Cork

In the meantime, the cork that is Dad rode his own tide. He stayed with me, one on one, over Easter weekend. I cooked for him, fussed over him, fit him into the fabric of my life while Himself and The Boy visited the in-laws. He spent a couple nights with my brother before coming back to my house. My brother and I had to face telling him how dire his wife's condition was, and hope he understood us. He went to my brother's for a week once Mom stabilized, while my family - guilt-wracked - left for a vacation long in the planning. 

When we returned, we agreed - he would stay with me and we would have a day-time caregiver to stay with him while we worked. He would no longer be bounced from house to house, living from a duffel bag. Our first day back from vacation was a flurry of laundry, setting up the guest room, settling him into it, and folding him into our daily lives. I made him breakfast each morning before work while we waited for his caregiver. We had coffee together and every day he asked: "When's Ma coming home? Are we going to see her today? Do you have to work today?" to which I answered, every day: "I don't know, yes we are and yes I do." Because I am only 15 minutes from the rehab, we took him in to see her most every evening.

It was perfect. It lasted a week. 

One night, visiting Mom with my brother, his wife and my Dad I watched as if in slow motion as Dad slid down the wall of her room to collapse on the floor, unconscious. He folded like someone removed his bones - ankles, knees, waist - saved from slumping on the floor headfirst by my brother, standing closest.  Paramedics were called, we tried the usual stroke tests, and he was bundled off to the ER (two blocks away) while Mom looked on helplessly from her bed, and my brother & I wondered if it was another stroke.

It was dehydration - he hates being nagged to drink more water, and yet that simple thing led to so much more...complexity...in our world.  He was admitted for observation and an MRI. In the meantime, they found he'd broken his ankle when he fell.

My house has guest quarters and bathing facilities on the second floor only. Ditto my brother's. We made due for a weekend with a twin bed in the dining room before getting services aligned that would allow us to take Dad back to his own home, one level, with a live-in caregiver.

It's been a mixed bag. Dad hasn't the coordination or upper body strength for a walker or crutches, so he's confined to a wheelchair for mobility. He can't remember how he broke his ankle, and that frustrates him sometimes.  Having him back at his own house makes it harder to get him to see Mom - I can't manage his mass if he falls, and so we wait for when Himself or my brother to be available.  It's 40 minutes from our house to his, time to get him out of the house, load him up, then 30 minutes back up to see Mom, an hour visit, 30 minutes back to his house, 40 minutes back home for us.

The first week, he managed to call my house a couple afternoons before I got home from work. He'd ask The Boy, "Is anyone going to see Grandma today? Are they going to take me, too?"  It was heart breaking.  He asks less, now. We think that her being out of the house is his new normal, that he's adapting to it. We always thought he'd just fade away without her, but maybe we were wrong.  Maybe he's more resilient than we gave him credit for...or maybe it's just the way his memory works now.

Cumpleaños

Tomorrow is Mom's birthday. She'll be 82. If you'd asked me last August when I was writing Time I wouldn't have thought we'd see this day. Her struggles with renal disease, congestive heart failure, diabetes - all these factors laid the odds against her survival. And yet she has.

I won't pretend it's been easy. There has been surgery for a peritoneal catheter, endless training on manual dialysis exchanges, and then overnight cycler training. Helping her overcome her fear of the unknown, her fear of the machine, being intimidated by all the information coming at her. My brother and I took turns going to both sorts of training with her, together we helped create first an environment for manual exchanges and then one for the overnight cycler. We went with her to doctor's appointments where we took notes, asked questions, became her advocates. We educated ourselves on her disease, the treatments, the diet, the risks...

In the meantime, our lives have gone on. For my brother and I it was work, family, house projects, responsibilities. For my parents, the deliberate routine of their days: appointments, visits, shopping and the denouement of the week - seeing the kids and grandkids. In spite of their frailty and disabilities, they continued to manage to live - independently dependent. My brother described it as a 3-legged stool...one leg breaks, the stool is no good.

Dad's relative freedom of movement offsets Mom's limited mobility; Mom's awareness and sharpness compensate for Dad's cognitive limitations. Together, they are whole. Take one out of the equation, and it all falls apart.

A leg came off the stool last month.

Mom suffered a recurrence of the issue that had her in the ER last August. She was admitted to the hospital for a weekend, then released. Once released, she developed a wet cough that rapidly degenerated into a full blown respiratory infection. She was hospitalized again, this time for two weeks...and we nearly lost her. It was recommended that she spend a few weeks in a rehabilitative setting before coming home, 2 weeks off her feet took its toll on her already limited mobility.

