“I look like I’m two years old!”

I think I finally found a way to make people stop thinking she’s sixteen!

Eye see you

Liza is taking a class in fashion illustration at Bay Arts, and today they got to work in charcoal and chalk pastels. I feel like she held her own with the high school students:

(Especially since this is the first time she’s ever worked in charcoal. Guess I might have to borrow some from Mom’s supplies so Liza can play with the medium at home.)

Gossamer

I try not to share too many craft projects on here, but look how pretty this is turning out! 

(The yarn is solid purple; the pattern is from my quilt showing through between stitches)

Assuming I don’t run out of yarn before I’m done, this will be my first sweater made primarily out of handspun, the finest yarn I have ever made. I am inordinately proud of myself.

Only in my life ...

... is this considered a "day off":

• Pack lunch and prepare breakfast for kid
• Handle some paperwork online
• Buy some Christmas gifts on mom’s behalf, online and in store
• Buy some Christmas gifts on my behalf
• Start winterizing the yard, including trimming trees, weeding and dead plant removal, bringing the last of the plant supports into the garage, refilling bird feeders
• Mow grass and blow clippings off sidewalk
• Handle mom’s paperwork, including sorting mail, paying bills, depositing checks, and buying postage
• Text chat with friend whose life is as complicated as mine (actually, hers wins, at least this week)
• Mail packages to help deal with the last of my grandmother’s estate from 2011
• Mail packages for Jason 
• Buy packaging materials for teacher gifts
• Recycle stupid mercury-containing CFL bulb
• Buy Christmas decorations for her room
• Buy Christmas decorating supplies for my house
• Buy birdseed
• Reschedule medical appointments, employing the technique of, " Do you have anything sooner at another location? I’m not sure she’ll live long enough to make the suggested appointment date."
• Pick the kid up from school
• Buy cat food for mom’s cat (from the vet)
• Deal with her hysterical/delusional phone call
• Cook dinner
• Convince kid to do homework and practice for her music lesson and clean up trash and art supplies from her Family Bush project and put the thing in the car so she doesn’t forget it tomorrow
• Deal with phone call from facility nurse with lab results and tests that are upcoming
• Research online: advanced bed sore treatment, pneumonia symptoms, palliative care options
• Work on commissioned Christmas present for a friend of the family
• Text friend about her experience with palliative and hospice care for her parent
• Figure out how to be in two places at once with the kid while Jason is out of town (answer: lower standards about timely arrivals and departures)
• Keep up my 276-day streak in Duolingo app
• Write my daily blog post

The family bush

Some of my favorite branches on Liza’s family history, which is so wide she decided it’s a bush not a tree.

Well, crap

     While I’ve been visiting at the nursing facility, I’ve been crocheting fuzzy lap blankets out of insanely thick yarn. Pencil-thick yarn plus a hook the size of my thumb means I’m making stitches that are more than an inch square, so a 3’x5’ blanket only takes half a day of work. The finished projects are going to go to Liza’s teachers as holiday gifts, and she’s been helping pick out colors for each teacher. We’ve run through the list of her instructors multiple times, and yet ...

     "This is the last one! I can finally retire the giant hook!"

     "Wait, what color did we pick for the art teacher?"

     "Son of a ..." 

     (Gretchen shuffles off to Joann’s for more yarn)

Hey, Aunt Judy!

Look what i found:

Pretty sure this was not the intended lesson

Things Liza has learned during her family tree project:

• This would be a lot easier if our ancestors had had fewer kids (14 great-great aunts and uncles on one branch is a bit much to put on a sheet of poster board, especially when it happens in multiple generations and multiple branches).
  
• Five generations of ancestors = a whole lot of people.
  
• This would be a lot harder if Ancestry.com wasn’t a thing that I was willing to pay for this month so she can finish her project.
  
• And it would be harder if I hadn’t started working on our family tree on Ancestry.com a couple years ago.
  
• This would be a WHOLE lot harder if we didn’t have ancestors who were into genealogy back in the good old days of writing to churches asking people to go look for dates on stones in the cemetery.
  

So sayeth the child

"Humans will reach their full evolutionary potential when they stop putting tiny tomatoes in veggie cups."

So that’s what that awkward sized compartment is for

Ched R Peppers for the win!

