the end part 1

From rehab mother is sent to a personal care home. This is a place where someone has people in a home and they tend to them around the clock. It is not like assisted living. A nurse owns this home and my mother arrived on a Friday. I visited her on Sunday. The picture reflects what I found. Hospice had been called, they evaluated her on a Wednesday and decide she has definitely had a large stroke in the rehab place and because no one was paying attention, had no care. REALLY? My mother was non responsive except she was calling for Uncle Will. My mother lived with her grandmother and her son ( Uncle Will) off and on until she was sent to the orphans home after her grandmother and her father's deaths.  I am not sure why Uncle Will didn't marry, but my mother was fond of him. I had never heard her mention him in years, other than when looking at a picture.
We pull up at the personal care home, the backyard has grass knee high and the trashcans are filled with obviously dirty diapers, the smell is gross. I just do not have a good feeling about this. My daughter and I walk around the front of the house and she starts crying as we stand on the front porch and look around. She says it looks like a crack house. The outside lights are busted, the front is just horrible looking. We knock, they unlock the door and enter the house that mother is going to never leave. The smell is not good. It smells like the trashcans, only inside. I am led to my mother's room and she is in a hospital bed, the tv blaring. She is breathing through her mouth, lips pulled back, I realize at that moment she is gone from us. This is not the mother I fed chicken soup to a week ago. Her legs are pulled up, atrophied, her hands are rigid, I pull up her eyelids and her eyes are fixed. I try to bribe her into a response by saying " look there is Cody mother.." she turns her head but sees nothing. She attempts this a couple of times, but makes no response. The shade over her head is stained, the bathroom that she won't use is filthy from the roommate, the trash can full of used diapers, the bathtub dirty.  My mother has a dresser and my sister in law has thrown her shoes under her bed. REALLY? My mother will never need those shoes again. Her clothes are just haphazardly stuffed into the dresser. Her teeth are nasty, and need to be cleaned.
I finally get to talk to the nurse that owns the home on Tuesday before the evaluation and let her know mother's medical history, personal history and answer some questions she has. She says mother is quite dehydrated and we don't know what can be done, improvement is not really an option, but stabilization is what we are aiming for at this point. I talk to her quite often and she says mother has had yogurt, and some ensure, that she is taking her meds with applesauce. My brother thinks she is improving because they have her sitting up in the sun in the bed. Does he talk to her well no but she is improving he can see it. The nurse says he stays 5 minutes, what could he know. 
I am sick with a sinus infection so bad I cannot drive to see my mother. I am sick and miss work and believe that stress from work, mother and the ups and downs of this summer are getting to me. Cody going to college, me being alone it is just a lot to deal with, even if I was fooling myself it wasn't so much.
So the weekend passes... 

Another hospital stay...

Well she went back into the hospital again in August for another UTI. The nurse at the assisted living first thought she had suffered a stroke, she was non responsive, her mouth was drawn, her eyes were fixed. They did CT Scan and decided after she started screaming and yelling that she had another uti. A week in the hospital, my brother said we need to call hospice.They have decided once again perhaps she has had a stroke in the first place after reviewing the CT Scans again. DUH!   I race to the hospital she is moaning, sitting in a pile of poop, and legs over the side of the bed. She isn't eating much he said or drinking. I get her cleaned up by the aide, her lunch is sitting there on a table. " Mom you want to eat?" YES! So I start feeding her, chicken that is a little tough, rice with butter and peas mixed in, chocolate cake, chicken soup, ensure ( blah but who wouldn't think so,) mmmmmmmm on the chicken soup, another bite? YES! she was responsive the whole time. Was watching tv which she hadn't really seen in some time. Off to rehab the next day.
 The rehab center said she wasn't responsive enough to do rehab. She had left the hospital with two drugs in her system that were making her non responsive. One was a sleeping pill, and a a strong pain pill. The rehab place said she couldn't do rehab so they had to decide what to do with her once again. If she couldn't stand up and get out of bed on her own, she couldn't go back to the assisted living. So what to do... She hasn't been eating and drinking, " the rehab place really isn't very nice," then what is she doing there?
I don't understand just sticking my mother somewhere and leaving her and expecting it to work out, when we all know from experience you have to keep on those people and keep in touch and go everyday to find out exactly what might be happening or not happening. "Did you check her meds before she left the hospital?" The hospital has a habit of sending her home on things she wasn't even taking because they decided that perhaps the drugs weren't working in the hospital, but they are on the chart. 
People just don't care about the elderly. They have lived their life, they can get better or not, it is just not important to anyone really. 
except me..