Tonight Mom comes home from her 4-day respite stay. I got a phone call this morning at 6:45 from the nursing home. They noticed her right ankle was swollen and red. It's not unusual for Mom to have edema in her ankles, especially the right one. We put her feet up on a foam wedge overnight, but we don't ask the nursing home to do it. When we got to the facility to take Mom to day care, the ankle was bright red, which is not so common, and it was hot. She might have cellulitis, the nurse suggested, and the day care nurse seconded that guess. We'll watch it for a few days, and if necessary, contact her doctor for an antibiotic.
Other than the ankle situation, Mom seemed more alert than she did yesterday morning. We also found out that yesterday morning they gave her a shower, which would explain her lethargy. The whole shower/bath phenomenon wears Mom out. We give her a sponge bath every morning, which is not so hard on her, but we have the day care give her a tub bath once a week. It's a special tub where she transfers from her wheel chair to a chair that slides into the tub, and fills up to near her shoulders, I think. So it's more vertical than horizontal. It doesn't help that Mom has always been slightly afraid of water, especially any water that gets in her face, like a shower.
Mom's fear of water is one of the best indicators of what she would do for her children. Until I was in second grade, we lived across the street from a YW, so Mom dutifully took us to swim classes there, but did not participate herself. We would spend a week or so every summer at my paternal grandmother's cottage on Lake Bemidji in Minnesota. It was a wonderful place on a beautiful lake (my grandmother was a different story, maybe for another time), and Dad loved going out fishing with Grandma in the boat; we kids would often go along, though Mom usually opted out. But nothing kept us from swimming and playing in the lake as much as possible. Mom would often sit on the deck to supervise, and on occasion would venture in the water herself.
It took me years to recognize how both the swimming and the boat rides required extra sacrifice on her part. Her fear of the water made those experiences unpleasant at best for her. Eventually, Mom even took her own swimming lessons at the YW, so she could feel better about watching us in the lake and in hotel swimming pools on our longer family vacations. In my mind, that was a true act of motherly selflessness, confronting her fear in order to take better care of us. She never complained about her fear of water, and would just mention it once in a while if we would nag her about joining us for a swim or a boat ride. We were all water-loving tadpoles, and in the self-absorbed way of children, couldn't seem to retain awareness of Mom's aversion to water.
One more story about Mom's fear of water. After Dad died (1991), we would all do our things to give her some social outlets. One time my brother John went to visit her, and took her to the movies. Mom didn't particularly like movies either, or at least, she was very particular about which movies she liked. She loved On Golden Pond, for example, which did not fit with her water phobia. But when John took her to see Titanic, that was too much. She told me the next time we talked that she didn't really like it much, especially the scenes with all the people in the water after the wreck. I still have never seen Titanic, but have seen bits and pieces, including the part she referred to. It would never have occurred to me that the film would cause her a problem. To this day, I don't know if John knows those scenes bothered her.
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