In the few weeks since her second stroke in just under a six-week span, Morie's mother is considered to be stable. At this point, from what Morie tells me, that might be about as good as her mother is going to get. Her mother isn't dead, but she doesn't have much of a quality of life. She's bedridden and is no longer ambulatory. I don't think she's even trying to physically get up as it is. She has sporadic moments of consciousness. I can't even say that she's lucid and I suppose I use the word "conscious" to mean that her eyes are open and she might look around and take in her immediate environment. Beyond this, she is usually asleep and breathing on her own without any noted difficulty. She spends much of her days asleep now. With the exception of Morie herself being present, her mother seems to have the closest thing to persistent 24-hour, around the clock, care as there are a myriad of relatives who are at her mother's bedside at almost every hour of the day, providing whatever care is deemed necessary. I think the family is looking to acquire the services of actual nursing staff to frequent her mother's home and assume a more knowledgeable and professional manner of care. Until then, the family will look after her as best they can. Morie has not ruled out the possibility of exploring placing her mother into a hospice care facility.
Morie's never really been the type to show emotion and in this regard, she very much has a man type of mentality, where she is very good at putting her feelings and emotions aside in favor of allowing logic and problem-solving to take over. As I may have mentioned before, she and her mother have had a historically tumultuous relationship, so I have to think that seeing her mother in her current state has to be conflicting for Morie. Still, I have to think that Morie still wants what's best for her mother, even if it happens to be placing her in hospice care.
Mom deteriorated and died in just under four days. She felt so bad on a Monday, to where she started talking about how she felt that she was dying, and just under four days later on that subsequent Thursday, Mom was gone. Hospice care was never an option. On the day she died, there were plans to place her on dialysis, being that she was believed to have been experiencing some manner of kidney failure. I may have written this before too, but as it turned out, she had multiple organs failing, to where dialysis was not going to do much for her. Now, if I think about it further, Mom was first hospitalized in early August 2018. She would die in mid-October that same year, some two and a half months later. I think that in some way, at least given what I know now and what had transpired at the time, maybe I could see Mom's time away from home as being some form of hospice care for her. She was dealing with a condition that was never going to improve and clearly, as time progressed, her condition got worse. The continued wound care she received was only able to do so much before she had reached a catastrophic point of zero return. Those massive bed sores would eventually give way to sepsis, which Mom's system could no longer stave off. The various medical personnel in the facilities where she had been admitted did what they could, maybe not much to cure her condition in one fell swoop, but instead to treat everything in a slow and gradual process. Her bed sores were massive. I happened to see one of them and if I had to describe what that sore looked like, I would refer to it a being a sort of the kind of fissure you might see on the ground, but instead on her back. Those were never going to get better. Little did we know that as the days went on, Mom's time was ticking much faster than we could have ever assumed or anticipated.
I don't know how much more time Morie's mother has or in what way(s) she is going to deteriorate. I suppose the family is ready and waiting to see what happens and that's really all that they can do. Morie remains conflicted. I know she is, even though she may not outright say it at first, if ever. All I can do is be supportive and let her know that I kind of know what she's going through. She knows that Mom died and she was one of the few people in the office I told when all of that was taking place. When Mom was in the midst of her health crisis, I didn't tell just anyone. I only told a few select people. Morie has also chosen to remain similarly selective as to who she tells about her mother's current health ordeal. I don't blame her.
I guess Morie and her family reluctantly play the waiting game. I know the game all too well.
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