My Second Mistake - 4 AM on August 10th

Dear Mom, this is about the second mistake that I made, and it's a biggie. As you know, I have had a baby monitor in your bedroom for several years. It has come in useful many times when you needed help during the night. You just had to call my name, and I usually woke up rather fast. Most mornings I get up rather early (4:30 AM) to start getting ready for work. I like to beat the rush hour, and I like to relax and write emails in the office before the daily grind. Well, what I have always done is carry my part of the baby monitor into the bathroom with me. This way I can hear you while I am in the bathroom too. On this fateful morning, around 4:20, I heard you making several grunting noises. I had never heard grunting noises like this before, but I assumed -- and falsely so-- that you were simply trying to get out of your recliner. When the grunting stopped five minutes later, I figured you had gotten up. God, what a mistake this was! I am so sorry. I relive this moment hundreds of times (even though it has only been two months since your stroke). Little did I know at the time that you had had your stroke and was unable to get up out of your recliner where you have been in the habit of sleeping for the last four years. I went ahead and finished getting ready for work, and by 6:15 I was probably at the office already. As was my custom, I opened up the Scrabble App from facebook and took a look at the two or three games we were playing. In every single game you had passed. You PASSED? Even in a brand new game that I started, you passed without exchanging letters. I should have known then that you were still trapped in your own body, unable to tell anyone, and that you were trying to get ahold of me the only way you knew how, by pressing the PASS button on the Scrabble game on your iPad. Oh dear God, had I only been wiser. If I had been wiser, I would have run into your room at 4:20 AM to see what was wrong when you were grunting. Maybe then your stroke could have been made less severe. I heard that there is an injection that paramedics can give a stroke victim as long as they know that the stroke was just three hours ago. Who knows? If you had that injection, would you be talking and would you be alive today? We will never know because of my lack of better judgement. Believe me, there was something gnawing at me that day. I was worried about you when I heard that grunting. I was still worried when I got to work that morning, but I never made a call to Mary Jo to tell her to check up on you. This is why I was not surprised when Mary Jo called me around 7:15 AM and asked me if I was sitting...

The First Mistake - August 9th 2012

The very first mistake I made, Mom, was on August 9th, the evening you told Mary Jo and me that you wanted to talk to us. You were visibly shaken. When we all sat down in the living room, you told us that you were starting to shake uncontrollably. You were concerned that it might be the starting signs of something very serious. I must admit that I didn't take it seriously at all. I just thought it was something natural that happened to an 85 year old person from time to time. Mary Jo thought differently. She thought maybe it was a bad reaction to drugs. I can't remember all she said, but she had a number of ideas. You told us that you had called your doctor and talked to the nurse about it, but they couldn't get you an appointment until Tuesday. That was their mistake! They should have realized it could be something serious, and they should have told you to come in right away. Paul could have easily taken you. But tragically we all went to bed that night with no clear plan what to do. I remember that night you were very confused about whether or not you had taken your pills. I think I told you to not worry about the pills. You first had mentioned you took them, so I figured your first answer was proably right. But you kept second guessing yourself. Little did I know that that would be the last night we would ever have an actual conversation. You had your stroke sometime that night. We don't exactly know when, but I know it was between midnight and 4:00 AM. I will tell you why I know this in my next entry.

I Miss You Mom

I miss you so much, mom. There's not an hour that goes by that I don't think of you. I am so sorry about all the mistakes that were made by so many people during the last six weeks of your life. I just can't get those out of my mind. I can't help thinking that if we did things differently, you would not only be alive today, but you would be talking. The stroke that you had on August 10th took away your ability to speak, and we could all see how frustrating it was that you couldn't speak, but I almost look back fondly on those first twelve days after the stroke when you were actually speaking better every day. I can't help thinking that that progress could have kept going if we had not brought you to that rehab center.