Wake Up Mom!

Thankfully I was raised by my parents who stayed together. They both were practical and supportive. My dad was the one with tough love who was hard on me expecting me to do better. My mom provided comforting love who was available for a hug when ever you needed one. Everyone gets old and things change when they go through health issues that require you to support your parents. They both have suffered strokes, but my mother's was more recent and has struggled to get better.

My mother's stroke affected her short term memory along with her abilities on her right side of her body. She used my dad as a crutch until my dad could not anymore. When she sees me, she knows that she wants to do something, but want me to figure it out. It is like I am always playing a game with her call "Figure out what she means." I understand the cats better than my mom most of the time.

I try to make things easier for her and give her a choice of two things and most of the time instead of answering my question she will say "OK." Many times the question I ask has a "Yes" or "No" answer and she can not tell me. I write this blog with the hopes that she reads it, understands what is going on and can just snap out of it.

Another thing I wish my mom would snap out of is using her right hand and walking normally without assistance. She leans over so much it creates a hump in her back. My dad was so proud of her walking by her hemi-walker he recorded her on video. I have dreams from time to time that she is walking around without the hemi-walker.

I hope there will be a day when I can sit down with her and discuss things in the past and how far she has come. I know that she progresses in some things, but feels like she digresses in so many things also. My parents had DirecTV for years and my mom forgot how to use the remote after her stroke. She would look at the TV instead of the remote and couldn't figure it out. After my dad passed, I looked to reduce the bills and simplify television for my mom with a bigger, better picture.

I started by getting my mom a new 55" 4k Sony TV and switched to PlayStation Vue. She could talk to the TV with the microphone and select what she wanted. The problem was there was so many buttons around the direction pad it was a little confusing. So I swapped her TV out for a 55" 4k Hitachi with Roku on it. The remote is so simple that almost everything can be done with the direction pad. If she gets stuck, she can hit the button that looks like a house to go home to start over.

When my mom uses her TV, she does it well most of the time until later on in the evening. She forgets what she wants to watch and how to get there. I tell her to use the direction pad on her remote and she acts like she doesn't know left, right, up or down. It is very frustrating when we finally get PlayStation Vue loaded on her TV and she uses the remote to move the cursor down to "Mom" very quickly, but she doesn't remember to
hit "OK" on the Roku remote after that, but it does show that she does know how to use the direction pad on the remote.

My mom gets mad at me when she doesn't understand something. Again I will ask her a question of what is she trying to watch and she says "Yeah." I miss my mom who might not have known everything, but tried to understand. I do see progress and am sure I will leave out a lot if I made a list, so I just want her to wake up out of her dream and try harder. Try harder at communicating what she wants and try harder at doing more for herself. I miss having her to be able to talk to about things from time to time.