An increase in social experiences will develop the frontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for various complex cognitive functions, such as decision making, personality expression and emotions (The Stroke Foundation).
I suppose it says something that I can finally begin reading and thinking about a way forward.
That I can start to vision a way forward.
Because two weeks ago today, I never went to bed. I got home late from sax lessons that night. Bob, the kids and I were all sitting around the kitchen table, talking about our day, when the phone rang. The landline. That has only one purpose.
“Your mother’s having a seizure and she’s not coming out of it!” Dad cries into the phone.
“How long has it been?” I am getting better at staying calm about this.
“I think maybe three or four minutes.”
“Okay, wait til five minutes before you call for help.” We wait silently for the next minute. “Is she coming out of it?”
“No!”
“Go ahead and call. We’re on our way down.”
We make it to the farm before the ambulance gets there, where I find my mother unconscious in bed. She’s breathing. But we can’t wake her. She’s so tiny now. She was once all strength and force. Now, I could scoop her into my arms and cradle her like a baby. The medics arrive and confirm that she’s postictal. I stare with suspicion at the wrappings on her head. Two days prior, the neurologist’s office had applied electrodes to monitor brain activity after her latest EEG suggested an abnormality. She was to leave them there for three days. She hadn’t seized since October.
We decide to keep her home for the night, to avoid the trauma of the ER. The medics leave, Bob and the girls go home. I stay with Dad to help with Mom.
But the seizures continue through the night. At 3am, we call the medics back. At the hospital, the doctors are unsure of what’s causing her difficulty breathing, what is stimulating the seizures, what is causing all the weight loss. On Friday, they finally send her home at her insistence. She’s determined to be here for cafe day. But Sunday morning, when she collapses, we bring her back.
And that night, she has a stroke.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve held my mom in the past two weeks, thinking that it may be time to say goodbye.
Dad never gives up, and keeps vigil by her side. My brother comes home and meets with the doctors. Bob, the girls and I keep the farm going and I drive in every afternoon to be with her.
I feel positively manic. One moment I’m in a heap of despair, considering life without my mother. The next, I’m pulling myself together and helping Bob to set up the water system in the pastures so we can move the ewes and lambs out. The next, I burst into tears while talking to customers, then I’m cheering and hugging the kids when we manage to safely load the rams onto the truck and take them back to my Uncle Tommy’s farm.
“I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay,” I tell Bob as I rotate through a stock of bandanas soaked by snot and tears, rinsing and wringing them out to dry in the sun. “I just …..I just have to integrate all this.”
Because, although I feel she’s a bit too young for all this, I do comprehend that witnessing the decline of one’s parent is the natural course of things. If one is fortunate. Mom is 75. And I said this is where I wanted to be for this time of their lives. I didn’t want to be living far away, flying home for periodic visits. I wanted to be part of their world.
It’s what I wanted to do, but it’s not what I want right now.
The doctors figure out that she has excess fluid on her lungs. They draw off a liter and a half. She begins to breathe freely again. And no sooner can she draw a breath, then she finally starts to eat.
And three days later, she is transitioned to a rehabilitation facility, where she is now.
She is expected to recover. She is expected to return home. But there is a lot that is unknown about the state of her brain. The arteries are constricted. There is a possibility something can be done, but that determination will be a long time coming.
And so, life at Sap Bush resumes in the vortex of change once more.
How much care will she need? How much recovery can she attain?
Every day I go and sit with her, trying to sift out my mother from the cocktail of medications she is now on. Once determined and positive, she’s sad and lonely in spite of Dad’s constant company at her side, fearful she won’t be allowed to come back to the farm. I rub her hands and massage her feet to calm her down. And I realize something.
I’ve been through this before. Just on the flip side. It’s called parenting.
There are medications to complicate things, but the rest of this is about the brain — About developing it, asking it to re-route around the roadblocks, to continue to grow and expand, even in the face of injury.
That was my life for years, homeschooling and providing Ula’s therapy through her cerebral visual impairment.
I snap off the television in the room and put classical music on Mom’s phone. I go on a hunt through the rehab facility to find colored pencils and markers. And we spend the afternoon coloring. She calms down.
Meanwhile, on the outside, our customers and neighbors begin filling the Sap Bush mailbox with cards. Pat, a retired reference librarian who is part of Mom and Dad’s coffee klatch, begins sending me the latest findings on neuroplasticity for stroke victims. From her research, I recognize the importance of expanding her social interactions to help her get back in touch with her personality. I put the word out that visits would be helpful for her, and the next day when I show up in her room, Justine, one of our customers who usually sits at bar 2, is sitting in Mom’s room. She’s sent Dad home early. And George, who lives just five minutes away from the rehab facility, had been in earlier. I am beginning to see a return of some of Mom’s familiar facial expressions.
Justine goes home, and Ula and I sit with her for the evening, playing a game. She is exhausted by the time we leave, as am I. I receive more texts from people who plan on coming throughout the week.
And I am reminded with each card, with each customer who talks to me or takes Dad out for dinner, or visits Mom, with each email and bit of wisdom that comes in from friends and readers far and near, with each hug that comes, that this is not an extraordinary circumstance, but this could be an extraordinary experience. My family is rich with people who will stand beside us as we begin the swim toward whatever will be our new normal.
I don’t know what that will be. I’ve got a stack of research to wade through, lots of ideas about things to do with mom for recreational therapy in the late afternoons, and a business to run. But this morning, as the birds sing outside my window, I am grateful for these few minutes where I am able to just savor the kindness, sagacity and compassion we have been gifted from everyone in our lives over these past two weeks. And in this moment, I trust that, whatever happens, we’ll be all right.
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