I just canceled the DVD portion of my Netflix subscription. We hardly have time to watch stuff, and it can take me a month to get around to a DVD. Dropping it saves about $100/year. Still, when I hit “cancel” after multiple opportunities to change my mind, I started to cry.
I don’t think it was really about the DVDs.
The third person I sent my mom rant to was Amy, an old family friend (readers should review “The Shirt” for information on Amy). When we moved my mother, we couldn’t keep her in our home town anymore—she’s about 40 minutes away, closer to Baltimore, in the town where Amy lives, and it took me awhile to tell Amy. When I did, she wrote back: “OMG! [Facility] is on my street, two blocks from my house! I can’t believe your mom is there. And I’m so sorry to hear all the craziness you are going through. I’m sure it would be difficult anytime. But in the middle of a pandemic. Wow!”
I was shocked that someone we know—someone my mother has known since Amy was a baby—lives two blocks away.
Alison wanted to send Mom’s caretakers some baked goods, both as a thank you (in general, and because my mother can be difficult) and as a way to let them know that we aren’t ignoring my mother, we are not negligent, no matter how it appears on the ground. We have awareness! My sister practically has a second full-time job working on this! (Ooops, ranting again.) So we asked for the name of a bakery in the neighborhood that might deliver, and Amy eventually wrote back: “I picked up a bunch of baked goods at a delicious local place, and Greg and I went down to [facility] to drop them off, along with a card for the staff, which I signed from you two. I also dropped off some sunflowers and a card for your mom, which I signed from me and Greg. They were very sweet! The woman who answered the door knows your mom. And as we were talking, your mom’s aid was on her way out for the day, so we stopped and talked to her and gave her some of the baked goods. She was delightful and really seems to care about your mom.”
This, as you can imagine, has been a godsend. I mean, what an angel Amy is.
(But have we been able to reach Mom since? No.)
I haven’t been talking about my mother, because I just can’t. Thank goodness my parents had a second child. Alison (who has power of attorney) has had a work and personal life that means that she understands the systems, knows the questions to ask, and understands the answers. Still, everything is so complicated and hard for people with a background like hers—how does the normal person navigate this stuff? I simply shut down.
My mother went was hospitalized July 2, was there about 10 days, maybe, then went to rehab, where she’s been since. I can’t go into everything, but here is a frantic e-mail I sent to a friend on July 30, then cut and paste it to another on August 6, another on August 17, and now I am posting it here:
Briefly (because OMG, I could go on and it exhausts me) we had to move her from independent living to assisted living against her will (and other things that didn’t go well), then there was a bait and switch and we couldn’t afford it there anymore so we had to move her to another assisted living place, but she went into the hospital, so the move happened while she was in the hospital, and things were very **** up with that because she is a hoarder [Bloggers: see June: Whining/Negativity] and because the old place [facility name] dumped some of their shit in with the movers [what I’m saying here is that they dumped things into her apartment that weren’t hers], there had to be a second move of things out of the new apartment to her hoarder’s house, and luckily she went to rehab after the hospital and is still there because there was no room for her in her room in the new place, but there is now, but she has yet to set foot in it (and neither have we). All this from afar and with covid. We can’t really enter any facility anyway. My sister is in charge, thank god. And mom’s health is really questionable. And that is the very short version.
Today my mother is having an in-office vascular procedure meant to help her avoid amputation. If things do not go well, she’ll be admitted to a hospital. And of course, at 89, things may not go well at all.
We can almost never reach her to talk with her, which is another whole thing maybe I’ve discussed and maybe not. No cell phone. Doesn’t pick up the phone by her bed.
She still has never been to the new place and may never be.
And Tim’s brother is having his prostate biopsied this morning. It’s just one big party today.
It is already September, and I haven’t addressed July or August in any real way, so I will say that in July we participated in small socially distanced gatherings with friends, because we had to, but maybe there were too many, and that thought freaks me out, and my back went out after I opened the garage door, which brought on weeks of issues, and one day I drove 40 minutes each way to get Thai takeout, and Tim made his first tomato galette (he subsequently made four more), and one day I had canoe date with Tim at Glen Lake after not having taken the boat out at all last summer, and there was another blog zoom date with all the bloggers (even Helen!), and we went biking on our rail trail, which suddenly has become complicated (stay tuned!), and we looked for more birds, and there have been Mom complications, and a family friend died; and in August my sciatica saga continued, and I was a judge for the final round of a writing competition, which added significantly to my work load, and we pulled back from socializing a bit, which was good but led to some serious feelings of isolation, and I had to take my car in for maintenance and wait for it, only for an hour, and the few other people in the waiting room were masked too so I assume I was OK, and one day Tim and I went to an exhibit of paintings at the museum (the one I work for), which really was delightful and civilized and we had the place to ourselves, and then there was a day when we went to two small outdoor concerts (more on that later, perhaps), and we had a quiet 34th legal anniversary (but duck risotto and a good bottle of wine!), and then I got news of the sudden death of a dear college friend (Saturday), and I’m reeling a bit from that and still hoping for more detail.
