Bitchy McBitcherson's Blog

Tag: family

  • Happy Tails

    Our Fosters from Ms Tori on Vimeo.

  • Eleven

    Apparently I could only make it to number 11 before having a failed foster.

    Welcome to the family, baby boy.

    I think we’ll be calling him Watson.

  • Sitting and Thinking

    So, yesterday I teased that I had other news that was too big to just tack on the bottom of that post.

    It wasn’t really a sweeps week “to be continued” type of tease. I just have all this shit on my mind, but my mind hasn’t finished chewing on it yet. I know some of what it means, but I don’t know all of what it means.

    So, here you get a little glimpse into my life, mid thought process.

    I am typing this while sitting at the dining room table. At my feet, Indy is asleep. This is usual. She is asleep at my feet a large portion of the time that I am on my computer.

    Far less usual, and quite unexpectedly, there is a puppy asleep at my feet too.

    Webster.

    Webster is back. For reasons which are totally understandable, and I agree with and support, but are not my reasons to tell. The family who had hoped to adopt Webster, has decided it isn’t what is best for him. He was with them for a week and they all had a wonderful time, but they came to a very difficult decision. They are doing what they think is best for the dog, which I totally respect.

    He left on a Sunday, and came back on the following Sunday. They were willing to foster him, but I wanted him back. I put this much in. I’d like to see it through to all three orphans finding their forever homes.

    It is time to figure out what “I might have wanted to keep him” means, now that it is an option.

    I am certain there are other families out there who would love him just as much as we do. I am certain there are no other families out there who would love him more. I knew both of those things about Bear too. There is more to it than that, as I so difficultly had to stand by when letting Bear leave. I must ask myself, “Is there somebody that is better for him due to practical life circumstances?” and “How exactly does he impact the lives of the pets we are already committed to?” Most of all, I need to make sure that I don’t let the pangs of regret I feel for “having” to let Bear go, allow me to lie to myself about these answers. It would be easy to trick myself, just so that I can avoid a difficult goodbye.

    That is where I am at today, with a puppy curled up at my feet, right next to Indy.

  • And Then There Were None

    Do you hear that?

    The house is so quiet.

    It makes me feel anxious, because I haven’t done anything for the puppies lately, so they should be noisily complaining, and the silence leaves me with a repetitive flutter in my gut that something is wrong.

    Yesterday, I dropped my daughter off at a class and came home for an hour and a half of couch potato-ing before needing to pick her up again.  It was the first time I’ve been alone in the house without any other people since January 10th. Holy crap, that is a lot of people time for somebody like me. I couldn’t swim in the silence because of the feelings of puppy anxiety.

    Time for life to return to some value of normal. Whatever that means.

    Darby went home on Wednesday. On Thursday Mindy got sick. I called the vet and described the symptoms and she told me she was having a reaction to one of the vaccines. The vet came during her lunch hour to bring me some medicine for Mindy and an hour after she left Webster had symptoms too. On Saturday the call came from Darby’s family that she’d been sick for two days.

    The vet was not pleased, and called the manufacturer and is returning this particular batch. They were not violently ill, and are going to be fine, but it was frustrating and inconvenient, at the very least. Nothing like taking three totally healthy happy little puppies and making them all sick while trying to prevent them from getting sick to raise my stress level a bit.

    Webster was supposed to go home Saturday, but he ended up staying until Sunday so the vet could take a last look at him. I thought Mindy was going home on Sunday, but that was due to a typo (not mine) so she actually left yesterday.

    I guess the big happy news is that Mindy went to live in California. This is a long story.

    On July 13th, 1997, I met a family of three, and they rapidly became a very important part of my life. The female portion (D) of that trio has been mentioned in the past, for example, here and here. Their family of three turned into a family of 5 over the years. The three children have been asking for a dog, because that is what children do. D is not a dog person. She didn’t dislike dogs. She has taken care of my dogs for me when I needed it, and taken care of other people’s dogs, but she didn’t have any desire for her own dog.

