On growing old – it’s a slow fade
I took my mom to the doctor today. She fell last week walking up concrete stairs and has been in pain. Helping her into Blue, where I almost had to heave her up since it’s so high, then watching her try to get her seat belt on was a little unnerving. When we got to the doctor’s parking lot, she did, surprisingly, what old people do – she began to tell me the directions into the office – “We’re going to go up this walkway, then we’re going to turn left, and then it is the second door on the left” – almost as if she wasn’t going to be there with me when this happened.
It’s strange – I don’t remember her becoming an old person.
Then we go inside the doctor’s waiting room and I got her signed in and waited. I was reading a report a reporter had just sent in, and I saw her hand shaking out of the corner of my eye and so I held her hand. After a half hour, I asked the receptionist if the doctor was running late and got one of those looks. Shortly afterwards, we were shown to a room and I helped my mother get up on the examining table – she seemed hardly able to move.
The doctor came in and asked her questions. She had warned me that he is “mean” before he got there. When he asked if she had pains shooting down her leg, she said no. And I interjected – Mom, I thought you said you were having sciatica – she said no pain in the leg. But just like that the doctor quit looking at her and talked to me the rest of the time as if she weren’t even in the room.
When he walked out, I whispered “he thinks your deaf,” and she laughed out loud. I then helped her over to the Xray room and helped her get on the table. Her skin looked old – she always had the best skin – that’s where I get it from – but now it looked old and sinewy like a chicken you wouldn’t eat.
As I went inside the drugstore to fill her prescription, I looked back in the car and with the rain fogging up the window, I could barely see her and it wretched my heart to the point of tears popping into my eyes as I walked in the door.