Month: January 2025

It’s Saturday morning on the Atherton Tablelands, Far North Queensland. I need to provide an update.

After the long trip (40 hours travel time, Klawock to Atherton), I crashed last night around 8 pm (local time = 1 am Alaska time). I slept through to 2 am and woke up completely, but after killing some time reading I managed to sleep again from about 4 to 5. Now it’s 6 am and I’m going face this day. There was rain last night, and lightning in the clouds as I drove from Atherton up to Ravenshoe to my mom’s house.

Here’s a summary of the situation with my mom. She has the broken right shoulder, but they’ve also identified a possible bad break in her right femur. This is troubling mostly because if it’s serious and goes untreated, it could mean she really basically never regains mobility. They’re taking her down to Cairns today to do an MRI (no MRI at Atherton Hospital), and try to evaluate how bad it is and what if anything to do. If it’s severe, they want to press for surgery (inserting a pin), explaining that it is “palliative”. Although I understand, I also really want to respect my mom’s repeated and furious declarations of wishing for “NO interventions”. For my mom, even the MRI is really a step too far with respect to the boundaries she tried to set back when she was more coherent, and letting all this happen feels like a betrayal, but it’s very hard to resist the medical-industrial complex and their “of course it’s the right thing to do” approach to the medical ethics of any and all interventions.

At the same time, the threat of “never regaining mobility” is pretty scary – even Ann admitted that in talking last night. Mentally she’s more calm than I expect, but they’re giving her opiate painkillers and some kind of anti anxiety med (I think?). Anyway, I’d be calm too, probably. It’s clear, though, that her mental decline is real and substantial. She really reminded me of Arthur the way she was told repeatedly during the 2 hours I spent with her about the upcoming MRI appointment, only to deny having heard about it the next time it came up, and giving alarmed expressions.

She retains her sense of humor, and returns frequently to a notion of “giving” – though I can’t quite figure out what she means (giving what? to who?) but it feels like a kind of spiritual expression for her, and maybe groping through the fog for some idea of closure? I don’t quite know – her vocabulary is highly reduced and she has much difficulty expressing herself sometimes, though her level of understanding in any given moment is quite a bit higher than Arthur’s is.

Today, mom’s off to Cairns for this MRI thing, where my accompanying would be pretty pointless given the logtistics of it. So I’m going to focus on figuring out why my mobile phone roaming, which worked so well last time I was here, is absolutely failing me. I’m very upset about it but also absolutely clueless what I can do about it? How do I get customer service from AT&T while overseas when my phone isn’t working? I may end up buying a local pre-paid phone if I can, because this is not a situation where I want to be phoneless.