Mama-Drama Mama

I've been to hospitals many many times in my short life... to hang out with my bro, my dad, many relatives and friends. But I have not seen so much mama-drama all from one single patient!

Day 3 of my mother-in-law (mil) in the hospital. She had a much delayed (about 10 years), very much needed hip replacement surgery on Monday morning and will be there for another couple of days. She was fine and dandy and day one. She looked great when they wheeled her in from the recovery room. No make up (she usually has on about as much eye shadow as Mimi on the Drew Carey Show), alert and looked great! Better then usual as far as I'm concerned. She was on the phone talking to her best friend in Boston, her cousin in New Mexico, the nurses who came in to check on her... she told Valerie and I stories while we sat there half reading our stack of magazines and everything was looking very good. That was until I got to see the bottom half of her body when they changed her. Will my life ever be the same again!? Probably not. It wasn't exactly what I'd bargained for when I said I was going to keep her company while she's in the hospital... but oh well... I figured if I could get through day one and all that I'd seen, everything would be smooth-sailing from there. I thought sooo wrong!

Yesterday, she was in a lot more pain. I called her early in the morning asking if she'd wanted me to bring her breakfast. She rambled on about how they gave her breakfast she didn't ask for and how there was no juice, dried up muffin, bad scrambled eggs, coffee she doesn't drink blah blah blah. I asked her again about breakfast. She went on about the nurses. I asked for the third time if she wanted anything, including peaches. She bit on the Californian peaches that Bruce ordered :) So I cut some up, bagged them and went along my way to the hospital at 9:30am.

My arrival seemed to make her happy. That's why I always stay as long as my bladder can hold on. Usually about six hours lol. I'm way too paranoid to use her private toilet (nope she hasn't gone that far) nor those for the public. Ok, I'm just weird, I'll admit it. I walked into her room and right after we exchanged pleasantries, she went on and on and on and on... you get the point. Complaining about the nurses and how they didn't get to her until 1am when she'd be pushing that button for them for more than an hour. Turned out that the buttons on the bed don't work... she finally found the one on the tv remote control. She claimed she'd yelled at them 'are you going to wait till I die before you come in?!' over the intercom. I believed her. She seemed to be getting nastier (not to me of course) by the minute. The physical therapist came and without any warning, my mil shot her mouth about her pain and there was no turning back. The poor young pt got a good tongue lashing from her. I controlled my temptation to laugh 'coz it was complete unnecessary heightened drama (oh I'm never going to walk again, this surgery was a big mistake, I was walking fine before and now I can't even move my leg). She was NOT walking fine... she was hardly walking! I tried my hardest not to be embarassed but wow... when the crying started, I wanted to run out of the room. WOW! I now truly understand my husband's plight and why he has so little sympathy left for his mother after the last decade of trying to get her to do this and other things to make her own life better...

So after MUCH screaming and crying and complaining and whining and bitching, the pt got her onto the chair from the bed with the help of the walker (my mil insisted on using her own high tech walker and had a 20 min argument why she refused to use the hospital's). It took about an hour to move the inch from bed to chair. By then, it was lunch time. The lady who brought in her lunch also got a tongue lashing from my mil 'coz she didn't bring in the menu on time. All I could do was sigh, rolled my eyes about a gazillion times and screamed inside my head... what a day!! Why was I even puzzled that I had a splitting headache when I left at 3pm lol.

Bruce called to check on her this morning. He said she was whining... I'm not going there till after my Ladies' Luncheon so I'd have a nice day besides that :)

For all the evil stuff I've said and done, this has got to be redemption time for me. Heaven's got to have a place for me now! :)