A BETTER VIEW

A stroke of luck: Hospital, therapy settle old family wounds

By Chris Benguhe | July 2, 2009 | The Catholic Sun

Editor’s note: This is the final column in a series. Read Part One and Part Two.

Hospital rehab programs place people in one of two categories — those who heal and those who don’t. Unfortunately they placed my mother into the latter.

She was scared and stuck, literally and metaphorically. And rehab programs, especially those funded by Medicare, don’t tolerate anything less than success. If you don’t make progress, you’re out and with only a few days notice.

So suddenly and without warning they asked us to take my mother home — helpless. She could not even get herself in and out of the bathroom, and she could not afford 24-hour-a-day home health care. Their solution: a nursing home!

Now telling my intelligent, capable and headstrong mother to go a nursing home was a sure way of getting her to use her good hand to throw a heavy object at me. Plus, it didn’t seem right. She deserved a real chance to recover her independence.

Out of the darkness came one voice that cared — the physical therapist friend of mine who came to comfort me when my mother first had her stroke.

“Let me work with her,” she practically ordered me. “If we can get her into my center for one month, maybe we can get her well enough to go home.”

It was worth a shot. I had to trust my friend, and my mom had to trust me.

“Mom, I know you can come back from this,” I explained. “But it’s not going to happen here. We need to go somewhere else for a little while — a month. I promise we will bring you home after that.”

“You are the boss,” she said simply. I was flabbergasted. It was tantamount to the falling of the Berlin Wall! My mother had ceded control. Now it was up to me — to us — to deliver.

Team effort

A team of newly dedicated therapists at Arizona Grand inspired by my friend worked on my mother seven days a week. The first day she stood on her own. The first week she was walking. By the end of the month she was doing sit-ups and yoga. There was no way to explain the progress. Actually there was. They cared. My mother knew it, and she trusted them.

Each night either my brother or I visited, trying to boost her morale. Sometimes we succeeded, and sometimes we failed. Sometimes we looked past the person — the mother, the human — we were too obsessed with fixing her.

But little by little we cleaned up our acts and tried to respect, to appreciate and to make each other shine. We scrubbed 20 years of grime and grease off the floors and the walls of her house. We changed the carpets, and cleaned out the past as much as we could. She did her best to let us let go of the past.

A month after my mother’s stroke I was speaking to my brothers almost every day; we haven’t done that since I was a teenager. My oldest brother — who kept to himself too much for his own good — became my teammate. Together we worked on the game plan for my mother’s recovery.

Today, my mother is home. She is walking more, talking more every day, but we depend heavily on the kindness of friends, new and old.

We cannot “make” her heal. But every day we learn to love, to grow and to rejoice a little bit more instead of squandering these days wishing things were different.

I reflect on that as I slip in a CD of old jazz standards. I ask my mom to stand up and let go of her walker and hold onto me instead. For the first time in over a decade I danced with my mother.

“The memory of all that,” sings Ella Fitgerald. “No they can’t take that away from me.”

--

Chris Benguhe is a columnist for The Catholic Sun. Please send comments to letters@catholicsun.org.