Today Mom had an MRI done to determine the cause of the speech aphasia and loss of motor skills. It was as I had suspected from early on.

Mom has had a minor stroke.

That explains all of the weird symptoms that she’s been exhibiting – the loss of communication, the loss of motor skills, the loss of connection to reality at times (today she told me that a fish on the ceiling helped her sleep last night and that there was a hat on the fence outside her 5th floor window, not to mention the black widow spider that was on my glasses at one point). At least now we have a direction to move in and to see what we can recover of what she’s lost.

I’m terrified for her at this point, because she’s unable to communicate even the most basic wishes when she’s tired or hurting, and she’s usually tired or hurting. I don’t know how her care is going to change at her nursing home, and I really don’t have an easy way of checking on her, unless it’s to check with Kenneth and get reports from him.

I’m more scared of what I’ve just inherited. As her financial power of attorney, it’s now fallen to me to make sure that her bills are taken care of and that things run smoothly for her with regard to her money. Fortunately I’m a signatory on her bank account, so that helps immensely. But her budget and all of her finances are locked away on her laptop at her facility, something that I’m likely going to have to get my hands on to be able to efficiently execute her finances. That will likely be something that Kenneth is going to have to retrieve for me and ship to Austin so we can get things done.

Right now, though, I have another priority that I need to look at – that being the trip to Arizona to be with my wife’s family over Easter weekend. With my knee in an immobilizer, this might be a long trip for us. I’m dreading the flight back to Austin, even though United was kind enough to not only put me on the right bulkhead aisle but to move my wife’s seat from somewhere else on the plane – our reservations were made at different times – to right beside me on the bulkhead.

I’m kind of numb given the news of Mom’s stroke, so bear with me if I seem out of it for the next little while. Life is too busy to be able to process this effectively and it’ll be over a week before I can really start to do that.