Update And Mood

Update:

My father is still in the hospital.  Not much to report - or nothing great, anyway.  Refuses to take his medication.  Not eating well.  Speech is "garbled", although we are not clear if that means "unintelligible" or "mixing words".  They have reduced his blood thinner as they may order a lumbar puncture (tapping of the cerebrospinal fluids - warning that the picture on Wiki-everything article is not for the faint of heart) - not confirmed as ordered, but in the doctor's notes.

Also, still restrained.  Notes comment on his strength.  At 81 years old.  

I stopped by and saw my mother as well today.  It was not such a good visit.  She is ready to leave, but as I spoke with her I realized that I think she thought I was my father.  An odd feeling, one that is slightly uncomfortable  Told her she was still working on her memory, and we would be by to see her again soon.

Thoughts:

Glen asked me a question that I had to think about a bit before responding:  How am I doing?

That is an odd question, odd both because I do not know how to fully answer it and odd because it is something my sister and I were discussing yesterday.

In a very real way, times seems to have completely collapsed.  A little over a month ago, I had taken my father to the doctor and he had passed his general physical as well as his cognitive test.  Within that period of time we have gone through three versions of "The Plan":  a) Move both of my parents into a retirement home; b)  Move my mother into a memory care facility and my father staying at The Ranch; c) Move my mother into a memory care facility and my father into assisted living.  And now, d)  Move my mother into a memory care facility and my father into a "skilled nursing facility", yet another term I am learning.

Plans b through d have all been in the last two weeks.

My future planning has narrowed to very small windows of time:  get my mother moved in, get my father moved in, get my father out of the hospital, get my father moved to whatever the next stage is.  I (and my sister, I think) are no longer planning in bigger chunks than this.

As their mail comes in, we triage everything.  At this point, we are making a few choices about what stays and goes (the satellite TV, for example, goes) while the rest of it - home insurance, auto insurance, utilities - we are maintaining as is as much as possible for n ow.  That is an issue for another day.

Am I frustrated we cannot do more?  I do not fully know how to answer that question.  We have certainly gone back and looked at the last period of time: Did we miss anything?  Should we have moved sooner?  Was there some significant health issue we missed?  Should we doing more now?

The answer keeps coming back as "No".  Four months ago my father was as he had always been.  The decline accelerated within (literally) the last two weeks; everyone involved has noted it.  And currently, given The Plague, there is little we could do that we are not doing:  We cannot go to his room and even if we did, I have no idea what we would do if we were there.  We are not medical personnel.  Maybe I could convince him to eat or take his pills - but the comment this morning was that he was not always responding even to his name.

I do not think I could do any better than a trained nurse in this matter.

Everyone has been unfailingly kind and understanding in this, from people involved in the various facilities to the various nurses and doctors we have spoken with to the pharmacists and receptionists and everyone in between.  I would hope that they are responded to with the same sort of courtesy and kindness from those that they are serving, although the more cynical side of me doubts this to be so.

The events of Great World "Out There" - the national goings on, the Arctic Disaster currently inhabiting the Midwest and South - are things  I should care about.  I have family and friends impacted by the Arctic wasteland that is the South and Southeast right now.  I actually have thoughts and opinions on such things, and occasionally the rattle around in my head as postings as I drive back and forth or as I walk the dirt roads here to make myself get out of the house.  But they all have an unreal quality to me at this moment, even as I acknowledge that eventually - whenever the "New Normal" appears (yet another reason to hate this phrase) they will impact my life.  

Literally, my world has shrunk to my parents' house, a hospital, a window at a facility, and the roads that connect them.

I worry, perhaps a little of all things, that my writing has also shrunk to this narrow band of experience and reality.  On the one hand, it feels like I should at some point be writing on different things - on the other, the reality is that I do not know how many people write on this, or at least individuals that are not professionals.   One cannot endlessly natter on about one's emotional and personal experiences when there is so much else going on to write about.

Yet every time I sit down, this is the only place my words seem to run to.

I do not find myself particularly tired or emotionally exhausted or "out of sorts" the way I have read or heard from others.  There is a strange limbo-like quality to all of this, brought on perhaps by the fact that I am displaced from my normal surroundings and habits and schedule.  I work, but it almost feels like I am simply filling the time between when I get up and the time that I quit, waiting - and dreading - for the phone to ring or a message to present itself.

In a very real way, I am a nomad living in a prairie of shifting grass mounds; I have surrendered any hope of passing through the prairie at this time, and am only concerned with getting over the next mound.