIBLY not understand this--she's faking, he's manipulating, she's not trying, she doesn't WANT to understand.
It's been a hard day, and yesterday was a hard day too.
