But now I have a minute to actually write about them. First of all Mrs. the Poet is mostly OK, she’s in the hospital because of the not-mostly part. We now have proof that Mrs. the Poet would deny she’s in pain while being eaten alive by a monster, because she was. Denying she was in pain, not that there are any monsters in the house to munch on her.
Let’s start from something close to the beginning. After getting out of rehab in September Mrs. the Poet had to wear a diaper because she couldn’t get to a toilet fast enough to not pee her pants. Or sometimes poop her pants. The fact that we have a pre-ADA house and the bathroom doors are not wide enough to get through with a rolling walker (the walker I had after the wreck was not a rolling walker and had no problems with the bathroom door but that’s a different story), has a definite bearing on this story.
Anywho, because she can’t get from the bed to the toilet quickly she’s been sleeping on our recliner-couch in the living room with a commode next to it, which was good as long as she ate and drank and consumed enough calories to maintain her health. And I think y’all can see where this story is headed, but don’t get in too big a hurry to get to the final destination that you miss taking the journey. We did good for about a month, and then I think she got tired of doing her business in the living room in front of the picture window (with the blinds down and closed so nobody could see in, but that wasn’t the point) and started limiting her intake to limit the number of times she bared her butt in the living room.
Now a contributing factor was our different sleep schedules, I’m nocturnal and she’s an Early Bird. Before her problems with UTI and her tummy she would sometimes get up about the time I was going to bed. Now I kept the same -to-bed time as before but her rising was much later, so there was a considerable period she sat wet on the couch until she could nag me awake before I was through sleeping, leading to a general lethargy on my part until after Mrs. the Poet went to bed until she started shifting her sleep to later in the evening but still not much past midnight. This let me get a few more hours of shut-eye, but still not enough to let me be my cheerful happy self /sarcasm. I’ve never been cheerful or happy since the wreck and TBI in 2001, but moving on. I think that the periods she sat in the wet diaper might have had an effect on her outlook on life, and she started consuming less fluids, which led to a possible UTI and rashes and (worse) skin ulcers. And she also started eating less because food was still tasting bad, but I think she just didn’t want to poop in front of the window.
And the combination of not enough fluids and calories caught up with her and she just got too weak to stand with the walker when I pulled her to her feet from the couch. And too weak to stand means too weak to use the potty because she has to stand to get her pants down and diaper off and butt wiped (she has to be standing clear of the potty for me to get in and clean her). And Tuesday of last week she fell getting to the potty and had to be helped to her feet by the EMTs and didn’t get her diaper changed and had to sit in a dirty diaper all day, and the next day and the next and on until Sunday when I called for an ambulance to transport her to the hospital where they cut her clothes and dirty diaper off and found massive skin infections and other things I don’t even want to think about, all because she was embarrassed to potty in front of pulled and closed blinds. [exasperated sigh] And this makes several trips to the hospital because of potty issues. The first trip at the beginning of Summer was over her not drinking enough and getting a UTI, the second trip was because the antibiotics she took for the UTI caused her to have C. diff, and now because she was embarrassed about going potty in front of the window (with the blinds down and closed). Now the first two were because she was actually sick from diseases, but the last trip was because she was sick because she was embarrassed. And because while she was still relatively healthy she didn’t want to go to the hospital. And now she’s practically immobile in a hospital bed with 3 IVs, one in each arm and a third in her hand. [another exasperated sigh]
And if she hadn’t been able to convince the nurses I wanted to have her transported on Tuesday instead of waiting until Sunday I would be in jail now for elder abuse. And I still want her to be healthy and sleeping in my bed even if we only sleep for a couple of hours together, because we belong in the same bed, sleeping together.
Witch on a Bicycle 