Yesterday was Thanksgiving Day. I spent it with a friend and her family. One of them asked me about my mom and I broke down. It was a thoroughly humiliating experience. I dread meeting new people now. I am consumed by such overwhelming grief, bewilderment and rage I can hardly keep it together.
My friend and I stopped by the nursing home to see my mom, and she kept nodding off while we were talking to her. She is also bruising more easily, having a lot more trouble breathing and seeping blood from her damaged foot and bedsores. The last time she exhibited these symptoms, she wound up being severely anemic. They had to give her three pints of blood. I have been hounding the staff at the nursing home to order a blood test for over a week now, but they won't do one until the 1st of December.
While I was at the nursing home today, mom had no less than three breathing treatments in the six-hour period I was there. She is supposed to have one every four hours, that's how compromised her breathing was. Then, she bumped her bad foot into the wall, and blood started dripping out of her bandage. I ran around trying to get someone to change it for her. They are going to wrap her toes with more gauze, but they aren't going to change her bandage until tomorrow. There were tears in my mom's eyes from the pain, and fear in her eyes from the shortness of breath. It's like I'm standing in front of her while somebody smothers her with a pillow and there's not a damn thing I can do about it. She watches while I sit at the foot of her bed and sob and tell her I'm sorry because I can't help her. I can't make her breathe better, no matter what I do.
I'm telling you now. If you smoke, quit. If you care about yourself or the people you love even one tiny bit, quit. Now. Don't wait for the perfect day to do it. There is no perfect day to do it. My mom says when she tries to breathe, it feels like she has a sponge in her lungs. She can't move any air, and it terrifies her. There is nothing about smoking that makes it worth your while. It is a dirty, filthy, expensive, life-sucking habit with no health benefits whatsoever, and to take a chance that you will be one of the extremely rare few that will suffer no noticeable ill effects until the day you die is not worth it. That's what my mom used to think. She doesn't think that way now, and now, it is much too late.
I wish more people could read this particular blog. It's very sad the damage that smoking can do. I too have had relatives who've suffered from diseases that stem from smoking. I find it hard to understand why anyone would start smoking. Then again, I'm lucky I've never ever tried it.
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