Hospitals and Highways

I drive a lot. From Waseca to Rochester to Waseca to Rochester over and over and over. It's an hour-long drive... Not sure if you are familiar with rural minnesota roads, but here is what one can be expected to look at during a mini-road trip in Southern Minnesota...

I got the call a little over a week ago, the kind of call that you never want to get.

My mother's idiot boyfriend left a message on my voicemail:

"Steph it's ___. Listen, ...(interject pointless babble)... and anyway, she fell down and had an accident and she has a fractured skull and there's some bleeding. They're taking her to Rochester. Gimme a call back."

It was about 07:30 and I'd just gotten off a 12-hour shift. It was snowing big, fluffy, wet snowflakes in Fort Lewis.

A day later I was on a plane, rolling over the information in my brain, trying to be a 23-year-old playing a "real" grown-up, researching medical/legal options, preparing for the worstcase scenario -- that my mother could be a vegetable.

What it came down to was this: I am simply not ready for my mom to be dead. Or brain-dead.

Lucky me, she wasn't.

Unlucky me, she still wasn't (isn't) too good.

In between trying to coax her to walk around the halls once a day, let me attempt to help her into the shower, run a pick through her mangled, knotted up curly bed-head or feed spoon-fulls of mashed potatos and other various hospital foods into her definiant mouth, I usually just kind of sit there. I let her hold my hand. I change the movies for her. I watch her as she dozes off and wakes up again.

It's so unnatural. It's like, "Wait a minute, I'm the daughter."

I think she senses this, too, because although she really needs me there and needs my help, she tries to tell me what to do. Only I don't obey now. Responseless, I notice how the silence fills the room with an awkward sensation -- the way that you feel when someone is in front of you in line at the grocery store arguing with a screaming child who wants something she can't have. And getting nowhere.

After the first couple nights in the intensive care unit, I watched the news alone in my hotel room. I thought about Natasha Richardson's accident in correlation to my mother's mishap. Here was a woman who just bumped her head going down the bunny slope. She's dead. Here's my mother, who supposedly fell down 13 cement steps only to be found curled up in a ball by her boyfriend the morning after and then left to internally bleed for 24 hours before being actually admitted to a hospital. And she's here.

Thank God. I really am not ready for her to not be here.

I'm so grateful, but I'm so annoyed. I am angry at her for a lot of reasons but it seems wrong and pointless to express it right now. I'm not sure she'd really understand.

She's gotten her sense of humor back but who knows if she's just silly because she can be or silly because that's her mentality right now.

What I really want to say to her is:

Do you realize how your drinking not only put your life at risk but affected all of the people around you?

But how is it fair to say that to somebody who is living life in a hospital bed? Is my anger justified?