This morning I got up very early and spent the morning with my mom. Yes, this was my first early morning shift, and Starbucks slowly eased the pain a little. But when my mom woke up, smiled at me, waved at me (with her RIGHT hand! I was so proud) and said "Hi Sissy!" the pain of 7 am was gone! We had the best morning together. After laying with her arm around me for a little while, my mom said, "get me up." I said, "where are we going?" and she said, "I don't know but I'm cold." I suggested that we go outside, and she was down for it. Although my mom often does this, and decides two minutes later that she's ready for air conditioning again, the temp that early in the morning was perfect and we had a lovely visit. Sitting in her wheelchair, she propped her feet up on the bench that I was in, and we just talked. It was amazing. There are changes in my mom every day, but today it felt like a slightly bigger change, and it was nice to feel almost normal for a bit. My mom is very insightful during some of these talks - telling me how bad she feels for some of the people in her group therapy classes and discussing all of our hopes for the future (with her holding up her crossed fingers each time). I noticed during this time that my mom's memory, attentiveness, and ability to think about more complex issues seems significantly improved. All of these things come and go, don't get me wrong, but they are becoming longer and more often.
After our talk, we ate breakfast. My mom's been eating pretty well lately - it's kind of up and down, but who can blame her with hospital food. My grandmother made some Cajun food this weekend and my mom was all about it! She even convinced her speech therapist to let her try eating rice and gravy. This is definitely not on her "soft foods and honey-thick liquids" diet, but my mom is quite the smooth talker. Although she didn't get approval to add rice to her menu, she at least got to have it for the day ;-) Unfortunately, those swallow reflexes are still healing, but we're getting there. I felt pretty horrible the other day when I walked in with a venti (Giant!) vanilla soy latte, and my mom immediately reached out and casually said, "give me a sip." It's funny because it's such a normal thing to come from her - she always wants to taste what you have and she loves coffee as much as I do. I just stood there, staring at the coffee, not knowing what to say as my dad made this face like "oh noooooooo, what did you do to us!?!?" I was trying to decide how to let her down easy when my dad remembered that we have these packets with powder in them to thicken up liquid. Genius! My mom's been addicted ever since. Every time we say, "Donna, would you like to try eating some lunch?" she says, "mmmm, no. But I'll take some coffee...." hahaha I love it. My daily Starbucks stop is officially justified. We use coffee to bribe her into eating more food, and when my dad let her drink coffee from the cup today (rather than spoon feed her the thickened liquid), she closed her eyes and held the cup like it was made of the finest gold. She's so cute.
Lastly, there was no therapy today, but there was a movie being shown in one of the conference rooms - it was "Meet the Parents." I had asked my mom this morning if she thought she'd like to go, which she did. At one point, she woke up from a nap telling us that she didn't want to miss the movie, so did we need to go?! When it was finally time, she and I headed off with a bag of movie snacks that I had picked up for her. One of the biggest issues my mom had when we first got to TIRR was attention span - she couldn't focus on one thing for long at all. I didn't expect her to make it through the entire movie today, but I was interested to see how long she could last and be able to pay attention. My mom hasn't quite mastered whispering yet (although when did she ever really whisper before ;-P) but she and I would talk and laugh together about the movie, and she would reach into the bag of candy as she stared intently at the screen. It was so much fun...something so simple as watching a movie together, yet something that we haven't been able to do in a long while. After about a full hour, she said that she was getting tired (she always falls asleep in movies!), but she wished she wasn't because she wanted to see the end. We ended up leaving the movie early so that she could take a nap, and when she did, I left the hospital to run some errands. Apparently she couldn't sleep because I was no more than 10 minutes down the road when she called me (my dad dialed) and told me to come back so we could go finish the movie. I love her. And I love that she's coming back - however slowly it comes.
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