Aaargh
My grandmother is driving me absofuckinglutely nuts. She’s so convinced that I’m incompetent that I have to go over the books for the rental units almost daily. Even if none of the renters have been in to pay rent and there have been no deposits made to the rental account, I still have to go over it with her six or seven time nearly every frigging day because she’s sure I’ve done something wrong somewhere. Or else she thinks that I’m stealing from her and is trying to catch me at it, even though it’s her grandson that has been the one robbing her blind in the past. And these multiple times to go over the books are always at the very moment I try to have a little time to myself while Mom’s napping, since I’m doing a lot of physical labor lifting an adult who’s nearly dead weight multiple times a day, running to fetch anything Mom might need, doing her laundry, and even attending to her bodily functions and hygiene. I have no time to myself to de-stress during the day, or to rest my aching muscles from lifting a full-grown adult around. I don’t mind doing what I’m doing for Mom, but the combination of my grandmother’s attitude toward me and her feeling that if I sit down for even a minute means that I’m lazy… well, it’s gonna send me right around the bend sooner or later.
On top of all of that, the psychotic cousin’s ex-wife kicked him out of the house, so he’s been around here all the time, unless he was working. This afternoon he announced that he quit his job. That means that he will be here all the time, and will doubtless talk my grandmother out of what money she does have. He makes it impossible for me to go out and run errands when I need to, because no matter how many times we tell him to park on the street, he pulls in behind my car and blocks me in.
What he doesn’t know is that I still have a key to the van. And I’m about to the point of asking Shaddy to follow me in his car, drive the van out into the middle of nowhere, and just leave it there. He can’t try to turn me in for grand theft auto. The van was never put in his name. It’s still in my grandmother’s name, and in spite of her opinion of me, she’d never turn me in to the cops. As crazy as she is, she still at least recognizes that I’m the only thing between her and a nursing home.
It’s probably a good thing that she doesn’t know if I had the power by the terms of the living will, she’d already have been declared incompetent and be in a home.
She’s back
We found out that the rehab center that the physical therapists were talking about was the same nursing center, still run by the same people, that my grandfather wound up in for a while before he died. The care there is truly horrid. They let what would have been a minor and easily fixable condition, that they knew about because my grandfather talked about it several times to them, go on and worsen until it verged on life-threatening. So it was decided that Mom would be coming home and doing her physical therapy on an outpatient basis after all, and it’ll be up to me to take care of both her and my grandmother.
The last several days have been exhausting. I haven’t been able to get much sleep with the sleep disorders and the cats crying all night. And then, if the cats do eventually quiet down from panicking over the way they can’t find Mom, they wake me up between one and three hours after I get to sleep, depending on when they quieted down, so they can have their usual 6am breakfast. I usually can’t get so sleep again after that.
Night before last, I was tired and tried to get to bed early, leaving my grandmother to lock up. She usually does, so I didn’t worry about it. The Demon cat started yelling, and would not stop. Things finally quieted down a little around 3am. I thought I’d be able to get some sleep. But my psychotic cousin and his son showed up and walked right in the door. My grandmother hadn’t locked it.
He’s a threat, both as a thief and physically. I could not sleep while he was here, but it’s my grandmother’s house and she gave him permission to stay. Stay he did, with his van parked in the driveway all day so I was unable to get to the grocery store. He wouldn’t move it. And I didn’t sleep. The psycho stayed here until 8:30 last night.
The cats, especially the Demon, started crying at 9pm. I eventually got them quieted down, and they stayed quieted down all night, but I was so stressed by then that, in spite of my exhaustion, I wasn’t able to get to sleep until somewhere around 5am. The cats woke me an hour later for their feeding, and I eventually managed to fall back to sleep around 7:30am.
My grandmother woke me at 8:30am. It was ostensibly to tell me that my mom had called and would be calling back (I found out later that Mom had specifically told her not to wake me, because she knew how little sleep I’ve gotten in the past week). The real reason my grandmother woke me up, however, was apparently to pick a fight with me the moment I was awake. She started the ball rolling with the next thing she said, telling me that I was completely unable to do anything to be able to take care of my mother because I can’t do anything right, ever. I said, “Yeah, that’s right. You think I’m too stupid to be able to do anything, ever.” She informed me that I’m also unable to stay awake long enough to do anything, ever. What the fuck? I’ve been getting between two and three hours of sleep a night for a week. In spite of that, I’ve been doing the shopping, running the errands, cooking the meals, dealing with the rental units and the renters, keeping an eye on the psychotic cousin when he was here to make sure he neither stole anything nor attacked my grandmother again (he has two prior elder abuse convictions for attacking her), arranging to have a ramp and wooden deck built so that we’d be able to get Mom into the house, and on and on. But I apparently am lazy and do nothing but sleep all the time, according to her.
