There and back again
Jul. 3rd, 2024 07:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flexagonExecutive summary: the bug and I flew out to Montana last Friday, set up 1/2 a bathroom and 1/2 of a different bathroom for the needs of a heart surgery patient, got the patient home, carried around some heavy things and then (mostly I) spent more hours than you would believe on organizing pills and prescriptions. Much of this in a house with a covid-positive person and many cobwebs. Then we came home as soon as possible, getting caught halfway and staying an extra night, but finally being home again.
But it's longer than that because if there's one thing I have Big Feelings about, it's the state we were visiting. And of course my dad. Cobwebs and things. At least the old curmudgeon decided, after the surgery, to let me help him, which he was dead set against before.
Dramatis personae:
K is dad's wife, who was both sick and overwhelmed at first and doesn't tend to think through things very pragmatically to begin with. I like her, but she wasn't the best in this situation.
M is K's visiting friend.
The real work started last Wednesday as, along with one-way plane tickets and car rental etc, I desperately tried to order things from a local-to-there medical supply company that would deliver out to the sticks. I confirmed that it was possible, then badgered both her and M (who texts, unlike K) about the dimensions of various showers and toilet seats. I made M send me pictures of a broken shower door and the shower head, etc. On Thursday I got the larger essentials ordered. Then K, who was just innocently and infuratingly happy about the new Dad-release date of fucking Saturday, innocently asked if we'd be coming by on Friday(!). I came very close to snapping at her because YES, omg YES, we will have exactly half a day to set up the house before he gets home and I was expecting to have like five days. WE WILL BE THERE. Hardware store and then there IMMEDIATELY. She was a little startled and I wanted to throttle her.
Thursday: work work work, pack pack pack. Charge a car using an external charger, just for extra fun (it worked!).
Friday, thank goodness all the planes flew on time, and the medical supply company had delivered by the time we landed. We got to borrow two hours from the universe; I was on about 3 hours of sleep but a whole lot of adrenaline. We got a rental car (which took forever but turned out to be lovely, a brand-new Kia Forte), hit the hardware store and a grocery store, masked up and got straight to work. We were honestly amazing that day! We got a new shower head, non-slip shower mat, shower chair and toilet riser all installed, and we got all the instructions for picking him up from the nursing home the next day, and somehow still found energy for date-night sex. We had rented our own cabin right across the highway from their road, which turned out to be a good call since K never did test negative for covid and they needed all their air spaces.
Saturday we got up early, ate an enormous breakfast, and uh... fetched my dad from the nursing home. I had his wallet, which felt weird. And seeing him felt weird. He teared up and said "I thought I would never see you again" and I was like "Me neither! Here, we brought bags for your stuff". They let him go easily, along with a huge, startling and weirdly organized collection of pills (the more experienced among you should hear ominous music playing), and he immediately started being a pain in the ass by insisting that we were driving him home the wrong way (we ignored him in favor of the GPS). We put him in the small guest house, where he immediately hit his head on a badly placed shelf corner but only gently, and a friend of my dad's came bounding over to see him and said "oh, you're the mask Nazi" to me in greeting. ("Yes," I agreed firmly, "I'm the Nazi regarding everything pragmatic around here right now"). I fled to the hardware store to proceed with putting a grab bar into their bathroom, and we picked up a prescription for K that I "forgot" to ever get paid back for, and a chocolate malt from the Dairy Queen to make dad happy, and pipe insulation to pad that goddamn corner shelf with, and a new pill box. Then back to our own cabin for The Initial Sorting of the Pills. Just the ones from the nursing home (more spooky music plays). I wrote them all in a document as I went. As I was figuring out what to give him that evening, it turned out that he hadn't been given his morning meds, which was a detail you'd think they might have fucking told me about that morning (I howled), so we went down an extra rabbit hole of "for drug X, is it better to take a dose late or skip it"? UGGGGH. Finally I ran a small cup of pills over to him, filled the new pill box with pills for the upcoming week, and we called it a night.
