Let the Adventure Begin

In thirty minutes I will leave home to venture to the rehab center to pick up Peg. I feel confident that she is well enough to return to her home environment, but with reservation. Yesterday, I hired a full time caretaker, and she will be here by the time Peg and I arrive home.

Peg seemed okay with Donna during the interview. By the time I arrived at eleven, Donna was already visiting with Peg in the dining room. They seem to hit it off, and it made me happy to see Peg smiling and talking. Of course, no one had a clue as to what she was saying, but that doesn’t matter.

This is an adventure because we are accepting a complete stranger into our home to live with us and to care for Peg who is known to flash moments of femalian jealousy when she feels threatened. I have lived through this type of scenario before when I hired a caretaker for my aged Aunt Marie. In that case my deceased wife was not around to get nervous, and Marie didn’t really give a hoot.

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Wish me luck, better yet, say a prayer that all works well.

Lunch At the Home

Today, I had the pleasure of sharing lunch hour with Peg and five ladies at the rehab center. When I arrived Peg was busy in conversation with Gert a short haired little lady to her right. What amazed me was that neither of them have very good hearing. The back ground noise of construction, clattering silverware, and many conversations made it hard to hear anything. Add the fact that Peg and most of the ladies there suffer from dementia and words don’t come to them. Still they were consumed by conversation. I must have missed something, because I haven’t been able to understand anything Peg has said  for the past six months. I did notice that they used a lot of facial expressions, smiles, finger points, and head bobs. Somehow it seems to work for them.

I began spoon feeding Peg, and observed what was going on around us. Across the table was another short-haired, white-haired lady with an extremely sharp chiseled nose named Annette. She was bent over, her head barely above the table. Her son-in-law Ray came to help her eat. He placed a clip board in front of her with a blank sheet of paper, and a pen. Annette began to write. She tried telling him something, but the volume of her voice was a whisper. As weak as her voice was she held the pen firmly and wrote smoothly without hesitation. I never did learn what she wrote, but she filled an entire page before she began to eat. An aid brought her a plate of food which had been macerated. Her ham and cheese sandwich looked like a scoop of pink mashed potatoes. Ray handed her a spoon and Annette took a scoop of the pink stuff and held it under her face. She raised the spoon toward her lips and stopped half way unable to make it to her mouth, her hand dropped. She tried again, but failed. The third time she lifted her hand as far as it would go, and dropped her mouth down to meet it. A vision of Tim Conway of the Carol Burnette show streamed through my mind. Meanwhile, a nurse placed a glass of protein shake in front of Gert. She snubbed her nose at it. A  drip hung from the tip of her nose. She was visibly upset about the drip and slowly raised the edge of the table cloth to blot it. An aide spotted her too late and came running with a handful of kleenex. Gert reached for the protein shake and tipped the glass spilling it across the table. She made the move so smoothly it was hard to tell if she did it on purpose. My guess is she didn’t want to drink it, so she disposed of it.

I sat on Peg’s left, and beside me sat Rose. A very active ninety-two year old Italian lady. She is the only resident not using a wheelchair. She walks to the dining room with her purse hanging off her shoulder and sits at the head of the table. Everyday she has the same thing, heavily buttered raisin toast, a cheese omelet, and two cups of coffee with three creams each. Today, she waits and feels ignored. Not to be left out, she rises from the table and heads for the kitchen to get her coffee. She returns empty handed with an aide following her with the coffee in one hand three creams in the other. Rose sits again pours the three creamers into the coffee. Her omelet arrives. There is no toast, and she waits again. Her greatest enjoyment is to break off a piece of toast and dip it into her coffee and eat it like a biscotti. Having waited long enough she rises and proceeds to the kitchen to get her raisin toast.  “We’re making it Rose,” comes the voice of an aide. Rose returns and two minutes later the toast arrives. Rose is finally happy.

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Anna, an aid, arrives to encourage Rose to eat. Anna looks across at Peggy and says in her heavy Polish accent “why you not smiling?” Peg stares with contempt at the aid who takes care of her. She has grown to dislike Anna, but cannot tell me why. Then Peg flashes a big toothy and phony smile at Anna, and says, “that’s because you are full of shit.” I almost fell out of my chair.

