Me under a big tree

 Can you see me under there?
What is that saying about being lost in the forest and missing the trees -or is it missing the forest because of the trees? My trees and forests are all mixed up.
  Grandma is better but not ... well, better. She's "grandma" now so much more than my mom -except when she notices the waffles are soggy because I forgot the oil (cooking tip...).
  The eldest has moved to the basement -now he will have more room but it feels as if I have admitted he is not going any where else. I have not admitted this. I only fear it when I can not sleep. Will he be the weird guy (or is he already?) living in the basement? When did it stop being right to  mother him? How do I not?
  My daughter feels inadequate and unlikable and I'm afraid I have bequeathed her all my self-doubt and then some. I haven't been supportive enough, I am too critical... nothing new here. She still wants a mom and she does not want a mom. We are so the same.
 And all day long the 7 year old can keep up a sing song "you're the bestest mommy in the world." until I am pretty much ready to let him play his video game as much as he wants if he'll just be a little quiet. I can not bare to think of when these days are gone.
    The other research assistant has never learned to use quotation marks so I have spent a week trying to sort through a literature summary that is mostly quotes but I can't tell where they begin or end. I can think of nothing cute to add.
 It is hot. I am not so heat tolerant.


...but it is shady under the tree. And lost in the forest at least it is a little cooler.

A hardened spine: softened life

Friday one could not much avoid the news but it seemed even more distant than usual. I was on hospital time. My mom had 4 vertebrae cemented, or glued or plasticized -I'm not really sure. Unlike my younger self I don't even ask. All I needed to know was would there be much recovery time? No. Little enough anathesia that she only seemed mildly drunk for an hour or so. Naturally nothing started on time, but I was determined to still make it out of town by 7 -and we did. We left my mother with my daughter and eldest, grabbed the youngest and went to... Grandma's house.
 We did check on the cats. We did pick up laundry and look for things Grandma wanted and measure for new windows in the garage. With a friend and her younest to keep us company we also swam and sat... and sat some more.  Our life is so hard. This is the sky as seen from the middle of the river with a good breeze.
 After 4 days I can say the kyphoplasty procedure was a success. She is now merely miserable some of the time, 94 all of the time, and in agony none of the time as far as we can tell.  I've run into at least 4 people who have a family member who just had or will have the same done. It's nice to know that for once my mom is in with the in crowd. My clever husband has decided when I turn 70 (that really isn't in the immediate future) I should just go in and have my whole spine reinforced just in case.
Then I can lie on my back and stare at the sky some more.  For another 24 years?  Only if the drugs are better.

Gray day

 This afternoon they will cement 4 "levels" in Grandma's spine. The consult yesterday with the specialist was (approximately) 30% filling in forms in the waiting room -or would have been except they are trying out a new electronic system. Still, "tapping out" forms sounds silly.
 Then 50% with the PA who told me 1) I couldn't have given my mom naproxen with out a prescription, 2) perhaps I meant "napersin" and 3) Aleve is "certainly" not naproxen - or "napersin" - 4) it is ibuprofen. She absolutely insisted on this last point even when I insisted on questioning it. So I caved and realized how silly of me it was to pretend to any medical knowledge and I should probably never give an aspirin to my family without supervision -if indeed they are aspirins. It took me the ride home to realize I wasn't the one who should have been embarrassed.
 This leaves 5% of the visit seeing the consultant. (I can do the math, but I feel this answer is a more realistic reflection of my feelings at the time and therefore a better representation of the truth -as I see it).
 Last night I tried to talk to my mom about when WWII started. Where was she? How did it feel? She told me about the friends they were visiting when Pearl Harbor was attacked. I extracted a little more -what about her own feelings? Well she tried to join up -yes, I knew that and all the services rejected her because she has 2 joints too few (be careful cutting wood). But what next? I think, but this part was tricky to sort out, "times were bad" and she couldn't go home. Ah, history. I probed more -was it the rationing? the fears? what? It was her father. Her father who we only hear stories about his brilliance. That father... and her "times" with him. It was growing up and moving out and all of that. It's not just for me that these things drown out the news. They did in history too.
  Maybe with T-10, L-1, L-2 and the vertebrae whose name I keep forgetting are fused this afternoon even WWII will look better.

jellyfish:enhanced

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This is a recent image of an actual jellyfish. It has been digitally enhanced. In the original it fades into the color of the water too much. If I'd had a better photo editor I would have sharpened it as well but I was just using Microsoft Office and the options were limited. No need to remove red-eye.