When I say that, what I really mean is that I then brought out the X-box controller and played Animal Well on my computer for a while. I'd been playing with the squirrel, who'd given me special dispensation to play without him in Montana, and the steady stream of discoveries in that game became a nightly joy.
Sunday I started off weak by failing to buy a treadmill. This apparently is something that must be ordered. Then to the hardware store again, and I think I left the bug to finish up the grab bar while I collected my dad's existing pill bottles from the bathroom and began to go through them. And oh my god. Yes, some of them were the same as the nursing home's, but not all. Some bottles were duplicates of each other. Several bottles were past their "discard by" date. And some, of course, were my dad's boner pills, because of course they were. Worryingly, a few of the new medications only had one or two days' worth left after the pill box, which was not a great situation since most of Dad's meds get mailed from a VA hospital and -- did I mention they live in the sticks? -- are slow to arrive. The most critical medication of all didn't even have enough to finish the pill box (oh no). At this point I was counting pills, and realizing that somehow procuring new prescriptions for these things was going to be the very top priority for all of Monday. Somewhere in here, we extended our cabin reservation for a day.
Monday we took dad out to breakfast at his favorite place. We were able to seat him in the corner (with military-based PTSD you always think about this. Always). Service was slow and I was beginning to sense the depths of my new project, so I spent the time rifling through his wallet looking for insurance cards and taking photos of them. Medicare, Veteran's Association. I started with an ordered list of phone calls to make, and I made them, largely failing to transfer the Most Important Prescription after thinking briefly that I'd succeeded (argh). The most useful call was to the RN's desk at the cardiologist. I remember being outside on the porch, watching cobwebs and thinking no, phobia, I have no time for you right now, and verbally going down this long list of medications. When it got to the point of waiting for others to follow up, we went inside and got serious about picking out a treadmill to buy for the folks -- a walking treadmill with long arm-rails, made for rehab and/or the elderly, which is exactly what we've got. We moved furniture around until there was space in their living room for it, and took off for a much-needed afternoon at the gym. This was the best afternoon we had there. We talked while waiting for elk burgers, and agreed that we were running out of physical things to do and were just about to start getting underfoot, so we bought plane tickets to the next day (Tuesday) and went to the gym with actual hope in our hearts of someday being home again.
Had you noticed how I'd been avoiding all the emotion I could, in favor of leaping to the next pragmatic thing, and the next, and the next? That was on purpose. And yet it was very, very hard for me to be there on a one-way ticket. Something in my heart believes that Montana is near-inescapable, or at least takes 10 years of teeth-gritting and work to escape, as it is. It helped to be there with things to do and, for once, in charge, but still. No ticket back. I had a scary moment when I was mailing huckleberry jelly to myself at home, and I remembered my childhood ZIP code just as clearly as my current one, and I wrote down the wrong one even after pondering which was which... oof. So having tickets for home was quite the relief. Back to their place, organized the pills in physically the same order as in the pill planner, and taped up a "how to fill the pill planner" instruction sheet right next to those very shelves. Labeled the shelves; did I mention yet that some intuition made me bring the label-maker along? Yep. I had a feeling I'd be organizing something, and I was deeply and thoroughly right about that.
Tuesday morning a nurse called me back really early, in follow-up, and said I was organized and doing well above average and that four of the prescriptions we needed should be ready that day, and I kind of teared up myself. Then we cooked the folks breakfast (still masked, K still positive for covid) and set up chairs and an improvised table outside so that we could all eat together just once. Then we went to the pharmacy to pick up the four prescriptions that had come through. One of them was hella expensive and I kinda let the folks think the VA was covering it, even though the pharmacy was out of network... guess I lied. On the way back we got the unnerving news that maybe Dad needed to get some kind of test done, that day(?), to get more of the one super-critical prescription? What? Got on the phone with the VA anti-coagulation unit (because that's a thing) and reached a far better understanding about that stuff, which took some panic out of the med situation but added some to our scheduling. Because after that I still had to explain the new pill directions to K, and we ended up leaving for the airport 15 minutes later than we'd hoped to. Importantly, on this day they did finally test out the shower setup, and confirmed that yes; with the grab bar and the chair and the hand-held shower head, K was able to wash my dad's hair. The system worked. Whew.
