Still

When we don't talk about things, sometimes they get stuck in places we hadn't intended. For example, there is the matter of my mother's Multiple Sclerosis. She has been lucky in terms of just how debilitating the disease has been for her. I say this because because as a family this is my mother's life, and it is exactly how it is. Well into her eighties she was a walker of prodigious capacity. She got around pretty good for a woman with legs she described as feeling like they were "always asleep." Since I was a kid, my mom's lower half has felt like she has that pins and needles thing. All the time. 

Then go ahead and toss the allergies and the asthma on top of that. The prednisone used to help her lungs deal with the onslaught of periodic asthma attacks brought the treat of diabetes as yet another physical hurdle to deal with. And the hits just kept coming. 

Still, she persisted.

Not a lot keeps her down. But when she gets down, it's a toughie. The vast and sweeping irony is that her ex-husband, my father, was the "healthy one." Raquetball and running and biking and so on. He was doing all the things that would help him live forever. Twenty-six years ago, that theory took a hit when he suffered what we call "sudden deceleration trauma." Accidents happen. But my mom, with her litany of challenges kept on keeping on. 

That keeping on part has become more and more challenging as mom's original equipment has begun to fail. Those lungs that have been compromised for so many years have taken a beating. Getting around now requires assistance of some sort. Independence seems like it might, to quote the poets, vanish in the haze. She is the living proof that getting older is not for sissies. 

Gravity recently caught up to mom, causing more than just a few bumps and bruises. The hospital is a scary place, maybe more so for those who care for her than the patient herself. She's been there before, after all. And mom always bounces back. 

We just hope she bounces back without breaking anything.