Ambulance to ER to Oncology Ward....
The last two days are part of the time warp I am traveling in with each breath of air I breath...and the transformation of my mother is astounding. She has melted before my eyes and her voice is diminutive and faint, almost inaudible. Yesterday she was transported from her home via ambulance. The fire fighters came first, then the EMT's and well it was a flurry of excitement as they arrived, with their heavy boots and pants and boxes off stuff to pop a persons heart back into their chest and reel their souls in from never never land...they were nice, they were sweet and they were kind. Kind is the word and the feeling I needed so did mom as she boarded the little chair they used to hoist her down the meandering stair case of hers...all the while, the troopers were marveling at her whimsical art and light fixtures suspended as if a trapese from her 30 foot ceilings...
I followed the ambulance after one of America's finest commented on our GARY SINISE FOUNDATION sticker on our car. The logo and design done by my husband, and his V12 studios - we struck up a conversation about the NYFD and his connections to those brave men and women who were at Ground Zero...and our kinship with Gary Sinise, a true patriot and American who is a supporter of all things good and helpful to our country. Then I felt at home when the ambulance started up and I followed my tiny alien like mother as she was in the back of that truck hooked up to an IV that was swinging back and forth from the motion of the road. I know, I could see it and her tiny bald head from my vantage behind the ambulance. They didn't use their sirens...they drove and drove and I followed and followed. And I wept.
I keep wondering how long this mission of love and life and ending will last. I never want it to end and then I want it gone tomorrow. But in the removal of this episode in my life and the ending of my mother's life is great loss. And since I can't have it back the way it was, I am in this constant spin cycle that is both beautiful and brutal at once.
Mom is not in pain, but she is slow, weak and not thinking clearly any more. Her mind is stuttering and stammering and not producing her words or her thoughts. Her ideas of her illness are based in health not in illness which is nice, but not real. And in that not real place it is foreign because my mom is the ultimate realist.
So seven hours in the ER where they catheterized, poked, proded, bled, x rayed and yammered with her endlessly about medications, chemo therapy responses and her bowls. I looked at my iPhone and tried not to look at the ET version of my mom in the gurney while the man like women nursed her and the women like doctor men attended to her. Wildness on the planet for sure. Hospital ness of the world. Yet, we were in a corner private room. We stayed there for ever it seemed until a bed on the oncology floor was available, and well I was so exhausted I thought my eyes were going to dry up and fall out of their sockets.
A new chapter. The hospital - and to think the last time my mom was ever in a hospital it was to give birth to my deceased brother Timbo...in 1965 - Tim who died from complications from a drunk driving accident in 1987 is hovering above us all right now waiting to meet my mom in the next dimension.
I am tired. The Oncology Ward will be there tomorrow with it's mahogany wood floors, comfy couches, fresh flowers and bald thin skeletons shrinking shrinking shrinking under the covers of their beds...while priests get lost on the floors with their purple sashes rolled up in their fists...but the angels are present...the angels are present. Come to us oh sweet angels and make this suffering make sense. Give us the power to say goodbye to all of our earthly loves and wants. Let us have the strength to float up into the next life with ease and with joy...the same joy that comes with the birth of a new life.
I followed the ambulance after one of America's finest commented on our GARY SINISE FOUNDATION sticker on our car. The logo and design done by my husband, and his V12 studios - we struck up a conversation about the NYFD and his connections to those brave men and women who were at Ground Zero...and our kinship with Gary Sinise, a true patriot and American who is a supporter of all things good and helpful to our country. Then I felt at home when the ambulance started up and I followed my tiny alien like mother as she was in the back of that truck hooked up to an IV that was swinging back and forth from the motion of the road. I know, I could see it and her tiny bald head from my vantage behind the ambulance. They didn't use their sirens...they drove and drove and I followed and followed. And I wept.
I keep wondering how long this mission of love and life and ending will last. I never want it to end and then I want it gone tomorrow. But in the removal of this episode in my life and the ending of my mother's life is great loss. And since I can't have it back the way it was, I am in this constant spin cycle that is both beautiful and brutal at once.
Mom is not in pain, but she is slow, weak and not thinking clearly any more. Her mind is stuttering and stammering and not producing her words or her thoughts. Her ideas of her illness are based in health not in illness which is nice, but not real. And in that not real place it is foreign because my mom is the ultimate realist.
So seven hours in the ER where they catheterized, poked, proded, bled, x rayed and yammered with her endlessly about medications, chemo therapy responses and her bowls. I looked at my iPhone and tried not to look at the ET version of my mom in the gurney while the man like women nursed her and the women like doctor men attended to her. Wildness on the planet for sure. Hospital ness of the world. Yet, we were in a corner private room. We stayed there for ever it seemed until a bed on the oncology floor was available, and well I was so exhausted I thought my eyes were going to dry up and fall out of their sockets.
A new chapter. The hospital - and to think the last time my mom was ever in a hospital it was to give birth to my deceased brother Timbo...in 1965 - Tim who died from complications from a drunk driving accident in 1987 is hovering above us all right now waiting to meet my mom in the next dimension.
I am tired. The Oncology Ward will be there tomorrow with it's mahogany wood floors, comfy couches, fresh flowers and bald thin skeletons shrinking shrinking shrinking under the covers of their beds...while priests get lost on the floors with their purple sashes rolled up in their fists...but the angels are present...the angels are present. Come to us oh sweet angels and make this suffering make sense. Give us the power to say goodbye to all of our earthly loves and wants. Let us have the strength to float up into the next life with ease and with joy...the same joy that comes with the birth of a new life.
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