Everyday Life

With me hanging on to one elbow, she slowly hitches herself up the 1.5 inches onto her bathroom scales, groaning, straining, and clutching the counter in front of her as if she were balancing atop a fifty-foot flag pole. The scales are placed in front of the bathroom sink so that she can hang on to the counter to get her balance, but then it takes all Mom’s resolve to unclutch her fingers long enough for me to get the true reading of her weight. This hated ritual is necessary because an overnight two to three pound gain or a one pound gain for five consecutive days indicates renal failure. A couple weeks ago this indicator and some other symptoms cropped up just before a weekend so I put in a call to her doctor and her medicine was readjusted for a few days to drain off more fluid. This tends to irritate her kidneys, but by the third day of double the usual number of bathroom trips, Mom was better and has remained okay even after the water pill went back to the usual dosage. Here we are on that proverbial rollercoaster again. The twists and turns, highs and lows of our journey are getting more frequent and more disconcerting.

 

 

After dodging that bullet, life evened out for a few days until Mom had her annual eye appointment. Then, in one day she ping ponged between being angry with me for not telling her about the afternoon appointment until she got up that morning, feeling embarrassed once she got there because she had to take off her hat which had messed up her hair, being irritated over all the waiting between tests, tiring out from the physical struggle of several transfers from her wheel chair, and the final relief of finding out in the end that her eye health had remained stable. I think the emotional ups and downs of days like these are as draining for us as the physical challenges.