5/6/10

4/6/10

This week we added a physical therapist and a home attendant to “Team Dad.” Amy, the physical therapist, assessed Dad and says that “the strength is there” but that it's the back pain that's keeping him from walking. This leaves us in a catch-22 situation, because we could give him Percocet, which would be much more effective for the pain, but it makes him hallucinate. The hallucinations don't seem to bother him – he's usually happily traveling in his mind, but they're difficult for the rest of us. Amy gave us a sheet of exercises to do with Dad, and will be coming twice a week to work with him.

The home attendant, whose name I have forgotten, is a pleasant young african-american woman who seems to get a kick out of Dad. She'll be here 3 hours a day for three days a week – just a drop in the bucket, but that's all Medicare covers. At least it'll give Marie a chance to get out and do the laundry and errands.

Dad himself has mastered the hopping maneuver to get from the bed to the commode, and even did it once by himself when Kristen purred Jaelynn into a deep sleep. He also does a kind of somersault move when he realizes that he's on the wrong side of the bed and that the commode is on the other side.

Dad has developed a new desire to physically hang on to whoever is sitting with him – usually the hand, but one night he was in an odd position and couldn't reach Jaelynn's hand, so he grabbed her foot and slept holding on to it all night. Yesterday, while holding Kate S's hand, he started exploring her arm. “You have muscles!” he said. “I'm like Popeye,” Kate told him, randomly. “Do you eat your spinach?” Dad asked, totally remembering Popeye. “Yes,” said Kate S. and proceeded to sing him the Popeye theme song.

“Where am I?” Dad kept asking last night, in a panic. Trying to distract him, Kate S. brought Brad, who'd just arrived, into the room. “Where am I?” Dad asked Brad. “Earth,” said Brad, an answer no one had ever given before. Dad was quiet, processing. “I guess that's right,” he said, and fell asleep.

Today I found a baby starling, too young to fly. I brought it to the vet, who pronounced it healthy, and it was then picked up by a bird rescuer who will nurse it to adulthood. I told Dad this story, and he was very anxious about the little bird. “It's still alive?” he kept asking.

Big changes are afoot here in the apartment, the physical space transitioning to meet Dad's new needs. First, his substantial porn collection – 69 VHS tapes – got packed away, to make room on the shelves for all his new supplies. Then we bought a new recliner and put it next to his bed, so that his caregivers can be comfortable when they have to sit beside him for long stretches. The recliner got stuck partway into the bedroom, and we had to take the door off the hinges so that Jaelynn and Suzy could wrestle it through the doorway. Today, an air conditioner arrived, something Dad would never have dreamed of owning. If it was just me and him, I wouldn't have forced it on him, but I can't ask people to volunteer to take care of him and then have them roasting, especially since most of Dad's caregivers are heavyset folks who don't take the heat well.

In the general hubbub of moving stuff around, we discovered a box of brown glass beer bottles that Dad had been saving for who knows how long. Seeing them made me sad, because those are the bottles that Dad used to make into drinking glasses, when he could still see. Somewhere around here is a whole lot of blue Arizona bottles that I collected for him in 1996. He said he wanted blue glass, so I drank this nasty tea that I didn't really like every day and then carted the bottles from Rhode Island, where I was living, to New York. Dad wound up with so many that they lined the entire hallway of his apartment, where they sat, gathering dust, because Dad didn't want to face the fact that he was too blind to do it anymore.