Mother is still in the hospital

My mother is arguing about not getting her sleeping pills while she's in the hospital. She has generic Ambien and they gave her the name brand product. She insists she is not getting the proper medicine - because she refuses to believe the name brand is the same as the generic medicine. She is also demanding more pain medication. She can't have more pain meds than she is already getting because it would cause her heart to stop at this point.

These days, we never know if she will be coming home from the hospital. The time between hospital stays is becoming shorter with each crisis. 

Meanwhile, her personal assistant is being a very vigilant and loving care-giver. Being with Mom at the hospital, taking laundry to be done home, bringing clean clothes and cleaning her home. My sister-in-law was a bit concerned with the security involved with her having so much access to everything. I said, as long as she was not in charge of the checking account and credit cards, I had no concern whatsoever about this woman who is giving my mother the kind of care and attention she wants. It's really quite a God-send for now. Apparently one of the doctors took my sister-in-law aside to talk about how people too good to be true usually are. Since this is a woman who has a long history here with family who live in this area, it doesn't seem that she would want to burn anyone here. I told her that even if some things of value turned up missing in Mom's home, I was okay with that. The quality of care she is providing is worth more than anything sitting in a drawer somewhere in my mother's house.

Mother is back in the hospital

My sister-in-law phoned tonight to let me know that my mother is back in the hospital again. She's had fluid in her lungs for several days and they believe she has pneumonia now. Once again, she had too much trouble breathing and they brought her into the emergency room today. She is in CCU now with Adela, her care-giver, at her side. Some time late tonight, she will have her dialysis treatment at the hospital. I don't think they can do anything to clear the fluid from her lungs other than try to help her body do it. Hopefully, she will get some sleep tonight.

Thanksgiving 2015

Thanksgiving dinner at Casa WereMonster included rotisserie chicken from EarthFare grocery, roasted fingerling potatoes & brussels sprouts, fresh brussels sprouts salad ala Mario Batali, and fresh baked baguette with goat cheese and lingon berry preserves. Not bad for a simple meal.

Today, we went to see Crimson Peak at the $2 cinema. Quite a good movie, though I admit the dialog in the first few minute of the screenplay could have been better. Still, it is surprising that it is already in the second run theaters now. It's a deeply Poe-Gothic tale and visual eye candy.  After the movie, we tried out another Blue restaurant in High Point - Lulu and Blu. MonsterMustDie had the gnochi and I had the mushroom flatbread. I think he got the better dish. Although he said the gnochi was perfectly cooked, it had too many peas in it. The flatbread was wonderfully crisp and light but the topping went too far on the tart side. The flavor shitaki mushrooms and arrugula were completely overrun by very tart goat cheese and sun dried tomatoes. Made my mouth pucker with every bite.

Excelsior

I am in love with the look of this packing material. The color and texture appeal to me. Don't know what I can do with it but I like it.

Falling into Winter

People screaming about the war against Christmas are the thing that make me want to completely avoid the Holiday season.  All the fighting that breaks out this time of year makes the annual decent into winter hard. This winter will be as hard as last year, as I've had to drop everything I spent a ultra-slow year building to spend a month in Georgia and now I will be starting over again from the ground up, probably after the first of the year. That means another empty winter with no friends, even less money than last year with depleted savings, and no pleasurable activities. It means I am a year further away from the level of activity I once had. The house and yard still need a lot of work and money infused into them. We still have a retaining wall to replace, a fence to build, and stumps to remove in the yard. The house still only has one room that is actually finished. 

There is one improvement. A lot of cleaning and clearing has been done. There are not boxes everywhere - they've mostly been placed downstairs next to the decrepit furnace and that is the domain of MonsterMustDie. There is actually furniture to sit on and books to read upstairs now.

The electric dishwasher that came with the house died last night. This is not an appliance we must have, so I will be hand-washing more. I really liked it best for those very hard to clean tools like strainers, collendars, graters and washable items with many small connected parts. Those bits just won't be quite as clean as they used to be now. The Microwave oven died at the end of September, when the number keypad stopped working. We threw it out after a service person told me the board controlling it was now an unreplaceable part. It seems like such a waste, considering it spent nearly 10 years in a box from the time it was new to the time we finally started using it here in this house. One year of active use and it's dead. The dishwasher is very old and it was probably long past it's lifespan. The biggest concern we have is the furnace downstairs. We were advised that it was already long-past its expected lifespan when we bought the house. MonsterMustDie says he does not have the budget to replace it now so we just have to hope it will make it through this winter. We had hoped to replace the HV/AC system the first year here but that is no longer on the current schedule. We will replace it when it dies and not before. As smaller appliances are dying, we won't be replacing them this year. The only thing I can imagine that we would absolutely have to deal with the loss of immediately would be the Furnace/AC, the water heater, and the refridgerator. I think we can live withouth all the other modern conveniences easlily enough. 

Jules Perry shared a photo with you from the Flickr app! Check it out: https://www.flickr.com/gp/weremonkey/4pc65i

Tiny Lights

The holiday season lights started going up in High Point today. 

Test flight

Today, Mother got in. Her car and drove to Chick-fil-A to pick up dinner. She was able to leave her walker outside the drivers side of the car and get back to it when she returned. When she got back, while the car was out, I went up the steps into the storage space and found the light weight hospital walker and brought it down. She hasn't tried moving it in and out of the car yet but it is one more step for her getting by without me there. At the very least, she can go to drive-through services like banks, fast food, and the RiteAid pharmacy. 