OK, here’s something. In the midst of getting some of these house projects done in June, I did my annual window washing/blind dusting, which longtime readers of Route 153 know is a BIG DEAL in this house of 30+ windows and doors. It’s a task that takes a few days, and sometimes those few days have many days between them. There’s a part of me that enjoys it, oddly, but this year I think I enjoyed it more than usual, and I suspect it was because it felt like something normal and ritualistic in the face of all the abnormal.
Given that I do this only once a year, I’m sure it’s impossible for anyone to ever tell that I’ve done it at all. But I know.
I realize that some of these covid posts are tedious and whiny. These days everything has an odd shadow cast over it. Everything is harder, more complicated. Things aren’t working the way they should—or in some cases, maybe just not the way they used to, and there’s a learning curve. Medical issues are harder to deal with. Grocery shopping is more complicated. There are many things that simply seem too hard to acquire. The U.S. postal service isn’t working as well as it used to, and neither is FedEx or UPS. Things we order get delivered to people who are not us, and then we need to somehow prove that we did not receive them. Awhile back, for example, I ordered a dozen bottles of a salad dressing I used to buy through my now-likely-defunct buying club. They were shipped (from California, it turned out, which horrified me) and then stalled there. Eventually I got word that they had been delivered, but they hadn’t been. I went to the post office, and apparently the shipment had been signed for, but it wasn’t there. So where was it? It had been delivered to the elementary school, it would appear, because why wouldn’t it be? I can’t recall how they figured that out, but if it weren’t for a woman with a cell phone in line behind me who knew some custodial staff there and called them, and if I hadn’t driven to the school myself, I would never have gotten that case of salad dressing with—yes, you guessed it—four of the dozen bottles broken. Which led to more phone calls and refunds. See? I can’t even apologize for getting whiny without eventually going off on a rant.
When I had my annual ob/gyn appointment last November, we needed to schedule a mammogram, but the year before, because I have dense breasts, my doctor scheduled both mammography and sonography as screens, but apparently no insurance company will pay for sonography as a screen, you have to see something suspicious on a mammogram, so I ended up paying for that out of pocket, and it was very expensive, so I wanted to figure out what I should do, because my doctor thinks mammography is not enough for me, but she said they were about to get a 3D machine, which is much better than 2D, so maybe I should just wait for the 3D machine, which would be there by the end of February, allegedly, but then, of course, with all the regular delays and then the covid delays, it wasn’t, and so when I went for my follow-up in June, I asked if I should just get a 2D or wait or what, because by now it had been 17 months since my last mammogram, and she said if I were her sister, she’d tell me to not wait, and she could send me to Dartmouth, which is a couple of hours away but is in their system, and I asked if there was anything closer, and I could in fact go to the hospital where I used to get my mammograms done, before I got in with this ob/gyn at long last, who wanted to keep all my records down by her, so we scheduled that, and the people there were lovely as always, and 3D felt just like 2D but with an extra D, and according to that screen, I’m good.
An upside to unemployment is that when Thom (who helped us get our couch) came to barber the trees and clear out the brush from our backyard, Tim and I could work as the underlings, carting brush and limbs up the hill to dump into the truck, trip after trip, so he didn’t have to hire other help for that, and it saved us a little money. Similarly, when Paul came to touch up the paint job on the front of the garage, Tim could assist. Every little bit helps.
June also brought with it Tim’s aching knee and more Friday telemedicine and a trip to the hospital where a clinic was set up to test for both covid and Lyme disease. He was, thank god, negative for covid, which we found out in a couple of days. By the next week’s end, the blood work revealed that he had anaplasmosis, another tickborne illness. It was what they’d suspected, and it was good that this was what he had, because they had started him immediately on the antibiotics for that—had it been Lyme, they would have had to switch his meds. Chances are he already had it at least a month. They’d suspected it or shingles when he’d called before (again on a Friday), but there was no visible sign of shingles, so they scheduled blood work. Over the weekend, the shingles broke out, so they quickly treated that and canceled the blood work, which, in retrospect, I’m pretty certain would have shown he had both things at once. The poor guy. He’s much better now.
At March’s beginning, the dentist said that the hairline fracture we’d been watching on that back molar meant I should either replace the filling or get a crown and I decided on the crown because I had insurance and the procedure was scheduled for the 26th and then everything shut down, and the appointment was tentatively rescheduled once, maybe twice, and then they weren’t going to call again until the office was really open, and meanwhile Tim lost his job and I had to call the dentist and find out what happened if I lost my insurance, which was potentially complicated, but in the end I decided to pay for COBRA, which shockingly turned out to be my cheapest option, and the procedure happened on June 8, 13 weeks later, and he put the temporary crown on (with the help of his covid-terrified assistant), and the next day part of it broke off, and three days later the rest of it came off at my friend’s socially distant retirement party, so it may have been the most temporary crown of all time, and I went crownless for two more weeks, but then finally got the thing, some glittery gold in the back of my mouth.
