Today in My History

2000:  Do You Still Love Me?
2001:  The Master at Work
2002:  The Whole Tooth
2003:  Virtual Miracles
2004:  The Miracle Worker
2005:  Just Like a Real Reporter
2006: 15 Seconds of Fame
2007:  Tradition
2008: With a Little Help from PhotoShop
2009:  The Four Show Weekend

BITTER HACK
Gallathea
(feature story)
Rumors

Books Read in 2010
 Updated: 11/13
"Die Trying"

Recipes for Cousins Day Drinks
(updated 3/17/10)

Getting Mobile from Bev Sykes on Vimeo.

and on You Tube

Postcrossing Postcards

A LONG DAY

16 November 2010

Between 6:30 and 7:45 this morning, I got all the puppies fed and shampooed.  Perhaps the operative syllable there was sham-POOED.  What a mess they were.  But we now have some baby shampoo so each of them were completely cleaned up and back to bed in time for me to make my 8 a.m. dentist appointment.  I actually pulled up in front of Cindy's office door at 7:59.

This was supposed to be a follow up to my root planing of a couple of weeks ago, but in the interim, I had bitten into a piece of popcorn and broke a tooth, so we were dealing with that too.  I also had, on years' worth of suggestions from my hygienist, finally purchased a Sonicare toothbrush and after 65+ years of brushing, I had discovered that I needed brushing lessons, since it's so different from any other toothbrush I've ever used.

I returned home at 9 and called my mother to make sure she had called her doctor to make an appointment to see her this week.  When she answered the phone, she sounded terrible.  She said she felt awful and had been awake coughing all night.  I told her to call Kaiser NOW and if she could get an appointment with her doctor for the afternoon, I would drive down and go with her.

She called back to say she had a 2:15 appointment.  I tried to find someone to feed the puppies while I was gone, but wasn't able to find anyone, so I packed up the dogs and headed off to San Rafael again.  I figured that their feeding would be late, but that it wouldn't kill them to eat an hour or two later than they wanted to.

It was good that I was there to go with my mother.  I had only gotten half the story from her trip to the ER.  I didn't hear, for example, that they suspected she'd had a minor "ischemic event" (small stroke) or that they wondered if she had symptoms of COPD.  When her doctor mentioned these things today, my mother didn't remember hearing them and her friend had not told that to me either.  It does explain why two doctors wanted to keep her overnight for observation.  My mother still doesn't understand why they wanted to keep her in the hospital overnight.

(I also had not heard that she had chest pains several weeks ago and took a nitroglycerine tablet.)

Her doctor heard some crackles in her lungs, so sent her for a chest x-ray.  There was nobody in Radiology, but it was thirty minutes before she was called.  The clerk was sitting at the table staring at us for all that time and finally asked if we had been seen yet.  Duhhh!

The chest x-ray didn't show anything serious, so she sent her to the lab for a blood draw to see if she had walking pneumonia (she will find out the results of those labs tomorrow)

My mother was unhappy when we left because she didn't feel any better.  I pointed out that the doctor didn't have the power to wave her hands around in the air and cure her.  But she's downright mad that she is still coughing.  My mother is a wonderful person, but her problem is that she has been in good health all of her life.  She's had this cough for 4 days and is angry that it's not gone. NOW. But when the doctor first talked about putting her on an antibiotic, she said she doesn't like to take medications.

Sigh.

Mothers!

But I continue to worry about her short term memory problems, as I have seen her take double the medication (because she forgot she had aready taken it), and forget what medication she was supposed to take at a certain time.   She asked several times if she was supposed to get her meds tomorrow, forgetting that I had told her several times that the doctor was going to call her first and let her know if she was going to call in a prescription for her.

Fortunately, the legal problems with the mobile home park she lives in continue and in January she will find out if her rent is going to be raised to $2,000 a month (from the $90 she now pays!) or not.  I'm almost hoping that the homeowners lose the fight this time around because it will make the issue of finding senior housing for her more critical.  I will feel so much more at ease if she is somewhere with people who can monitor her when the family can't be around.

The puppies woke up shortly after we got home and I got all three of them fed and cleaned up (again).  These days I figure they are doing GREAT if they take 3-4 oz.  When I got home I found out that two of their sisters each had 12 oz of formula in one feeding yesterday.  I'm going to end up with the runts of the family.

Once they were fed and cleaned up, I packed them back up in the car and drove home, getting here in time to get Walt's dinner cooked (though I had stopped for a Iced Mocha at McDonald's and really wasn't hungry at all, so I skipped dinner myself).

We'll be back at my mother's on Wednesday for Cousins Day.   I'm going to get her back to Kaiser because she needs a fasting blood test.   Maybe by then we'll have some answer to what is going on with her this week.

PHOTO OF THE DAY

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