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Not from my garden!
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Let’s do a quick review: As soon as most of the snow from
the first big storm of the year, at the end of March, had mostly melted, we had the second biggest snow of the year on April
2 and 3 and…anyway, we couldn’t get out of our driveway until Friday. Granted,
we only had one car to get out, because not only had the Husband’s snow tires
been removed from his car just in time for the first big storm, but his car has
been having a lengthy vacation at the garage. His transmission is dead, and the
part that might fix it has to come from the dealer, and the dealer keeps
sending the wrong part. If the part, which never arrives, doesn’t fix the
transmission, then it’ll have to be rebuilt, which will cost something like
$5000 and who knows how much time? Or where that
money will come from? That’s what my second car cost, new.
This is when I started beating my head against the wall.
Then we had an earthquake, which I felt – everything went side to side – and that
was exciting. Oh, and 4 days later, a solar eclipse. The gods are having a
field day this month.
In the meantime, my F’ing FL friend’s (F-FL F) PCP had
posted something alarming about her health on his medical site after his April
1 appointment with her, which caught my attention and initiated a series of
emails between him and me. Not with her, because she’s not been speaking to me
since October, when I told her, after trying three times unsuccessfully, that month, to get her to answer some simple
questions about her daily activities so I could re-up her on the F-FL Medicaid
wait list, that she seems to be unable, anymore, to follow simple directions; I
pointed out some other simple things she’s been unable to follow instructions
about, and told her I was worried about her and reiterated that she needs to
communicate with her cousin and me before making decisions about important
things, consequently. Her last communication to me, following that email: “Every
time you write to me, Deb, every single time, you’re horrible and mean and say
things to me that I’d never say to a friend, and I get IBS and have to take an
extra pill then go sit on the toilet for four days in great pain, so I’m not
going to read anything you send anymore,”
OK ! That cleared some time for me; I used to send her a pretty
postcard 6 days a week and a chatty letter on the weekend. It didn’t take a lot of time, but added up over many
years, it took a fair amount of time and money. No point in writing to someone
who’s not going to read it, and it’s pretty darn hard to maintain a one-way
relationship with someone who is, at best, uncommunicative, and at worst, never
writes or calls. I’ll stick to the letters about health matters, which she’s
not going to read but I need to send.
So when her PCP noted that F-FL F had informed him that
she no longer had any interest in having appointments with outside
practitioners, and that her pain levels had increased in the past two months so
she is taking more of her opioids. So he’d told her she needed to see a pain
specialist, and needed to explore with her psych whether her psych meds needed adjusting. This is a red flag: I had to find out what
was going on. My job, in taking care of her, is to deal with medical matters,
since that’s my expertise; Cousin Paula deals with finances, as that’s her
expertise.
Lots of back and forth and in effect, PCP can’t write a
prescription for the level of opioids F-FL F now needs, and he’s noticed a
distinct slow cognitive decline, and he thinks her psych meds/treatment (or
lack of it) may be part of the problem. Besides that, she’s refused to see the
dental specialist the dentist referred her to, or to make an app’t with a pain
specialist, or see an ophthalmologist to keep an eye on her cataracts and developing
macular degeneration; and her
PCP was unaware of the hoard of hundreds of opioid pills F-FL F has hidden away
in her room at the assisted living facility.
The nursing director, who left there in December, knew
about the hoard and was supposed to have found and destroyed it, but didn’t;
and the new nursing director didn’t know about it because the gone nursing
director didn’t pass on the info; and no one knows whether F-FL F has actually
had more than a phone call with her psych in more than a year because she can’t
get there in person and has not been able to figure out zoom, which the gone
nursing director was going to facilitate, but we doubt did.
PCP told me it was time for me to get involved in F-FL F’s
health care again whether she liked it or not. So I spent about 30 hours
writing a detailed letter to her asking for an explanation and warning her that
cognitive decline has been noted by several people, and if she couldn’t explain
her decision not to see specialists reasonably, I wanted to know if she
understood that meant she was risking blindness, and that her pain meds were
going to go away, and did she then intend to start using her hoard? I explained
that I didn’t know what would happen but she’d need to be protected from
herself, if necessary – and got no reply of course. Then there were many emails
and phone calls to the new nursing director and the new facility director, and a
letter to the psych, and copies of my letter
to her to all of the above and Cousin Paula and the PCP, and Cousin P and I
gave permission for the facility to do a
search and destroy of the opioid hoard and put F-FL F, at her PCP’s request, on
medication management, which means the facility will hold onto her
prescriptions and deliver doses to her to take at proper times.
And I warned them all that F-FL F would throw a major
hissy fit when she found out about all of this.
Let’s leave F-FL for a moment and go back north to NH on the
day before the latest huge snowstorm. History: I badly hurt my back, leg and
foot in mid-January (a cat was involved), and no one can figure out what’s
going on and why it’s still not healed; but it was horrible, involving swelling
and calf pain and aching back and xrays and ultrasounds and cramping and shooting
pain and too much hurting to sleep, and on and on, but slowly slowly with Chinese
medicinals and lots of acupuncture and times of ibu+Tylenol, it’s been changing
weekly and was bad but not horrible before the storm.
