Tuesday, December 23, 2008

A Mother's Christmas Blessing

My mother was famous for her inability to get along with technology. Every watch she owned stopped within a day. Parking garage machines refused to spit out tickets for her. What her presence did to the voting machines in her precinct in West Hartford remains a family legend (no, she was not in Florida in 2000--if she had been, the results would have been different).

So at 1:30 this morning I felt my mother's presence, not as angel wings beating sweetly around me, but in the form of two nurses huddled around my IV pole, passing yards of tubing back and forth as they tried to untangle the maypole.

"Let's see. The PICC line should go through the pump here, but it won't fit."

"Yeah, the switch clicks off every time. What about the port line?"

And so it went, with the pumps on the IV pole joining in the conversation, beeping and pinging like Artoo Deetoo gone berserk. Finally, I realized what was causing all this.

"Mom, enough already," I thought sternly. There was a sudden, blessed silence as the monitors settled down to normalcy. The nurses sighed with relief. "I knew we could get it to work," one said.

After they left, I smiled into the dark and quiet. Merry Christmas, Mom.

3 comments:

Miriam said...

Could I identify? My mom had an incredible command of areas like history and the English language, but math, physics, and logic eluded her. She had the darndest time trying to figure out how things worked. My dad asserted that he built his workshop to fix the items mom had broken!

Ev said...

For a minute there I thought the IV tubing was going to be tangled like yarn :-)
Hope you are healing up.

Arctic-mermaid said...

HEy Lucie;
I'm with you there today as I've been everyday Girl. Take care, have a wonderful Christmas and hurry up and get all healed up. Okay?
Lots of love, You are on my mind alot