My mother the nonagenarian

IT’S my mother’s birthday; she turns 90 today.

It’s quite a feat, given that she has beaten the average Malaysian Chinese woman’s life expectancy of 79.4 years, escaped Covid-19 and survived numerous falls.

My siblings and I are indeed grateful that she has reached this incredible age milestone, but our joy is muted by the fact that while she is with us physically, she has become lost to us mentally and emotionally.

Mum, with my late father, moved into my house in 2005.

But it was only in 2019, the year I retired, that I was able to spend a lot more time with her and become more involved in her care and wellbeing.

Things took a strange turn when the pandemic hit us in 2020; it marked the beginning of her decline in health and cognitive abilities.

As I wrote in my Oct 7, 2020 column, “My mother, my child”, she became quieter, sleeping more and losing track of time. She would fixate on small matters and get extremely agitated over them. She also started to slur in her speech.

With the advice and support of my sisters and her geriatrician Dr Khor, I did what I could to try to slow down her deterioration by stimulating her with music, TV shows, games, flashcards and puzzles as well as keeping her physically safe, especially from Covid-19.

I no longer allowed her to walk to prevent falls, mounted safety bars in her room, bathroom and on her bed, and hired a physiotherapist to try to strengthen her weakening muscles.

All the above helped for a while, but the decline was relentless. By Sept 22, 2022, when I last wrote about Mum (“The inevitable goodbye”), she was fast becoming a mere shadow of her old lively self.

In the 16 months or so since Sept 2022, her mental state worsened. In June last year, it became clear Mum needed a full-time carer for all her needs.

We were very fortunate to be able to replace our part-timer with Jane, who was introduced to us by my ex-colleague Ann.

Jane, who is from the Philippines, spent many years looking after elderly employers in Saudi Arabia. She now does an amazing job of looking after Mum 24/7, supported by my long-time Indonesian helper Wiji. Thanks to Dad’s careful savings and pension, my siblings and I are able to provide the best we can afford for Mum’s well-being.

We watch her carefully for signs of discomfort and pain; she no longer speaks and barely registers any emotion, apart from the occasional grimace or grunt.

Jane has to check her skin every day for any cuts or inflammation. That was how she spotted the bed sores on Mum’s bum before they became festering wounds. Even so, it took many weeks of treatment before she was completely healed.

Back in Sept 2022, a major issue with Mum was her habit of spitting out her food. She would eject bits she didn’t want to chew even after she kept the morsels in her mouth for some time.

I finally figured out that she didn’t like to use her teeth anymore, so we took to blending her food into puree consistency, which she eats a lot more willingly. Feeding her dinner, which used to take as long as two hours, is now done in 30 to 40 minutes.

I get rather emotional thinking back to how, 35 years ago, she prepared and blended my daughter’s baby food for me. Truly, my mother is now my child. And like a child, she likes sweet things and will open her mouth for cakes, ice cream and soft cookies.

We can give her that, because she has lost a lot of weight and her Type 2 Diabetes seems to have gone into remission. Jane continues to monitor her blood glucose, but Dr Khor has taken her off insulin and reduced the strength of her diabetic medicine.

In fact, she has removed many drugs she deemed no longer necessary based on Mum’s blood tests. It is a relief, because getting her to swallow the pills was also a battle.

Talking about her doctor, we have also stopped bringing Mum to the hospital for her appointments as the consultations are now done online. We also have an external laboratory send their staff to my house to take her blood for analysis, and I email the results to Dr Khor.

One of my biggest concerns, which I mentioned in a previous column, was her dental health. One of Jane’s major tasks is ensuring she has good oral hygiene, as it will be extremely difficult to take Mum to a dentist.

By chance, my sister found a dental clinic in my neighbourhood mall, and the nice young dentist examined her teeth while she remained seated in her wheelchair.

He found her teeth to be in decent condition considering her age, which means all the regular cleaning after every meal has paid off. He recommended we use a very soft toothbrush for Mum, which my sister and I separately rushed to buy!

Thanks to enabling technology and services, understanding doctors and good caregivers, my mother is in good hands and has survived till now. She has not caught Covid-19 so far.

Jane and Wiji take her for strolls in the neighbourhood, and I try to take her out to give her a change of scenery, which we think she enjoys since she stays awake.

The best places to take her are malls, especially when they are decked out for festivals like Christmas and Chinese New Year. We don’t have to worry about rain, but I do worry about crowds, so I choose less busy malls.

That was what we did on Sunday. My sister and brother-in-law, my niece, her husband, their brood of four adorable children, my family and the caregivers gathered at a quiet restaurant to have an early celebration of Mum’s birthday.

We had a table full of food, and while Mum was limited to rice congee with fish and tofu, she ate it all up, including a good slice of the cake. We like to think she still has some awareness and enjoyed the dinner party even though she showed no emotion at the raucous singing of “Happy Birthday” in four languages: English, Mandarin, Malay and Cantonese.

It has been four years since Mum told Dr Khor during a hospital visit that she felt useless and was just waiting to die. That was three years after Dad’s passing when she was still feeling the loss immensely.

We don’t know if she still feels the same way, and there doesn’t seem to be any way for us to find out. As her family, all we can do is to ease her journey and pray so that when the time comes, she will quietly and painlessly go into the night, knowing she is loved and will be missed.

The views expressed here are the writer’s own.