Resurrected Post: Happy 93rd Birthday, Grandma!

I started this post at 0624 on my Grandma's last birthday, September 7, 2007. (I'm going through my draft posts and looking to see how many I can finish up and post as I have a goal to have 500 posts on my blog by December 31, 2007. )

Written 3 months ago - it will drop off at the end as I never finished my thoughts that morning.

My Grandma is still with us.

I took off work early yesterday, it must have been around 11:30 or so, because the doctor at the hospice called my mom to tell her he didn't think my Grandma was going to make it much longer and we should come quickly. I visited with my Grandma for about 3 hours and she is still hanging in there. She is having trouble swallowing, and is in a deep sleep. Twice while I was there, she opened her eyes and looked upwards toward the ceiling, staring.

My mom kept getting a strong feeling to call her sister, with whom she had been estranged for the past ten or so years. My youngest sister had a friend give her a ride to the hospice and she asked if she could call to our aunt. Then my mom talked to her, and I got to talk to her. While my mom was on the phone with her sister, my Grandma was acting agitated. I had suggested earlier that maybe my mom could call my aunt and let her talk to Grandma. So my mom came in after a bit and put the phone to my Grandma's ear and my Grandma demeanor changed as she listened. She moved her mouth as if trying to speak and made soft grunting noises. Poor Grandma. After my mom took the phone away and left the room, my Grandma relaxed and fell into the deep sleep again.

Before I left the hospice, I told my mom what had happened and I suggested that she call the other family members that couldn't be there in person.

My grandma can't hold on too much longer; because of the inability to swallow she is becoming more dehydrated and of course cannot eat. She is so frail that it would be difficult to hook her up to an IV and maybe wrong to prolong her life since the cancer has spread quickly in the past two weeks. But my Grandma's M.O. is STAY ALIVE.

When she was a young girl, I think around the age of 8, she was standing behind their horse carriage and the horses spooked, backed up and knocked my grandma over the side, it was 30 feet to the ground. My mom was telling me again yesterday, something about how they ended up fusing 7 vertebrae into 3 to "fix" her. Then when she was 13, her appendix burst inside her and they had to remove her intestines to clean out the infection. Then she got tuberculosis and had to live in a sanitarium for a couple of years. People were dying all around her and my mom says my grandma's father died right there in the hospital (from TB). My grandma was a child during the Great Depression and was sent away from her family to live with an aunt (I think that is what happened if I remember correctly). When she got out of the sanitarium she found that family members had gone to the bank and stolen all her savings, the money she had planned to use to move to Arizona. So she took her belongings (one suitcase) and bought a bus ticket to Arizona. That's all the money she had. She ended up in a spinster's home, since she was almost 30 years old. She got a job at Luke Air Force base in a secretarial pool. Grandpa had been stationed in Arizona there, he was from Texas. He was the guy that saluted the superior officers as they came into and left the base. That's how my Grandma and Grandpa met. They knew each other for only three months and married. My Grandpa went off to the war shortly after. My Grandma was already pregnant with my mother. My mom was born in 1944. In 1954 my aunt was born. In 1956 my Grandma got breast cancer in her left breast. A mastectomy was performed and she survived cancer. My Grandpa was kind of messed up from the war... I guess he had a hard time holding a job so they opened up a restaurant at 15th Avenue and Pierce in downtown Phoenix. Gordon's Fish and Chips. My Grandma told me once they owned the restaurant for 15 years and only one year made a small profit. They sold the restaurant to a mexican man who made only ONE payment and I guess they didn't feel they had any recourse and I guess they figured they weren't having to put OUT money for the place, so they never pursued payment from the guy. That makes me mad just thinking about it.

My Grandpa died in 1990. My Grandma was like a blossoming flower. My Grandpa was kind of grumpy and it seemed like he'd held her back. She had 7 years in her home on her own until she started getting dementia and wandering around her neighborhood. So my mom brought my grandma to live with her about ten years ago.

Anyway, my intention in telling you that is she has had a lot of bad things happen to her, things that could have killed most people and she stayed alive, so it is probably hard for her to give up. And she probably wanted to see my mom and aunt reconciled at the very least. I'm so happy that my aunt could be gracious, since she can be very mean spirited when she wants to be. My mom was very afraid of that, and didn't think she could cope with being yelled at.

Since she can't swallow, and is in the deep sleep, she isn't showing signs of being hungry or thirsty. I just wish I could be there with her. My mom comes to visit, but I feel that a person should not be alone in their last days or hours. Just like a birth watch... one wouldn't "visit" a laboring woman and keep coming back to see if the baby was born yet. It's the same with a death watch. It was also interesting yesterday one of the nurses at the hospice (a man named Jonathan) was telling us that he observes the person's face to get an idea of how they are feeling (in pain, etc). He said my grandma's face looked calm and peaceful, but *I* could see that she was tense, because of the frown between her eyebrows. That is exactly what I watched for as my sisters' doula, at their births. The frown between the eyebrows gave me a lot of information about what was going on with them. With birth, if the woman is all tensed up, things are not going to progress steadily and easily like they should.