Some Days Are Not Good

March 24, 2010

Today has been utterly exhausting. I woke up to the freezer door standing wide open (obviously for quite some time), food on the counter, 4 or 5 dirty dishes and a quart of milk had been consumed. I got the kitchen righted and took Jordyn to the bus stop and headed home. I managed to get 1/2 a cup of coffee in me before I heard the wheelchair above my head.

Mom woke up with a vengeance today. Ravenously hungry and determined to make herself pancakes, she WALKED into the kitchen. She turned the burner under the cast iron skillet to high and went across the kitchen to mix up the batter (which she sloshed all over the counter). She turned around and reached overhead to pull down the cooking oil, then poured a more than generous amount into the already hot skillet. In a flash, the oil was smoking and popping. I hurried to remove it from the heat. Meanwhile, Mom fills her coffee cup with half a cup of water and bunch of half & half and puts it in the microwave. When the timer goes off, she puts it on the counter and dumps a spoonful of Community (absolutely nothing else will do) Instant Coffee into it... the volcano that erupted everywhere was intense. I may have to tell Jordyn about it because it would be a great science project. While I cleaned up the mess, Mom fried pancakes.

Once things were stable in the kitchen, I sat Mom at the dining room table with her mountain of pancakes ( she ended up polishing off 8 small pancakes!). I began my Wednesday morning routine of filling their weekly pill boxes. It was more time consuming than usual because I had to make new med lists for them both as we have had several recent medication changes. By the time I was finished, they were done with breakfast and ready for a nap. So, I helped them get settled and disappeared downstairs to get a few things done.

Lunch time rolled around and I headed up stairs to fix them something to eat. They were already in the kitchen and Dad was pulling everything he could get his hands on out of the refrigerator, Meanwhile, Mom was stirring a pot on the stove. They were making there on lunch. I checked on Mom first and saw she was making oatmeal. When I turned to Dad, he grabbed my arm and pulled me as far from Mom as he could.

In a resounding whisper, he told me they had "decided to get a bite to eat because Mom got dizzy in the bathroom and closed her eyes then fell". He had apparently helped her up and encouraged her to lie down and rest for a bit. Having worn himself out, he stretched out beside her. They just forgot to let me know until now. For the 1,000 time I reminded him how important it is for him to let me know when one of them has an accident or an incident so I can assess the situation. A delay of the time it takes to get help could mean the difference between life and death.

Once everyone had had lunch, I left them alone again, at Dad's request, for a while. It wasn't very long before I heard them make their way back to their bedroom. When I checked on them, they were both sound asleep. A couple of hours later Dad decided he wanted to pick some Daffodils for Mom so he put on his slippers and quietly shuffled out the backdoor. He made his way to the hill that leads down to the lake and stepped right over the barrier.

I heard him calling me from the top of the stairs a little after 4 o'clock so I ran up to see what he needed. There he was hair sticking up wildly, shirt and pants covered in dirt, debris and grass stains (front and back), a handkerchief wrapped firmly around his left hand as he stood there shaking his head sadly. I couldn't have been more shocked as he told me what he THINKS happened. According to him, as he reached for the flowers, he lost his footing, or got dizzy, or was pushed, or something... and the next thing he knew he was rolling down the hill.

We both knew what was coming next as I looked at the huge tear in the back of his hand. I ran to tell Jeremy to come watch his Grandmother and bundled Dad into the car. Once again, we were on our way to the emergency room. When we arrived I dropped him off at the entrance and went to park. By the time I walked in, he was almost done with registering. "Sweetheart," he said to me, "Who is our primary doctor again?" Smiling, I told him. When they called him back for triage everything was fine until they took his temperature. "Mr. Felker," the nurse asked, "Have you been sick recently?" Immediately, he said no. I jumped in and pointed out that he has had a slight cold for about a week. The nurse explained he had a fever of 101.8. Dad smiled and said he had been running a "little fever" for several days now.

When I asked him why he hadn't told me he said he didn't want to worry me(ARRRRRGH, how can I help them if they don't tell me when things are wrong!!!!!) Whisk, we were taken to an examining room and a nurse breezed in and looked at his hand. There was no way for them to stitch it because the skin had simply peeled back. As we age, our skin becomes thinner and on the back of the hand, there is no fat to anchor the stitches. Next came an intern who decided it would be best to x-ray it just to be on the safe side and after looking at the chart, he decided it would be a good idea to do a chest x-ray too. He explained that it was likely he had "a touch of" pneumonia.

While we waited for the x-ray tech to come get him, the nurse came back in and irrigated his hand with a saline solution. She then pulled out 2 Q-tips. Very gently, she used one to lift up the skin and slid it under the flap. She then put the other one on the outside and began slowly drawing them toward the other side of the cut. "An old nursing trick," she smiled and urged me closer to see what she was doing. She explained that an elderly person's skin can actually curl under itself with this type of injury and if you can get to it within 2 hours of it happening, you can usually use this method to draw the skin back into place. I was amazed to watch her do exactly that. One steri-strip later and a whole lot of padding and bandaging and we were ready for x-ray.

The x-rays came back fine on the chest and on the hand so the nurse brought him Tylenol for the fever. When she approached the bed with it, he wanted to know why he had to take it. When she explained he said, "That's silly, I don't have a fever." The nurse, deciding to indulge him, took his temperature again. He was right, NORMAL.
She smiled and asked him if he had eaten or had anything to drink just before coming in. He said no not before we got here but he had drunk a cup of coffee after we got here. The price of those x-rays make that one heck of an expensive cup of coffee.

Then as I was signing him out, I find out that when I left the room to call Mom and report that he was ok, he told everybody that would listen that I was "a girl he had hired off the streets to take care of his wife." You can imagine the confusion that caused as I had to repeatedly explain I am his daughter-in-law. As we left the hospital, I informed him I would gladly spank him if I ever heard him telling people things like that. He insisted he hadn't... he didn't think. The laughter that followed us from the nurses station finally put a smile on my face.

We got home about dinner time (which Richard thankfully cooked so I could run to the drug store). Lord, the money that gets spent on keeping Dad in bandaging supplies is awful. When I got back, I went to check on Mom. When I walked into the bedroom, she was sitting on her bed, holding her toe with tissue wrapped around it. "Shari, do you know where the band-aids are? Ayla always gets them for me but she isn't here and I'm not sure where she gets them from." I dropped to my knees and removed the Kleenex to find over half of her toenail missing! She had tried to trim the nail and had pulled it off by accident. So, off I went to get bandaging supplies while Dad yelled at her for trying to do something I could have done for her. I almost wished she would yell back at him for rolling down the hill but she didn't and the rest of the evening was fairly uneventful.