calherewecome

No pictures today.

It’s been a tough week. On Sunday, Paula and I went to the Chili Cook-off at lodge. Mary decided that she didn’t want to go. Okay, no problem. When we got home at about 8 pm we got Mary up to offer to have some dinner and watch the TV news.

Paula and I both had sat down. Mary gets up from the dining room table and heads for her room. Then she had a whopping dizziness episode and falls on her back. We helped her sit up and we tried to take stock of her condition. She was conscious and didn’t seem to have broken anything. We decided to not call the EMT’s and wait for the morning to call her primary care doc.

So on Monday morning, Paula makes an appointment with her primary at 11:45. Her doctor ordered X-rays. X-ray showed fractured rib (non-displaced). He gave her some kind of strap to help stabilize her rib cage and wrote her an Rx for pain med.

At this point, Mary is noticeably weaker and noticeably disoriented. Paula has been sleeping on the extra bed in her bedroom. She has needed help sitting up and getting up out of bed. We are insisting that she use her walker rather than her cane when walking around our condo. She fought us for a little bit but has come around on the issue. We told her if you don’t use the walker you WILL fall again and next fall will kill you. So she’s on board with walker.

Last night she got up at about midnight when Paula was about to go to bed and she asked “Is it time to get up?”. Paula gives her a big sigh. No.  Paula gave her a bottle of Ensure and put her back to bed.

One good thing happened this week. Her lawyer dropped by yesterday with his notary in tow to sign her new estate docs. She managed to get it done, but she had trouble. Lawyer says to her “put the number 4 here (between August and 2016), initial here and sign here.” She had trouble with those simple directions. Eventually, we got through all of the paper work along with notary stamps. Lawyer will make copies for his file and call us to pick up the originals. We breathed a big sigh of relief to get this task done.

So the docs include updated will, durable power of attorney, health care power of attorney and add Paula and my names to her family trust.

So to finish off the week, we took Mary to get her hair done. Paula got the car and meet us outside the elevator. I started to walk with Mary to the elevator. The distance from our front door to the elevator is about 25 yards. She almost couldn’t make it. Navigating with the walker is very tough for her. While she was getting her hair done, we did the grocery shopping.

So here’s where we stand. At the end of the week she is noticeably weaker, noticeably frailer and much less aware of whats going on in the world. We’re beginning to feel that the end is near. Her internal fuel gauge is pointing at a big red “E”. But then again she might bounce back. We need to make another appointment with her neuro doc to talk about one of her meds. We feel that might be making the dizziness worse not better.

As it stands now, we feel we can’t leave her alone. One of us has to be here. We may start scheduling our caregivers for an evening every other week so that we can go out and have dinner and see a movie. Our goal all along has been to avoid putting her in a nursing home. But after this week, we beginning to think that maybe the time has come to look at that.

We are so looking forward to our trip up north on August 19 to get away for the weekend. We have scheduled our caregivers for the weekend.