    The kids swore that if they got a dog they would take care of EVERYTHING and D wouldn’t have to do anything. Right. Sure.

    Back in December my friend who took Ellie was going on vacation. She arranged for a petsitter to come and stay at her house to take care of her three dogs, but as the vacation approached, we realized that Ellie still wasn’t getting along well enough with one of her other dogs to make that a good idea. Trusting a pet sitter to deal with that kind of dynamic just wasn’t reasonable. However, the boarding situations available really were not ideal for Ellie. So, I asked D if she’d be willing to take Ellie in for a couple of weeks (paid, of course).

    D agreed. For one thing, Ellie needed it, and for another, we had a plan. She would assign the kids to take care of Ellie, with the promise of all that money at the end. The kids would not take care of Ellie, D would do it all and keep the money, then the next time the kids said “we’ll take care of EVERYTHING, you won’t have to do anything” she would feel less guilty for laughing in their little dog wanting faces.

    Ellie, no surprise, was a PITA. She got into the trash, because that is what Ellie does. Then her digestive system completely revolted, explosively, all over D’s carpet, because that is what digestive systems do when fed too much trash. Ellie was also absolutely sweet and adorable, because that is what Ellie is.

    Three weeks later when Ellie went home, instead of a long sigh of relief, D found herself missing her.

    Which is what led to her telling me she was thinking about getting a dog. I assigned her and the kids a bunch of reading. I went over the pros and cons of dog ownership. I asked her to make a list of what she was looking for in a dog. I warned her not to go out shopping for a dog, but instead to just be open to getting a dog when the right one came along. You don’t want to go out with the plan to pick a dog, because then you’ll simply pick the one there that comes the closest to being what you want. Instead, it is best to wait until the one that is actually right presents itself.

    So, she started reading her assigned homework. She made a list of things she wanted in a dog. The list included items like:

    • around 25 lbs
    • short hair that doesn’t shed much
    • an adult, about 2 or 3 years old

    Time passed. The right dog hadn’t presented itself yet, but she was taking my advice and not being in a rush.

    By the time Mindy was about 4 weeks old, her developing personality started speaking to me, and it kept telling me she’d fit in to that family really well. This was a silly notion, because she was:

    • expected to be about 50lbs
    • is a husky mix and will do so much more than just shed
    • is not going to be an adult for a couple of long destructive years

    I thought about it a couple more days, and then sent D an email, acknowledging all the bad, but explaining I had a feeling. She wrote back and said she’d been having the feeling too, from the first photos of the three of them.

    They talked it over and decided to fill out an application. Other local people applied for her too. We waited anxiously to find out what the rescue would decide.

    Mindy is an adorable and very adoptable little puppy. Ellie had been available for ages without any interest, and she had health conditions which made her less adoptable and made California a much more suitable climate for her. It is frightening to send a dog so far away. What if the new family changes their mind? It is especially iffy seeming when it comes to sending a dog to somebody who has never had a dog before.

    The rescue decided to trust my recommendation, for which I am very glad. Nobody wanted Mindy to be flying in cargo, so that means she needed to head out to California after she was old enough to fly, but before she got too big to qualify to go as carry-on. This left a very narrow window. D and her daughter came out for a long weekend, to get some how to care for a puppy training and to fly Mindy home with them.

    I was very anxious all afternoon yesterday while Mindy was in flight, but it turns out she did very well on the flight. The wait for the shuttle to the parking lot was a bit rougher (so noisy outside at LAX) and she cried and peed in her carrier. However, by last night she was safely at her new home and is getting settled. I know she’ll be very happy with them, they are really good family for this little people focused pup.

    Best of all, I will get to be in touch with Mindy for her whole life.

    There is stuff to say about Webster too, but that will wait for another post.

  • Friday, December 4th, 2009

    Almost every night of my life I go to bed with a plan as to what I will be doing the next day. Almost every single day, something goes awry.

