Change Is Hard

…but change is certain.


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Aging is harder than it looks

I stopped to visit Aunt V on my way home from work tonight.  She’s at a nursing home where hopefully she’ll get physical therapy to help build her strength back up.  She’s back to not being able to walk or stand on her own after a week lying around in the hospital.

This is her first full day and she wants out.  Now.  Yet she can’t do much of anything for herself – so where to go is the question.  Tonight I was being a cheerleader for her, reminding her how well she was getting around last Sunday, how she worked hard to get stronger and she can do it again.

She said she hadn’t realized how difficult getting old really was.  But, she said quietly as she gazed out at a lake she can’t really see, “it’s hard.”  I can only agree and hold her hand.

She can’t see much, has trouble hearing, can’t read, and is more confused than she used to be.  She’s always been very sharp, very up to date, very engaged.  Now she’s sitting staring vacantly out the window, or thinking that she’s being watched, or that ‘they’ are trying to harm her.  Then she’s lucid again and you aren’t sure you really heard her say anything crazy.  Maybe it’s just you.  Maybe.

On my drive home, sitting at a light I glanced over and saw a driver, older than me, with ear buds in his ears, listening and nodding to something.  I thought about all the people out there hooked on their phones and ipods and other gadgets.  When the next generation gets to be 95 and are sitting in a room at some nursing home will they have ear buds attached?  A cell phone with the sound turned up clutched in their arthritic hands, pressed against their hearing aid?

Will the future be less frightening to us if we’re still ‘connected’ to the outside world through our electronics?  Or will those electronics slowly move us toward craziness?

Meanwhile we will take our current situation one day, one hour, sometimes one minute at a time.  The road ahead isn’t clear to any of us and hard decisions await.  I guess that makes us like most everyone else out there.

But it’s still harder than it looks.

 

 


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June photo scavenger hunt

Karma at her blog has challenged us to another photo scavenger hunt.  These are so much fun, though I’ve only done one so far.  But June’s list looks kind of hard to me:

June’s Photo Hunt:

a colorful bird of your choice

a grad – of any sort

a dad – of any sort

something purple

a butterfly

a funny face

BONUS: a cow, bull, heifer, calf or ox.  Extra bonus points for my favorite, the belted galloway.

 

Well.  I don’t have a Dad around here anymore…and I don’t have any graduates that I know…and I don’t know where I’m going to find a cow of any sort much less a belted galloway…and I might be able to find the colorful bird…maybe…but it might not be the best photograph…and I haven’t seen a butterfly yet this spring.

So…any help, ideas, suggestions would be appreciated!

And you too can join the scavenger hunt….just put together your photographic finds, then let Karma know where you’ve posted them.  It’s an adventure and we all need a little more adventure in our lives.

Right?


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Bump in the road

We’ve had a pretty good week with Bruce’s aunt here.  We’ve all adjusted to having an additional person around, even Katie.  I was concerned that Katie would have issues with the noisy walker as it (and Aunt V) rolled over the tile floor, that she’d bark at the wheelchair, be distressed by the oxygen machine humming in the corner.  But no, as soon as Aunt Vi arrived Katie sniffed her and settled in to watching her.

This morning, after I left for work Aunt V got up and began to do her normal walking exercises.  But she didn’t feel so good and sat down early to watch the birds at the feeder.  She says Katie settled into a chair across the room and watched her quietly

Turns out Aunt V really didn’t feel well, and ended up going to the hospital with shortness of breath, dizziness and blurred vision.  They’re doing tests now and hopefully it was just dehydration and nothing more serious.

We were making progress getting her stronger, but Katie knew something was wrong.  Now we’re all hoping that she’ll be back home tomorrow, ready to do her walking laps, drink her water, take her vitamins and work steadily to get back to her own place again.

Katie says she’ll keep an eye on Aunt V.  It what she does best.  Right now she’s waiting by the front door for her Dad and his Aunt to come home.

A dog’s job is never done.

 


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I've seen the future

Bruce’s Aunt has been staying with us for the past week as she gets back on her feet after a recent stay in the hospital.  She had an outpatient procedure that complicated itself into a 5 day stay.

