Grandma Lives Here!!

When my grandma fell and broke her hip, at the age of 85, her children didn't know what to do with her. None of them felt like they could take care of her, it really would have upset their lifestyles. They considered putting her into a "rest home". I remembered as a child hearing my grandma say that she didn't ever want to "go into a rest home". Her own siblings had opted to put her mother into a rest home when she became unable to live alone. Seeing her mother "imprisoned" in a rest home and the way she went downhill after being put there, had troubled my grandma for years. She hadn't wanted that for herself. Knowing how she felt I considered having her stay in our home. At the time I had four small children. The oldest was 7 years and the youngest was about 8 months old. We had also gone through the loss of our fourth child about a year and a half prior to this event, so we were still trying to come to grips with that. During this particular year I had been teaching a class in our church (to women) on home nursing. Included in the agenda was a section on how to care for a bed patient. Other than this brief exposure to home nursing as a teacher, I had no experience with the care of an older person who was bedridden. I just had a desire to be of help to my grandma. My husband and I discussed the situation and agreed to have grandma come stay with us.

We lived in a three bedroom house at the time. The two oldest boys agreed to give up their room for grandma. I was very proud of them for their sacrifice. They had always enjoyed going to visit grandma and so were excited to have her come stay with us. We set the boys up in the toy room. That sounded like fun to them! They also got to choose to sleep on the floor, which was another treat. We started out with everyone anxious for grandma to stay with us.

It was a real adjustment, especially at first. When my mother brought grandma to our house from the hospital, it took us a while to even get her into the house. She had a very difficult time maneuvering stairs (of which there were a few to get into the house) and she was a bit unsure of what was happening to her. She had already spent some time in the hospital and now was coming to a strange place to live. When we finally got her settled into her room, I found that she had developed a bed sore while in the hospital. This was a situation that I had to get on top of immediately to prevent from getting worse. With the use of a lambs wool pad, a special medicated powder, proper hygiene and a lot of effort, I was able to help her clear up the sore quite quickly. Another challenge that developed was that no matter what I was in the middle of, right at the worst possible moment one of the kids would run in and tell me "Grandma has to use the bathroom". I would have to drop everything and help her with the bed pan. I soon realized the best thing for me, as well as grandma, was to work with her so that she could walk again. Besides, grandma was also feeling the frustration of being in bed all the time. She had been relatively active before her fall. She always had some sort of project that she had been working on. Now she was in bed with not much to do besides being in strange surroundings, and it was very hard on her. We got a walker and started the task of getting strong enough to walk again. It took some convincing to get her to accept the idea of working hard to walk. She felt weak and unsure of herself in accomplishing this new task. It was a new situation for her, as well as for me. After about three months of sometimes tearful effort, she was able to walk by herself with the walker. After 6 months she was walking on her own. We were able to take her to church with us, as well as other places with the use of the walker. This alone was a boost to her spirit. Some places that we went, such as to the store, she wanted to just stay in the car. I found that even the change of scenery was good for her. She enjoyed watching people and the funny things that they would do. It was good to see her starting to find some joy in life again.

After grandma had been with us for about 6 months and because of change in my husbands work, we were going to be moving to a different house in a nearby city. As we looked for another house we looked for something that would also work for grandma. When we made the move, we moved the bedroom furniture from her own bedroom, in her house, to the bedroom that would be hers in our new house. We created "her room", as it had been in her house, so that she would have a feeling of being "at home" in her room with all of the old familiar things that she loved. She had pieces of furniture that had been handmade by her father that were very precious to her and brought a lot of memories back to her. This did seem to help her feel more at home. I was glad that we made the effort to accomplish this; it was well worth it. We also brought her sewing machine, quilt blocks, genealogy books and other materials on which she had been working before her accident. Now she could have familiar things to do with her time. She had been a very good quilter for many years; now she could cut out blocks and sew them together and resume what she had been doing before. We brought her family books because she had been doing a lot of genealogy and working on gathering family histories. All these things we did to make her feel like our home was her home.

