Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Coming back

With one family crisis after another, it's been ages since I've blogged. Just too exhausted to be able to think, let alone type, at the end of a day filled with working overtime and caring for aging in-laws.

My sweet mother-in-law had a brain bleed on January 2nd. She is declining rapidly now. We were told that it would be best to make sure all the arrangements are in order... so we have. Her funeral is planned and ready to go. Sounds so morbid, and a bit disrespectful, to put it out there like that, but the truth is that it is going to be painful when she dies. Having things ready will not make it less painful. It will just allow us to avoid having to make painful decisions under the stress of grief.

I still hate Alzheimer's.

Sometime in February, she stopped eating. So my father-in-law decided to go to the nursing home and try to get her to eat dinner... every day. He would feed her the few bites she would accept - and tell her how much he loves her. She doesn't have many words left that she can even speak, but she can tell him that she loves him.

It's a beautiful tribute to 60 years of being sweethearts.

Unfortunately, the stress of daily life, work and trying to get her to eat took a toll on my father-in-law and he got sick.

It started with a cold. Then the cold kept getting worse. We finally got him to agree to go to the doctor... who said it was not pneumonia, but just a common cold. A bad one, but a common cold.

Yeah, right. Nothing common about that cold. No sir. Nothing common at all.

When we finally got the diagnosis of pneumonia, it was due to a very bad fall. My father-in-law had been sweating in his bed, so he went to his laundry room, leaned over to get a fresh pair of jammies out of his dryer... got a wave of weakness from being so sick... lost his balance and fell.

At the ER, we found out that he got a compression fracture in his back and broke his ankle... and oh, by the way, he does have pneumonia.

Fifteen days in the hospital on IV antibiotics, thirteen days in rehab/nursing care and he finally got to go home.

He's weak as the proverbial kitten, but he's home. Visiting nurses, visiting physical therapists, my husband and I are all working together to make sure he stays there!

Now to work on my exhaustion so I don't get sick!