 We always called them nettles. I never hear that anymore.

 So as to my own enhanced life. Monday I called my mother's primary care office and said outraged  things about never being called back so they tried to have the office manager speak to me but I then explained that if a nurse would just speak to me I didn't need the office manager. The nurse helpfully told me that we couldn't go up on the Vicodin so we should see an orthopaedist - me: we don't have one of those since she last saw a guy who did kifoplasty (made up spelling) to glue the previous compression fracture. Her: go see them. Me: them's not orthopaedist. Her: GO see them. End of consultation. I handed this next phone call off to my man.

 Is it a man thing? Because he made a phone call. They called him back. Within hours they'd looked at the x-rays from the ER (ok sometimes the digital world has advantages) and they'd crammed my mom into the doctor's schedule today, scheduled an MRI for the previous day and outpatient OR time the next day to be ready for a decision to do the procedure. And just like that my week was planned. Or unplanned, or however you want to think of it. My mom cried when I first told her  -she's so hopeful this will bring her relief. I tried to temper that by pointing out we had several hoops to jump through (albeit very quickly), one being Medicare approval. Then I went outside. Then she had my daughter call the man, at work, and she proceeded to insist on talking to her lawyer because we weren't going to have her treated until we got "welfare" to cover it and pay for our care-taking and also a lot of stuff about being cut off from medical care because she is 94. Really. Not that he wanted to upset me but my man did have to check with me to find out exactly what I was saying to my mother.

 Later she didn't want dinner -or to speak to me but some how I got through to her that insurance pre-authorization is just a fact of life -completely apart from Obama care (can you tell she watches too much Fox News?) and we'd had to jump through this particular hoop many times, especially for our 1st born (my ace in the hole for all things medical). She admitted she'd been listening to too many dire health care scenarios -she didn't explain why she'd think we would be looking for welfare handouts -except to remind me she's 94 and m i s e r a b l e.

 Me, I'm a sea nettle. All squishy and wind blown and at the mercy of the tides. Digesting any fishy thing caught in my tangled tentacles. But I have nematocysts. Lots of them. Ask my kids.

texting in the car

...or why women in their 50's just can't text and drive. On the other hand texting is a great way to communicate from the ER or on your way there (as at this moment captured with the same thing one texts on) - isn't technology amazing!?!

 Now the Grandma update: She is miserable between vicodins and that comes out in a lot of little digs but then when the pain is under control she is very full of love and gratitude. Most of the time she can't figure out why she's still alive -depending on the pain control that makes her weep or laugh. Us as well. We did have fun at the table when she couldn't see well enough to tell what the yellow tomato was. Whatever it was we assured her it would taste like chicken. We thought this was funny but admittedly there's only so far you can go playing with the visually impaired. Also we save this sort of thing for when the vicodin is full strength.

A long way off

  I am still sticking with pictures from last week! Clearly I am on shore in this one (hence the view).

On Wednesday the first phone call of the day was to inform us that while Grandma had said call the squad at 7am, at 7:15 she changed her mind. We were still on the phone when they arrived.
 It took us until maybe 11ish to get there and (miraculous, except not the one we wanted) the hospital was discharging her already. With a  "probably" new spinal fracture and instructions to do exactly what I'd been telling her to do for the past week. On the "plus" side my mom had figured out it would be easier to do this in a house with central AC and that she wasn't going to be able to get back to her bed anytime soon. BTW the above picture was not taken out her bedside window but it could have been. Whereas the view from her bed downstairs (a spare hospital bed in the living room) is of the ivy growing up the windows. So my beloved helpmate took her home and my daughter and I sacrificed and bought she-crab soup and bbq to eat back at Grandma's house as a break from packing up and feeding the cats and securing the boat etc. etc. The breeze was lovely.
 Back at home the view was not so. I immediately tried to get caught up on my work (the kind I get paid for) and to miscommunicate as much as possible with my helpmate. He practiced miscommunication with the daughter and we both regretted drinking too late with the neighbors the night before. In 29 (almost) years of marriage I can count on my fingers (OK. I do need both hands) how many times we've gone to bed that angry at each other. Then I started thinking about how much we had (maybe) neglected the needs of our eldest (remember him? The one on crutches) the past few years. You can imagine the sleeping that followed.
  Maybe this will all look better from a distance.
Next blog I will explain everything there is to know about mother-daughter relationships, how I went from being a marvellous cook to unable to heat coffee correctly and figured out I can't please every(or is that any?)one.

