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The evening of Valentine’s Day, I checked on my mother and made sure the outside doors were locked. I went to bed and slept well. I woke up the next morning to find the light on in her room and the television blaring. Something was definitely wrong. As I approached her closed door, I heard her moaning from the other side. I put my hand on the door knob and tried to open it, but it wouldn’t budge. She had fallen during the night and her body was right up against the door.

I immediately called 911. Two female paramedics were there right away. Unable to get into her room, they called the fire department, but before the firemen arrived, one of the medics had managed to get through the door. Mom was coherent as they checked her vitals. She told them she had leaned over to put something in the trash and lost her balance. She estimated that she had been there since before midnight. They strapped her to the stretcher and all four of them carefully carried my 98 lb. mother to the ambulance. I grabbed my things and followed them to the hospital.

At the hospital it seemed that I had to tell the story to every aide, nurse and doctor who came into the room. They immediately started her on morphine for the pain, so she was out of it for the rest of the day. I sat there and waited. And waited. After running the tests, they determined that she had broken her hip. The femur was fractured and would require surgery. Because she is on blood thinners for congestive heart failure, they would have to wait until her blood thickened before they could do surgery. This was Wednesday, and they weren’t expecting to be able to do surgery until about Friday.

About 3:30 they finally moved her to a room. For the next two days they kept her just doped up enough to either be sleeping or agitated.

On Friday morning they performed the surgery and everything went as planned. My mother is a fighter. Her nickname is Kitten, and she certainly has more than nine lives. She’s lived through a blood clot on the brain that might have killed anyone else. She’s recovered from alcoholism. She’s traveled alone on the highways and probably taken risks most of us would avoid.

Spending so many hours sitting in the hospital, I had time to reflect on the last few years and the trials we have all endured. The medication trials.

I went to Memphis and moved my mother to Houston back in 2001. She’d wasted the past five years in a nursing home as a result of becoming confused on prescription drugs after suffering a broken bone. My brother took her to a psychiatrist who determined she had schizophrenia. Instead of researching the side effects of the drugs, she was given an anti-psychotic drug and got even worse. This was a classic case of treating a side effect of one drug with another one.

By 2001, she was a mess, and my brother could no longer deal with her. He told me I’d have to assume responsibility. For months I tried, but it was impossible to do with me hundreds of miles away and unable to visit. I was able to get her out of the nursing home environment and into assisted living. It was definitely a step up from where she had been. I expected a period of adjustment but was not prepared for what we’d have to face. Even though her new environment was clean and beautiful, things got totally out of control. I found a social worker but when her counseling did little good, she referred us to a psychiatrist. He recommended an anti-depressant, but when one pill helped a little, he decided to add another. Before we knew it, the ugly signs of schizophrenia had popped up again, and we were right back where we started.

My Aunt Nina became a vital part of managing mom’s life at that point. She assured me that mom had never been schizophrenic and that it’s not something someone “develops” when they are elderly. We refer to Nina as “Doctor Hayes” because she has done so much research of her own as a result of chemical poisoning years ago that almost killed her. Nina was convinced that Mom’s medications were out of sync. As Mom became more unmanageable for the staff, they felt the only thing to do was move her to a nursing home. Instead, believing that Nina was correct, I had her committed and taken to a psychiatric hospital where they could evaluate her. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

I met with the psychiatrist at the hospital and she explained that they would take her off all medications that weren’t necessary to keep her alive. Getting her “clean” was the only way they could find out what was causing her behavior. The first day mom was out of control. I couldn’t make much sense out of the things she was saying. The next evening she was so cold and despondent that I went home feeling sure she would die there. The next day she was having hallucinations and mad at me for putting her there. I went to visit every day, sometimes crying all the way home, but by the end of the week, I was surprised to see that my mother was starting to emerge once again.

At the beginning of the week, I had been told I needed to start finding a nursing home for her. I was even told that it didn’t matter where I put her because she wouldn’t know if I came to visit anyway. Now, just seven days later, the administrator at her assisted living wanted to send someone out to assess her and see if she could come back to live there. She passed the test and went back to her own apartment. As it turns out, Nina was right. The reason for her schizophrenic behavior was the anti-depressant and combination of medications.

Life started to be good again. I visited often and she seemed back to her old self. She was even socializing a little within the facility. Then, in June of 2002, my brother died of a heart attack due to the side effects of an anti-psychotic drug that was given to him for pain. That threw a kink in everything. She started wanting to go back home to Tennessee. She thought she could live alone even though the rest of us knew she couldn’t. We begged her to come live with us. It was going to cause a lot of changes for us, but it was really the best option for her. She’d be saving money and she wouldn’t be alone.

I wish that I could say that my close supervision meant that these medication problems were over, but that’s not the case. It helped to establish a base for those medications she needed so that when her behavior changed, we could go back and see what had been added since then. The most important thing I feel I’ve done is become aware of the dangers of these prescription drugs and fighting with doctors to help them know how harmful these side effects are to her.

