“Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worse kind of suffering.”
- Paulo Coelho
At 10:20 tonight we were advised Mom's name had been scratched from the surgery schedule. Tomorrow morning we will start the waiting game again. In the meantime, the medical staff had not given her morphine since 6 A.M. as they did not want to depress her respiration prior to her surgery. So she spent the day in tremendous pain from the hip fracture compounded by tremendous agitation from morphine withdrawal. It has been very hard to watch.
Other than one brief visit to check her vital signs and two to empty her catheter bag, the nursing staff have been invisible. No one checked to see how she was doing. No one came to update us on the expected time of surgery. It has been another long day. I'm spent. My sisters are exhausted.
We are trying with mixed results, to stay calm and not get angry. We get that she is not a priority for them. She is 89 years old. She has Alzheimer's. She can't communicate with them. She is not their mother. They weren't on the receiving end of her loving kisses. She didn't sing to them or read them bedtime stories. She didn't tell them she loves them. I wish they could look at her and see who she really is. Apparently they can't.
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