Grandma had been one of those grandma's that you loved to go visit; she was always happy to see you. She loved children and could always find something for the little ones to do. With grandma in the home now full time, it became a challenge. Her life was different one big way because there were children around almost all of the time. She seemed to enjoy the children but she did get to a point where she became frustrated by having children around. The children were also trying to adjust to another adult in the home. They knew grandma from before the accident. We had visited her many times. Living with someone is a lot different than just visiting them periodically. My children were good children but two of the three oldest children were boys, and boys like to wrestle. Our little girl in between the boys (boy, girl, boy) would get into the wrestling matches too. Every time they would start to wrestle, grandma would think that they were fighting. So kids being kids, they would pretend to be fighting just to see grandma get upset. Sometimes she would ask them for a "crumb of bread and cup of water". They would bring her a crumb of bread and a cup of water. I keep telling them that when she meets them on the other side, she'll get back at them. We also found that she did strange things, because she was unsure of where she was. She would take food into her room and put it in her drawers, stuff bread down her bra to save it for later, and generally act like she needed to be sure that she had enough for later, to protect herself. I repeatedly reminded her that if she ever wanted more to eat, she could go into the kitchen and help herself. We would laugh at the funny things that grandma would do.

The children did love her though and spent quite a bit of quality time talking with her and helping her. They would come to me and ask if they could go in and visit grandma. She would sometimes help them with school problems or other things that they were doing. They also would ask her questions about what things were like when she was a child. She enjoyed telling her stories to them. They learned a lot about grandma too. They got to know a grandma that I hadn't been around as a child, one that was a bit vulnerable but also one that would get angry at times.

I spent considerable time talking with grandma and learned many things about her life that I had been unaware of before. Those are precious memories now, I feel like I learned to know my grandma as a person when she was in my home. I also realized that she could remember things very well that had occurred in her life 50 or 75 years previous, but she was trying to keep the present sorted out in her mind and having a difficult time doing it. She would be cutting out quilt blocks and then stop cutting. The scissors were not working right. She would tell me that she would have her father sharpen them when he stopped by. I was hoping that he wouldn't stop by just then. He had died before I was born. She also repeated stories, which I have found since is a very common thing for an older person to do. In fact as I get older, maybe I do that. But these were things that we chuckled about as we thought of the things that grandma was doing.

Even with all of our painstaking preparing and efforts to make grandma feel at home, when she stepped out of her room she was in another world. Because of her failing memory she had forgotten that I was her granddaughter. She thought that we were just a nice family that she lived with. She complained about no one ever coming to visit her. She didn't have other visitors very often but she didn't realize that she was living with someone who had loved her all of her life. I would overhear her say to people as they would visit, that I was just a nice lady that was taking care of her. Even when I explained to her that I was her granddaughter, she would remember for a little time, but the memory would fade and I would become the nice lady again.

Because she had been living alone and very independent, nobody had checked her person for any problems. Really, how do you go up to someone and say "can I check your body for any irregularities?" I found as I had to help her bathe that one breast had a large lump. I took her to the doctor and they found that she had cancer in her breast. It had developed to the point of almost becoming an open, oozing sore. They did a radical Mastectomy and then followed by radiation treatments. Taking her age into consideration they didn't feel like it would be to her advantage to put her through chemotherapy. In her mind though, she had cancer and that meant a death sentence. There was no more point to go on. After the surgery on her breast, she didn't have the will to go on. She didn't want to eat or get any exercise. She felt like her life was over. I tried to get her involved with family and gave her little chores to accomplish and had her do things to help me so that she felt of some use. Although those things did keep her mind and body busy, deep down she just wanted her stay on earth to be over.

Because of the situation, grandma became incontinent which made life very difficult. We also put her on a dietary supplement to help ensure that she was getting the nutrients that she needed. She didn't want to eat and so I wasn't sure that she was getting any needed nutrients. The hardest part of all was that she didn't want to cooperate and so I had to take a hard stand to make sure that she was taken care of. When she died, she doctor told us that if a person really is tired of living, they will usually get their wish. She had lived a long full life. She had given much joy to any one who knew her. She had served others willingly. I was happy to have been able to serve her for a few short years.