I Love My Mother

Today my mother travels down to Ontario to visit my sister and her family.  It has been 10 years since she made the trip and she is very nervous about getting on the plane alone.  When she was visiting me on Sunday she looked up at me and I could see that she was almost begging me to rescue her from the trip!  I felt terrible that I couldn’t go down with her but not only have I used up all my vacation time I had also made a commitment to attend our company Christmas party that I was loath to break.

            So I had a nice long chat with my mother on the phone last night and she was in a surprisingly chipper mood.  I asked her why the big change.

            “I had an amazing day today.”

            “Really, what happened?”

            “I went to the doctor . . . “ and she was off to the races.  She told a big long story about attending at the doctor’s office.  It wasn’t her regular doctor, it was the substitute.  All her tests had come back “very good” so she was happy about that.  Then she asked the doctor about her arthritis shot.  He said he could give her one.  She was in heaven as she had been suffering for months with the arthritis thinking that she couldn’t get another one for a year. 

            Now comes the painful part.  She started to tell me about the blue pill, then it was a grey pill, then it was the ineffective pill with nothing in them, then it was back to the blue pill.  We are talking about her sleeping pills.  She has been complaining for almost a year now that she has been unable to sleep because they have discontinued her old pills (which she’s been taking for over 20 years since she started menopause) and she is convinced that the pills she has been receiving are only placebos.  She has been rolling around in bed all these months, barely getting any sleep.  The doctor said that he could prescribe something stronger but she should only take a half pill.   So she went next door to the pharmacist.  As she talked with the pharmacist (she has become quite a chatty person in the pharmacy apparently – what happened to my quiet little mother?) and lo and behold, the pharmacist recommended something different.  So back she went to the doctor to get another prescription (after the pharmacist had talked with the doctor on the phone).  She gets back to the pharmacist and suddenly she is in a chat with another one of the ladies in the drugstore who tells her

            “You know, they are now making the old pills again.”

            “Really” she turns to the pharmacist “could I get those instead?”

            He says she can but she will need to get another prescription so off she goes to the doctor again.

            At this point in the story she tells me that my brother John has been waiting in the truck all this time for her and he has been watching her go back and forth between the doctor’s office and the pharmacy.   Naturally he is wondering what on earth is going on.  When she finally gets into the truck she tells him

            “I am as happy as a lark.”  I thought I was going to kill myself laughing.  Just hearing my mother get all excited because she “got a shot in the arm” and got her sleeping pills back was hilarious.  She had forgotten all her anxiety about the trip in the excitement of realizing that she was going to be able to sleep in a strange bed. 

            My mother, I’ve just got to love her!