This was to some degree a continuation of the anger she’s had at me for the last couple of days. She’s been trying over and over to get me to forge signatures on checks, and I have been telling her over and over that I will not do something illegal. She thinks that if she tells me to do it, then it’s not illegal. So as far as she’s concerned, my refusal to do so just proves that I’m too stupid to do anything right, and that I’m only refusing to make her life miserable.
After all of this, I’d had it. I told her to go fuck herself and slammed the bedroom door shut.
Mom called shortly after, to let me know that they were discharging her from the hospital today, so I got ready and started to head out. My grandmother saw me leaving, and demanded to know where I was going. I was too angry to be coherent, so I just walked past her. She told me, “Fine. Goodbye, and don’t bother coming back.”
If it wouldn’t strand my mother, I’d have taken her up on that right then and there.
I got to the hospital around 9:45am, and we waited. And waited and waited and waited. Finally, all the stuff that we were going to need for Mom’s home care was gathered together and shoved into the car, Mom was installed in the front passenger seat, and we headed home. It was 1pm.
At home, we got Shaddy to give us a hand getting Mom out of the car and into the house while I carried in walkers and bedside commodes and the bag of stuff from the hospital. Mom’s fiddling around on her computer now, and I will shortly be heading out to pick up the list o’ medications on her various prescriptions.
My grandmother is avoiding speaking to me at all. This is a good thing, and if it continues for the rest of her life, I will be much happier. I’m perfectly okay with never having to speak to her again.
Change of plans (maybe)
I had to be at the hospital at 9 this morning, so the physical therapist could talk with me about working with Mom on her physical therapy, how to get her up and down the stairs in order to get into the house, etc. The cats have been freaked out by her absences, and the Demon has spent all night, every night, crying. Last night was no exception. Morris the Kibbe has needed constant love and reassurance during the afternoon. Extra, the alien in a cat suit, spends all morning crying. Consequently, I have had nearly no sleep since Mom went into the hospital. But I was there at 9 anyway.
Yesterday, Mom was able to walk out the door and down the hall and back on her walker, and was pretty steady doing it. So they figured that they could send her home today.
When I was there, the physical therapist worked with Mom on the walker. Today, Mom’s left side was noticeably weaker. She only got a couple of steps before she was so wobbly that they had to sit her down in a chair. The way the left side of her face was affected by the stroke was also more noticeable to me, and her speech was more slurred than it was last time I went in.
The therapist said that she was actually surprised that they were planning on sending Mom straight home. Normally with stroke victims, they go to a rehab facility rather than do their physical therapy on an outpatient basis. I was told that since Mom was so weak today and had such trouble, I had to be home 24/7. So I dropped the one class I was holding onto. But that still presents problems. How can I even go to the grocery store and run the other errands that need to be done if I’m not supposed to leave the house anymore? I’m the only one who can do it. And getting Mom up and down the stairs every day for her physical therapy would be a nightmare. She was having great difficulty walking. And even though they instructed me on how to help her up and down the stairs, the stairs we’d have to use are very narrow. It would be very difficult, and possibly impossible, for me to position myself the way they said I would need to be to prevent a possible fall.
There are also the logistics of her being home. The hallway that connects her bedroom and bathroom to the rest of the house is extremely narrow. Too narrow for either a walker or a wheelchair, as we proved in the past when dealing with both my grandfather and my aunt Demon Dog. How do we get her to her bedroom?
They were going to make sure she had a bedside commode, since she’s so weak getting to the bathroom would be difficult. But if she can’t get down the hall to her bedroom, that means she’s going to wind up sleeping on the couch in the living room, and will have to use the commode there, which would be hard on her. It’s the public area of the house, after all, and we have Shaddy and Mark and Juan in and out of here all the time while they’re doing work on the house and my grandmother’s rental units.
They said that they would also get a shower chair, so she could get still shower. However, the only shower in the house is the one in her bathroom, down that long and narrow hall that she isn’t going to be able to navigate on her walker. The only other alternative to that hallways is to go down one set of stairs outside and up another.
And there’s the fact that she was weaker and seemed more strongly affected by the stroke today than she was before. She has actually deteriorated past where she was when it first happened. She had no speech impediment, and then a slight lisp, and now she slurs because her mouth is worse now than it was then. She could walk unaided before I took her in, though it was difficult. Yesterday, she was able to walk some with her walker. Today it was a huge struggle that didn’t work out very well. The therapist told us when they finally got her back in bed that this often happens with stroke victims, and is part of why they normally send stroke victims to a rehab facility in order to regain strength and function, and only send them home when they’re stronger. It can sometimes take a week to a week and a half before all the deficits from even a minor stroke show, so there could be further deterioration for Mom ahead.
