I just discovered that my Outlook calendar on my new computer is missing several birthdays. A bunch of email addresses were missing, too. The .pst file I transferred from old to new had not been recently updated, for some reason. That has happened with Outlook almost every time I got a new computer. Fortunately, I noticed before I missed some grandchild ‘s birthday!
A couple of heavy carbine clips arrived
from Amazon last Tuesday, so I filled my huge new Nyjer seed bird feeder, and
hung it with the other feeders on the back deck. That thing holds eleven pounds of Nyjer seed.
“Let’s see how long it is before the
birds decide it’s not a scary trap,” I commented to Larry.
I walked over to the microwave to warm
up my coffee, and Aaaaccckk! – there was a small wasp exploring the top of
the stove, tail flicking in that typical threatening way. A wasp in the house, on the 7th
of December, when it’s only 39° outside??
One foolhardy wasp is now squished and
deposited in the trashcan.
At Loren’s house that
afternoon, I collected his laundry, then got his good winter dress coat out of
the closet in one of the spare bedrooms and put it in the coat closet by the
front door. I think he went all of last
winter without wearing that coat to church once. At least his Jeep was in his garage, and he
always parked close to the church doors.
But he needs that coat, and now that he won’t be driving, we’ll
all help him remember to wear it. His
leather gloves are in the Jeep console; I should get those and put them in the
coat pockets. I wonder where his wool
dress cap is?
I worked on my Christmas
letter part of the day. The temperature
was dropping; it got down to 25° that evening, with a wind chill of 19°. For supper, I made a pot of ham, rice, and
broccoli. Mmmm, it was good.
“Reckon if I take some
to Loren tomorrow,” I asked Larry, “he’ll forget that he has at various times said
he doesn’t like ham... doesn’t like rice... and doesn’t like broccoli?”
I mostly ignore it when
he says such things, because his likes and dislikes change daily. I make healthy, varied meals, and he usually
eats with relish. Uh, that is, with
gusto and zest. Hmmm. None of the above are condiments! There. English,
tsk.
One day, he took the lid
off a ceramic dish I placed in front of him, stared at the ham and clam chowder
inside it, and asked suspiciously, “Do you guys like this stuff?”
I assured him that we
did, so he picked up his spoon and ate. He
must’ve liked it, because he polished it off. 😅
That evening, Larry went to Gresham to try
to collect get the rest of the hog barn.
He wasn’t able to do it Monday, because he didn’t get off work until
9:00 p.m. Tuesday night wasn’t much
better; he didn’t get off work until 8:00 p.m.
So he scurried off without eating supper, saying that he was still full
from something he’d eaten earlier.
Whatever it was, I can attest to the fact that it had garlic in it. 😝
Wednesday
morning I awoke suddenly, and actually remembered what I was dreaming. Sometimes I wake up knowing I was dreaming,
and have a vague recollection, but the more I try to nail it down, the more it
fades into the mist.
And my
dream? Why, it was just as sensible as any
of my dreams always are, of course! – I had gotten us a baby polar bear. (Most times, the kids are all young and still
at home, in my dreams. This one was no
different.)
Trouble is, the
thing was growing by leaps and bounds right before our wide eyes – and it was hungry.
And the bag of
bear food could not be found. The bear
was getting impatient. It was no longer
the roly-poly cute thing it had been when I brought it home hours earlier.
I gave it some
of our Siberian husky Aleutia’s food while we frantically turned the house
upside down looking for the big bag of bear food. We could hear ol’ Poley crunching away on the
dog food, and knew it would soon be gone.
We finally
found the bear food: Lydia had covered
the bag with her blankie, and was using it for a pillow in the middle of the
living room floor.
“You mustn’t do
that!” exclaimed Teddy. “That bear will eat
you!”
Lydia, eyes
huge, sprang to her feet, whisking her blankie away. I rushed to give the bear his food. He slapped the bag right out of my hand, the
better to get to the food fassst. By this time, he had grown to about ten feet
tall.