    Thursday, December 3rd, I went to bed, and my Friday looked like this:

    • get up
    • have breakfast
    • go to hand therapy
    • get out of hand therapy and go to the vet to pick up medicine
    • get gas
    • go home to have lunch
    • go to see Little Women (The Musical)
    • go home to drop the kid off
    • run to Costco
    • take kid to the show she is assistant stage managing for
    • go home and get more work done
    • pick kid up from the show
    • eat dinner
    • go home

     

    On Friday I got up and I had breakfast and went to hand therapy. Hey, so far, so good.

    I sat and waited and waited. Hand therapy has never started late before, but I used the time to contact the person who had my play tickets. I had forgotten to get them from her when I saw her on Saturday, so the new plan had been she would hand them off to somebody else who was going to the play. I wanted to find out who had the tickets.

    She still had the tickets.

    Hand therapy finally started, late, and of course, ended late. Instead of heading to the vet, I needed to go pick up the tickets. At breakfast the kid had suggested we could go out for lunch, but on the way back from getting the tickets (ticket holder and I don’t live near each other) I called and told the kid to just eat. We were going to be very tight getting to the play.

    Got home and looked up the address from the place the play was held, because the tickets just said the name of the theater, assuming I’d know. I got the address and went out to the car. The nav system was unfamiliar with the address. It knew the street, but the construction was too new to have the address listed. That got me close. We sorted out the rest and pulled into the parking lot 5 minutes before the show was scheduled to start.

    Little Women happened. It ran A LOT longer than I was expecting. We rushed home so she could get ready to leave for the show. I wanted her to go with me to gas, Costco, and the vet because I didn’t think I’d have time to come back for her and still get her downtown for her show.

    I went upstairs to use the computer for a few minutes while she gathered her snack and stuff for the show. I was sitting at my computer when I heard crashing and thudding. I yelled out to her… got up and started moving, and yelled out again.

    In response, I hear, “It hurts.”

    Fuck. So, I’m moving faster, but not sure where she is. It sounded like something tumbling down the stairs. She wasn’t at the bottom of the first set of stairs. “Where are you?” I yell, as I am about to open the basement door to look, but she made a groaning noise from the kitchen so I went in there, to find her sprawled on the floor, kind of sitting, with her legs akimbo and tangled in the barstools. “What did you do?”

    “I fell, and my hand is stuck.”

    “What?”

    “I tried to stop myself from falling, and I can’t get my hand out.”

    I got closer to her and moved the barstools out of the way. Her legs were REALLY tangled up in them. Then I took a look to see what she was talking about. Her right arm was up and twisted around and her hand was palm flat against the fridge with the hand through the refrigerator handle. Her fingers were through the freezer handle (side by side).

    “You have to get up, you can’t move your arm from that position. You’ll have to lift with your body.”

    “I can’t. I’m stuck. It hurts.”

    “What hurts? Your elbow?” (things are twisted around really awkwardly)

    “No. My hand.”

    I try to lift her off the floor by her armpits to give her a better angle on moving her hand. She shrieks at me. I let go. I move a barstool and tell her to use it to lift herself up. She tries but collapses in pain.

    I look at her hand again. It seems… fine really, just in the door handle. It went in there. Take it out.

    I tell her I’ll try to move it. I touch it. She shrieks. I try to slide it. She shrieks. I poke at her shoulder and elbow again and ask where it hurts, and again she tells me her hand. I get some ice out of the in door dispenser and put it in a baggy to put on her arm.

    “Look, you’ve got to get your hand out before it swells up and really gets stuck.”

    “Believe me. I’d LOVE to,” she snarls.

    I begin looking at the door handle to figure out how to remove it.

    Now I may as well take a minute to point out something you might already know. I’m not soft and cuddly. It isn’t that I am bad in a crisis. I’m just not very comforting. This makes me bad for some people. I like information. Then I want more information. Then I want a plan of action. Then I want action. I’d like all this extremely rapidly. I’m not warm and nurturing, and I don’t do “everything will be just fine” unless I have some kind of proof that things are going to be fine.