The first night here was quite hectic.  The hospital didn’t discharge her till early evening and we had to get oxygen delivered that night, get her set up here at the house, and get ourselves oriented to her needs.  She was exhausted and very weak, not able to stand on her own, as we struggled with tubes for oxygen and the foley she’s still wearing.  Eventually we got her settled into bed, but neither of us slept that night, listening to every sound she made.  At one point during the evening I thought to myself…’this is what 95 looks like…and it’s not pretty.’

She’s gotten a lot stronger during the past five days, thanks mostly to the diligence of my husband who makes her sit up in different chairs, stand up repeatedly and walk back and forth down the hall and out to the kitchen several times a day.   She’s doing her own breathing treatments, working on getting her lungs stronger.  I think she wants to go home and get away from us! 🙂

I wonder what she thinks about all day as she watches TV, takes her pills, does her exercises.  I wonder what she sees in her future.  Then again maybe at this stage of life the future is no further out then supper plans for the evening.  I guess there’s no better way of living in the moment than being 95 and hanging out with family.  We’re lucky to have her with us.

Regardless of the circumstances.


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Turtles turtles everywhere

Tonight Katie went ballistic while watching out the front door for her Dad and her Aunt Vi to arrive home from the hospital.

Guess what was in the driveway?  This one hissed at me too, but she was so small it didn’t matter.  I carried her over to the pond (the direction she was headed anyway) and let her go.

Another turtle with a scary life experience who survived to tell the story.

Katie’s mad again.


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Katie and the big turtle

A year ago last fall Katie and I had an adventure with a tiny newborn turtle.   Diana will remember that I grabbed the baby turtle back out of the water right in front of a big black snake that was anticipating lunch.  This morning we tried very hard NOT to have an adventure with a much larger turtle.

Earlier in the day I noticed what looked like a big turtle in the neighbor’s front yard.  But the light was low and he had mowed his grass yesterday and I figured it was just a big clump of cut grass.  Later in the morning Katie and I went out to do her job and I noticed this trail through the dew…

…now WHAT I thought, would make a big wide flat mark like that?  Then I remembered the clump of  ‘grass’ I had noticed earlier.  I wondered…if there was a turtle, where was she?  So we tiptoed around a spruce tree…and found this:

Katie was not happy to be taken back to the house.

An hour or more later we went back outside and guess what.  She had maneuvered into the middle of our yard, on her way to the pond across the street.

It’s MY yard Mama!  I want to go see what she’s DOING!

OK, OK.  I’ll just sit right here and watch her.

Katie was again unhappy to be told to “leave it’ as we went back inside.

I was worried that she’d get smushed crossing the road, so I thought I’d pick her up and put her in a laundry basket, carry her over the road and let her go in the pond.

Not going to happen.  She hissed at me when I touched her.  So I figured she was on her own.

She’s made it to the pond safely now.  She would have made it faster if we hadn’t investigated her progress all morning.

Silly us.


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Letter writing results

Back in February I decided I’d accept PJ’s challenge to write a letter a week until Memorial Day.  I am a letter writer at heart, having come from a long line of letter writers.   I concede that written letters sent with a stamp may have moved into the realms of dinosaurs but it was a challenge that touched my being.

I’m happy to say I made it, though it wasn’t always easy and the last couple of weeks I was scouring the address book looking for someone that I thought would appreciate a letter, someone that hadn’t already received a note from me.  And I’m less happy to report that after all those weeks and all those letters I got a total of two letters back.  Previously I had believed that letters begot letters…that surely people receiving a surprise letter would respond in kind.  Not necessarily so.  Both people that wrote back said they were happily surprised to get a letter these days, and both their letters were newsy and fun to read, and something I wouldn’t have received without my initial effort.  But still.  I calculate that I mailed at least 12 letters.  My response rate wasn’t much better than the expected response to a direct mail marketing campaign.  And I wasn’t even advertising anything nor asking for money!

Still I have to say it was an interesting experience; one that made me reach out to people I normally would only write to at Christmas.  And while some of the letters were fun to write, some felt more like a chore.  So going into the future I think I’ll still be writing letters, but not so much on a schedule.

Still I’m glad I did it, and I’ll imagine that everyone that got a letter smiled a bit even if they couldn’t find the time to let me know.  And if you didn’t get a letter – don’t feel slighted – it’s just that I know you read my blog and you already have the latest news!