Who are these people?

...and why are they smiling? It could not have been the weather. 102 in the shade and I'm not sure the parasols count. This brief moment was inevitably followed by a a desperate need to lie quietly in one of the air-conditioned rooms. Curtains were hung across the stairs to keep that conditioned air from falling into the rest of the house.
  Since Grandma couldn't make it further than the bathroom at the top of the stairs it didn't seem to matter too much. Naturally as the weather got set to cool we left. Except for the Grandma of course and my baby girl.
 The actual baby of the family told us as we left how terrible we were always taking him away from his sister. The sister called us 10 minutes out to say that Grandma wanted to see a doctor immediately and they would have to call the rescue squad.
 They didn't. We kept driving. Bad weather was on it's way etc. etc. By the time we got home the storm was just hitting us (oh, did you think I was being metaphorical?) and those left behind were without power from their own storm (now that could have been metaphorical but it wasn't). Frantic phone calls and then the power came back and our storm blew over. Metaphorically speaking.
  No real point in trying to convey the content, or context or anything of all the calls the next 48 hours. Phone calls while I was driving on 95, phone calls while in Walmart, phone calls while trying to find my email (another story). Where is your daughter? Why can't Grandma get up? Why should Grandma get up? What to do? Isn't this the same blog I wrote a week ago?
  Not quite the same because this time my beloved husband is/was fixing the dishwasher (saving us money) as I type. Until I have to stop typing and find the breaker for the pump and open all the valves in the house. Then I find alot of towels. Then I turn back on the pump and close valves. Mostly. I ask the 7 year old to turn off the ones upstairs. You know that sink never drained well? Then my husband rediscovers after 29 years of marriage that I don't know my left from my right so the valve he thought I'd shut under the sink to the dishwasher I'd opened so in fact all the excitement was un-necessary. But the loyal little one told him he was a much better "fix it guy" than the man who came here yesterday because nothing so exciting happened then. Then my husband went to bed -and discovered the sink that still had the faucets open. To give credit where it is due I am the one who figured out where all the water was going and placed the buckets in the basement, 2 floors below.
 So who are these people? Well not great home health nurses and definitely not plumber's helpers. And they are smiling because they were living 2 days ago.

Warnings can be so helpful...

 If only yesterday had come with one. Like this one in Walmart which I so appreciated because I had actually been about to light up right there since I was tired of smoking in the pet food section.
 We sent the little one off with his sister a few days ahead of us to Grandma's. He wanted to be with his sister who has been traveling. She was going down to take care of Grandma in Grandma's own house. We were planning on spending the 4th through the weekend there. I needed some undistracted time to work on some research grants. No swim lesson for another week. The perfect plan. Honestly it only hit us at dinner time that we had no one else to feed but ourselves and could do pretty much whatever we wanted. Not quite alone but the eldest is happily computer gaming too much so we might as well enjoy it. Then the phone rings. Before we'd even called the Chinese restaurant.
  Grandma has fallen and she can't get up. ...and she won't let her very offended grand daughter help her up. So for some 4 hours we are back and forthing on the phone. Rescue squad? Rescue us? Pain meds? Where's the little brother? How much T.V. has he watched? Don't be mad at Grandma! Don't be mad at your granddaughter!
  Finally everyone was settled for the night -but us. That took a few drinks and some pie. And some old Chuck episodes. Which meant it was really late when we went to bed -which in and of itself should have alerted us to the fact that we would have an early morning call. Why doesn't your daughter hear me calling (that would be because it is 7am and the window AC units)? What medicine should I take? ...and many more  questions for her son-in-law the doctor. It's just unfortunate that he's an electrical engineer.
  We have still resisted going there and tried to get the work done we stayed home to do -but the whole wow-we-have-time-alone thing is pretty much shot. Tomorrow as early as we can we'll drive on down and spend the next 5 days in a house with no AC except in the bedrooms, and a miserable old woman -and Grandma too. Visitors welcome... but you've been warned.