    My kid tends to get a little anxiety filled in a crisis, and with the anxiety comes a lack of clear communication. I want a description of the pain so I can try to figure out what is happening. She just keeps letting me know there is pain. We’ve been having this same thing happen since she was little.

    It isn’t that I am completely lacking in maternal instincts, but… it is kind of overrun by my instinct to, “leave the squawking one before the noise and weakness and fear draws predators to the rest of the pack”.

    So, because I cannot get a good assessment of pain out of her, I try threatening her. “Do I need to call 911?” One of the things I passed onto my daughter through a lovely combination of nature and nurture is a complete dislike for strange people invading our home, and any medical person ever touching us, ever, but especially when they are unknown, and we are in pain and feeling vulnerable.

    “Well I can’t stay like this!” she snaps.

    Oh. Interesting. She is open to the concept of needing to call 911. That has NEVER been her response.

    I decide it is time to call her father. He’s nicer in situations like these and has more of a calming effect. I do this while digging out the refrigerator manual in hopes of finding some instructions on how to remove the door handle, but my initial examination of the handle has not left me feeling hopeful.

    Him: Hello?
    Me: I think you need to come home. I’ve got a bit of a problem here, and I actually think I’m going to have to call 911.
    Him: What?
    Me: It’s fine, but Z fell and is in pain and she’s kind of stuck… you should just come home.
    Him: Okay. But, what’s going on?
    Me: I don’t know! She fell and she got her hand (I start laughing) stuck in the refrigerator door (I say, laughing all the way HOHOHO).
    Kid/Regan MacNeil (and yes, I think her head might have spun around) screams: Yeah it sounds fucking funny, but it fucking hurts!
    Him (who cannot actually hear WHAT she is screaming): Stop saying 911, you are freaking her out.
    Me: Just come home.

    I look through the manual, but it has no instructions for the door handle. I continue to encourage her to keep trying to get out. This continues to annoy the shit out of her. I tell her I that I didn’t bring any of my saws from California, so I think I’ll need to call 911 so they can saw it off. “But, I still need my hand,” she informs me. I try to reassure my suffering from shock child that the saw would be for the handle, and not her arm, and I laugh at her a bit more. She tells me she needs to call her stage manager, because she won’t be able to do the sound board like this.

    I again try to ascertain what type of pain she is feeling, is it deep bone pain, or surface pain. She tells me she can’t feel her hand at all anymore.

    Well, fuck.

    I explain to her that I think it is time to call 911, and she doesn’t argue in the slightest. I pick up my phone to call, but there is an incoming call.

    Me: Hello? Where are you?
    Him: I’m on my way. WHERE is she again?
    Me: In the kitchen.
    Him: I don’t understand. What’s going on?
    Me: Look, you are just going to have to see it. I need to call 911 now. Are you almost here?
    Him: Are you sure?
    Me: I’ll see you in a few minutes.

    I call 911, and start my call with “This is going to sound really strange, but…” and proceed to explain that my daughter is stuck in the refrigerator door handle. Blah blah blah. Help. She tells me she is sending the police and paramedics and that they will get her out.

    I look through the manual again. Troubleshooting does not cover this issue. At all. Fuckers.

    Her father arrives home, gives me a WTF look, and I wave him toward the kitchen. I hear him trying to convince her to, you know, just take her hand out. More anger and pain and frustration (and possibly pea soup) spurt out of her. He laughs at her less than I do, because he is much nicer.

    I go out to look for the cavalry. The first to arrive is a police officer. He tells me to give him a couple of screwdrivers, and he’ll get her out. He asks how she is doing. I tell him she is freaking out. He tells me to take care of her, and he’ll take care of the handle. I don’t bother to explain to him that it would actually be more efficient to switch roles. I give him the requested screwdrivers and go out to meet the pulling up EMTs.

    The police officer is totally unable to get her out.

