I got home from China a little over a week ago. Since I don’t work I don’t usually fuss about jet lag. I try to go to bed and get up at about the right times and not worry if I oversleep a bit or need a nap, after all sometimes that happens anyway. It takes a week to ten days to adjust.
I’d been home a few days when we got a call at 1:00 am that they had taken my grandmother to the hospital. It took over an hour of phone calls to find out where she was, which was a bit unnerving. When I finally located her, I spoke with the nurse attending her and since she was sleeping stayed home until the next day.
I finally drifted off sometime after 3 and didn’t get going until after 9. The first sign that things were a bit amiss was seeing the blood on her carpet when I stopped to pick up a few things for her on my way to the hospital. There had been no mention of bleeding from the nurse who called me.
When I got to the hospital she looked awful, her left hand was severely swollen and bruised, seems the EMTs had botched a blood test and attempt at inserting an IV (at a guess they had dropped the sample resulting in the blood stain I saw). Also, the left side of her face was red blotches, more blotch than skin by a lot. The nurse, when I asked, said that Grandma had said it had been going on for some time, months. I said “no”. We had spent Wednesday evening with her and it wasn’t there then. She hadn’t seen herself in the mirror and didn’t understand what they had been asking her about.
She looked awful, but the superficial wasn’t the real problem. She had coughed herself into atrial fibrillation. If you are my week ago naive self you don’t know what that means: In a nutshell the top valves of her heart aren’t playing nice with the bottom ones.
Because of her age, 95 years, and health history including a very bad reaction to one of the drugs they usually use to treat this and kidneys that are barely managing day- to-day life, the usual approaches needed modification. So we went from the nurse I spoke with on the phone the first night saying she was just being admitted for overnight observation, to “tomorrow”, “tomorrow”, “tomorrow”, “tomorrow”, “tomorrow”. She is finally home (at her nursing home) now.
While she is in the hospital I suffer from life lag. I have to drive over and be around to find out what I can. We have to arrange a wheelchair van to bring her back and it takes both of us, so when they keep saying “tomorrow”, we keep putting off our own life (vacuuming, grocery shopping, etc) so we are ready to bring her back.
It takes a week to ten days to get over jet lag; I wonder how long it will be until I feel like I’m over life lag, or if I’ll get over it before the next crisis: her heart isn’t really back to the old normal, and the coughing that popped it out of sync last time has been coming and going for years.
Have you ever had life lag? How did you cope? I feel like I need to have a strategy moving forward, because I fear this wasn’t our last rodeo.
As I walked the dogs, sans camera because we were supposed to be hurrying to get off for Mother’s Day lunch and tea with Grandma. As I mentioned earlier the day itself has been gorgeous and usually on such a day the dogs and I would dawdle dreadfully, maybe spending over an hour to go a couple of miles between their sniffing and my taking pictures. The dogs still sniffed but I shortened the walk and left my camera at home. However, as we got back into my yard the poppies were just catching morning sun filtering through the leaves on the maple tree.
The Mount, where Grandma lives decorated the dining room in a classy way, with dark blue table cloths and dark red roses. I almost burst into tears. On Monday we had had to put my father’s dog to sleep. I called Sam my half-sister because we had different mothers. I loved her dearly, we spent many happy hours together walking on the beach and in the woods during her not quite 13 years on Earth.
The rose against the dark blue cloth hit me hard: the veterinarian’s office had laid out a dark blue blanket with a red rose for Sam on Monday, My beautiful, lively Sam was skin and bones and unable to stand on her own anymore. Damn, I’m crying again.
The Mother’s Day tea featured fancy teacups of different designs and luscious, goodies, both sweet and savory, as bright as flowers as carefully arranged on the plates as a bouquet… But they also had those red roses and the dark blue table cloths.
Because of the warm weather sometime during the day the first two roses in my back yard decided to bloom. I found them as the pups and I returned from our afternoon stroll…thank goodness they aren’t red. I think it’s going to be a while until red roses don’t make me teary-eyed.
If you are young and have never walked through the “valley of the shadow of death” with a loved one don’t read this. Live into the simple joys of Christmas. Let your stresses be finagling a smile in the Santa photo and finding a way to teach the next generation about joy. Smile, laugh, bake and eat cookies!!
Do you ever sit on a park bench for more than ten minutes? Not very often. Most park benches aren’t terribly comfortable and, in Seattle, they are often wet and cold, also I tend to be walking when I am at parks (two dogs, need I say more?).
XingfuMama 