Friday, November 5, 2010

Making Plans

It occurred to me today that Mac was raising all kinds of obstacles to his successful Wi trip in his head. These obstacles became so big to him that they stressed him into a breakdown. He was afraid that he wouldn't be able to park in handicap parking. He was afraid of the stairs up to our bedroom. He was overwhelmed about packing things into the truck to take out there, (things that he was insisting we had to take). He was just getting more and more freaked about the whole thing. His physical problems turn into mental problems and then those mental things turn into worse physical things. It is a very nasty cycle.
I'm on to him now. I am not going to take him to AA to stay at Karen's house because she has a half flight of stairs. We are going to hit the road to Florida and stay in motels along the way (handicapped rooms on the first floor) and we will take as many nights as it takes. He really wants to get down there and get to see our doctor down there as the one up here seems useless for his more complicated conditions.
Also I am making him cut up his food and eat little bites at a time and wash it down with water and I try to make sauces for everything and soups. He can't swallow properly either. You wonder what will go next?? It is very frightening to him and hard on me too. Going down hill like this is worse than just going.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Sad start and a happy ending for today!!

Today has been very frightening. Mac woke up with severe pains in his muscles all down the back from his waist to his calves. I gave him too much medicine for them. The tramadol I gave him at first wasn't strong enough so I added an Aleve and he went to bed and didn't get up until 4. The pain was gone after awhile and he was just out of it on the drugs. I am taking him off of Lovastatin, which is a drug associated with muscle pain, and we will see if that helps him at all. I am playing doctor, but I just don't want him to suffer.
We had to cancel our plans to go to Wis. tomorrow. We will see if he thinks he can do it on Sat. Right now the thought just overwhelms him, as much as he wants to see his grandsons skate.
He was much better tonight and I got the nicest phone call from Shannon. She told me that she had passed her CNA licensing exam, and that it wasn't an easy test. During the test a very touching moment had occurred. One of her classmates had requested an oral exam and had paid an extra fee for it, because she was from Thailand and didn't understand written English as well as oral. They forgot to bring a reader for her and she was toughing it out and another of her classmates (an aging hippy) got everyone (and they sounded like a very diverse group of classmates) to hold hands and pray for the poor girl who was having the trouble with English. One girl was only 17 and just out of a group home and needed this certification to be independent, another was middle-age hispanic, they were all women, but from all different types of back grounds and they held hands and prayed for their friend and it worked. All of them passed the test!!
The other thing she told me that just touched my heart, was that the paper doll set that I had sent to my 7 year old grand-daughter had created a storm of paper dolling out there in California and that Sofie had copied my technique and made a doll for Shannon's friend Thalia by cutting up a photo with THalia's picture on it and using that for the face. Sofie was also using a photo printer that I had given them last year and made a bunch of photos to send to me. I feel like a sent out a creative seed and that it took root in some well fertilized soil and that a huge creative flower was in bloom.
Last week Anja called to tell me how much she had loved her birthday present, which was a pair of DVD's about dragons, and had come by mail from me. She won't be that thrilled about dragon DVDs much longer, she is 12 now and I love that she is still a little girl in any way at all.

Years Later

I haven't been blogging for two years. I want to get back into this as I am on a different kind of journey. My husband has some form of dementia and I need to cope emotionally and help him at the same time. My thought is that if I keep track of what works along the way I might be more effective.