Category Archives: health

pillow talk

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pillow.jpg

This is one side of the pillow I made for my mom to encourage her to “self-soothe.”

I used cotton poplin photo fabric on which to print out the 25th anniversary photo of my parents, my mother’s favorite photo of the two of them. Then I pieced washable satiny fabric around the photo to make the pillow the size I wanted it to be. The great thing about the photo fabric I used is that it’s washable.

On the other side of the pillow is a photo of what there is of my mother’s immediate family. (It’s the same photo I used in our holiday card.) I call it the “family pillow,” and she holds it while she falls asleep. She doesn’t like sleeping alone in her bedroom; she says she’s afraid (not unusual for people with dementia). But when I tuck the family pillow under her arm and remind her that she has the whole family with her, she relaxes and is able to fall asleep.

We all need ways to self-soothe. I’ve been doing it with chocolate. But that hasn’t been enough.

So, today, just as the heavy flakes started falling, I had my first visit with a therapist who uses approaches to which I respond better than “talk therapy” and who takes Medicare. I’m still processing what went on in this first session, but I will say that I felt much lighter as I left than I felt when I got there.

Maybe I will make myself a pillow with the images that I need to empower myself to relax.

one hundred minutes of solitude

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She got up early this morning, appearing , already dressed, at the side of my bed, saying that she would just stand there and I should go back to sleep. Right.

So, I got up made her a cup of coffee, which she drank and then went back to sleep.

Ah. Found time. My rare chance to revel in the healing hush of the now-lush landscape.

I took a cup of Earl Gray tea and a Portuguese sweet roll embedded with Muenster cheese and went out to the rocking chair on the screened-in breezeway. Calli, my cat, glad to follow me into the dappled morning, scooted out the door to hassle the chattering jays who have learned to keep their distance from the chittering cat.

I sit and sip in the peace of some needed minutes without demands. Hummingbirds come and go at the red and white plastic flower. An indigo bunting perches on a tree branch, uncertain about approaching its favorite feeder. Calli has her eye on it. A pair of mourning doves bill and coo on a fallen tree trunk. Somewhere behind the thick screen of leaves, the lake glistens at the clear blue sky. I wish I had a hammock.

We took her to a geriatric specialist last week, hoping that the doctor might have some advice on how to deal with where mom is at — which is a moderate to severe dementia. My sibling, who has been in denial about the severity of her condition, finally, I think, got it: it’s only going to get worse. His handling of her situation, and his attitude toward me, makes my work here much harder than it has to be. If I leave, it will be because of him, not her.

She is 91, but she still dances with me almost every night before she goes to bed. We are both still good dancers. It’s about the only thing we’ve ever had in common. Dancing calms her down.

Calm. It’s what we all need here.

And lot more than only 100 minutes of solitude.

8 1/2

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That’s eight and a half hours in the ER. We left at 5 p.m. It’s now almost 2 a.m. I haven’t eaten since lunch, and I’m sitting here eating baba ghannouj with a spoon and drinking V-8 Fusion because it hurts when I chew because I had a tooth extracted yesterday.

Mom was severely dehydrated and we couldn’t seem to stop the diarrhea. So they took all kinds of her fluids for testing, stuck a hydrating infusion in her arm, X-rayed her and did a CAT scan of her stomach and intestines. They didn’t find anything that we didn’t already know was there — nothing that would be causing her to spend so much time sitting on the commode. So, just in case, they gave her an antibiotic and we loaded up on gatorade on the way home.

And just to make the day complete, as I was rushing around making sure I had her health insurance info and stuffing extra clothes for her in a bag, along with a water bottle, kleenex etc. etc., my flip-flop caught on something sticking out of her wheelchair and I did some damage to my second toe on my left foot. No time to worry about that, right?

At the hospital, my toe started throbbing; turning purple. I had the option of signing myself into the ER too and have my toe X-rayed, but that would have left my sib to deal with my mother all by himself. My toe hurt and looked gross, but I could bend it and move it, so I figured it’s just a bad bruise. I opted to tend to the reason we were there in the first place.

She is supposed to consume nothing but ginger ale and gatorade for the next two days. If she refuses to drink — as she has been doing midst fits of dementia — it’s back to the hospital and back on the IV.
I’m wondering how they ever manage situations like this in nursing homes. It took two of us to manage the care of one of her.

I’m still hungry. But I’m also tired. I don’t know which need I’ll fill after I post this. Either way, it’s been a hell of a day.

I think I killed the queen

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She was sitting on my bobbin box, which is on my sewing table, which is right under a trap door in the ceiling that’s not totally sealed. The biggest bee I’ve ever seen. Just sitting there, moving as though she were grooming herself. I needed someting firmer than a fly swatter to smash this one. In my mind’s eye, she seemed as big as a hummingbird. But this was not a hummingbird. This was a giant black and yellow bee. And not a bumble bee, which is kind of furry and plump. This was something I’d never seen before.
I’ve since come to figure out that it was probablya Carpenter Bee, of which there are lots around this cedar-sided structure, but none as big as the one I smashed with my quickly removed sneaker.
I gingerly picked up her stiff body with several wads of toilet paper and flushed. Eeuuuww! She had weight and substance, and I swear I felt her exoskeleton crumble. Not like wiping up a smashed spider.
I sure hope she was the queen. That might minimize some the war we have to wage against those persistent Carpenter Bees.

Bugs are a fact of life. On this planet, there are 200 million bugs for every human, and we go to great lengths to keep them under control

The one bug that really disturbs me that I have yet to encounter is the bed bug. But if I ever do, I have found a great resource on how to deal with them. Check it out in case you are ever confronted with the problem. Not as easy as killing the queen, but what choice do you have?

the state of things

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Bush is scheduled to give his State of the Union address on Tuesday. I doubt if I’ll watch him. I don’t need any more reminders of how disillusioned I am by life on all levels these days.

I can’t even get the Sunday edition of my local newspaper, the Times Herald-Record, delivered the way it should be. It took me seven phone calls and six weeks to have them get the Sunday paper here the first time. And they still haven’t put up one of those tubes for newspapers delivered to rural customers. They leave the paper on the side of the road in a plastic bag. I’ll make phone call number eight tomorrow and give them one more week to get the tube up. Otherwise I won’t renew my subscription.

There’s a commentary by a local resident in the paper today, however, that deserves mention because he quotes the words of General Dwight D. Eisenhower 45 years ago as he was ending his term as President of the United States.:

‘In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence … by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this … endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. …

Today … the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system – ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society. … and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Whatever happened to that kind of moral Republican leader??

And here, on the home front, she washes paper plates, folds up sheets of paper towels and makes neat piles of them in her dresser drawer, keeps wanting to dance, takes out her hats (of which she has boxes) and reorganizes them. She needs something to do, something she can do. I ordered a “pencil by number” kit of flowers and hope that she might occupy herselp with “coloring.” We can hang up what she finishes on the porch.

I’ve been giving her iron and B-12 pills, and she seems to be stronger physically, even though she still sleeps away half the day. What the hell, she has nothing more interesting to do.

This week I will get a massage and a hair cut — not from the same person, of course.

I sit by my window and wait for a sunny day.