Mom and I talked about it after the therapist left, and we agreed that it might be better if she does go to a rehab facility until she feels safer. I trust myself to be able to handle most things, but how in the hell am I even supposed to go to the grocery store if she is nearly falling while using her walker now? It took two people to help her on her walker today and keep her from falling. If she tries to go to the bathroom or something and I’m not here, my grandmother can’t do anything to help her. I’m probably strong enough to, but someone has to keep things going around here, do the grocery shopping and other errands that any household needs to do. And how am I supposed to get her up and down the stairs when I have to be to her weak side, and the stairs are only wide enough for one?
Strokes take away the ability to control the emotions. Stroke victims are usually much more emotional. Mom’s not a crier normally. She internalizes rather than express her feelings in even smaller ways most of the time, much less cry. But in the hour I was there, she broke down and cried four times. That’s probably more than I’ve seen in the last year, and that includes all the time we were dealing with Whiskers’s declining health.
While I was there, Mom’s attending physician talked with me. He said that they now had Mom on two medications to control her blood pressure, and they were bringing it down gradually. With someone who’s had a stroke, you don’t want to bring it down all at once, since that could trigger another stroke. In preparation for discharge, they took her blood pressure once more. It hadn’t changed from the earlier reading, and they’d been expecting it to. It was still 205/96. That’s down from what it was when I took her in, but it’s still frighteningly high. The nurse who took the blood pressure said that her pressure was still far too high for her to be released. We were already stalled anyway while they talked to the attending physical about a rehab facility, so I was finally sent home without Mom. It’s still possible that she will be discharged today, but that may have changed also. They’ll call and tell me when everything’s been decided.
Yesterday, my grandmother was talking to Shaddy and me. She started off talking about how worried she is about her daughter. But then she went on to say that if she could see so she could do her own stuff, then my grandmother wouldn’t need Mom to do things for her, then she wouldn’t be worried at all. How nice. What a nice thing to say about her own daughter. And she wonders why both Mom and I feel that she doesn’t give a shit about either of us. I wanted to just rip her up one side and down the other when she said that, but I wasn’t going to do it in front of Shaddy. I have disliked my grandmother for some time, a feeling that she proves pretty much daily is mutual. But as this goes on, I’m coming to hate her. And yet I’ll still be there to do the things that need to be done, because I am a nice person and no one else is willing or able to do it. And I will doubtless continue to be treated like an annoyance at best, and more usually like I’m the villain in her life and my very existence makes her miserable.
And there’s Mike. He has said that since I can’t go out and see him, he’ll have to come here and see me. It’s currently what I call a kinda non-relationship relationship, since we are attracted to each other, and do have feelings for each other stronger than friendship, but have both agreed that with the distance it makes no sense for things to progress beyond what they are. We were talking about eventually meeting, originally me going out to where he is so we could spend some time together and see how we get along in person. And I would dearly love to be able to spend some time with him, even just talking and seeing how we get along in person. But if I can’t leave the house, what then? I can’t have him stay here. My grandmother wouldn’t be able to deal with it, and it’s her house. And where would he sleep, when we’re full up? And if things did work out in person, if we considered taking it to another level, how would that work? I am trapped here. I can’t leave. And it’s unfair to Mike to either ask him to wait until I’m free, when that could be years down the road, or to give up his life and move here to this dead-end place where the only jobs anyone can find are in the field picking grapes.
I gave up my life in the Bay Area, my apartment, my circle of friends, to come down here. I gave up my bedroom and any hope of privacy or solitude because a friend of the family had been kicked out of his place, and no one could stand to see him out on the street. I’ve now given up the schooling that would take me to the career I wanted. I’m thinking that, much as I’ve come to have some pretty strong feelings for Mike, it would be best for him if I give him up. So on top of everything else, I’m feeling pretty sorry for myself. But I think I have good reason to. I’m giving up nearly everything I wanted, and I’m feeling pretty trapped and hopeless about ever again doing anything to move my own life forward.
Stroke
They’ve finally officially said that it was indeed a stroke that hit Mom. And when I saw her at the hospital today, I noticed more effects than I did yesterday. I’m assuming I was too busy stressing to see them, and that they existed. Her left eyelid droops somewhat, and the left side of her mouth doesn’t move like it did when she talks. They’re subtle enough that it doesn’t surprise me that I didn’t see them in the morning panic over the non-working left arm and leg.
The physical and speech therapists are fairly confident that the damage is minor enough that with time and therapy, Mom will regain most, and likely all, function.
