Engaging mother
Although we’ve put mother in a nursing home, we try to remain involved with her care. When we visit her, it’s usually either during tea or dinner, so we’ll help to feed her – my sister with tea and I with dinner. As for my brother, he takes care of both when he visits from Singapore.
As mother’s condition deteriorates, she’s often restless, moving her hands to scratch her back or arms, and not keeping still for us to feed her. To help keep her hands still, the carers have given her a small soft toy to hold in one hand and sometimes, a towel to hold in the other. To keep her still during feeding, I have learned that it helps if we engage her in the feeding in some way. How?
It’s especially difficult when we try to feed her liquids, either by putting the mug to her lips or with a spoon. I’ve found that if I tell her to hold the mug and then put her left hand on the mug, for some reason, she can sense that it’s a drinking vessel in her hand, and she would tighten her hand on the mug (instead of just resting the hand on it). When I tell her to drink, I can feel her “helping” to move the mug to her mouth. At the same time, I can see her lips parting in anticipation of the drink coming towards her. When we get her involved this way, the liquid doesn’t spill at all.
When it comes to her bowl of food, I’ve told her to “help” me hold it, then put her left thumb on the rim of the bowl and the rest of her hand around the base. While this keeps her hands still, it doesn’t always get her to open her mouth for the food. More and more, she’ll keep the last mouthful without chewing or swallowing, which could sometimes take a long while! We have learned to watch her and try to get her to talk, because when she does, her mouth will start to chew and swallow. Her feedings are taking longer and longer; often, she’d be the first to start and the last to finish.
This refusal to chew and swallow got so bad recently (we had to use a large syringe pump to feed her) that I went to see her geriatrician , Dr R, about it. He looked at her 2 medications and said she didn’t have to take one of them anymore. Risperdal had been prescribed for her when her condition was first diagnosed, to calm her and minimise her restlessness. Now that she’s confined to a wheelchair, Risperdal was no longer necessary. Or so we thought.
True enough, her chewing and swallowing improved after she was taken off Risperdal. But her restlessness also increased and she was scratching more, and quite violently, too, often leaving streaks of red on her skin. So I called Dr R to suggest we put her back on the dose, but every other evening, instead of the previous daily evening. He agreed, and it worked. Now, mother chews and swallows better, and scratches less, too.
This past weekend, we learned that she’d been coughing. The cough medicine made her drowsy and on Saturday, she slept through tea and was very sluggish over dinner. The next evening, in the car on my way to see her, I found myself wondering if we were going to lose mother soon. But I was in for a surprise when I saw her. I’d greeted her and told her it was dinner, did she want it. She grunted her usual “yes”. And during dinner, she kept her hand on the bowl when I put it there, and finished her food in almost record time. Before I left, I bent close to tell her I was leaving and would come and see her again next week; she rewarded me with another of her “yes” grunts. I was so happy, I tweeted about it on my way home (during a stop at a red light, I hasten to add). This was what I tweeted:
Had a good visit with mum. She was alert. I live 4 days like this.
I was also so pleased with how she held the bowl, I took a picture.
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Mother and I – we’ve come to a point in our lives where our roles are now reversed, and I behave like a proud parent everytime she does something encouraging.
