My mother, my child, my duty

The writer's mum fitting shapes in a child's wood puzzle to help improve her concentration and fine motor skills.

EVER since the coronavirus became world public health enemy No.1, I have been very diligent about keeping my family, especially Mum, safe. At 86, and with all her illnesses – obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes – she runs the highest risk of dying from the disease if she catches it.

So for the last seven months, she has been housebound with practically no contact with outsiders. Her world, which had already been very small, shrank even further.

My parents moved into my house in 2005 when it became apparent that it was no longer safe for them to live on their own. Mum’s most worrisome health issue is that she is very prone to dizzy spells leading to falls.

Her worst fall was in 2010 when she fractured the L4 vertebrae in her spine and was bedridden for months. We have taken her to several doctors to try to ascertain the cause of her dizziness without success. As the years went by, we coped as best we could with her condition and she moved from using a cane to a walking frame for support.

After Dad left us in 2016, my sisters and I knew it was only a matter of time before Mum would pass on too. We were determined to make her as happy and comfortable as possible before we lost her.

Despite the good intentions, though, I failed miserably to keep her happy. A major reason was I wasn’t happy myself and was going through my own difficulties, mostly at work before my retirement.

I’ve always found Mum rather difficult and sensitive and a volatile mother that Dad had to temper. The truth is I love my mum but I don’t particularly like her because to me she seems ornery and demanding, and I always feel I can never please her.

So as long as her diabetes and blood pressure were under control and I dutifully accompanied her to all her medical appointments, sorted her medications, took her out for the occasional meal and she had her own comfortable space, I thought I was doing right by her.

And then I retired and my world changed. It coincided with my having to care for Mum full-time as my maid went on home leave for two months. I smugly wrote about how I coped in my July 17,2019, column, “My life as I never knew it” (online at bit.ly/star_life).

For a while I reconnected with her but once my trusty maid returned, I handed the heavy lifting of caring for Mum over to her. My conversations with Mum dried up again as I tried to reset my own post-retirement life.

Along came Covid-19 and my world changed again. We all became housebound. Yet even though we were under the same roof, the adult children were stuck in their rooms working long hours on their laptops and I was either at my desk surfing for news on the pandemic, watching my K-dramas or in the kitchen cooking and baking.Mum was largely left on her own.

Then my maid and I noticed she was quieter than usual. She was sleeping so much she often could not distinguish night from day. She would get confused over her meals, thinking she should be having breakfast instead of dinner. She would argue that we were giving her the wrong medications.

When my sisters called, she showed little interest in talking to them. Her speech was becoming slurred and she had all kinds of random thoughts. Frequently, she would fixate on a small matter and get very agitated if it was not resolved to her liking.

Mum was fading fast and it had nothing to do with the coronavirus. It got me very, very scared. Even though it is an inevitability that will come to pass, I cannot bear for her to go now. Not when I would have to bear the burden and responsibility of laying her to eternal rest alone without my sisters, who live in Sydney and Singapore and who would be devastated by not being able to come home to bid her a final farewell.

I was galvanised into action to stem my mum’s deterioration. After discussing it with my sisters, I decided to put away her walking frame and insist that she use the wheelchair at all times to minimise her chances of falling.

I mounted more grab bars, on both sides of her bathroom door and on the bedroom wall, and added a bedrail to help her raise and steady herself. I stuck anti-slip patches all over the floor.

Mum has lost a great deal of muscle strength in her limbs because she is so sedentary that her movements are limited by chronic pain. A friend suggested that I try getting the services of a physiotherapist who worked with her late father, but I had put off contacting him until about a month ago.

Ibrahim, a young graduate in physiotherapy from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, has been coming to work on strengthening Mum’s withered muscles for three weeks and he has made a difference. Improvement will be slow and difficult, but she looks forward to his visits and that is a great breakthrough.

At my sister’s recommendation, I made an appointment for Mum to see a geriatrician in the hope that such a specialist would be able to oversee her health holistically. We had to wait two months before we saw Dr Khor but it was worth the wait.

Dr Khor was meticulous and very kind, spending two hours assessing and talking to Mum in excellent Cantonese. From her gentle prodding, Mum revealed she felt useless and was just waiting to die.

My poor, poor Mum.

While I am doing all I can to improve her physical well-being, my mission now is to lift her mood and get her more engaged with living again. Thus far, to perk her up, I have been playing classic Chinese songs and Cantonese opera which she loves on YouTube (thank you to whoever uploaded those performances by Yam Kim Fai, Pak Suet Sin and Tang Pik Wan).

I have also dug up my children’s simple wooden puzzles for her to try to improve her concentration and fine motor skills. I have ordered more puzzles online and am searching the Internet for more ideas and activities to keep her more alert and present.

Sadly, just as we thought we could see the light at the end of the tunnel, Covid-19 infections have returned with a vengeance and our collective fear is rising. Any plans to take Mum out have been put on hold again as mall after popular mall in the Klang Valley record new cases.

But no matter how depressing and difficult it is, I will do all I can to keep Mum alive and well and beat the damn Covid beast.

The views expressed here are entirely the writer’s own.