“Bad bear!” I
admonished him.
He wagged his
head at me.
I thought it
prudent to back out of the room and shut the door quietly. Knowing that the bag of bear food wouldn’t
hold him for long, I quickly gathered kids, dog, cat, and we headed hastily for
the door, hoping the bear wouldn’t exit from the side door just as we
escaped out the front.
My alarm went
off.
I have no idea
if we’ve all been eaten by a polar bear, or what.
What I really
want to know is, where did I buy a bag of bear food?
I scrambled out of bed, made it,
grabbed the clothes I’d laid out the night before, and headed for the
shower. I peered out the window at the
big new birdfeeder, and discovered American goldfinches and house finches
perched all over it, gobbling finch seed fast and furious.
A lady on my online quilting group recited details of a
frustrating day she was having, finishing with, “I need to sew in a bad way!”
That reminded me of the story told of Abraham Lincoln:
Upon meeting his future wife, Mary Todd, at a large Sunday
party in the luxurious home of mutual friends, he said to her, “I would like to
dance with you in the worst way.”
Mary Todd later reported, “And he did.”
That night, Larry and I were watching the screen saver on my laptop, and a picture of his grandfather, Leonard Jackson, scrolled through. He was measuring the snow on his farm in El Moro, Colorado.
There
are so many pictures from which the screen saver draws, that it has to be going
for about ten minutes before it gets itself well enough combobulated (should be
a word) that I can press the back or forward arrows to see previous or future
pictures. It hadn’t been going that
long, and when Larry pressed the back arrow, the screen saver quit. But we wanted to get a better look at that
picture, so I did a search for it in the picture folders.
Turned out, it wasn’t with the photos
from Norma’s boxes that I recently scanned, but in a folder of photos scanned
back in 2004! Aunt Lynn had given me a
shoebox full of old pictures (177, to be exact), and I’d taken them home,
scanned them, and then mailed the box back to her. We looked through these photos, and I saw that
a good many of them were not with Norma’s scanned pictures.
Good thing I hadn’t given those flash
drives away yet! I had 177 photos to add
to them. That will make a total of 1,439
photos. Those flash drives are already in
people’s Christmas cards. Whataya bet I’d
licked the envelopes shut, too? 🥴
Loren didn’t feel like going to church
that night, but we were not unduly concerned, since he often missed Wednesday
night church services when he was doing his own driving, either because he
forgot and went to bed, or went at the wrong time (usually, an hour too early).
Thursday afternoon when I took Loren
some food, he was in bed when I got there.
This is not entirely uncommon, so, again, I was not too worried. However, I noticed that he had a bad
cough. I hunted through his cupboard,
found some Vitamin C powder, and put it into his juice; but he only drank about
half of it; I would find it on the table the next day. I asked if he needed to see the doctor; he
predictably said he did not. He’s always
afraid they’ll give him antibiotics, and he thinks he is allergic to every kind
of antibiotics ever manufactured on this planet. He is allergic to Amoxicillin, and
perhaps other types of antibiotics as well.
Home again, I was putting things away
in the kitchen when, from the window, I saw movement on the front porch. I peered out – and there was a big, beautiful
Siamese cat sitting there beside the lilac bush, doubtless stalking the little
birds that like to perch there.
I tapped on the window. He looked up.
The poor kitty has only one eye!
It’s a pretty blue eye. I wonder
what happened to him? Cat fight, possibly. Our cats have had eye injuries from fights,
but thankfully none have ever lost an eye.
Friday, I
began printing my Christmas letter, and hoped to have them ready to mail when I
took Loren his meal.
The first thing that
happened was that my wonderful, brilliant, new Acer laptop was instructing the wonderful,
brilliant, almost-new HP Printer/Scanner to print in grayscale – and there
was no other choice in the list of options.
I did a quick online
search for a solution, and found someone giving lengthy, deep, convoluted
instructions for changing something in the registry.
Now, I’m not averse
to changing things in the registry, and I’ve done it quite a number of
times. But! – I make sure I find
instructions on a reputable website, and, above all, I only do it if it seems
like the sensible thing to do.
