As I leave the house to make my now weekly pilgrimage to
Oshkosh, I spot one of the kids’ iPods on the kitchen floor. It looks a little
odd, and then I see that all that high technology is now held together with
electric tape.
The surface appeal is gone, but still it manages to work
somehow.
It’s a little like that with Mom. A $90,000 chunk of
technology about the size of a cigarette pack is implanted under her skin,
about where a breast pocket would be. It paces her heart and, when the rhythm
goes all kaplooey, it shocks it back in line. Disconcerting, that.
But now, despite the nifty gizmo and all sorts of expensive
pharmaceuticals, her giant heart, filling three quarters of her chest cavity,
is failing in its job. As a result, her body is filling up with fluid.
In the past two weeks, she’s gained 20 pounds. It’s in her
arms and legs, which the physical therapists wrap with elastic bandages, and
in odd bulges around her midriff, which they can’t wrap. Because she’s had two
radical mastectomies, in some of the places the fluid would normally go, there
aren’t places anymore.
Aside from the discomfort (doctor word), pain (patient
word), and fear it causes, congestive heart failure is hell on personal vanity.
I call my friends Sabina, a physician, and Susan, a nurse,
to get a pre-trip briefing. So I am prepared for the worst.
Still, heading up Highway 41, the sky is so blue, and there
are red barns in fields of oat stubble and snow: beauty all around
me. I turn off the radio to make a place that’s quiet enough to let in wisdom
greater than my own.
I enter the nursing home, a place of old people and middle-aged daughters. Mom is sleeping: I nudge her awake. She rises, in some pain,
but manages to get going.
After she stands for a bit, a pocket of fluid forms beneath
her buttock. She makes me feel it, and I am suitably horrified. All the people
she has made feel her butt today, including her nurse, a man, have been
horrified, she says. We laugh about that.
We walk the halls to a waiting room with nursing-home-mauve-and-blue wing-back chairs and an enormous freight elevator. Odd décor
even for a nursing home, I suggest. Mom climbs on: 117 pounds.
That’s three less than yesterday. The diuretics are starting
to work at last. The many bathroom trips last night begin to feel less onerous.
And today becomes an up-day on the rollercoaster.
