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Sick, also regarding grandmother
Mar. 15th, 2005 08:36 pmI'm thinking that there is an approximately four percent chance of me going to work tomorrow. I feel completely awful. I was just peachy yesterday, but then I coughed when I went to bed, and that started that wheezing thing, and it's gone downhill from there. By afternoon, I felt like utter crap.. I'm so achey that I feel like I can't stand being in my own skin. I don't know when I've felt this bad. I have kept my poor husband updated throughout the day with a series of whining emails about how bad I feel. It just feels so unfair. This is the third time I've been sick in a short amount of time. But I'll stop complaining about it. For now.
My mom called this evening to just make my day ever so much better (not that it's her fault, of course.. she was just the messenger.) My Mamaw fell down this morning and broke her pelvis.. they're going to keep her in the hospital for a "couple of days" (however long that turns out to be). My aunt, who is a nurse at the hospital she's in, seems to think that she will probably not walk again. She has Alzheimer's, and has been basically unaware of being in the world for a long while now. I've meant to write about it so many times, but.. well, I put it off because it hurts to think about it. We were there a couple of weeks ago and it all really hit home.. I went downstairs to the bathroom, and there's a closet (no door) full of towels and soap and hair dryers and basically all the stuff you have in a bathroom. And I was sitting there, looking into the closet, and it occured to me that all the towels were folded wrong, and I almost cried because my grandmother has always been very fussy about her house and all the items in it, and although I've been fully aware for years that she's in a steady decline, seeing those towels shoved in the closet by someone else.. it just killed me. I wanted to rip them all out and refold them, but I knew that it wouldn't make anything better so I just turned the light off and left.. but it was hard.
When she first started showing signs of memory loss, M pointed out that her short-term memory was faulty, and really, how bad was that in the general scheme of things? You just tell her what you've been doing three times in an hour.. it doesn't hurt anything. When he put it that way I realized that he was right. Now, I wish for those days when that seemed like the end of the world---now that she mumbles things that don't resemble sentences, and talks to people that have been dead for longer than I've been alive, and walks aimlessly around the house she's been living in for almost fifty years and says that she wants to go home. She fell today while fighting my grandfather. He's 84 years old and was trying to get her to calm down.. she had hit him badly enough that his arm was bleeding. I don't know how much longer he can take care of her like he has been.
I guess I didn't really mean to get into all of it today, either, but there it is. Sorry for being depressing. I started writing an article for MM a year ago about it.. I opened it recently to proofread but didn't have the heart to tinker with it because it was so sad to remember how relatively much better she had been when I wrote it than now. I keep thinking about it, though, and maybe I'll get around to it eventually. I don't do nearly as much writing for MM as I'd like, but that's because I'm one lazy bit..sy pookums.
It feels totally wrong to get into any of the other stuff that I was going to write about now, so I guess it's time for me to go away, play a little Zuma and get myself to bed. Hopefully, I'll feel better tomorrow.
My mom called this evening to just make my day ever so much better (not that it's her fault, of course.. she was just the messenger.) My Mamaw fell down this morning and broke her pelvis.. they're going to keep her in the hospital for a "couple of days" (however long that turns out to be). My aunt, who is a nurse at the hospital she's in, seems to think that she will probably not walk again. She has Alzheimer's, and has been basically unaware of being in the world for a long while now. I've meant to write about it so many times, but.. well, I put it off because it hurts to think about it. We were there a couple of weeks ago and it all really hit home.. I went downstairs to the bathroom, and there's a closet (no door) full of towels and soap and hair dryers and basically all the stuff you have in a bathroom. And I was sitting there, looking into the closet, and it occured to me that all the towels were folded wrong, and I almost cried because my grandmother has always been very fussy about her house and all the items in it, and although I've been fully aware for years that she's in a steady decline, seeing those towels shoved in the closet by someone else.. it just killed me. I wanted to rip them all out and refold them, but I knew that it wouldn't make anything better so I just turned the light off and left.. but it was hard.
When she first started showing signs of memory loss, M pointed out that her short-term memory was faulty, and really, how bad was that in the general scheme of things? You just tell her what you've been doing three times in an hour.. it doesn't hurt anything. When he put it that way I realized that he was right. Now, I wish for those days when that seemed like the end of the world---now that she mumbles things that don't resemble sentences, and talks to people that have been dead for longer than I've been alive, and walks aimlessly around the house she's been living in for almost fifty years and says that she wants to go home. She fell today while fighting my grandfather. He's 84 years old and was trying to get her to calm down.. she had hit him badly enough that his arm was bleeding. I don't know how much longer he can take care of her like he has been.
I guess I didn't really mean to get into all of it today, either, but there it is. Sorry for being depressing. I started writing an article for MM a year ago about it.. I opened it recently to proofread but didn't have the heart to tinker with it because it was so sad to remember how relatively much better she had been when I wrote it than now. I keep thinking about it, though, and maybe I'll get around to it eventually. I don't do nearly as much writing for MM as I'd like, but that's because I'm one lazy bit..sy pookums.
It feels totally wrong to get into any of the other stuff that I was going to write about now, so I guess it's time for me to go away, play a little Zuma and get myself to bed. Hopefully, I'll feel better tomorrow.