It most definitely
did not seem sensible to me that one should need to change the registry
in order to make all the normal printing choices show up.
I uninstalled the
printer, then reinstalled it.
Voilá, the
color-print choice was right back in place, and in its normal ‘Default’
position, into the bargain.
I chose ‘Even pages
only’ and hit print.
The printer printed.
Once or twice it
lost its marbles and informed me there was no paper in the tray when there was
in fact plenty of paper in the tray.
After opening and shutting the tray several times, it somehow came into
possession of its marbles again, and printed.
But all the kafuffle
kept me from getting it done before time to go to Loren’s house. I didn’t want to be late, because I was a bit
worried. When I called at 3:00 as I
usually do, he didn’t answer the landline.
I tried the cell phone. He
answered – but didn’t say anything. I
could hear him breathing, though. I
thought perchance the phone was misbehaving (it’s an older slide-phone, and
sometimes it has quallyfobbles), so I said, “If you’re talking, I can’t hear
you. I’ll be bringing you some food in
just a little bit.”
When I got there,
he’d been lying on the couch in the living room. He came into the kitchen with me – and I
discovered all of the previous day’s food still on the table. There was also soup from three days earlier
in the sink drain. At least it was on
the side with the garbage disposal. I
grabbed a spoon, shoved it down the drain, ran the garbage disposal along with
plenty of water, and cleaned out the sink.
I threw away the old food on the table, and set out the fresh food.
Loren looked at it –
and then went back to lie on the couch.
His cough had gotten much worse, and he seemed awfully weak. He
had eaten practically nothing for a couple of days, and I don’t think he’d had
much of anything to drink, either. Dehydration was probably causing him
to be even more confused than ever.
I called Larry to
tell him we needed to get Loren to a doctor, and
I would need help. He’s not all that big, but if he started to fall,
there’s no way I could keep him from it. And the weather was worsening
fast. Larry was in Wahoo... Teddy was in Newman Grove... Caleb was in
Fremont... So I called Robert, our
nephew and also our pastor.
We
met at Loren’s house, Robert helped him into my BMW, and then I followed Robert
to Urgent Care.
Why
do nurses and doctors think all old people are deaf, and they must therefore
yell and scream in their faces? When the doctor came in, he began
interrogating me like I was a criminal on the witness stand. He asked
what my major concerns about Loren were.
I
said, “He sounds like he might have pneumonia, and he’s probably dehydrated.”
He
acted like a stupid lay person like me would have no way of knowing if a person
was dehydrated. “Dehydrated?” he
asked. “Why would you say that?”
I
raised my eyebrows. “Because he hasn’t
had enough to drink,” I answered, and, commendably, refrained from added,
“Duh.”
He
then demanded to know in exactly what way Loren was ‘confused’ (as though he
didn’t believe what I’d told the nurse), while Loren sat there with his head
down, needing help, pretty much out of it. But when the doctor asked me
that, Loren lifted his head and looked at me, as if wondering what sorts of
things I was going to say about him.
My
temper got right up to the top of my head, and I glared at the doctor as well
as I could over the {required} {stupid} mask and said, “I’d rather not discuss
that right now.”
And
then the strangest thing happened: the doctor entirely changed his
persona and was almost syrupy nice from then on. He said he thought he
recognized Loren’s name (which he pronounced as ‘Sweeny’ – they can’t say it
right, even immediately after I tell it to them) (Daddy . used to say, “It
rhymes with ‘money’!”), and asked if he was the preacher at our church. I said he had been the interim preacher after
my father passed away in 1992, until our nephew Robert Walker, who was right
then out in the waiting room, became our pastor.
“So
your father started the church?” asked the doctor.
I
said yes, in 1955. (He didn’t really start the church,
but I reckon the fact that membership was at 26 when he started pretty much
makes it true to say he ‘started’ it.
And mentioning the previous pastor, under whom there was a big, bad,
fractious split, might open a whole other can of worms.)