When she was telling me about all of this, she didn’t mention anything about her blood pressure. I’d like to know about that, but I didn’t want to push her. She looked worried and tired enough without me badgering her with questions. Yesterday it was so high I was surprised that she didn’t have a heart attack on the spot.
She’s on a no-sodium diet at the hospital, unsurprisingly. We actually eat low-sodium as a matter of course. None of us are big on the taste of a lot of salt, and our tolerance has lowered still further over time. On top of that, my grandmother has a heart condition and high blood pressure, so we’d need to keep sodium very low just for her anyway. My mom is less than pleased with the hospital food. So far the meals have all been gray meat covered in gray gravy. I offered to cook something no-sodium but tasty and sneak it in for her tomorrow, but she turned me down.
Her doctor told her that since she’s been smoking two packs a day for 50 years, he won’t tell her that she needs to quit completely. But he does want her to cut back. And I’m going to have to monitor that, because it’s real easy to not notice how much you’re smoking when you’re fiddling around on the computer.
She didn’t mention anything about him telling her to cut out or cut back on the booze, and I bet she didn’t mention how much she drinks to the doctor. I’m going to have to see if I can have a word with him about that.
I have dropped all but one class this semester. One of my classes is actually here at the satellite campus, rather than an hour drive away. It’s only one class a week, but it still gives me a chance to get out of here, and it keeps me in school. And it means that I don’t have a bunch of days in the rest of the week where I’m gone for six or more hours a day, between classes, study time, and driving time.
A couple of friends, Mike and Brian, let me vent about it all until I was much calmer. It got me out of the downward spiral of depression and hopelessness I was experiencing most of the day yesterday.
And Mike said that since it’s definite I won’t be able to go out and see him, he’ll just have to find a way to come out here and see me. That is something to really look forward to. Yay!
Just got back from the hospital
The cat scan doesn’t show “anything major”, according to the doctor.
Mom’s all full of tubes and things. I nearly started crying when I saw her. Her blood pressure is really high. Scarily high. So getting it down is one of the major reasons that they’ll be keeping her for a while.
Even she, who is normally quite militant about me going to school no matter what, agrees with me that for at least this semester, I have to drop my classes.
Mom has flatly refused to get any insurance, even though she became eligible for low-rate insurance for the retired some time ago. She and my grandmother both live on fixed incomes. I have no income.
I may have to drop out completely and get a job to help pay the bills. But then I’d have to be out of the house, with no one here to take care of both Mom and my grandmother.
Life, it has exploded all over, and in very bad ways.
Dropout
My grandmother is nearly entirely blind and deaf. She can’t do much at all. She also has unexplained fainting spells periodically, which she will not seek medical help for.
My mom can hardly walk on carpet, and nearly falls over on any other surface. Getting that function back after this stroke, if she does, will take time and physical therapy. Until then, she’s not going to be able to do most of the daily things that need to be done around here, especially if it means traveling away from the house.
If either one of them falls because of these things, the other is not going to be able to help them.
I can’t leave them unattended all day every day.
I’m dropping out of college, at least for this semester, while we see if Mom can get enough function back to be self-sufficient again.
I’ve already been argued with for even considering this, before I got word that it was a stroke. Yes, I know that people can and do work full time and go to school full time. Unfortunately, that is less of an option when you have two women who need someone able bodied to help them if they fall and to attend to needs that they aren’t able to do for themselves anymore. There is a big difference between working full time and going to school, and needing to actually be at the house in case of an emergency. I can maybe manage an online class, but spending most of the day, every day, during the week out of the house, is not really an option now.
Oh fucking hell
I gave up my bedroom so that someone we knew who was homeless wouldn’t be out on the streets with his 6-year-old daughter.
My mom went in the hospital today, and I just got a call saying yes, it looks like it was a minor stroke, and they will be keeping her for a couple days.
And now I can hear that my psychotic cousin is here, and I can’t even retreat to my room and lock him out because I gave up my room.
What a marvelous fucking life this is turning out to be lately.
ER trip
Just got back from taking my mom to the ER.
I suspect a small stroke. She’s lost muscle control on the left side, mostly in her arm and leg.
It has been a scary morning, and it’ll be hours before we know any more.
I hate waiting and feeling helpless.
And my grandmother has already taken my mother’s absence to be a bitch at me and find fault with me. She’d better keep her mouth shut, because I don’t think I’m going to do so well and not ripping into her the next time she decides to try and bully or pick a fight. My ability to be diplomatic with her is never big to begin with, and at the moment, I really don’t have the emotional stability to either try and be reasonable with her despite her irrationality, or to just walk away.
My stomach’s tied in knots with worry, to the point that I’m vaguely nauseated.
This is really fucking scary.
