Once again we find ourselves in the Arborg hospital. My Mom is again the one lying in the bed. The first time was we were celebrating my brother's new life. This time it was a prayer filled vigil. This picture was taken on my fifteenth birthday.
My Mom lay inert. Her eyes would open and I did passive physio on her every day after school, but she, herself, could not move. She had a tube in her trachea and a ventilator pushed air in and out of her lungs. Tubes carried liquids in and out of her body through many different portals. Monitors beeped and whistled. Sometimes they would shriek and nurses would come running. My Mom's condition was fairly stable but she was a vegetable.
Occasionally she would try and mouth something, but because of the tube in her trachea she had no voice so we really didn't know what she was saying. The doctors felt like it would be alright to try and take the trachea out. So first they had to do a day of 24hrs off the ventilator, but because our hospital is so small one of her family members needed to stay with her. I stayed with my Mom. I talked, I sang, I tried to do homework, I carefully monitored her breathing. After that 24hr period she passed the test, and so they took out the trachea. For the first time in 3months she had a voice.
The voice that spoke from my Mom's body was not her own. The things she said made no sense at all. That first day she was worried about packing up our cabin-we don't have a cabin, then she kept asking where her baby was-my brother was 10. She was confused and did not recognize anyone except for her Mom, and she only recognized her sometimes. My Mom was lost.
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