The
doctor then informed me that he had met a lot of our parishioners. “Wonderful
people, e very one of them!” he pronounced.
Uh-huh.
What brought about this epiphany, I’d like to know?? He certainly hadn’t
been in possession of it when he first walked into the room.
The nasal swabs hurt and upset Loren terribly. I know perfectly well this test doesn’t have
to be that painful! It was
horrible, it really was.
One
of the nurses, upon learning that I am 22, 20, and 17 years younger than my
siblings, asked, “So you were an ‘oops’ baby?”
Rude,
lady, rude.
This
offends me. First, God doesn’t make mistakes. Second, neither did
my parents.
“No,”
I told her. “I was the baby my parents had long hoped to have.”
People
change their tune when I say that, and proceed to act like this is the most
wonderful story they’ve ever heard. Hypocrites.
😏
The
Urgent Care doctor said we needed to take Loren to a hospital ER to have
complete tests run, tests they could not do at the clinic.
Meanwhile,
it was turning into a blizzard out there, and I would like better tires on the
Beemer for this kind of weather. So
Robert drove us in his Suburban.
It
took a while to get to David City, as there was ice under the snow. Loren did not say one solitary word, the
entire trip.
We
couldn’t go in the hospital with Loren, but the nurse took my number, and
called now and then to ask me questions. Loren wasn’t able to answer much
of anything they asked him.
Meanwhile, Robert and I drove around David City looking at houses, Christmas lights, Main Street businesses... and having quite a nice time talking about all sorts of things.
My sister Lura Kay called him at
one point, and he told her about Loren, and then told her that we thought she
should let Loren live at her house.
“Hey!”
I protested. “I said no such thing!”
Robert
was laughing, and I could hear Lura Kay laughing, too – but then, as Lura Kays
are oft wont to do, she started wondering if she should do
that. No, no, a thousand times no!
The
doctor then called to tell me they had finally finished all of Loren’s tests. Other than Covid and a bit of dehydration, he
is healthy, she said. The doctor gave us the options of picking him up
and taking him home, if someone would stay with him that night; or admitting
him to the hospital overnight. If he was admitted as a patient, they
would not be allowed to give him an IV of monoclonal antibodies in the morning –
and that can be extremely helpful.
We
assured her we’d find someone who could stay with him, for we wanted him
to have that IV. They couldn’t give it
right then, as it was late, and there was no one in the lab to mix the
medicines.
They’d
given him an IV for the dehydration, and he seemed much more
himself for about half of the way home, kidding Robert about his driving and
laughing about this and that. But soon the IV was losing its
effect. He was awfully tired, too. Makes me feel bad to see him
suffer.
We
could only go about 40 mph, as the roads were quite slick.
Our oldest grandson Aaron stayed with Loren that night. Aaron is 20 now, and a dependable, kindhearted young man. Loren knows him (though he forgets his name), and really likes him.
Aaron brought a bottle of Vitamin C/D/Zinc
that Hannah had gotten at Walgreens. It
has been shown to be quite helpful with Covid-19.
I
rode with Robert back to his house, where my car was parked. He helped me scrape the ice from the
windshield of the BMW, and I headed (cautiously) for home. I got there at 11:30, feeling pretty much
like I’d been rung through a ringer. I hadn’t
done anything too awfully exhausting, really; but emotional stress is wearing!
At 11:54 p.m., my
phone chirped. And there was a message,
complete with picture, from son-in-law Todd, Dorcas’ husband: “Brooklyn has arrived. Momma and baby are doing well.”
Look
at that, our oldest and our youngest grandchildren, right on the same page!
I
wrote back, “Oh, that’s wonderful! I’m
so happy for you. Thank you for letting
us know. Give Dorcas our love.”
“You
know I will,” answered Todd, and I could almost hear his southern accent as he
said that.
When
Dorcas sent me more pictures and all the vital statistics the next morning, I
discovered that Todd had sent the first picture and the note a mere two minutes
after Baby Brooklyn was born.
