I remember sitting in a hospital lounge around 4 am with my family, still trying to understand what had just happened to my mother. I remember one second me in a car with her driving back home from an exhausting road trip, and the next hastily being driven to Frankford Hospital, where my mother had been helicoptered to. A doctor came to meet us and told my father something in a low voice that I couldn’t make out. My father turned to my uncle and said to drive me, my sister and my grandma home, as he would be staying at the hospital for a few days. I later had been told by my sister that my mother had suffered from another stroke.
This all happened in the summer of 2008 in New York, it was a dark night but the road was lit with cars. I was with …show more content…
For the first time in my life, I had to deal with the fact that the person that always looked after me was in a hospital bed recovering from a stroke. While I still had my father, between work and visiting my mother in the hospital, he was barely home. It became my sisters and I’s responsibility to take care of the house work.
The housework seemed like a daunting task to me, as I was around 10 at the time. There was so much work to be done, I was now partly responsible for doing the laundry, doing the dishes, setting the table and cleaning the house. I was not used to having these responsibilities and struggled with them at first. I hated doing the work, but I knew it had to be done. I also had to do smaller less important tasks, I started to pack my own lunch and make my own breakfast.
I also had to learn to take care of my grandmother, while she was still very healthy, she needed help with many things. It became my responsibility to remind my grandmother when to take which of her medications. I also had to take care of her minor problems, like getting her a blanket when she felt cold, raising the AC when it got too hot, helping her climb our staircase and getting her food when it was dinner
This all happened in the summer of 2008 in New York, it was a dark night but the road was lit with cars. I was with …show more content…
For the first time in my life, I had to deal with the fact that the person that always looked after me was in a hospital bed recovering from a stroke. While I still had my father, between work and visiting my mother in the hospital, he was barely home. It became my sisters and I’s responsibility to take care of the house work.
The housework seemed like a daunting task to me, as I was around 10 at the time. There was so much work to be done, I was now partly responsible for doing the laundry, doing the dishes, setting the table and cleaning the house. I was not used to having these responsibilities and struggled with them at first. I hated doing the work, but I knew it had to be done. I also had to do smaller less important tasks, I started to pack my own lunch and make my own breakfast.
I also had to learn to take care of my grandmother, while she was still very healthy, she needed help with many things. It became my responsibility to remind my grandmother when to take which of her medications. I also had to take care of her minor problems, like getting her a blanket when she felt cold, raising the AC when it got too hot, helping her climb our staircase and getting her food when it was dinner