For the final trick of the trip, our flight out of there was delayed by a couple of hours. I kept my shit together because we had clean clothes and we were still going to get out, and we used the time for late lunch at the airport -- I indulged in a bison burger and huckleberry cider. We asked ourselves whether we knew anyone in Minneapolis, our layover city, and we did! It was in factjustplainuniverse, who happened to have a neighbor's apartment available! With this lined up, I was entirely fine with missing our next flight. Which we did. I had coffee on the airplane, mixing my uppers and downers, and we sprinted across the airport to no avail, and ultimately got to meet justplainuniverse's partner and hang out in a super cute apartment. Fine. That was fine. A silver lining, even, with getting to see an old friend and talk about who we are now in our 40s, while totally creeping on someone else's apartment. Today our second flight went just as planned, and here I am at home dumping it all out.
I'm not DONE with the whole endeavor. I'm still the one making sure all the prescriptions happen, not to mention finding a treadmill installer, and I think my days of blissfully keeping my phone on silent are over. Also I really can't deny it, the generational control dynamic just flipped and I don't know if it will un-flip.
The bug was absolutely amazing -- not only did he do all the things listed above and more, he put up with my dad and the covid risk and did everything I asked, while forgiving my snippiness and petting my head and telling me I was doing a really good job. It was ridiculous, and I'm beyond appreciative. He knows I'm onboard for something similar for his parents someday but still. I could never have done so much with just one person or, personally, held myself together without him. And as for me... I'm sure I did the right thing by going out there, and I'm sure I was hella effective. Kind of in East Coast mode sometimes ("kind but not nice") but I think they understood I felt responsible and had a job to do.
Might have more to say later, if you can believe that, but now it's time to go flump in my own bed.
But it's longer than that because if there's one thing I have Big Feelings about, it's the state we were visiting. And of course my dad. Cobwebs and things. At least the old curmudgeon decided, after the surgery, to let me help him, which he was dead set against before.
Dramatis personae:
K is dad's wife, who was both sick and overwhelmed at first and doesn't tend to think through things very pragmatically to begin with. I like her, but she wasn't the best in this situation.
M is K's visiting friend.
The real work started last Wednesday as, along with one-way plane tickets and car rental etc, I desperately tried to order things from a local-to-there medical supply company that would deliver out to the sticks. I confirmed that it was possible, then badgered both her and M (who texts, unlike K) about the dimensions of various showers and toilet seats. I made M send me pictures of a broken shower door and the shower head, etc. On Thursday I got the larger essentials ordered. Then K, who was just innocently and infuratingly happy about the new Dad-release date of fucking Saturday, innocently asked if we'd be coming by on Friday(!). I came very close to snapping at her because YES, omg YES, we will have exactly half a day to set up the house before he gets home and I was expecting to have like five days. WE WILL BE THERE. Hardware store and then there IMMEDIATELY. She was a little startled and I wanted to throttle her.
Thursday: work work work, pack pack pack. Charge a car using an external charger, just for extra fun (it worked!).
Friday, thank goodness all the planes flew on time, and the medical supply company had delivered by the time we landed. We got to borrow two hours from the universe; I was on about 3 hours of sleep but a whole lot of adrenaline. We got a rental car (which took forever but turned out to be lovely, a brand-new Kia Forte), hit the hardware store and a grocery store, masked up and got straight to work. We were honestly amazing that day! We got a new shower head, non-slip shower mat, shower chair and toilet riser all installed, and we got all the instructions for picking him up from the nursing home the next day, and somehow still found energy for date-night sex. We had rented our own cabin right across the highway from their road, which turned out to be a good call since K never did test negative for covid and they needed all their air spaces.
