This past fall, I spent two weeks taking care of my elderly grandmother. She lives in the Canyons of Southern California, with no Internet and limited cell phone service, so I had a lot of time to think. Watching Grandma go through her ordeal showed me how nothing humbles a person like illness or injury, and how hard it is for some of us—especially those with fierce independence—to depend on others.
Grandma is normally very healthy and active, and she’s young for her 82 years. She’s been largely injury-free, until she was unlucky enough to fall on a department store escalator and break the upper portion of her femur bone. She spent a week in the hospital after surgery and then two more weeks in a rehab facility. She now has two pins holding her bones together, so I’m calling her the Bionic Woman. She gets a laugh out of that. When we finally brought her home from the rehab facility, we were all thrilled. It meant that she was recovering well. But it also meant that we no longer had nurses and attendants on call to help with her care.
That’s where I came in. I was there to help her with everything from changing her clothes, to sorting out and administering her many medications and vitamins, to making it to and from the bathroom without falling down. She was grateful for my help, I knew that, but I could also sense her struggling with the loss of self-reliance. Because even though she may look old on the outside, my grandmother has always been young at heart. And that internal youth has always been combined with a fierce will to get by on her own.
Depression, unhappiness, loneliness, painful events, and sorrows should not be given. news generic viagra from india You can also take help tadalafil 20mg of herbal pills that can prove handy while you're driving. No doubt, erectile dysfunction is the most embarrassing health problem with severe viagra without effects over the emotional health. Its use as an online pharmacy sildenafil appalachianmagazine.com aphrodisiac is popular as it enhances the production of sperm naturally. Up until the accident, that’s what she was doing. She still drives her big, pearl-white Thunderbird (although she probably shouldn’t), makes her own meals, takes care of her aging cat (who I sometimes think is on more medications than she is), raises the shades in the house every morning and lowers them every night, and volunteers at a local historical home. She’s a 100-pound energizer bunny, and I often think she’s busier than I am.
Just before Grandma was released from the rehab facility, her roommate, Rosemary, called me over to her bed and asked me to get a pen and paper from her bedside table. I did as I was asked and handed over the requested items. Rosemary wanted to write me a note so that Grandma wouldn’t hear what she had to say. When she was finished, I took the pad of paper and read what she’d written: “Hide the car keys.” I laughed before I realized that Rosemary was serious. I later learned from my grandmother that she and Rosemary had had a conversation about driving and Grandma had said she’d be driving again soon. Rosemary told her it was too dangerous and she might end up hurting someone, which of course, made Grandma feel bad. When she told me about the conversation, she broke down in tears, saying that she didn’t know if she was ready to give up driving just yet.
It wasn’t hard to imagine myself in her place, many years from now, lying injured in bed, my equally fierce independence slipping away before my eyes. I felt terrible for her, and I told her that I understood how hard it must be. When you are an independent person, you sometimes wear that independence like a coat of armor. And when that armor is taken away, you are left feeling exposed and vulnerable.
Grandma is doing better now, and she’s slowly regaining her independence and getting back to her old self. I know she’s still scared, and that she’s had to learn a hard lesson for an independent person: it’s OK to let others in. It’s OK to admit that you need help and to lean on someone else, even if just for a little while. And that’s a lesson we all have to learn at some point in our lives.
Recent Comments