The
baby’s full name is Brooklyn Faith. She
weighed 7 lbs., 4 oz., is 19 ½ inches long, and was born at 11:52 p.m. on
December 10.
How’s
that for an early Christmas present?
God knows just what we need, right when we most need it. There are no coincidences.
So now there are only two of our
girls to worry about! (For the moment, anyway.)
With this good news bolstering me, I
headed upstairs to laptop and printer, and finished printing my Christmas
letter and stuffing it into cards and envelopes.
Larry took Loren to get the IV Saturday
morning. He was 12 minutes late getting there, because he had quite the
time getting Loren ready to go. He
hunted for a belt, finally found one with a functioning buckle, helped Loren
stand up, started to put the belt on – and Loren sat down. Larry managed to get the belt on him
anyway.
He handed Loren his shoes... Loren
looked at them and set them back down.
Larry had to put them on his feet and tie them for him. He handed Loren his coat... Loren just looked
at it. Larry helped him put it on,
turned around to look for his hat – and Loren took his coat back off.
They got back around 11:30 a.m. Loren
went to take a nap, Larry went to work, and I went to stay with Loren, mailing
the Christmas cards on the way. I did a
bit of cleaning (though the place really needs a lot of cleaning).
His house was
boiling hot. I turned the temperature down; he had it set well over 80°! I think his personal heat gauge was
malfunctioning, probably. While he
napped, I loaded the BMW as full as I could get
it with stuff from his lower level – the stuff Larry helped him get out of his
camper a couple of months ago, the stuff that messed up the nice clean lower
level that I had just finished clearing out. I didn’t get it all, but I
got most of it. I took a lot of it to the Goodwill; none of our chillen
want old scritch-scratchy blankets, and none of us are in need of flexible
silverware. 😏
I found two soft fleece blankets that we had given to Norma
and Lawrence a few years ago. I washed them, along with some nice towels.
We’ll keep the blanket that was Norma’s
and take the rest back to Loren.
I returned to try to get him to eat
something, as he’d only had applesauce and a few bites of peaches; but he was
sound asleep. I decided he would be all right until Larry got there, as
he was not nearly as weak as he’d been the day before. He definitely seemed more cognizant.
Dorcas sent more pictures.
“That’s just the sweetest, most
beautiful little face you could ever ask for,” I told her.
“😍 I think so, too!” she wrote back.
This baby is a special blessing to
them, for they lost a baby a couple of years ago.
Saturday
evening, I ripped the Christmas envelopes containing the flash drives open (yep,
I had already licked them and even taped them, for good measure), extracted the
flash drives, and added those 177 photos to them. Then I stuck the drives back into the
envelopes and taped them back
together again.
I should write on the envelopes, “This mess happened after I
put it in your card bag.”
(Each Christmas, someone sets up large paper bags on long
tables in the Fellowship Hall; each bag has a name... and we all make like
postmen and drop our cards into the appropriate bags. Then after our
Christmas program, the young people deliver the bags to the correct families.)
Sometimes when something happened to an envelope before I
mailed it, back in the day when I mailed letters through the U.S. Postal
Service, I’d write on the back, “This envelope was damaged after I mailed it; I
cannot be held responsible.”
There was always at least one clueless auntie who scratched
her head and wondered, “But how did she know, or did the
envelope get returned to her, or... ??”
I didn’t bother to explain; I just did it again in a few
months. {... evil sniggle...}
Once that was done, I put bookmarks in all
the other Christmas cards – 101 cards, 2 bookmarks per card. The bookmarks slid under fingernails and
cuticles on the right hand, while the envelope flaps slid under fingernails and
cuticles on the left hand. 😲
I wanted to stick the envelopes back in
my printer and print on the outside of them, “You’d better appreciate this!”
I
got a text from Keith: “The star just
fell off the Christmas tree... 😳😬😜
Remember what you told us when the angel
or star fell off the tree?”
I
remembered.
