Sunday, June 18, 2017

The remaining choice plays out

I’m home now, back from Pittsburgh. I spent several days visiting Mom so Tom and his wife had the time to arrange for caregivers so they could bring Mom to their house. Not all details are in place yet, though they hope to do so within a couple more days.

Mom’s meals have been a glass (maybe two!) of chocolate milk or fortified milkshake plus a few spoonfuls of applesauce or yogurt. Then she says she doesn’t want any more. I noticed she does much better without the straw. After drinking, if she’s been awake for more than a couple hours she is ready for a nap. If that meal is supper she will sleep from then to the middle of the next morning. She has lost a lot of weight.

For a while Tom had asked that Mom’s meals be pureed. But soon she wasn’t able to eat even that. So Tom canceled the pureed meals. And at the next meal they set a hamburger in front of her – which Tom ate. Since then they’ve been good at keeping the refrigerator in Mom’s residence wing stocked with milk, milkshakes, and applesauce.

If I’m there with someone else – a cousin came with his son from North Carolina for a couple days – we carry on a conversation and she’ll listen as we talk. If I’m the only one with Mom I read from a book – Mark Twain’s Roughing It. I read his description of a stagecoach ride from St. Joseph, MO westward in 1865.

Today, after Mom drank her lunch and began to get ready for a nap, I gave her a final hug.

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