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April porch furniture - expect another storm!
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I’d not finished pulling the over-wintered parsnips from
my raised beds, and decided I should really pull the rest of the patch of them
before they got covered in feet of snow, again. Out in the wind in the cold was
I, bent over, pulling huge long parsnip roots out of the ground and filling a
large basket, from time to time standing up and saying, Ow! Ow! Ow! about my
aching back and foot. Suddenly, I was flying through the air, arms and legs
flailing, unable to touch down or catch my balance, and eventually landed, face
down, 9 feet away between the two garden beds on the gravel path, sore leg in
the bed, other leg half buried in gravel, and thank god for boobs because
otherwise my face would have been buried, too!
My considered opinion is that the garden gremlins or
gnomes were mad because I was removing the last of their winter food stores, so
they picked me up, and tossed me; I have no other reasonable explanation. What
I know for sure is that the skin on the sore leg had road rash on the knee, and
I discovered a couple of days later that I also had a big lump on the heel of
that foot, which was very sore to touch. I expect I knocked that heel on the
concrete wall of the raised bed either when I first went flying or when I
landed. And I twisted my back all over again. But at the time I was in the
midst of a round of prednisone to try to fix the damned sore leg, so except for
some blood, and back pain that ibu and hot packs eased, I didn’t think much
more of it. Except when I had to help shovel the heavy wet feet of snow several
days later and my back started aching like crazy.
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Gremlin food?
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Hop back forward to mid-April, in NH. The Husband was due
to have a colonoscopy, first ever, and he’d carefully followed the
pre-colonoscopy routine, took the pills, drank the nasty stuff – and nothing
happened. No diarrhea. No pooping. But a lot of cramping and gas and bloating.
Next day, I heard afterwards, the surgeon who was doing
the colonoscopy found 2 large tumors and some polyps in his sigmoid colon
(close to the rectum), which so blocked the opening she couldn’t even get a
pediatric scope past them. And his large intestine was still full of poop. Is still full of poop.
I got a phone call from the Husband an hour after he got
home from the colonoscopy, because then the
laxatives finally kicked in, and he spent hours sitting on the toilet, and has
done for the whole past week. Next day he had the pleasure of having a dyed CT
scan: there might be malignant spread to local lymph nodes, or to the outside
of the colon, and there’s a suspicious something in the liver that needs to be
checked. So he has cancer, we don’t know how much yet, but the next year is
going to be a round of operations, chemo and possibly radiation, so a year from
hell.
The very same day of his colonoscopy, I got home to
discover lots of emails from F-FL nursing home people, PCP, and Cousin Paula
(nothing from F-FL F, because what I’d written to her was another of the mean
horrible letters I’m always writing to her, so I’m sure she never read it, but
also sure she knows I’m responsible for the current commotion involving her.
The nursing home people had gone to her room to do a search and destroy and
take away her meds to put her on medication management, and F-FL F, as I’d
warned them, threw a temper tantrum: they can’t take away her independence, she’s
going to call an elder care attorney, she’s going to fire her PCP, she’s going
to move, and apparently ranted and raged about many other things, no doubt me
to a large extent.
In an email I had with her PCP later that evening, he
said he might just fire himself – if she’s not going to co-operate, listen to
his advice, and is going to cause this much work and furor, what’s the point in
him trying to treat her? I had to tell him I really wasn’t sure and I
understood.
Now Cousin Paula is taking over the F-FL whole situation
while I’m wading through the NH medical situation.
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Parsley's starting to grow
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And yesterday, the lump on my heel returned and I have
shooting pains and aching and the whole of the bottom of the foot around the
heel is very sensitive to the touch and I can’t stand on it without a lot of
pain. I can’t see it, but the Husband says it’s red and bruised. I can’t put it
flat on the floor, so I’m gimping around on the ball of that foot, which is
causing the leg muscles to go into spasm all over again. Did I fracture or
crack a bone in the foot and somehow make it worse while I was beating my head
against the wall in frustration this past week? The xray I’d had preceded the
flying parsnip event by weeks, so who knows?
My seed potatoes, some of the onion sets, and shallot
sets arrived in the mail last week; the rest of the onions, and leeks, and
tarragon plants will be coming momentarily. These will all need to be planted
soon, and the rest of the garden’s going to need to be started, too. And I’m
hobbling. And the Husband will certainly be starting some kind of therapy or
surgery by mid-May; and he won’t be able to do anything for a month (surgery) and will be feeling too crappy to do
much (chemo) for weeks. And I’m hobbling. And we don’t know yet how many
operations will be involved – partly because they still can’t see past the
poop.
And we really, really need to have a yard sale this
spring – stuff has been building up for several years, and my brain needs it
gone. And I’m hobbling.
And beating my head against the wall. Maybe I should try
kicking the wall, instead…I wonder if that would fix the foot?
For
the blog April 21, 2024: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com
All
photos Debra Marshall
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Jonquils survived the storms. This is the raised bed that got me.
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