There was one period of time in our home when she complained of so much pain that I finally called an ambulance and spent the day with her in the emergency room, only to find nothing wrong. There have been braces made that were never worn. This pain was manifesting itself as physical pain, but it was really emotional pain. Another trip back to the hospital psychiatrist helped get her back on track. When an anti-depressant helped her get off pain pills and relieve this emotional and physical pain, I also learned that if she got too much of it in her body she would become anxious and bold. She would think she was capable of things that she really couldn’t or shouldn’t do. She wanted to travel. She became confrontational.

So here I am today. Still fighting with the doctors. Just today I asked to see her chart and discovered she’s being given a pill to help her sleep. As a result, she’s feeling dizzy, anxious, and afraid.

It’s been three months since her fall. She spent a week in the hospital and then was moved to a rehab hospital. Three weeks after the surgery they were giving her morphine one day and withholding it the next. One day she would be totally passed out. The next she would be crying and emotional from the withdrawal of it. Talking to the doctor didn’t help. It was only when I went to the patient advocate office that they helped him understand that you can’t just sporadically administer a narcotic!

One thing I’ve learned is that the doctors really don’t know that much about the drugs they are administering. It is important that you don’t just accept what they tell you as the truth. It’s not necessarily that they’re lying to you – it’s possible that they just haven’t come up against the problem before. Do your own research, or find someone you trust to help you.

After a month in rehab, Mom was moved to skilled nursing care. That means she is now in a nursing home receiving therapy five days a week. She hates it there, and I can’t say that I blame her. The food is so bad that most of the time she refuses to eat. When I visit, I bring food in. Some of the aides are downright hateful. In the beginning, she would call for help in going to the bathroom and no one would show up. If they did, they would tell her to just go in her diaper and they’d come back later to clean her up. What they didn’t tell you was that you might have to lie in your wet or dirty diaper for hours before they found time to help you. The place smells bad. Other people are in worse shape than she is and it’s depressing to be around them. I keep reminding her that this is temporary and that she’ll be coming home soon, but I don’t know how much that helps.

Some of the adversity has made her stronger and more determined to fight. It didn’t take long before she started getting up and going to the bathroom on her own. She’s made friends with the therapists and a couple of the nurses, and when the food is just unbearable, sometimes they will sneak her something else from the kitchen.

This has been a rough road for both of us. I never expected to be the caregiver; a part of the sandwich generation. She never expected she would have to depend on me, or anyone else, for anything. My mother was always a very independent woman. She was on her own and made a good living for herself most of her life. She had made friends and saved money to take care of her retirement. It’s just a shame that this is how she’s spending her later years.

It makes me wonder why we have become a society that spends so much money trying to extend life, only to spend so much of it dependent on others. The pharmaceutical companies offer a pill for everything, but the price we pay isn’t just at the counter. We are creating new problems because of the side effects, and instead of trying to understand what might be causing those new problems, the doctors are ready to prescribe a new pill. Before you know it, your irregular heartbeat means you need blood thinners and diuretics, but then you’re dehydrated and feeling weak. If you go to the doctor complaining of being tired and weak, he’ll prescribe something else. The list just keeps growing until you don’t know what’s real anymore.

Right now I’m healthy. I exercise and watch what I eat. There may come a day when I need medication for one thing or another, but I hope that I will have learned when to say “no” to medications based on the experiences I have had in caring for my mother. I would like to live a long life, but not at the risk of spending the last part of it unable to take care of myself. I would rather die naturally of a heart attack than die without my dignity in a nursing home, or to suffer so much pain that I am tempted to put a gun to my head like my uncle did. One of the drugs that had been prescribed for him had a warning that it could cause suicidal thoughts. Well, it did more than make him think about it. He went to great lengths to make sure it happened, even when family members had repeatedly removed guns from his home.

My children see the care that I’m giving my mother. I also share the information on how her medication can make such a difference in her behavior and attitude. I keep reminding them in hopes that they will be an advocate for me if there comes a time that I’m not lucid enough to think for myself. After all, we just can’t predict what medical trials we might have to face, even if we do take good care of our bodies.

Walking through the nursing home to get to my mother’s room, my heart breaks for those who are there for the long haul. Many of them have no one who comes to visit at all. Others only get occasional visits. Most of them have just been forgotten – put there because there is no one able or willing to be more involved. As for me, I thank Nina for making me aware of the dangers of these medications. Seeing the difference in my mother when she’s “in tune” on the right dosages and medications makes me wonder how many people really need to be in nursing homes. If there was just someone willing to take the time to figure out why they behave as they do, many of them might be able to come home.

If you have questions, www.drugawareness.org is a good place to learn about the drugs and the tragedies they cause. An excellent book on this subject is Your Drug May Be Your Problem by Dr. Breggin. The drug companies are behind the rampant and thoughtless promotion of these drugs. Their salespeople are on commissions and they peddle to doctors offering incentives, including lunch, vacations and money. It is all about profit, not about the patients. Most doctors don’t bother to determine if the patient has some organic disease causing their problems, but are quick to prescribe psychiatric drugs, especially antidepressants. Antidepressants have become the doctors’ "quick fix" for nearly everyone's disorder. They are passed out like candy without regard for the side effects, interactions and withdrawal symptoms. In fact, most doctors don't even know or understand the details of the drugs.