An Update on Marj Watkins
By Suzanna Leigh
“Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home …”
Erin’s voice touches my heart like holy water, as we sing with Mom. Mom’s voice is barely above a whisper, but she is singing!
Later, Mom hums some of the tune, or a bar or two of “Gypsy Rover,” the song I sang to her earlier, or she hums some of the “Blue Danube” waltz. Sometimes we can make out the tune she is humming, sometimes not, but she is nearly always humming these days. Is that part of what is keeping her going long past the hospices nurse’s guess? It does seem to calm her, especially when I hum with her.
I read recently that our sinuses produce nitrous oxide, and that humming releases 15 times more nitrous oxide into the system than regular breathing does. Nitrous oxide has multiple health benefits. It expands the blood vessels, helps the lungs to absorb more oxygen, brings more blood to the brain. It slows the nervous system and is calming. It can even produce euphoria. Too much of it, as when someone breathes in too much externally, can damage the nervous system. That must be why dentists don’t use it anymore.
“1, 2, 3, 4, 5” Mom examines her hand and counts her fingers, as though she wants to make sure they are all still here. Sometimes she fiddles with her ring finger, frowning. She is missing her wedding ring which fell off sometime ago, and no other ring will stay on her finger.
Mom is very much bed-bound these days, which means changing her in bed. This is hard, both on her and on us. She tends to get very anxious when we have to roll her to one side. Erin and I are exhausted, even when we work together to change and clean her. Even when mom is relatively calm. The doctor prescribed quetiapine for her anxiety, and it seemed to work well the first time we tried it. The Friday morning dose made changing easier all day. The next day, though, when the Q wore off, her sparkle was gone and she was emotionally flat; she had no response to emotion at all. True, she has up days and down days, but she has never before had a day when she was so zombie-like.
It took two days for her to get her sparkle back.
Quetiapine is the “gold standard” for treating anxiety in hospice patients. That means it works well for most people, with few or no side effects. “Most people” is not a category Mom has ever fit into. She didn’t even use ibuprofen for pain; she used arnica cream and ginger. While Dad was taking 15 different prescription medications in his late 80s and my brother Steve is taking several although he is barely into his 60s, Mom was taking only salt tablets and thyroid medication before she went into hospice. Now we give her ibuprofen occasionally; other than that, she takes no prescriptions.
Still, her anxiety when we change her worries us. She needs constant reassurance from someone she trusts explicitly, and even then she seems on the edge of panic.
We brainstormed how to ease her anxiety without pharmaceuticals. Now we make it tea time before changes, with a calming oat straw tea from Minglement and a drop or so of Rescue Remedy from Vashon Natural Medicine. We are careful to tell her every move before we move her, to reassure her. And we hum with her.
It still isn’t easy, but her sparkle is back.