Down from the ledge

After picking Mother up at dialysis, we had our post-clinic dinner at O' Charley's. She said their rolls are a favorite of hers and my uncle Ron. It's a basket of four soft yeast rolls slathered with butter and baked just until browned. The heavy meal didn't sit well in my stomach at first. I believe the slices of pumpkin pie we took home for breakfast later will be much better. 

As we drove in to her neighborhood, we met up with uncle Ron, who had come to check in on her. I had left a voicemail earlier when I was melting down. 

Now Mother is sitting on the couch crying again at the thought of me leaving. "Sis, you make a good nurse." 

She can't drive herself

I am here past my planned exit date now. I took mother to her dialysis treatment this morning. As we were getting into her car, I watched her try to put her walker into the back seat. She couldn't do it. She could not even begin to lift the walker to push it in. Then she started talking about how no one has time to help her. She brought a lot of this on herself by refusing to compromise her lifestyle and then telling everyone she could drive herself everywhere because Doctor Starnes said she could when he was only referring to her shoulder injury. After dropping her off at the medical center, I started descending into an anxiety attack. I tried to phone every family member I could. No one was available to talk. 

Once I pulled myself back together, I ran a few shopping errands and came back to clean the garage a bit more and put things away. Every time I start thinking about the pickle I'm in now, I start spiraling downward. 

Trapped is how I feel. Falling without a parachute. 

The crazy continues

Spent this afternoon driving Mother around so she could move bank accounts. More of this will go on Wednesday because the last bank we went to was already closed for the day by the time we got there. I get the impression she trying to do all of this without my brother's knowledge despite the fact that he is her financial adviser and has right of attorney on all of her accounts. 

Meanwhile, it looks like I will be trapped here until Friday at this point. I am starting to feel anxiety constantly now. My heart races. I tense up everywhere and I can't speak. I'm starting to feel like I did when I was a child and I can't get over this irrational fear that I'm never getting out of here. 

The undoing

When I woke up this morning, the dogs were in the carport eagerly peeing and pooping. I immediately let the dogs back in and cleaned up all but the urine on the abandoned stationary bicycle (I get to that after breakfast, during her therapist visit) and put down fresh pee pads everywhere. I said nothing. She said she had to let them go indoors because it's raining outside and she doesn't want wet dogs. "This is what I'll have to do when you're gone." She then calls to cancel an appointment with a woman named Luanne, who was going to discuss coming in to assist her around the house, telling her she won't need her now that mother has permission from Dr. Starnes to drive. She doesn't want to pay anyone who has to work in 4-hour blocks of time rather than as needed, either. 

It seems like she's already punishing me for trying to go home this week. Everything is punctuated with "when you're gone". This makes me want to leave sooner than later. It's like everything wrong here will be my fault when I leave. *sigh* 

Update: 

Cleaned the rest of the spots in the carport. Although I won't call it truly clean, it is a lot cleaner than it was before I got here. There is still filth all along the edge of the walls but I have cleaned and wiped down surfaces and covered what I could on the floor. I cleaned out the second refrigerator in the garage and threw out ancient opened wine that had become expensive vinegar and strangely bloated and bent aluminum cans. There are still several bottles of sparkling wine left to an uncertain future and one spot of solid crystallized puddle on one door shelf that I have not yet been able to entirely remove. 

A visit with the O'Briens

Sunday, when my mother has no appointments, is once again my only chanc to leave the house for a little while. Today's activity was driving to Roswell to visit Nicky & Sean to catch up for a while (mostly, me venting about my life at this moment) and picking up some succulent plants that were left over from the table decorations at their marriage ceremony a few weeks ago. Now, the little plants are in a box in the floor of my car and hopefully they will survive there until I can get them home. I am already thinking of different settings indoors for our new oxygen-producers. 

My mother, who no longer cooks but loves to watch QVC, bought a new food processor while I was out walking the dogs. I was surprised she didn't buy herself some of the Iman designer clothing they were selling before I took the dogs out, since she was going on about how nice the coats looked. She told me that I'll inherit the food processor when I gave a look to question the necessity of another appliance. I told her I already have a nice one at  home - what I need in the kitchen is a slow cooker and Dutch oven. She pulled out two small old fashioned crock pots from a cabinet in the garage and told me to take them home. At least that's some clutter I remove from what's out there. Our house is already far too full of stuff but I plan to make some big Goodwill donations of useful junk as soon as I get home. That will give me some small thing to do while I start the search for work and occupation from the beginning again. I had to drop or quit what little I had going on, that I've spent a year building, to be here helping her. 

Mother tells me that my brother's family returned from Italy this morning, according to my nephew. I hope to hear from my sister-in-law tomorrow or Tuesday, telling me that I am relieved of my service here. It is a pity that I'll have no Halloween, my favorite holiday, for the second year in a row. It is sad that I have now missed any opportunity to work seasonal jobs this year since everyone will have finished all of their holiday hiring in October. I am starting my second year in North Carolina in worse shape than I started last year. 

Early Saturday

Took mother in for an earlier-than-usual dialysis treatment today. Saturdays do occasionally start at different times than weekdays. My mother says that is the day when the techs sometimes like to have an early start and finish to their day, when doctors offices and other businesses are closed. Seems quite understandable to me. I am sure they like to have a larger block of personal time on the weekend.