Tonight I sit here watching my mother sleep as she is freshly out of surgery.  Her incision is so long I couldn’t fit it into the frame of the picture.  Her surgery so extensive that I could hardly explain it.  A journey ahead that we know all too well, and yet not at all.  And my thought is this:

My mother is worth dying for.  It is not a sacrifice, it is a joy.

The morning began with me about smashing the IV poll into a zillion bits.  The bell was sounding off and it was shift change.  They couldn’t get to it.  I kept hitting the silence button but that didn’t work because of its 60 second reset.  I called nursing again and again to no avail.  I tried to figure the machine out myself but couldn’t.  After an hour I called the nurse and told her plainly that I thought I was going to destroy it.  I’m frazzled enough.  I don’t need incessant beeping.  In less than a minute the nurse was in hear and did a 5 second adjustment to the bag, punched some buttons and reset it.  Thank God.

Next part was to get mom to surgery.  Such a high risk surgery, especially the anesthesia.  If you’ve read here before you know that anesthetic is like pouring gasoline on dementia symptoms, although it does have somewhat of a delayed response.   We almost didn’t get mom back out of the last tail spin.  I’ll save the details in case she ever reads this.  But it was bad.  Really bad.

So today I was all set to say “Spinal Block with Propofol/Fentanyl” because that worked last time.  The nurse practitioners warned us that might not be possible.  Then the Anesthesiologist came.  He basically said no over and over.  He was real light-hearted and smirky while mom and I had tears down our faces.   Not sure if this was how he always is or not.  Regardless, it was like a knife in the heart to hear that we had to do general anesthetic today.  Mom sobbed saying she felt she had to choose between her life and losing her mind.  I cried because of it all.

The surgeon was phenomenol.  He got down to look at mom face to face and tried to explain so carefully.  The surgery was beyond what even regular and specialty surgeons could do.  He was a Traumatologist (his official term) and was doing a hail Mary pass.  What she doesn’t know is that if this doesn’t work or she breaks it again, it could mean amputation.

We sent her to surgery and drove to check out of the hotel I had been staying at.  While there I had a good cry.

Her husband, my brother and I waited in the room for reports.  I worked on my ecommerce sites that I’m doing to try to figure out how to make it financially.  My brother slept.  My mother’s husband looks like a train wreck of exhaustion.

But the surgery went well as he could.  He presented us with the screws from failed hardware #1 shrapnel.  That was nice.  Then he explained the procedure.

Right now mom is resting.  She looks good.  She kind of knows who I am.  And I have hope in my heart.

I have a peace about things but at the same time I’m asking if she falls off mentally again, how will we deal with this again?  We’re going in smarter but with much more fatigue.  She is on bed rest for 6 weeks and it could be months in a wheelchair.   A lot of unanswered questions.  My heart is still raw.  But I love my mom.  And she is worth it all.