Because everyone you meet
Is fighting some kind of battle.
Mom got a new set of teeth recently. She has a few teeth but she had gone without the rest for several years. As is common with stroke victims, She has trouble eating and swallowing anyway and not having teeth sure didn't help much. Of course with my mother everything has a time and place and her teeth come out and are cleaned and put in their little box with the denture cleaner after dinner as soon as she gets to her room. What happens if you wish to do something else? No! There are really no exceptions to this kind of ritual! There is no way of distracting her from taking out those teeth right then. When she first got them,they would get stuck and I would try to take them out to no avail. I'd try for a minute but my pink and white solar nails couldn't really pick them up. Mom would not wait a minute and would just keep pulling at them, trying to pull them out herself. Afraid she was going to hurt herself, I'd run down the hall to find a nurse. Truthfully all that gooey slobber would start to make me gag. Her teeth needed several adjustments so they wouldn't get stuck. Thank goodness, now she pulls them right out and I clean them at 6 pm. What if I wasn't there? If I wasn't there, she would have had to wait and she wouldn't have, she would have pulled at them and tugged them, making them bleed until the nurses came. The reason I visit mom everyday is that no matter how great the service is at a nursing home, they can't pay that much attention. There's a 100 year old lady in Mom's hall that has a lovely smile. She smiles all the time. She's a widow, her husband was a minister so she is similar to my mom. She has a sweet lovely kind spirit. I saw her coming down the hall with her daughter last week with no teeth. She looked absolutely miserable. I asked her duaghter and she said her mom had thrown up earlier, her teeth came out and no one noticed it. They were looking in the laundry, the garbage, everywhere! It was so sad. One of my mom's past roommate flushed her teeth down the toilet accidentally. One of Mom's past table mates would spit them out in the middle of her meal. That sound of clink clink would ruin every one's appetite. When others complained mom would just say "try not to look at her, look the other way." We kinda wished she would misplace her teeth.
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