Well, there’s that

     Me: Since 10am, I have been alone for a total of 10 minutes, and all of those involved me on a toilet.

     Liza: At least you were alone then...

Skin and bones

     Today she weighs 112 pounds.

     A week ago she was 130, and 126 a week before that.

     "As long as it’s in the triple digits, we don’t worry too much," the daytime aide joked while telling me the number.

     "I did notice yesterday that I can see all the bones in my arm," she mused, seemingly unfazed by the number.

     "She normally weighs 140-150," I told her, "112 is something to worry about."

     The nurse agreed, and we suspect that something went hinky with the measurement either last week or today.  Losing 18 pounds in a week is a little extreme, even for her ... especially when she’s been "doing so much better about eating," as she self-reports. Here’s what was left when she was done with lunch today, and it is indeed "better" than I’ve seen in the past.

(Her idea of a full lunch was 1/3 of a cheeseburger, three bites of yogurt, four bites of sherbet, 1/2 cup of mandarin oranges, and a cup of milk)

     The much-more-conscientious 

night aide is going to re-weigh her tonight to see if the 112 was accurate.  And if it was? Her care team and I are going to have to have an intervention AGAIN to explain why she needs calories to fight her infection and protein to heal her wound. In the meantime, at least she’s lighter for the aides to haul out of bed in the mornings...

I have a few other things to do, you know

     "So I know you wanted to get Christmas gifts for all of the aides and nurses, but that’s like 20 people if we count all the shifts. How about I get these cool insulated cups from 5 Below, and we can fill them with candy or cookies or something."

     "And for the ones I really like, you can order some really choice ground beef and hire a chef to come to their houses and cook it for them!"

     Gretchen blinks.  "Or I could just get them Dunkin Donuts gift cards."

     "Yeah, that would work, too."

Historical Society Research Library

Not shown: three hours of her at the "Manuscripts" table, carefully reading through documents from the 1960s and 70s to learn about Cleveland’s history of school desegregation. Not a peep of complaint the whole time, either.

Time for more research

It’s going to be hard to heal your wound or eliminate your infection if you refuse to eat more than half a dozen bites at a meal and you keep threatening to throw your tray at the nurse when she brings your medicines.

I wonder which of her meds come in IV form ... 

Rockin’ the Sumo Bun

You have to find the humor where you can

Apparently referring to her vitamin drink as "I Can’t Believe It’s Not Urine" makes her laugh so hard she isn’t physically able to drink the stuff for five minutes, which is not especially helpful (but is highly amusing).

Well, other than the maggots...

     "The weirdest treatment I’ve seen suggested is to wash the bed sore and pat it dry, then shine a 100-watt light bulb on it for 10 minutes from 2 feet away. All I can figure is that the heat from the bulb is supposed to improve blood flow and speed healing without having to touch the wound? If it doesn’t give you skin cancer first, I mean."

     "Where did you find that tip, bobtheasswoundhealer.com?"

     "Now that you mention it, my Google search history is pretty weird."

(And the advice came from one of the online PSP education and advocacy sites, whose advice I am now trusting a little bit less since the only other place I see light bulbs mentioned for wound treatment is on sites selling special infrared light bulbs. Also, incandescent vs CFL vs LED would make a big difference, which isn’t addressed. Would hate for her to spend hours with a lamp shining on her bottom, only to find out later we used the wrong kind of 100-watt bulb.)

Mondays suck

She has a C. difficile infection, which means she is quarantined in her room until the intestinal issues subside and she is no longer super contagious. The symptoms of the infection are making her miserable, as are the extra handful of pills she has to take every day to try to fight it off.

She has a bedsore which is not healing, which means this morning it had to be debrided and the wound care specialist is coming to see her tomorrow. She can’t stand to put any pressure on the area; sitting or laying down is hellish unless she is propped up on her side. You can’t eat safely when you’re on your side, so they prop her up for meals, and she cries through the four mouthfuls she takes before she begs to lay down again. And again, more pills to stave off infection, more dressing changes required because of the C. difficile infection nearby. All she’s allowed to have right now for the pain is Tylenol, but I’ve got the wound care nurse working on getting her approved for pain meds that might actually work. If that doesn’t work, well, the city of Lorain has quite an opioid addiction problem, and I have a wallet full of cash.