Lydia, being born on June 25th,
was a year and a half on Christmas Day, 1992. A month earlier, while she
napped, we set up our Christmas tree, all the older children helping. We
finished the last icicle and bauble just about the time I heard the baby’s crib
squeaking, telling me she was waking up. I went to get her, while someone
turned off the room lights and flicked on the Christmas tree lights.
I told Lydia, “Our Christmas tree is
all set up in the living room! Do you want to see it?”
She smiled and nodded. I scooped
her up… walked down the hall… “Just look!” I said.
Her eyes were already big, because all
the lights were off (and because they were big in the first place). We
walked around the corner, and there was the beautiful tree in all its glory,
twinkling away.
Her small mouth went into a little
round circle: “Ooooo. Pretty, pretty.”
We all stood silently and looked at our
tree admiringly.
And then the star atop the tree lost
its moorings, tilted, tipped, and slowly, slowly, tumbled down the side of the
tree, to hang upside down near the bottom.
“OH!!!” I cried, “You looked
too hard!”
The child’s eyes got bigger than ever,
and she turned to stare at me in amazement. Then the older children
laughed, and she realized I was pulling her leg.
She looked somberly into my face, and
said, “Mama.” in an admonishing tone.
The older children howled with laughter.
Keith said they’d gotten about four
inches of snow in the Salt Lake City area.
“This morning was fun hauling concrete in temps below 20 degrees,” he
added.
And then I wrote, with the help of
autocorrect, “Opportunity. Barry, that’s
too, too cold.” (I did notice
that autocorrect thought I should say ‘cool’ rather than ‘cold’, and fixed that.)
I saw those other words change just as
I clicked ‘Send’.
So I quickly wrote, “Who’s Barry?”
“Hahaha,” answered Keith. “I was just scratching my head over that
text. 😂”
“Opportunity???” I queried further.
“Gotta love autocorrect... if that’s
what it was,” said my disrespectful offspring.
“I wrote, ‘Oooooo, that’s too, too cold,’”
I informed him.
“Is someone tired?” asked Keith
sweetly.
“No, well yes,” I answered, “but I was
listening to Violet sing ‘Away In A Manger’, and forgot to reread my text. I hate using my phone to text! But I can’t download Verizon messenger on my
new computer; Verizon disabled the download because it has too many bugs. 😜 People are committing mutiny in the streets.”
“I bet they are,” said Keith. “Especially all the keyboard warriors like
you. 😉”
One of the things I found in Loren’s
basement was a handmade miniature leather saddle. I decided it should go to Aaron, along with
what we were paying him for staying the night with Loren. Loren would be pleased to know that little
saddle went to Aaron.
Larry stayed with Loren Saturday night
and Sunday morning while I went to church.
Victoria asked me to stop by for some
beef stew after the service. She gave me
enough for us and for Loren, too... but he didn’t eat any.
I only got four hours of sleep Saturday
night, so I tried taking a short nap Sunday afternoon. But my brain couldn’t understand for the life
of it that when I close my eyes, that means the brain is supposed to go
dormant, too! So after half an hour of
lying there trying not to move in order to fake ze ol’ brain out, I gave up,
got up, and got ready for church.
We decided Loren would be all right by
himself for a few hours, so we both went to the evening service. Afterwards, we got some groceries for us and
for him, too, and took them to his house.
We had not realized Loren had not been able to keep his place
clean! I gathered his laundry, picked up
things in the kitchen... but did not know, for instance, that the bathrooms
badly needed to be cleaned. Larry and I have
spent quite a few hours cleaning and washing things. It’s not done, by
any means; but it’s better.
I cleaned out the refrigerator when I put
the groceries away, and we took out the garbage. Even if Loren had felt
well enough to ‘play’ with his garbage can this morning, he couldn’t have,
because it was chockful of a whole lot of heavy things. The garbage man,
expecting it to have one small bag in it, as usual, probably grabbed it – and rearranged
his back.
