I am LIVID

Okay - a week ago I wrote about my MIL's broken ankle. She caught her foot inside the leg of her night table as she was getting out of bed.

She's eight-seven years old, seems to have every medical condition known to science, and has never taken care of herself. More than twenty years ago she was diagnosed with high blood pressure, congestive heart failure, diabetes and half-a-dozen other things. She takes enough prescription medications to stock a decent pharmacy. I know about that because I do her medications for the week every Sunday - three pill boxes with meds for each condition along with supplements to help keep her healthy.

After she hurt her ankle, she didn't complain about it so we didn't realize how bad the situation was for a couple of days. We thought, based on what she told us, that it was simply twisted or sprained. We did what anyone else would do in a situation like that. We applied heat and ice to try to cope with what little swelling there was, and gave her Tylenol for the pain. Still she didn't say anything that led us to believe that it was worse than a sprain, but when it didn't get better after a couple of days we agreed it was time to take her into the hospital to get her checked out.

Instead of trying to get her into the car, which might have twisted it again, we called the paramedics. They came and transported her.

X-rays showed a broken ankle. The surgeon, after he opened her leg to repair it, told us he had a hard time distinguishing bone from soft tissue because her osteoporosis is so advanced. In the end, he used five screws to put it back together.

Now - two weeks after her hospitalization and surgery, ten days after she came home, two social workers showed up on our front doorstep this afternoon. They accused my husband of abusing his mother.

This after two weeks of listening to her moan and cry all hours of the day and night - "help me, I have to get out of here" - when she can't stand or put any weight at all on her ankle.

This after she's tried, several times, to get out of bed in the middle of the night. After the second time, hubby resorted to using a two-inch wide canvas strap, stretched between the metal bed rails we bought to keep her from falling out of bed. When it's tied in place, a good five inches above her belly and not in contact with her at all when she's lying down, it's enough to make her believe she can't get up. She's not aware enough or nimble enough to crawl out from under it - which anyone with a sliver of awareness would figure out in a nanosecond.

She is so lost to everything that, the other night, with no blankets or anything on and the ceiling fan directly above her bed running on full but with that strap in place several inches above her, she swore it was making her hot.

For the past ten days she has repeatedly demanded that she be allowed to go home. When we tell her "you are home" she doesn't let up - she doesn't understand. Other times she'll cry that she wants to go to bed. When we tell her she's in bed, at home, she'll say "oh" and start right in again.

Hubby has been getting up three and four times a night, every night, turning her to prevent bed sores, transferring her to the commode we have sitting smack dab in the middle of our living room, changing her, bathing her, feeding her. He has done everything possible for her and the nurses that have been coming to visit every-other-day for the past week haven't complained or commented.

Then, today, these two officious idiots show up on our front door step and accuse us of abusing her.

Yes - I am livid because this is not right, this is not even close to being right. It's so unjust, so wrong that hubby lost his temper and now, because hubby is over-tired, stressed and less than his normal self, they have threatened to come back with law enforcement.

If we were abusive of her, why would we take her to the hospital where our abuse would be found out? Why wouldn't we just strap her ankle - about which she was not even complaining - and tell her "shut up"? If we really wanted to beat her, starve her, hurt or harm her why would we take her to someplace where she will get care?

All this does is make me less inclined to look outside our house for help for her, not more.

Yes, I am livid.

My MIL is not unaware of her surroundings and she is easily frightened just by having the nurses coming into the house. After each of their visits it takes hours for her to settle down and even begin to relax and act at least a little calm and as rational as her current baseline.

I am so fed up with this nanny state looking over my back fence, telling me what I am doing wrong or at least not doing right, that I want to scream.

What are they going to do next? Now, along with all of the other stress we're dealing with - sleeplessness and strain of doing our best to be patient and caring, to do for her everything she needs to have done, we have this giant sword of Damocles hanging over us.

Are they going to haul our butts to jail for doing our level best within our income level and ability to pay?

Will they drag us into court and force us to defend ourselves?

Perhaps they'll forcibly ship her off to some "home" where other families send their elderly cast-offs to die.

That would be abuse of the worst kind. She's agoraphobic. She never settled into the hospital - didn't sleep for nearly ten days except when she was under anesthesia. She has some sense of where she is, so they're going to disrupt that and say it's best for her?

We've already been down that road once, and after that "home" did their dead level best to kill her by overdosing her on insulin (nine hours after being admitting she was back at the ER that had released her to their "care" with diabetic shock), we pulled her out. The State of California agreed with us and we had legal standing to file a lawsuit against that "home" but chose not to because of the strain it would put on MIL.

I don't know - I have no idea what's going to come next but having gotten this off my chest, for the moment, I feel a little better. But take this as a warning: if you live in the United States of America and if you take care of any family member at all - child or parent - you had damned well better wrap them up in bubble wrap and make sure they don't show a single solitary bruise or you might be up on charges next.

Philippa

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