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...waiting to be filled...

I took my mother to the doctor again today for a follow-up visit, to discuss the lab work she had done last week. The results weren't what I'd expected-- her thyroid level is too high, even though she's been taking the exact same dosage for the past four years with no problems, and the tests she had at her endocrinologist's office in May were completely normal. It also appears she's slightly anemic, which came as a surprise to both of us; and she's got high cholesterol, which wasn't as much of a shock. So now she has to take yet another medicine for the cholesterol, after just having gotten off of one blood pressure medicine (as the combination of the two she was taking was lowering her blood pressure too much); and she needed a new prescription for a lower synthroid dosage. Plus they did more lab work, and she'll have to go back again in a couple months to see how this particular pharmaceutical combination is faring.

I'm still kind of depressed about all this... I'm glad she's got a doctor who's finding what her health problems are and is making a serious attempt to treat them, but combined with her now abysmal short-term memory and her eyesight, everything just seems to be piling up and getting worse, not better. And I feel that no matter how much I try to help, no matter how much I do to take care of her and remind her of things and transport her to these various appointments, it isn't enough... I know it's silly and unrealistic, but I wish I could somehow make all these conditions of hers go away. As much as I abhor nostalgia as a general concept, more and more I find myself thinking about the days when she was perfectly well, when she could walk miles and miles each day without getting exhausted, when she could see and remember without any trouble... and I miss those days more than I ever believed was possible. And no matter how much I realize I need to accept the inevitability of the situation, thoughts of the future terrify me... I don't want to see her decline any further, and I don't want to find myself in the position of having to turn her care over to someone else. But I'm almost certain it will come to that some day.

At least there was something good about the day... we got the Animaniacs and Pinky & The Brain DVD's at the mall, and we watched the first two discs of Animaniacs together. That was a nostalgic experience of a different sort... we always used to watch it when I'd get done with classes in my last year of college and then in grad school (it aired regularly on the WB channel in our area), and seeing those shows again after all those years was a reminder of a happier time, a time when both my parents were still here, before all the illnesses and accidents and responsibilities of the more than ten years that followed... but a reminiscence tinged with sadness in its own right, because she barely remembered any of the ten episodes we watched, even though we'd seen them dozens of times before. Tom Wolfe really was right when he wrote that you can't go home again...