Home!

My mom is home! She came home on Wednesday. It’s a good thing, I promise – not because of any seizure, or because she wasn’t progressing, but just because her time at rehab was over. So it’s a natural home return.

It’s really nice for her to be home - nice that she’s not interrupted in the middle of the night by nurses taking her vital signs, nice that my dad doesn’t have to travel to see her, nice that she can just be in familiar surroundings, and not a hospital.

Though it’s also more work – there are no nurses to help her to the bathroom, to help her get dressed in the morning, to get her food ready. And it takes a lot of effort to do all those things, especially to get to the bathroom – a transfer from the chair to the wheelchair, wheel the wheelchair to the bathroom, a transfer from the wheelchair to the toilet, and back again. She said to me today, in a joking way, “it would be so much easier if I could do this on my own!” It definitely would.

The one really disappointing thing about being home: my sister’s dog doesn’t recognize her. Now, my mom, before all of this, took care of the dog a lot, when my sister was at work. My mom would pet her for hours, walk her, play with her, and the dog loved my mom. But now the dog just doesn’t realize it’s my mom, which is harder for her than she’ll admit: it’s an ever-constant reminder of how different she seems to other people (or dogs). I just hope the dog can learn to love her again, even if she isn’t the same.