    The EMTs (3 of them) come in and check her shoulder and elbow and then poke at her fingers a bit. They slather lubricant all over the bits of her hand they can reach, the door, and the handle. Then one guy tries to brace the door and pull on the handle, to flex it and give her a bit more space. He slips and just opens the door a bit instead. More screaming. Later she told me it took everything she had not to kick him. He got the door shut again, pushed his fist against it with more force, and pulled on the handle again. Another guy grabbed her arm and hand and forced it up, and she was free. There was a valley in the back of her hand, near her thumb. At the deepest part it was about 1/2 inch in.

    They tested everything and determined that it wasn’t broken, and we all chatted as the officer worked on the police report. They’d never seen anything quite like it before. They admitted to being very curious when the call description came up on their screen (maybe that’s why they sent 4 guys?). One lamented not getting a photo of it with his cell phone before they got her unstuck. Uh huh. Internet, anyone?

    Anyhow, soon the emergency services crew were gone, and the family tried to salvage what we could out of our day.

    By Monday we did end up needing to take her in to have her hand checked because she was complaining so much of cold intolerance, and her hand was often physically colder than the other one. The doctor ordered x-rays which verified the previous determination that nothing was broken. She said the cold intolerance was due to crushed nerves and capillaries. Supposedly she should be in good shape in about two months.

    So, yeah, neither one of us have proper use of our right hands.

    Give me a fucking break.

    I had to invite strangers into my house.

    To rescue my teenager from the fridge.

    Seriously.

    This is my life.

     

    ETA: I did get the handle off later. It would not have helped. Actually, it just would have injured her more.

  • Happy Father’s Day

    My father taught me a lot of things over the years.

    The thing that has stood out the most though, was simple.

    “Back up as far as you need to, or at least as far as you can, to start with.”

    It makes good sense. Driving in reverse is more difficult than driving forward. Your body position is less comfortable. You sight lines aren’t as clear. The best way to spend as little time doing that as possible, is to get it right the first time.

    Why does this stand out the most? I guess that makes sense too. I back up pretty much every time that I drive. It also occurs to me every time I am in a parking lot watching somebody back up two feet, pull forward a little, back up two more feet. They are hesitant and want to back up as little as possible to get on their way, and in doing it in this fashion they just lengthen the amount of time they are in the way and more likely to encounter, or cause, a problem.

    A while back I mentioned it to him. That out of all his advice, and all his teachings, this is the one that I firmly attribute to him and has stuck with me all these years.

    He laughed, and at first I thought maybe I had insulted him a little. Surely he had shared more important things with me in our time together.

    He said, “Well, that’s really interesting, because I’ve often thought it was the most useful thing your grandfather said to me.”

    And so it goes.

    I love you, Dad.

  • just call me hostile

    Hi.

    I am cranky as all shit, and on drugs. If you say anything that even remotely has a whiff of advice about it, I will lose my shit. You might think that I appreciate your wisdom, but you would be very wrong. Seriously, I am not even slightly fit for human interaction and I used up all of my patience dealing with medical people today. What I want right now is a Vosges Mo’s Bacon Bar and to be left alone. Oh, and dinner at Porterhouse Bistro, except with a restaurant buy out so that nobody else is eating there.

    Friday night we were on our way to the kid’s show (she is on light board). We were making our way to the theater in rainy stop and go and crawl and rush and creep and go and stop traffic. The car in front of me stopped. I stopped. The driver of the Nissan Pathfinder behind me was looking away in hopes of changing lanes, and utterly missed the lack of continue to go.

    BANG

    Ugh.

    Cranky.

    The first thing I did after making sure that Z and I were OKAYish, and the other driver was okay and not a hit and run sort, was twitter “Car accident. Fuck.” which wasn’t really about being geeky. I didn’t have time to call A yet, and my tweets go to both his cell and computer, so it was the easiest way to try to quickly give him a heads-up. It had the rather strange added side effect of telling 50 other people about the accident almost as soon as it happened.

