When Mother Won't Eat

Image via WikipediaWhen your mother isn't eating (or walking): As "the Daughter," the first thing you will probably do, is that you will send up alarms, to the doctors and nurses, and try to get the hospital staff to DO SOMETHING. And they will will try to do something. But I have found that they will not usually sit beside your mother at every meal, with a spoon, and try to cajole her into eating an adequate amount of food.

The docs and nurses will also tell you that it is possible to take other measures... chiefly, the infamous feeding tube. What I have learned from my mother's various doctors is that putting in the feeding tube is not only a really unpleasant thing for the patient, but it's also a sort of a final thing, or a next-to-final thing. People rarely go back to eating normally after that happens; and, once the feeding tube is in place, then there will eventually be the need to decide when (or whether) to remove the thing.

My mother is not enjoying any small piece of this. She is mostly furiously angry with me, because of some things that are true (I am not going out and buying her "nose drops," and I keep bringing her the wrong sweaters to wear), and also because of lots of things that are not true (she thinks all kinds of delusional things, lately).

Today my mother's nurse gently placed some purple bands on my mother's tiny, bruised wrists. They say: "CHECK CHART." That's a sort of an inside language that means that the person who is wearing these bands is a DNR, or ("Do Not Resuscitate"). There is even a little formal ceremony that takes place when a patient goes from "Full Code" status to "DNR" status: two nurses have to be in the room, and they scan the code on the patient's wristband, and read aloud the number in the chart. I sat beside my mother (she had no idea what they were doing) and held my head in my hands as that small liturgy took place. And I thanked the wonderful nurse who made sure it happened properly. This was the same nurse who fed macaconi and cheese to my mother, tiny spoonfuls at a time, for her dinner tonight, because I asked her to.

Related articles

• When Does 'Do Not Resuscitate' Make Sense? [via Zemanta]