It’s been 3 days since I came back. Mom’s condition remains the same. Unconscious, bleeding in the bladder, breathing oxygen through the mask, weak and cold. She pulled out the IV and bled through two blankets and the bedding before the caretake discovered it in the middle of the night. By the morning when I got there, her arm was all bruised up from their attempts at finding a usable site for the IV again. Her vessels have got so tiny and hard to find now, it’s a miracle to be able to find one that the IV can send the nutrients in.
They forgot to turn on the rinse for the bladder so they had to manually inject and suction the bladder to get the blood clod out so it won’t plug the bladder in the afternoon. The attending came around 5pm with some students, they stayed at mom’s bed side and observed with her making comments on mom’s symptoms. Even with a daughter in the medical school, I feel like an experiment when the crowd gathered around mom’s bed, observing in medical terms.
The head nurse came in the afternoon also and talked to me for a while. Telling me to talk to mom even though she is unconscious, because the hearing is the last to go she said. The nurse pulled me aside in the morning to tell me mom showed signs of failing, the shallow breathing and the little urine (not knowing they forgot to turn the rinse on). The attending said I am the miracle drug for mom. She was doing poorly last week until I came back, then she got stable. 小花，mom’s god-daughter came in the afternoon, she said it’s hard to find a ‘good’ date forfuneral because mom is a ‘tiger’. She said I should put on the socks and shoes for her when we dress her. So many traditions, i would rather not know any.
I asked for a single room for mom, we are still on the waiting list. The caretaker for the neighbor is loud on her phone, she sings, she has other caretaker visitors. I share the sleeper chair with our caretaker and feel I’m intruding. It’s her bed at night, it’s her ‘station’. I wish we have a bigger room, more chairs, and less noise with the door closed. God willing.
I’m in a dilima. I want to pray for mom. But do I pray to the budda that she believes in or to the christian God that I am close to? It’s a test of my own belief. I always believe in a higher being whether it be the buddist gods or the christian god, or the moslim’s god. I learned to pray to the christian god, and now I’m at a loss how to pray to that higher being I believe is the same for all. Isn’t that ironic. I just realized I am still bound by the divides human in our finite wisdom made to help us understand the spiritual plane. It doesn’t matter which kind of prayer or which god we pray to, ‘they’ don’t care. It’s one of the many means to reach them/it/him/her. The right one is the one that helps us ‘feel’ that connection to them.
Exhausted and got back to the hotel early. Went to slepp probably before 9. Woke up at 1am. And haven’t been able to fall back to sleep. The morning is here. It’s going to be a struggle again in the afternoon.