ill parent – Page 2

The Caregiver’s Mantra

Patricia William June 8, 2018 13 Comments

Patricia Williams ~

If one more person tells me to be sure to take care of myself, I’m going to bury my face in a pillow and scream.

“Go for a walk, take a vacation,” they advise. I know they’re trying to help, but really? Giving me one more thing to do? Oh well, they’re just doing the best they can.

I moved my folks across the country, from Florida to Washington State, and into an apartment near me so that I could care for them in what seemed to be their final months. My brother, who’d been looking after them, was leaving to get married, and we didn’t think they were safe on their own.

They’d always been fiercely independent, but

Mom at Home

Arlen Gargagliano September 8, 2017 3 Comments

Arlen Gargagliano ~

Aisha is lurking in the kitchen just outside my home-office door. I hear her rattling dishes and speaking to herself in Twi, a language of her native Ghana. I know that she wants my attention, but I’ve told her that I need time to work. I try to focus on grading my college students’ papers, but I’m distracted.

Aisha is one of my mother’s aides. My mother requires care twenty-four/seven, and Aisha is one of several women, primarily foreign-born, who care for her in shifts. Mom’s had this arrangement since 2012, when several ministrokes disabled her brain and self-care abilities, and a broken leg left her mostly bedbound. My father’s recent death, ending their marriage of more than five decades,

Letting the Tears Fall

Dwight Thomas April 29, 2017 No Comments

In terms of size, I am a big man. But when I visited my dad in the hospital recently, I felt a “little boy” inside of me, resisting something I wasn’t ready for.

What’s Wrong, Dad ?

Anonymous April 13, 2017 No Comments

When I walked into my father’s hospital room, he began to sob. I didn’t cope well with his tears. I experienced them as a reaction to his seeing me and started to beat myself up, to think to myself, What have I done?

A voice at the back of my mind said, This is his illness–you can’t take it personally. But even so, I felt hurt by his crying.

Crazy

Ginny Hoyle April 7, 2017 19 Comments

Ginny Hoyle

I walked through my mother’s madness
in a coat of hungry colors.
Her eyes did not take me in. I was a child.
To win her, I hung by my knees from low branches

of the family tree, voicing nursery rhymes
from the hallowed text of her delusions.
And failed.

When they took her away,
I was older, careful. I hid my heart
behind a dozen jars of her best grape jelly
and drew ugly faces in my algebra notes.

When she came home,
I had no space to give her.
No, no, not in the kitchen;

my kitchen now.
Not in the blue chairs where she

Standing Up by Speaking Up

Jenny Kwak March 2, 2017 No Comments

My parents immigrated to the U.S. from Korea when I was two, in 1972. We were lucky we left when we did, or my father, a pro-democracy professor at Korea University during Park Chung-Hee’s regime, might have been jailed. We were also lucky my mother was a pharmacist, as the U.S. was accepting pharmacists and nurses then. We moved to Seattle and made our home there.

Complainer

Christina Phillips February 10, 2017 7 Comments

Christina Phillips

The patient, age forty-nine, complained of abdominal pain. She was taking both slow- and fast-acting oxycodone to manage the pain, and she also took antidepressants and a sleeping aid. She’d come to the hospital several times in the past year, always with the same complaint. This time, not feeling well enough to drive, she’d come by taxi. The veins in her arms were small, threadlike and collapsed, like those of a ninety-year-old or a recreational drug user.

Her medical file was huge, with reports from her primary-care physician, from local hospitals and from the gastroenterology department of a highly regarded teaching hospital across the state.

Wake-Up Call

Jenni Levy January 15, 2017 6 Comments

After my father died, I made sure I spoke with my mother every day. Dad’s death was sudden, if not entirely surprising, and there were a lot of logistical details to sort out. Mom, at 71, was living alone for the first time in her life. She wasn’t sleeping well. She was anxious. She didn’t understand all the paperwork that flooded into the house. I wasn’t surprised that she forgot things; she was overwhelmed with grief. And she’d never been good with technology; when she decided the phones in the house weren’t working and replaced them for the third time in a year, we just rolled our eyes. I brushed off suggestions from my brother that she might actually have a problem with her memory. Of

Read More »

Riñones al Jerez

Sarah Buttrey January 3, 2017 No Comments

“You do not need an MRI,” I told my father emphatically as he stood in my living room, explaining to me that his beloved doctor had ordered this for his low back pain. He was hoping for a quick fix before meeting his brother in Spain. “You need physical therapy.”

I dislike playing doctor to my family, not trusting myself to dissociate emotion from evidence, but this was just too much. Sure, his back hurt him sometimes, but there was nothing to suggest anything dangerous going on, nothing an intervention would fix. Nothing but the dreadful aches and pains of growing old.

Read More »

Knowing When to Let Go

Deb Skolnik January 2, 2017 1 Comment

I will never forget being told that my mother’s treatment options were pretty much over. A COPD/atrial fibrillation sufferer, she had been intubated and spent time in the ICU, then rehab and then home for a few days. She was very vehement about not wanting to spend life on a ventilator. And she documented this in a living will.

Read More »

Hope in a Hopeless Place

Paula Mahon December 25, 2016 No Comments

In 2008 my father was committed to a long-term care facility, and our family visited him daily. We testified to the nursing home staff of the funny, smart, kind and generous man he once was.

Read More »

last rites

Barbara Kaufmann December 23, 2016 No Comments

Read More »

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: ill parent

The Caregiver’s Mantra

Mom at Home

Letting the Tears Fall

What’s Wrong, Dad ?

Crazy

Standing Up by Speaking Up

Complainer

Wake-Up Call

Riñones al Jerez

Knowing When to Let Go

Hope in a Hopeless Place

last rites

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

fostering the humanistic practice of medicine publishing personal accounts of illness and healing encouraging health care advocacy

Tag: ill parent

Start typing and press enter to search