As I type this, I sit here - sipping my coffee on this lovely February morning - listening to the purr of the friendly neighborhood stray cat lying next to my hip and the chirruping of birds. There is a lovely breeze and today's temps will be somewhere in the high 80s on this delightfully (painfully) sunny day. This contentment is only interrupted by the sound of two cats trying to kill each other in the distance, and the occasional sleep deprived yawn.
A lot has happened since I last posted here.
My mother's cancer took her away from us. We fought valiantly until the end, but - in the words of one author's well known character - she got what we all get: a lifetime.
She died at home, her death rattle filling my dining room. If you ever have cause to meet any of my neighbors from that time frame, they'll tell you that I spent the evening crying on the front porch and that she was clearly audible from outside as she struggled to breathe.
They also witnessed what passed for a wake - we did tequila shots on the porch and shared stories. Not exactly the send off she probably thought she'd have as a kid (my family did the big funeral thing) but I think she would have liked it. As she got further along in life, she hated the pretension that tradition required.
Death itself is not cruel, but the act of dying surely is such to everyone involved.
We kept going, trying to muddle through. I had had enough. Too much, really. I spent the next few months mostly sleeping, waking every four hours out of habit. It was like it hit me all over again, every time, as I realized I didn't need to get up to give my mother her meds.
Needless to say that I spiraled into (not professionally diagnosed) depression.
Caregiver PTSD is a thing. It's a fairly common thing, one that needs more recognition and publicly available resources. I'd probably be better off if I'd been offered some form of counseling in the wake of those events. I'm still fighting against the urge to just lie down and stay there, compounded by subsequent events.
All four of my cats died. All from old age. Mau was first to go, at nearly twenty years old. So soon after my mother's death, it was almost like the universe was having fun kicking me while I was down. He was soon followed by Finn, then Fiona, and finally Ari. Not a single one under fifteen years old.
Yeah. We gave them all we could and did our damnedest to make sure they were happy and knew they were loved. Still, it is always painful.
Then, my husband starting swelling. Yes, swelling. Not gaining weight. Swelling. He went up and down for months. We went to the ER when he revealed that his genitalia had swollen to the size of his head. - another depression symptom, by the way, is a lack of interest in sex. Oddly, taking care of yourself that way is fine. But, the effort required for pleasuring someone else? Too much.
Anyway, they took one look at our insurance, diagnosed him with high blood pressure, and sent us home.
A month later or so, he was back in the ER. He'd swollen up enough that he couldn't walk and was becoming incoherent. Turns out he wasn't completely emptying his bladder when he peed and it was backed up to the point that his entire body was becoming saturated in waste products. Isn't that a wonderful thought?
He spent a week in the hospital, where they proceeded to frequently forget that he's diabetic - despite that apparently being the cause of the issue. His blood sugar in there was regularly above three hundred because they kept feeding him high carb meals. I have no doubt that this was a result of them trying to put meat on his bones - the swelling had reduced his appetite to almost nothing for months at this point and he was pretty skeletal.
Yeah.
Dear Doctors and Nurses: If you up a diabetic's carbs, you need to up his insulin. This isn't rocket science, people, and you have literal brain surgeons on staff. Not to mention Endocrinologists.
Pay attention, people.
But, anyway. Do you know how much it costs to have a week long hospital stay after being admitted from the ER? Around $50k. For just the stay. Don't start on the doctors and their separate billing.
Add in the fact that my husband is our only income and that he couldn't get to work? He works from home, but the office was upstairs. There was nowhere downstairs to move the computer - we got rid of the dining room table, even, when my mother was ill and hadn't replaced it yet. He couldn't go more than five feet from the couch he was sleeping on at first, and there was no handily stable coffee table to set the monitors on. We'd gotten rid of those years ago, since they just seemed to get in the way of first gran's shambling, and then mom's painfully unsteady movement at the end.
I managed to pay one last month of the mortgage and began the process of selling the damned house. Let's just say that, as he got sicker - and I get older and dealt with depression - repairs had suffered. A lot. We finally managed to sell it for less than we paid for it, but enough to get rid of the mortgage so that that's not dragging us down.
Joy?
From there, we begged money from friends and family, then rented a U Haul. In my panic and frenzied need to get us somewhere that we wouldn't starve to death, I forgot quite a few things that should have been saved. (Including my grandmother's bible and my mother's ashes.) But, we were trying to fit a four bedroom house into a truck designed for a studio apartment, so I'd like to think I was justified in my forgetfulness.
And, it's not like my mother's ashes know the difference between being tucked in a cupboard and the local garbage dump. I was more concerned with the things we needed to live. Assorted medical supplies, bed, clothes, and work computer - oh my!
Anyway, we headed for a friend's place in Florida. It's not much right now. We're getting things settled here, but we'll have a trailer to ourselves once everything is said and done. Our friend is letting us live there in exchange for enough money to pay the taxes on the property every year.
The spouse is up and walking again, though he is still having issues with stairs. Not a huge problem, since the trailer is only a single story. The two story house we'd had would still be a no-go, if we'd been able to keep it.
Medical woes continue. He has a catheter now and I'm having trouble paying the doctors we've seen since we got here. We opted for the better insurance with the yearly changeover, which has taken an additional four hundred and some dollars out of every paycheck. It cuts the cost of new visits dramatically, but doesn't get rid of the bills from before the New Year.
On a funnier note, whether a man dresses right or left is vitally important when a catheter is put in. The tubing is secured to the leg (with either a sticker or a Velcro strap) to keep the pressure of the weight off the bladder and other bits. And, it seems, that putting it on one leg can feel drastically unnatural if you have to tuck things to the other side than you normally do.
Also, on the bright side, people take one look at the catheter bag hanging from his belt and don't say a damned word when he claims a seat at the pharmacy. (We did have some issues before with low blood sugar and people complaining when he was fighting black spots in front of his eyes.) I have to bite my lip to keep from telling them that it's better than it was. He's gone from not being able to make it three feet from his bed to being able to make it to the grocery store and walk around it. He's slower than he used to be, but it's a vast improvement.
I am so very proud of him for that.
We'll get there. We always do. Life finds a way, to quote Jurassic Park. And, we are nothing if not alive.
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