My stubborn mother!
My 90 year old mother is in the hospital, again. Last time it was because she fell, again. This time because of pneumonia. Fortunately, she's getting over it but her multiple hospital stays totaling 20 days in the last 30 days, and her general inactivity (she's never been one to deliberately exercise), has made her much weaker.
Now, she can't get out of her hospital bed, and she outright refuses PT!
Of course, I love my mother, but she is incredibly stubborn and demands that she be in control, even when her decisions are ill-advised.
She's also increasingly suffering from cognitive decline, which is easy to see by the decisions she's made lately.
Yet, my sizeable population of siblings leaves her on her own. She's living alone without any assistance. She keeps falling, when not literally on her face, on the other side of her head, or as she has already done, breaking her hip. My sister who lives closest to her, is constantly rushing her to the hospital.
As one of my formerly favorite sisters takes glee in reminding me, I'm way down the list of medical power of attorney, and my extensive medical experience is ignored!
This morning, I learned that my siblings (most are retired and all well off) are discussing bringing in 24/7 assistance which they should have done many months ago to avoid my mother getting injured, but they're leaving the decision up to her. They say well we'll only do it if Mom says it's okay.
What? She's obviously not okay. She can't safely live on her own!
In what world do they not understand that their passivity is tantamount to elder abuse?
If my mom doesn't get out of bed she's definitely going to wither and die quickly.
Just one other thing that's important to note, my mom and her many children enforced this same apathy and passivity with my dad who they finally managed to kill a few months ago, tragically.
I say it that way because I was my dad's only advocate. Unlike my mom, my dad exercised all the time. He loved to walk and it showed in his health!
He was very vibrant and physically agile. But, after my mom threw him out of their house, within 3 days of staying at a board and care, where they were over medicating him, and not watching him closely enough, he fell and broke his hip!
It's at this point that I got really involved, and within 33 days of his hip surgery, I had him walking independently on its own two feet at the young age of 92.5!
And, within the next 2 months, we were walking over a mile! Very impressive for a nearly 93-year-old man.
But, my mother, who supposedly was happily married to my dad for over 70 years! was dead set, pun intended, that I was doing too much for him! And that I didn't need to be involved. Literally, she forced me to stop caring for him!
And of course he withered and died within 6 months because no one was motivating him to walk. Move it or lose it. Unfortunately, he lost it.
And all my siblings followed my mom. No one else objected to her abandonment of my dad.
Fyi, they have plenty of money to pay for 24/7 care, forever.
But my mother refuses to accept that. Even in the hospital when I visited her last night, she's claiming she doesn't have any money, which is completely laughable.
Finally, I find it completely objectionable and emotionally corrosive to leave my mother to her own devices when her devices don't work so well.
I'm not one to passively and apathetically sit on the sidelines and watch somebody die when they don't need to. Not yet.