Momma's Growing Old

I was home for Thanksgiving briefly. I went out to Thanksgiving "breakfast" with my mom. For years, my mother has always seemed to be very self sufficient and capable of taking care of herself (and she is). But the years are steadily going by and its now becoming very apparent to me that momma is growing old and her infirmities are beginning to multiply. She's got a bad knee that she had surgery on, and I was actually shocked to see that she now walks with a cane when I was home. The cane really signaled her advancing age to me. Momma is always just "momma", or she was. Now, I worry about her.

Besides the cane and bad knee, which is impacting her mobility, her eyesight is fading as well. She's basically told me that the doctors said that she's going blind. She declares this to me in the same matter of fact way you might say "this is a jar of peanut butter" or "he has very bad teeth". Likes its a factual but not particularly important datum. She mentions things floating in her vision, which prompted me to scope the net for information about what might be happening with her eyes. One site that popped up was Eye Floaters. They talked about things like "spiderwebs" and floaties in the eye. I was gratified to find something that talked in more concrete, medical terms about these Eye Floaters, particularly since a topic as serious as your eyesight seem to deserve a more intimidating term than floatie. Those things my mother complained about in her vision indeed had more technical terms like Vitreous Floaters.Okay, perhaps only slightly more technical that.

It was good to see Momma at Thanksgiving, but I came away with an acute sense of unease about what her physical condition will be like in a year or two. Not sure what to do about that.