Saturday we got up early, ate an enormous breakfast, and uh... fetched my dad from the nursing home. I had his wallet, which felt weird. And seeing him felt weird. He teared up and said "I thought I would never see you again" and I was like "Me neither! Here, we brought bags for your stuff". They let him go easily, along with a huge, startling and weirdly organized collection of pills (the more experienced among you should hear ominous music playing), and he immediately started being a pain in the ass by insisting that we were driving him home the wrong way (we ignored him in favor of the GPS). We put him in the small guest house, where he immediately hit his head on a badly placed shelf corner but only gently, and a friend of my dad's came bounding over to see him and said "oh, you're the mask Nazi" to me in greeting. ("Yes," I agreed firmly, "I'm the Nazi regarding everything pragmatic around here right now"). I fled to the hardware store to proceed with putting a grab bar into their bathroom, and we picked up a prescription for K that I "forgot" to ever get paid back for, and a chocolate malt from the Dairy Queen to make dad happy, and pipe insulation to pad that goddamn corner shelf with, and a new pill box. Then back to our own cabin for The Initial Sorting of the Pills. Just the ones from the nursing home (more spooky music plays). I wrote them all in a document as I went. As I was figuring out what to give him that evening, it turned out that he hadn't been given his morning meds, which was a detail you'd think they might have fucking told me about that morning (I howled), so we went down an extra rabbit hole of "for drug X, is it better to take a dose late or skip it"? UGGGGH. Finally I ran a small cup of pills over to him, filled the new pill box with pills for the upcoming week, and we called it a night.
When I say that, what I really mean is that I then brought out the X-box controller and played Animal Well on my computer for a while. I'd been playing with the squirrel, who'd given me special dispensation to play without him in Montana, and the steady stream of discoveries in that game became a nightly joy.
Sunday I started off weak by failing to buy a treadmill. This apparently is something that must be ordered. Then to the hardware store again, and I think I left the bug to finish up the grab bar while I collected my dad's existing pill bottles from the bathroom and began to go through them. And oh my god. Yes, some of them were the same as the nursing home's, but not all. Some bottles were duplicates of each other. Several bottles were past their "discard by" date. And some, of course, were my dad's boner pills, because of course they were. Worryingly, a few of the new medications only had one or two days' worth left after the pill box, which was not a great situation since most of Dad's meds get mailed from a VA hospital and -- did I mention they live in the sticks? -- are slow to arrive. The most critical medication of all didn't even have enough to finish the pill box (oh no). At this point I was counting pills, and realizing that somehow procuring new prescriptions for these things was going to be the very top priority for all of Monday. Somewhere in here, we extended our cabin reservation for a day.
Monday we took dad out to breakfast at his favorite place. We were able to seat him in the corner (with military-based PTSD you always think about this. Always). Service was slow and I was beginning to sense the depths of my new project, so I spent the time rifling through his wallet looking for insurance cards and taking photos of them. Medicare, Veteran's Association. I started with an ordered list of phone calls to make, and I made them, largely failing to transfer the Most Important Prescription after thinking briefly that I'd succeeded (argh). The most useful call was to the RN's desk at the cardiologist. I remember being outside on the porch, watching cobwebs and thinking no, phobia, I have no time for you right now, and verbally going down this long list of medications. When it got to the point of waiting for others to follow up, we went inside and got serious about picking out a treadmill to buy for the folks -- a walking treadmill with long arm-rails, made for rehab and/or the elderly, which is exactly what we've got. We moved furniture around until there was space in their living room for it, and took off for a much-needed afternoon at the gym. This was the best afternoon we had there. We talked while waiting for elk burgers, and agreed that we were running out of physical things to do and were just about to start getting underfoot, so we bought plane tickets to the next day (Tuesday) and went to the gym with actual hope in our hearts of someday being home again.