She's been in rehab for five weeks, and she still can't stand. "We aren't seeing any functional progress", they tell us. "Without functional progress, we will need to discharge her." We continue to advocate. "What's the next step in her pain management protocol?" we ask. They ask us what we'd like them to do. We are gobsmacked at how passive the process is. Nothing is done without us pushing them, without aggressive advocacy and relentless phone calling. The waves of her care and her needs and her demands wash over us, but she is like a cork atop the foam, riding where it takes her. We encourage her to be her own advocate, too. Tell them to do your dialysis earlier. Tell them you want analgesics before therapy, not after. Try harder. Push yourself more. 

But tomorrow, there will be none of that. We will go see her with cake and cards and flowers, and we will celebrate that she made this milestone. I will be tasked with finding her Efferdent and filling her water cups and taking her dirty pajamas home to launder them.

And I will be glad to do it.

Familiarity

It was a busy weekend - hauling mulch, hauling the kid to parties, weeding, trying to get caught up on the never-ending laundry. One thing I never did get to was a trip to Sam's Club.  Out of dryer sheets, among other things, I resolved to take advantage of a work from home day and go there right after work.

Moving through the kitchen to put away my Sam's Club booty, I saw the two deer were back. Once again, just on the other side of the brushline at the back of the yard.  Lucky for them that my haul included 3 bags of little Empire apples, so I grabbed one up and went out to the deck. The little buck was eating from the ceramic dish of sweet feed, so when I tossed the first apples, he saw where they went. Within moments of the apples hitting the ground, both deer started moving closer, finding the path out to the lawn, no hesitation in their steps.

With a half dozen apples on the ground, the doe moved in to eat. The buck took longer, browsing in the scrub, until he realized she had found something good. He moved in for his own, skittering like a kid goat as the rabbit pair raced behind, startling him. As the doe finished those apples farthest from me and moved closer, every bite was consumed with a pointed stare in my direction - the question was, did she want more or was she suspicious of me?  I rolled a couple more apples out, and it seemed at that point both deer registered the sounds of digging from out front. Himself and The Boy trenching to run a drainage pipe had gone unnoticed until then, but once noticed, became cause for concern.

Tonight, I got a good look at the doe. Where the buck is still winter-thin, her belly bulges. Is she carrying a single fawn? Twins? We'll know soon, I think.  Even so, her belly notwithstanding, both of them have thin, delicate faces and large eyes. Staring straight at them puts me in mind of a colleagues Italian greyhound. So fragile and thin.  

Once the noises from out front - and the rabbit races going on under foot - became too distracting, both deer moved back into the woods.  Rather than leave a scatter of apples to the skunks and woodchucks, I gathered them up and walked them out to the ceramic feed dish. Again, the whole time eyes were on me.  

I came back in to finish putting away the groceries and within minutes, they were back at the feed dish...and the rabbits are still racing in the yard.

Return

The winter was hard on them. They went missing for a full month, while I watched and worried. Finally, the snow receded enough to draw them out from wherever they took shelter, and they brought friends. Not just the customary doe and her buck fawn from last year, but three others as well. It was hard to tell who traveled with whom as they milled about on the lawn, one group wary of the other. I started putting feed out again, and they came regularly until food sources started to improve - or maybe our doe ran the others off.

What with one thing and another, this Spring has not been so leisurely, nor has it afforded the normal spans of time for reflection I normally gain from garden and yardwork. But now and again, I am reminded and rewarded.

A week ago, filling a thistle feeder and a suet cage (the latter in hopes that the woodpeckers will find it more appealing than our cedar siding) and I heard a rustle down the bank, in the gully on the east side of the house.  I stopped moving and looked, really looked.  Four big eyes and bigger ears looking back at me.  I sat down, filled the feeders and hung them all while listening for the crashing that meant they had taken off in panic.  Nothing.  I stood up slowly, and realized I was still being observed.  As I moved off from the feeders toward the house, they paced me - still in the brush but traveling along the property line towards the north, the back.  

I can take a hint.  I came back out with a small bucket of sweet feed and poured a pile on the lawn as they watched, not too close to the deck but without getting to close to them in the sanctuary of the brush line where they feel safe. I moved back up to the deck and sat down. They watched, decided I wasn't a threat at that distance, and came out.  They never came close enough to feed while I was out there, and when they decided I wasn't going to quit the field, they did...but only a little, only going a half dozen feet into the brush, then watching.  I took a ceramic planter bowl I'd used to hold a salt lick through the winter and took it to the brush line, staying west of where they were and moving slowly. I put the dish down on the edge and filled it with sweet feed. They never took their eyes off me.

The doe didn't present me with the right angles but I think she's carrying. I hope she brings this year's fawn back around once she drops.