Stress

My 90-year-old mother goes in for a shoulder joint replacement operation tomorrow. This is elective surgery. She is in a great deal of pain that is not relieved by less drastic measures, and so she has chosen this surgery after a serious discussion of risks. Any major surgery is dangerous; any such surgery on a 90-year-old doubly so. Besides the relatively straightforward risk of dying from the surgery itself are increased risks of later complications. But most worrying to her and to me are the very real risks of decline in mental ability that come from anesthesia, pain, and pain medications.

My mother's mother had Alzheimer's. So did my mother's paternal grandfather. So she has it coming from both sides. At her 90th birthday, as she directed everyone around to do her bidding, I declared her to have won the Alzheimer's lottery, to be this old and this competent. I should be so lucky. Besides my mother's genes, I carry my father's, and he had significant Alzheimer's by the time he was in his late sixties, so I've got it from both sides too.

Last year, my mother fell and hurt her back badly, while we were traveling in Europe. Think about the end of that sentence - won the lottery indeed, to be on such an adventure while celebrating her eighty-ninth birthday and surrounded by family. But the pain, the pain medications, and the disorientation combined to make her incompetent and pathetically dependent on me. She has bounced back well, but in the last month she lost her best friend from her past (Eileen Sears, for home town readers) and her new best friend and daily dinner companion at her residence. So she goes into this surgery sad and run-down by the increasing shoulder pain.

I've called out all my stress coping mechanisms.  I'm physically exhausting myself. I'm meditating, and mindfully eating, and when I'm done writing here I'm going to cook so there will be easy good food to grab over the next week.

The surgery isn't scheduled until the late afternoon tomorrow (Monday). I'm planning to post an update to this post at some point after the surgery, so the reader will not be left hanging.