What am I going to do with her?
One of these days we'll both be fine
One of these days we’ll both be fine
What Am I Going to Do with Her?
There is a patient in the bed beside my mother’s who I’ll call Janet who is suffering greatly and is likely on the wait list for long-term care like my mother. She’s blind in one eye and not able to move around on her own but seems to be more cognizant of her surroundings unlike my mother who needs to be reminded repeatedly that she’s in the hospital.
Janet can’t use the call button and screams “help me, help me” at the top of her lungs to get the attention of the nurses or personal support workers.
Of course they are busy and do their best to attend, but often Janet yells while they are in the middle of helping someone else. If her requests are simple like “cover my feet” or “open my package of apples,” I’ll step in—not out of any great goodness in my heart, but just to stop the sound emitting from her mouth.
Although I try to be friendly to Janet and always greet her when I arrive or leave the hospital room, I have come to detest the sound of her voice. I’ve never heard a voice so loud from someone so small. It is both deep and high pitched at the same time—demanding and incessant. It immediately makes you want to cover your ears and scream yourself.
When she is yelling, it is impossible to have a conversation. On most days, my sister who is not in town can hardly talk to my mother on FaceTime because of the noise.
Sometimes my mother will say, “What am I going to do with her?”
I just shake my head because I have no fucking idea.
One of the nurses said to me, “I’m worried she’s affecting the other patients and your mom.”
She is.
When I visit, my mother and I go for walks in the halls or sit in the waiting room outside the sub-acute wing where it is quiet and there’s a nice view of the city which still appears to still have a lot of trees despite all the development.
*
The other day, when Janet was sleeping, I pulled out some earplugs for my mother, but she didn’t know what they were.
“Do I eat these?” she asked of the soft, blue oblong-shaped items, and her question ignited the fury in me that the doctors and administrators here were planning to send her back to an independent living situation.
“No,” I said and wrote a note on a sticky pad that said, “These are earplugs.”
My mother couldn’t read my hand writing and looked at me very confused when she read the note out loud, “These are cars?”
So I re-wrote the note neater and when she read, “These are earplugs,” she laughed and laughed and asked, “What do I need with those?”
*
One day I came in and Janet was not only screaming at the top of her lungs, but also making a fake baby crying wan wan sound and banging a box of tissue on the hospital table in front of her as hard as she could which made a loud slapping sound as it hit the surface. I had never seen her in this much distress.
A psw who was helping another patient across the room looked back at Janet with disdain and said, “I’m not coming over there.”
Janet asked why not.
“Because you just slapped me. And you hit two other nurses today.”
Then the psw said to me, “I’m sorry you have to listen to her.”
A silence fell over the normally noisy hospital room, and I felt bad for Janet who for the first time in a week was not screaming.
“Oh, that’s okay,” I said.
“She’s been carrying on like this for hours.”
Later that day, I saw a nurse sitting beside Janet’s bed holding her hand. She said, “I know you’re having a very bad day.”
“I’m having an awful day,” Janet said her voice cracking. It sounded like she was crying.
“What is one thing I could do for you right now that would make you feel better?” the nurse asked. Her question made tears form in my eyes.
This I realized was the same nurse who had whispered in my ear to keep pushing the hospital because she knew my mother should not be sent home.
“Nothing,” Janet said.
“There’s not one thing I could do for you that would make you feel better?”
“No,” Janet said but something softened in her voice.
*
Once when Janet’s granddaughter was visiting and asked her how things were going, Janet said, “Bullshit. Bullshit is how things are going.”
My mother whispered to me, “What did she say?”
“She said bullshit,” I repeated, and we both chuckled.
Then Janet said, “When the nurses don’t come when I call, I scream all day. I scream from morning to night.”
Her granddaughter didn’t say anything.
She’s doing it on purpose, I laughed to myself—a little enraged, a little in awe.
Read more from One of these days we’ll both be fine
Kathryn Mockler is the author of Anecdotes.
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