This evening, we spoke for a while with my cousin who's a hospice nurse. She reiterated what we'd heard locally. Somehow, hearing it from someone we knew made it a bit more bearable and acceptable. I thought Others have done this. We can do it, too.
Some practicalities occur to us. For one, we need to come up with a way for my mother to signal us at night and on the weekend. Even if we're just down the hall, we might as well be a thousand miles away. Some kind of electronic device occurs to me -- a bike horn, or a wireless doorbell, something like that. It has to be something that's very, very easy to use, because she's pretty weak. We're also thinking about putting in a wireless baby monitor.
It occurs to me that for the first few nights, and possibly on an intermittant basis, we might want to have one of us sleep in my mother's bedroom, which is just across the hall from her living room, where the hospital bed will be. (Never thought of the 'living room' as 'the only room in which one is living'. )
One thing that my cousin suggested is that we routinely talk with others in this situation, or possibly write in a journal. I think that's a good idea.
2 comments:
These all sound like good ideas. When my MIL broke her hip and ended up living with us until her death two years later she used an old copper bear bell that my husband had from camping. It was loud enough for me to wake up and take her to the bathroom each evening. You are correct in that many of us go through this. I cared for my mother for about 6 weeks during her hospice time and my brothers and sisters shared the rest of the final days at her side. There is no easy path and talking about it does help.
I'd bet you grew to dread the sound of that bell.
We were thinking about all of this early this morning -- just before getting a call from the hospital -- just wondering what it will be like, thinking about how we'll likely start out saying Oh, we can't possibly go out and leave her alone on a weekend, knowing that at some point it'll mutate to How long can we be out?
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