Had you noticed how I'd been avoiding all the emotion I could, in favor of leaping to the next pragmatic thing, and the next, and the next? That was on purpose. And yet it was very, very hard for me to be there on a one-way ticket. Something in my heart believes that Montana is near-inescapable, or at least takes 10 years of teeth-gritting and work to escape, as it is. It helped to be there with things to do and, for once, in charge, but still. No ticket back. I had a scary moment when I was mailing huckleberry jelly to myself at home, and I remembered my childhood ZIP code just as clearly as my current one, and I wrote down the wrong one even after pondering which was which... oof. So having tickets for home was quite the relief. Back to their place, organized the pills in physically the same order as in the pill planner, and taped up a "how to fill the pill planner" instruction sheet right next to those very shelves. Labeled the shelves; did I mention yet that some intuition made me bring the label-maker along? Yep. I had a feeling I'd be organizing something, and I was deeply and thoroughly right about that.
Tuesday morning a nurse called me back really early, in follow-up, and said I was organized and doing well above average and that four of the prescriptions we needed should be ready that day, and I kind of teared up myself. Then we cooked the folks breakfast (still masked, K still positive for covid) and set up chairs and an improvised table outside so that we could all eat together just once. Then we went to the pharmacy to pick up the four prescriptions that had come through. One of them was hella expensive and I kinda let the folks think the VA was covering it, even though the pharmacy was out of network... guess I lied. On the way back we got the unnerving news that maybe Dad needed to get some kind of test done, that day(?), to get more of the one super-critical prescription? What? Got on the phone with the VA anti-coagulation unit (because that's a thing) and reached a far better understanding about that stuff, which took some panic out of the med situation but added some to our scheduling. Because after that I still had to explain the new pill directions to K, and we ended up leaving for the airport 15 minutes later than we'd hoped to. Importantly, on this day they did finally test out the shower setup, and confirmed that yes; with the grab bar and the chair and the hand-held shower head, K was able to wash my dad's hair. The system worked. Whew.
For the final trick of the trip, our flight out of there was delayed by a couple of hours. I kept my shit together because we had clean clothes and we were still going to get out, and we used the time for late lunch at the airport -- I indulged in a bison burger and huckleberry cider. We asked ourselves whether we knew anyone in Minneapolis, our layover city, and we did! It was in fact
justplainuniverse, who happened to have a neighbor's apartment available! With this lined up, I was entirely fine with missing our next flight. Which we did. I had coffee on the airplane, mixing my uppers and downers, and we sprinted across the airport to no avail, and ultimately got to meet justplainuniverse's partner and hang out in a super cute apartment. Fine. That was fine. A silver lining, even, with getting to see an old friend and talk about who we are now in our 40s, while totally creeping on someone else's apartment. Today our second flight went just as planned, and here I am at home dumping it all out. I'm not DONE with the whole endeavor. I'm still the one making sure all the prescriptions happen, not to mention finding a treadmill installer, and I think my days of blissfully keeping my phone on silent are over. Also I really can't deny it, the generational control dynamic just flipped and I don't know if it will un-flip.
The bug was absolutely amazing -- not only did he do all the things listed above and more, he put up with my dad and the covid risk and did everything I asked, while forgiving my snippiness and petting my head and telling me I was doing a really good job. It was ridiculous, and I'm beyond appreciative. He knows I'm onboard for something similar for his parents someday but still. I could never have done so much with just one person or, personally, held myself together without him. And as for me... I'm sure I did the right thing by going out there, and I'm sure I was hella effective. Kind of in East Coast mode sometimes ("kind but not nice") but I think they understood I felt responsible and had a job to do.
Might have more to say later, if you can believe that, but now it's time to go flump in my own bed.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-04 04:54 pm (UTC)All the love and support. You and the bug were mighty, the squirrel gave that extra bit of support with the gaming permission, and![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
justplainuniverse had you covered for your travel woes. I am so very glad you have such people in your life.
I'm here to be dumped at like this whenever it's helpful to you.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-05 04:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-05 02:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-05 04:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-05 03:33 pm (UTC)Thank you for writing it up and sharing
no subject
Date: 2024-07-05 04:29 pm (UTC)It's all true, and I'm hugely grateful that we came back to a four-day weekend because I need a lot of food / writing / napping / crafting / quiet.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-05 08:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-06 01:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-07 06:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-09 01:38 pm (UTC)