Autonomy.

So yesterday my mother informed my brother she had given birth. This surprised him as, at 44, he is very much the baby of the family. He assumed he had woken her, and she had been dreaming. "You're a bit past that sort of thing now, aren't you?" he said. "Cheeky" she replied. The new child was Patrick Thomas (mine and my brother Barry's middle names) and he is a red head. She was staring at a prayer card my aunt had sent her of a Titian haired baby Jesus as though it were her new son. The story didn't go away. She was still asking after Pat when Edward was leaving. 

She was fine today. No mention of Pat again, though initially she failed to recognise Edward.  

His conferences with the staff are concerning. The doctors attempt to scare my mother into cooperating, and it's fairly basic cooperation: eating, drinking, taking her pills, but she ignores them. Frustrated, they attempt to scare my brother, telling him she may have a stroke if she continues in this way, as though he has leverage with her, as though he can reason with her. But there is no reasoning with her. She is, in her own way, mad. And attempting to reason with a mad person is lunacy. 

Why do I say she is mad? It's an old fashioned and unhelpful word. My mother wants to be in her house and she wants to be left alone. That is her sole, diamond-hard focus. She wants what she calls "her independence". She wants to be free of daily inconveniences like eating, or drinking, or washing, or moving. Or even talking to people. Her only opportunity to get out of the hospital, once it was established that she had pneumonia and that the reason she was constantly short of breath was that she had two litres of fluid on her lung, was to eat and drink and take her medicine and recover. 

And from the first she has refused EVERYTHING. The sensible thing would have been to comply, to try, to do what the nurses tell her to do to get better - she used to be a nurse! That's the sensible thing to do. So I can only conclude she's insensible. She likes not doing it, she likes getting one over on the people who try and make her do things for her own good. She's said as much. She hides her pills, like a three year old, pretending she's taken them, winking that's she's fooled the busybodies again. 

I love my mum, but she makes me so angry. And in a strange way I admire the sheer bloody mindedness of it, even if I don't understand it. She's killing herself to prove a point. And her magical thinking makes her believe the outcome of all of this is that she'll be allowed to go home. It's crazy. We've always been horribly alike, but I don't recognise her here. She makes no sense. 

No wonder she's delirious, no wonder she's making up phantom brothers for me - she's so dehydrated, so starving, that she  might have been set adrift on a raft in the ocean. She is skeletal now. Bones on a rubber mattress. She finally agreed to an endoscopy yesterday, and the doctor pounced on the idea before she could change her mind. 

When Edward went in to see her today the first thing she did was to ask him for a drink, which he too pounced upon, only to be told she couldn't have one by a nurse, as Annie is nil-by-mouth before her procedure. Best timing in the business, my mother - NOW she wants a drink. 

I doubt very much the endoscopy will find anything. I don't think its a physical thing. I think its entirely about my mother's autonomy. She has the power to stipulate the things that go into her body. That's a thing she can control. She has the power to refuse to cooperate, to capitulate. Exercising that is the only exercise she gets. 

Today she didn't initially recognise Edward. But as he was leaving, she said "Thank you, Edward." and kissed his hand.  

I'm planning to go over again. Things look bad.