Phoebe Kate

I recount my experiences with my 92-year-old mother-in-law so often that I just betcha you feel like you’re living with her. 

If you’ve already got your own Golden Oldie, you can sympathize.  If you’re too young to be dealing with this particular issue, then heads up, kids.  One day, this is going to come out of nowhere and bite you when you least expect it.  Barring an early exit to the Eternal, your parents or in-laws, no matter how much they try to stay Forever Young, are going to get old and it will become your problem, too.  Mark my words.

Anyhow, the last we left the Old Girl, she’d been to the doctor and then the hospital to cure her “not feeling 100%,” which translated out into the diagnosis: CONSTIPATION. (Over the course of three weeks of complaint, she’d never bothered to mention to her family that she hadn’t pooped since who knows when.  And we didn’t know that’s what she meant by “not feeling 100%” because she declined to elaborate further.)

Oh well.

Now, over those several weeks of vague medical complaints, she’d also once mentioned something about her ear.  She said she could hear her voice “inside her head.”  Well, doesn’t everybody?  She said she thought she had a “cold in her ear.”  I asked if she had an earache and/or a fever.  She said no, it just “felt funny,” a story she stuck to no matter how many questions I asked.  

“I put some cotton in my ear,” she told me.  “To keep it warm.  That’s what they always did back in my day when your ear was feeling funny.”   

Ooooo-kay.  I don’t have home remedies for “feeling funny” other than take a couple of aspirin, a stiff drink or two of Jack Daniels and a nap.  Works for me every time.

Anyway, last week, she told my husband and me that her phone (a landline cordless push-button dealie) wasn’t working.  ”I can’t hear anybody!” she wailed.   

We’ve been through this with her before: she’s rough with her electronic stuff.  They don’t last very long in her keeping.  She rips the dials off radios turning them, yanks handles off refrigerators, breaks TV sets by switching channels, destroys toasters simply by looking at them too long.  Don’t ask me how.  She’s a frail 92-year-old lady. 

So we got her a new phone.  Second day she has it, she calls us to say it’s defective.  ”I can’t hear anything through it!” she bemoans.  Then she says, “Oh!  Wait a minute!  Let me change ears!”  And then she says, “Oh!  I was listening through my BAD EAR.  I can hear you just fine now!”  I say to her, “If you have a bad ear, why were you trying to listen through it?!?!?!  And by the way, since when do you have a bad ear?”

“Oh, I don’t know.  It’s not bad.  It’s just been feeling funny.”

Back to the funny feelings explanation again.  Only now, for the first time, we have deafness as a symptom.

Today, she visited her doctor to find out why she’s going deaf.  The good news is it’s not old age and it’s curable. 

Guess what?  It’s those cotton balls she stuffed in her ear to cure the “funny feeling.” With the same powerful hand that breaks all the electronics, gizmos and gadgets she owns, she wedged that fluff deep, deep into her ear canal.  It’ll be removed at the hospital next week by an ENT specialist who’s coming from the Raleigh area specially to do the procedure.

And now the humor stops.  My mother-in-law’s antics and mannerisms and archaic euphemisms for common ailments like constipation are amusing, that’s for sure.  But now she’s hurting herself by being evasive about her health and trying to treat her own conditions. 

And that’s not funny.  It’s worrisome. 

My sisterwoman, Val MacEwan — my best friend who has become the sister I always wanted – has just been down this sad, sorry, heartbreaking, tearful and hopeless road with her own mother.   

Tonight, thinking about today’s events, I can see the road ahead of my husband and me with Dorothy. 

–phoebe kate