    The guy was polite, a bit overly chatty, licensed, and insured. To illustrate the overly chatty, I can tell you he has three daughters in their 20s, he recently was laid off, and he was on his way to an AA meeting. Police stopped by, FIRST stopped by. Actually, FIRST blocked traffic enough for us to make it off of the freeway and into a parking lot, so that we could more safely exchange info. That was also as far as Mr. Pathfinder could drive. His transmission was not behaving normally, and it looked as though his radiator was cracked, but they could not look inside to see because the hood wouldn’t open anymore. He also had several chunks off of his car that he gathered up off the freeway, like sad toys, and tossed into his backseat. He requested that FIRST call him a tow truck.

    We decided not to do the ambulance thing, for reasons that I am not going to to bother justifying, but there are reasons and I stand by them. As we were close to the theater, and I needed to figure a bunch of things out, I went ahead and drove there and let the kid do the light board thing.

    I sat in the parking lot and looked things up on my phone and made some phone calls. I put in a call to her orthopedic sports medicine specialist back in California, and was able to exchange messages and he wanted her to have x-rays done. I tried to look up urgent care information, but the phone is very limited. The show soon ended and we made our way home. She was hungry, so she had some dinner, while I found the closest urgent care that accepted our insurance and verified that they offered x-rays. Some do not. By this time I was definitely experiencing pain. I had not immediately following the impact. My intention was to go ahead and get us both checked out, although honestly, had she not been hurting, I would not have bothered to go just for myself.

    We decided to wait until A got home since I didn’t really feel like driving. He got home, we made our way to the urgent care place and had trouble finding it. We finally got there, and they had closed a few minutes earlier. I had misread their hours and they are only open from 6 PM until 9 PM. We went home so I could look up other places, but all of them were already closed. A few were open as late as 10 PM, but too far away for us to get to in time. At this point I was in a lot of pain myself, was tired and stressed and pissed and really just fucking hating being in Minnesota instead of California, where I would have been able to deal with this with so much less effort.

    It was a night of not going smoothly, from the new (no choice in the matter) health insurance website, to the car insurance website, to urgent care, to fucking everything. I just wanted to be HOME, and by that I did not mean the fucking rental house.

    Anyhow, we determined that it was definitely not an ER level situation and we did ice and some meds and some bed, with plans to do Urgent Care the next morning at the place that opened earliest.

    Which, is what we did.

    It took hours.

    A few parts stand out.

    The nurse handed me the thermometer and said “Just put it wherever it’s comfortable.” I kept my mouth shut, but Z and I traded looks.

    X-ray techs really rub me the wrong way. When Z was done with her set of films she came out and said, “So… radiology departments just universally suck.” I couldn’t argue.

    The doctor came in after looking at the x-rays and was concerned by something she saw on Z’s and wanted us to wait longer so the radiologist could review it before we left. The radiologist ended up clearing her, and all was well, but it wasn’t a very fun wait, especially for Z.

    Anyhow, x-rays showed no injury to the bones. It is all soft tissue stuff, and just needs time to heal. Ice. Muscle relaxants. Ibuprofen. Time.

    She has a lot of soreness in her neck and shoulders, as well as some in her lower back. I have some soreness in my neck, but it is really pretty good, as long as I don’t tilt it or turn it. I have more pain in my lower back, plus my arms, pectorals and hands hurt.

    When all meds are on board I feel pretty damn okay for about an hour, and then I want to sleep. Mostly we have been sleeping the day away, and drinking a lot of water because we feel very hot and parched.

    Unfortunately my husband goes out of town tomorrow. I’m really not looking forward to dealing with dog walks yet.

    So, yeah.

    How is your weekend?