One On One Time

For the past three weeks I spent a lot of time visiting Peg at the nursing home. On the day she was admitted, I met with the home’s doctor. He told me that the average recovery time for someone who has been bed ridden is four days of rehab for every day spent in bed. Peg spent four days in bed so my rapid fire brain calculated sixteen days of rehab. Yet, to be very honest, Peg looked like she was just a few hours away from a casket. I went home and prayed. Then, I dialed an agency that provides full time help.

After twenty days in rehab Peg is smiling again, and attempts to walk at every chance she gets. She presents a fall hazard to the home. She began complaining about the CNA who takes care of her, and she has been refusing to take medications. She is ready to come home.

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I had a different theme for this post when I began, but the phone rang a moment ago, and quickly changed my train of thought. The nurse at the home called to report that Peggy refused to eat anything including her favorite, ice cream. I spoke to Peg on the phone to coax her into eating something. She promised me she would. I remained on the phone and over heard the nurse urging her to try a spoonful; she broke her promise. I know if I were there, I would get her to eat something, but it would take forever to make it happen.

This afternoon, at lunch, I was coaxing Peg to open her mouth to take food when it occurred to me that every woman at her table was exhibiting the same tendency. They all needed someone to coax them to eat, and to shovel the food into their mouths. They wouldn’t eat by themselves, but they would eat a bit if they were fed. The light went on, and I realized it was the need for personal attention that probably caused them to respond. When you are alone in a home filled with strangers, strange furniture, strange food, and upset about being there, the only thing on your mind is going home, or dying.

Time is all one has while living in rehab. The rehab part takes twenty minutes of your day, the rest of your time is spent sitting, watching, napping, waiting for the next meal, or the next pill. Taking an hour to take five bites of food doesn’t seem long, except to the caretaker. To the resident it is precious one on one time with a care giver.

IN CASE YOU THINK YOU KNOW EVERYTHING

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*A dime has 118 ridges around the edge.*

*A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.*

*A crocodile cannot stick out its tongue.*

*A dragonfly has a life span of 24 hours.* Definitely not true check out the link

*A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.*

*A “jiffy” is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.*

*A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.*

*A snail can sleep for three years.*

*Al Capone’s business card said he was a used furniture dealer.*

*All 50 states are listed across the top of the Lincoln Memorial on the back of the $5 bill.*

*Almonds are a member of the peach family.*

*An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.*

*Babies are born without kneecaps. They don’t appear until the child *
*reaches 2 to 6 years of age.*

*Butterflies taste with their feet.*

*Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds. Dogs only have about 10.*

*”Dreamt” is the only English word that ends in the letters “mt”.*

*February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.*

*In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.*

*If the population of China walked past you, in single file, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.*

*If you are an average American, in your whole life, you will spend an average of 6 months waiting at red lights.*

*It’s impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.*

*Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.*

*Maine* *is the only state whose name is just one syllable.*

*No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple.*

*Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.*

*Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.*

*Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.*

*”Stewardesses” is the longest word typed with only the left hand and *
*”lollipop” with your right.*

*The average person’s left hand does 56% of the typing.*

*The cruise liner, QE2, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.*

*The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and *
*a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.*

*The sentence: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” uses *
*every letter of the alphabet.*

*The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid.*

*The words ‘racecar,’ ‘kayak’ and ‘level’ are the same whether they are read *
*left to right or right to left (palindromes).*

*There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.*

*There are more chickens than people in the world.*

*There are only four words in the English language which end in “dous”: *
*tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous**.*
*There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: *
*”abstemious” and “facetious.”*

*There’s no Betty Rubble in the Flintstones Chewables Vitamins.*

*Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.*

*TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only *
*on one row of the keyboard.*

*Winston Churchill was born in a ladies’ room during a dance.*

*Women blink nearly twice as much as men.*

*Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks; *
*otherwise it will digest itself.*

*There, now you know almost everything!*

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