Mood: Gregorian Chants, any and all.
Stay The Course
Last Week: My Dad has been dealing with a UTI for a few weeks and did not seem to be getting better with a course of antibiotics. On top of which, there were a few mornings of slurred speech and even one where he was hallucinating! So, not knowing a better plan, Mom and I took him to the ER. He is already suffering from short term memory loss, so badly that he literally asks if he’s had his prescription pain meds seconds after he’s had it. Thinking much of this was in relation to Alzheimer’s prompted us to get him to the ER. We found out the slurred speech and hallucinations were directly related to the UTI, which gave us some lessened anxiety. A bit.
Unfortunately, it turned out to be and extremely busy night at the ER with multiple serious injuries and we were forced to leave by 10pm, me having been up since 4:30am and needing to do the same for work the next morning.
After a few hours at work the next morning, I get a frantic call from my mother, almost in hysterics, scaring the shit out of me. The main reason why this worried me so much will become clear when we get to ‘This Week’. At any rate, I drove home fast and by the time I got there, Mom had already called 911 for assistance. Sounds intense, yes, but when you think someone may be stroking out, what else do you do? EMTs were there soon and it was here we truly found out all of his symptoms were due to the UTI. Mom and I both opted to have them take him to the ER again, hoping that being brought in in an ambulance would get him more immediate attention. It did, he was catheterized, given a few shots, hydrated with an IV and sent home with Mom, as I went back to work since there was really nothing more I could do.
Backing up a bit, Dad’s sleep schedule has been brutal for Mom since the UTI and his short term memory loss keeping him asking for pills he has already had. He is up and down several times a night (and day) and that interrupts Mom’s sleep as well, as you may imagine. After several straight night of this broken sleep, she was of course exhausted. So I took my father to his regular doctor’s appointment the next day for a follow-up from the ER. All seemed to be more or less better.
This Week
This requires a little history before the events of this week. For several months Mom has been going through many appointments of various doctors to determine her shortness of breath. All of these came down to an exploratory check of her heart, going in through the vein near the crotch and requiring a short hospital stay. This exploratory surgery result was that she was going to need an aortic valve replacement. That surgery took place this Wednesday the 25th. So, all of the stressors of the previous week, Dad needing the intensified attentions and such were an emotional hell on us and with Mom due for surgery on her heart, my intent was to keep her as calm as possible and began helping out more with Dad, cooking up a storm the previous weekend so there would be plenty of easy-to-heat-up food for the coming week and more. Of course, finding out that most of Dad’s symptoms were not because of a stroke was an incredible release of those stresses!
In preparation for the time Mom would be in the hospital, at least two days, and that I would be taking her there, we needed to get in an at-home nurse for Dad. Staying at the hospital for the surgery and waiting and so forth would not be comfortable for him and more of a stress on me as we waited for the outcome of the surgery. So, it was arranged for three days to have a nurse from 8am-8pm, not knowing how much time might be needed each day, the third day being needed if Mom was not doing well enough to leave the hospital after one night of observation or not, as well as a day for her to rest if she was home.
We had a small bit of a rough patch with the nurse on the second day; I stayed in the upstairs guest bedroom to be on-hand if Dad needed me. He did. Enough that there may have been a total of four hours’ sleep for me. This, it must be said, after waking at 4am the previous morning to get Mom to the hospital and hour and a half away for her 7am check-in time. Needless to say, I was fair exhausted and looking forward to 8 o’clock when I could catch up on sleep to go visit and hopefully bring Mom home. By 9am, I was calling the nursing agency to see what was going on; they didn’t know and would get back to me. By 10am I was calling again to find out why I hadn’t heard anything yet; the replacement nurse would be there at 10:30. She got there at 11…
At any rate and fortunately, the surgery on Wednesday took less time than the doctor informed me and went really well! Mom did come home the next day and things are a bit better all round!
Why Worry? It’s Normal, Right?
Worry is such a weird thing, isn’t it? Unless it pushes you to get a thing done, worrying about things out of our control is useless. Really. But we worry nonetheless! Stress is entirely different, I think. Worry doesn’t leave you exhausted and crashing physically when it has receded, does it? Faith helps some, but it seems to be an ingrained part of humanity to worry about such things. Maybe that is a good thing? I cannot say, honestly. I know that almost every time I have worried about things out of my control, they either weren’t worth the worry or were far less of a thing to cause worry than imagined, and isn’t that a definition of insanity, doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result? Just Bizarre, fellow humans!
This blog was one of those personal things that helped me to write out and get out of my head after such a ‘fun’ period of time. If you’ve read this far, I thank you. Feel free to share your thoughts on Worry if you’ve a mind to.
Be well and I bid you Peace.