  • on the way home from the airport

    Kid: Oh my god, what… Ugh. That smells.
    Me: It’s my suitcase.
    Him: What?
    Me: It’s cheese.
    Him: You have smelly cheese in your suitcase?
    Me: It’s good cheese.
    Him: So?
    Me: It is a bit stinky.
    Him: I’ll say.
    Me: It’s really good cheese. It’s ridiculously expensive and I haven’t found it in Minnesota, and to order it and ship it is even more expensive.
    Him: So you put it in your suitcase?
    Me: Yes, I know, all my clothes are fucked. I need to wash everything.
    Kid: It stinks.
    Me: It IS a smelly cheese, but it is SO good.
    Him: You stunk up the plane?!
    Me: Yes, it kind of did. It’s really good cheese.
    Him: People probably thought it was you. They thought you were farty.
    Me: No, the suitcase was over somebody else’s head.
    Kid: It smells like dog poop.
    Me: It’s my favorite cheese. It’s really good.
    Kid: It smells like a dog came in here and pooed all over!
    Me: IT’S GOOD CHEESE!!!
    Him: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
    Me: Shut up!
    Kid: Inconceivable.

    Brought to you by Cowgirl Creamery Red Hawk and my not entirely loving family.

  • My Grandfather

    He is more coherent and has better motor control, so they are keeping him at home for now. This is good news. Unfortunately my grandmother has come down with the flu, which is always a risk for somebody at her age and health level. Plus my aunt also has it, and is the primary care provider for both of them. Definitely a rough week in that house.

    I am still so pissed about the lack of what I consider decent medical care. Unfortunately, like the major airports, the nearest major hospital (and any significant second opinion) is also a 4-5 hour drive away.

    For the moment things are not dire, but it is clear that I really need to move up a visit on my priority list, if I want to make a real attempt to get in another visit where he knows who I am, and I do.

    I must concentrate on getting my taxes done. I need that off the table so I have some flexibility.

  • feeling sad

    My father called today.

    My grandfather is not doing well.  Yesterday he complained of having no strength. He had to be in a wheelchair all day because he could not get around with his walker. He was too tired to take a shower (he usually sits on a chair and my aunt helps him) last night, so they waited until morning. This morning he was completely unable to help my aunt with the shower, she had to do everything. After she got him out, he passed out for 2 minutes. Afterward he couldn’t move his legs. They took him to the hospital and the hospital drew blood (saw nothing) and did a CT scan. The CT showed swelling of his brain. For some fucking reason which has my grandmother and aunt extremely upset, they sent him home instead of admitting him to the hospital.

    When getting him ready for bed, he couldn’t even move his arms enough to get them into his pajama top, my aunt had to do everything for him. He could not tell her who the president was. When she asked if he knew who she was, he said “My girlfriend.” She doesn’t know if he knew who she was and was completely joking, he didn’t know who she was and made a conscious joke to cover for it, or if he was really that confused. I am guessing the second, personally.

    In the morning they will see how he is doing, if he is significantly worse they will go to the hospital again. If he is the same they will take him to the nursing home. If he cannot move around at all on his own, they need him where there are more people to care for him and where there are nurses around. Luckily it is close to their house and an easy visit.

    I am not sure yet whether or not I am going. My father hasn’t figured out yet whether he is going. They live inconveniently far. It is a 4-5 hour drive from a major airport. It is a long drive for either of us from our homes. I am frustrated that they sent him home, that smacks of giving up.

    My biggest fear is they will put him in the home and two years later his body will still be technically alive, but he won’t have control of it, and his mind will be completely gone.

    I am probably not going to be very available the next few days, I need to get a bunch of work done so that I can leave if I need to. Or I might be around a lot to distract myself. I am not sure. Hopefully I will be working.

    I was the first grandchild by far. The first grandchild to the oldest child on both sides. I was 13 before I had a cousin. I had completely different grandparents than my cousins did. My grandparents were young and active and did a lot of stuff with me. My paternal grandfather took me fishing. He took me shooting. He took me camping. I have a lot of good memories of him. I am not as close to him as I am to my paternal grandmother, but to an extent their relationship with each other is what makes me the saddest. Watching both of them watch as their partner over all these many decades slowly succumbs to old age and poor health is sad.