Her feet are cramping and have tremors, which is probably dystonia but we don’t have an official diagnosis for that, nor do we have any way to make it better. Her feet jerk under the covers, and she cries because her knees and feet hurt so much. Parkinson’s drugs might help, but the neurologist won’t start them until her delusions are gone, and we had to cancel her appointment with her psychiatrist today because she was too sick (and contagious) to spend 4 hours in a wheelchair getting to and from the appointment. And anyway, the Parkinson’s drugs only rarely help with the diseases she has been diagnosed as possibly having, so it’s probably a moot point.

It’s no wonder she was telling the nurse and the PT and me that we should just let her die. Her phone call tomorrow with her therapist is going to be super uplifting...

I still giggle about Parikhinson’s

Once again, my team and I have pushed the world back from the brink of disaster. No one will ever know how close humanity came in November to perishing from the Black Death, the Zombie Plague, Parikhinson’s, and That Blue One We’ve Never Eradicated So It Remains Unnamed.

Now we just have to pull it off again next month, and the future of our planet will be safe and everything will be awesome forever ... or until we buy Season 2.

( https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/161936/pandemic-legacy-season-1 )

I’m going to need more bleach

     The call came while I was in Bob Evans, picking up the meal I was taking over to share with her.

     "The culture came back, and she’s got c. diff. We’re starting her on this antibiotic for three days, and this other one for 10 days, and probiotics for a month. She has to stay quarantined in her room until she gives us a clean sample."

     Well, that explains why she had been getting all of her meals in her room for the last few days.

So glad that Aunt Pat and I spent a few hours with her this morning while she was having her, um, difficulties. I wonder how long it will be before one of us comes down with it? I wonder how to clean the spores from her soiled clothes out of the washing machine? Guess we’re waiting to eat our dinner until after we can disinfect ourselves after our visit tonight.

You know the concert went well when

your favorite percussionist mimes gagging after the last song ...

...then starts banging her head on the wall while laughing.

Nature’s graffiti

There are times when showing up REALLY early for car line is a good thing.

A few faces

Back in the bottle, genie

See this child?

Today she went to shadow a student at a local high school to help us decide where she’s going next year. It’s not often that I’m sentimental and want to tackle my kid and make her go back to being, well, a kid, but today was one of those days. My precious pumpkin isn’t much of a child anymore at all, is she?

I found what I want for Christmas

I WANT A GIANT SWING FRAME FOR MY BACKYARD AND A SWING THAT IS ALSO A LOUNGE CHAIR.

It’s been seven years

Last time my kid let me French braid her hair was 2010.

Until today, that is!

We went to see Gallagher.

It was awful, despite the occasional photogenic moment.

The end.

I always knew she wasn't typical

Words I am getting good at pronouncing (and spelling):

• Atypical Parkinsonism
• Progressive Supranuclear Palsy
• Corticobasal Ganglionic Degeneration
• Dementia with Lewy Bodies

Too bad we can't start treatment for her symptoms until the delusions go away ...

Old lady

     "I'd like to start her on drugs to treat her Parkinsonism, but we have to get her delusions under control first. I'll talk to her psychiatrist and we'll come up with a plan."

     "I don't know why everyone says I have delusions. You can't prove that what I believe isn't the truth."

An hour later ...

     "How was the ride back?"

     "Okay, except the little old lady who followed us everywhere today came with me, and she wants to move in with me. I don't think that's a good idea."

     "Nope, probably not. You're in a single room, after all."

There was no little old lady following us around, nobody went home with her, and no one asked to move in with her. But do I have PROOF of that? Nope.

Watercolor pencils

She called while I was fixing dinner last night.

"I'm supposed to swap houses with someone, and I have no idea how I am supposed to do that. I mean, I am so busy, when will I find the time? And who will take care of my furniture while I'm gone?"

Fifteen minutes later, I had figured out that she had been reading an article about jumpstarting her creativity, and it suggested swapping houses with a friend for a few days. She had interpreted this as a command, and she couldn't figure out how to make it happen. Another ten minutes went by while I convinced her that she could skip that part and we could try some of the other ideas when I came to see her in the morning.

And we did try new things this morning, although she didn't use a paintbrush. Here's her work, made using watercolor pencils that she normally scorns.

(Nope. No clue what it's supposed to be. Doesn't matter, it's the process that's going to do her good, not what shows up on the paper.)