We came home, and while I put our
groceries away, Larry changed clothes and gathered up some things to take to
Loren’s house, as he was staying the night with him. We ate a late
supper, and then Larry headed off – on his motorcycle. Good thing it
wasn’t blizzarding!
Saturday, Larry took the camera off the
side of Loren’s house, where it faced south out toward the driveway and the
road, and reinstalled it on a lamppost in the yard facing north toward the
house. Here I am loading the Beemer with
stuff from the lower level... and there I am making a getaway after absconding
with the goods.
I said, “Hi!”
He smiled and
said, “Hi.”
“How are you
feeling?” I asked.
“Fine!” he said
cheerfully, with a big grin. (He didn’t sound fine, but he sounded
finer than he did a couple of days ago.)
He was quite
intrigued with that bag. When I laid it
on the table, he promptly started running his hands over it, squeezing it,
trying to figure out by feel what was in there.
“Don’t squish
my keyboard!” I said, grinning at him.
“I won’t!” he
answered, going on squeezing it.
“You’re going
to make funny things start happening on my computer!” I told him, and he jerked
his hands back and held them up in an ‘I’m not doing anything!’ gesture. 😄
Later, I had my
tablet beside my computer, copying a few messages from it, and Loren, who had
kept wandering over to look at my computer screen, now came along, spotted the
tablet, brightened up like he’d found a new toy, and started to pick it
up. He’s had just enough experience
looking at other people’s tablets and smartphones that he knows he has to hold
the sides and not touch the screen, or the stuff he wants to look at goes
who-knows-where.
I said with a
laugh, “Hey, don’t take my tablet!” and again he jerked his hands back and held
them up to indicate, ‘I surrender!’, like there was a hold-up or something,
grinning at me.
He felt well enough to sit on the couch
and page through a magazine for a little while, and that’s an improvement.
I scrubbed the downstairs toilet...
talked with a kind and compassionate nurse from David City who called Loren’s
cell phone... Why do they do that? They know (because it’s in his files) that he
has Lewy Body dementia; they had no success trying to talk with him Friday
night or Saturday morning... and I’ve given them my cell number. Yet they call him.
I asked her to instead call either
Larry or me. She took our numbers and
promised to do so, and probably will.
They’re more inclined to follow our wishes, there in David City. The people at Eye Physicians here in Columbus
would not call me. Ever.
No, that’s not right. They actually did call me early one morning
(8:00 a.m. or so) to ask why Loren wasn’t there for his appointment. They had given him an appointment without
letting me know, and of course he didn’t tell me.
I got a little testy (after all, she
woke me up!), and said, “How do you expect this to work out properly, when no
one will let me know, despite the fact that I’ve given you copies of the Power
of Attorney for Health papers and asked that you only call me, because
he will never remember an appointment, or he’ll show up at Gehring Ready-Mix
plant., thinking the doctor is supposed to meet him there??”
The woman didn’t say much, only made a
few small commiserating noises.
And they continued calling him, rather
than me.
Loren carried on conversations well
enough back then that I think they just plain didn’t believe me when I told
them he had Lewy Body dementia.
After a few hours at Loren’s house, I headed
home. I tried hard to get him to eat and
drink something. He drank water,
cranberry juice, had a few sections of an orange, and took a vitamin C/D/Zinc
tablet (which I didn’t crush, and he had no trouble swallowing).
Before I got there, he’d had yogurt,
rice pudding, most of a banana, and half a bottle of cranberry juice that Larry
had left on the table for him. This
tells me he’s feeling a little better.
Keith sent me this picture this
afternoon, writing, “Driving back to the plant, going through lots of school
zones trying to dodge kids. 😬”
I replied, “Wow, that’s pretty. Lay on the horn as you go along, just to be
on the safe side.”
Keith answered, “I’ll pass on that
idea. I don’t want people staring at me.”
“Hmmph,” I retorted. “That was really good motherly advice!”
And now I’d better get to bed. I’m hoping Loren will improve enough that I
won’t need to stay at his house for quite so many hours. There are a whole lot of Christmas presents to
wrap and bag!
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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