This is probably bad news

They’re getting ready to transfer Mrs. the Poet from the hospital to a nursing home. And it will probably be the one she will die in. She’s not showing a lot of improvement except that they were able to give her a shower where I couldn’t. I think that had more to do with them and where they gave her the shower than with her, because it’s very hard to get Mrs. the Poet in and out of our shower, because of the small door to the bathroom and the size of the shower. I might have been able to get her clean if I stripped down and took a shower with her, but with my lack of upper body strength I have my doubts.

Anyway, I was only able to get to one of the nursing homes on the list they gave me, the one closest to the house. I can just barely walk to this one because I can rest when I get there before I have to walk home, and it is an easy drive for my son. The only one of the children living in the US who would have a problem is the daughter living out in BFE, which for the purposes of this post is Aubrey TX. I might have spelled that wrong, so when I get the actual spelling of the town I will edit this post with the right spelling but leave this mess.

Getting back to Mrs. the Poet, they had to do a skin graft over the infected hole in the top of her foot while they were checking to see if the infection went to the bone or just to the exposed tendons. And yes I know that doesn’t speak well of my level of care, but I did the best I could with bandaging her up and changing her socks, including buying her new socks in a larger size to fit over her swollen feet. When her feet got so swollen that I couldn’t fit my slippers over her feet I knew for a fact we had a problem.

As I posted earlier, a big part of the problem is my lack of upper body strength. I have a very low lift and carry limit, and that frustrates me no end. Some of this is from old injuries, some of it is from lack of exercise probably due to those old injuries making exercise a literal pain. I have shoulder injuries that make raising my arms straight over my head impossible, and signaling a right turn on my bike where the arm is parallel to the ground from the shoulder is also a pain if I have to hold the signal for more than a few seconds. So no upper body strength, and those injuries were from the Aughties and early Teens of this century.

And I really need to put a load of laundry in the washer, so I’ll cut this one short now and maybe do another post after visiting Mrs. the Poet this afternoon.

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Things have been happening

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.

Sorry about the radio silence

Mrs. the Poet was released (kicked out by her insurance) from the rehab home and I’ve been kinda busy with her needs for the last bit. I read my e-mails and web comics and then I collapse in bed until it’s time to get up and do it again. Unless you’re into stories about changing an old woman’s diapers because she can’t get up to use the toilet, it doesn’t make for riveting reading. I get to sleep about 3 or 4 in the morning, wake up by 0900 and drag through the daily routine of maintaining life functions, turn the TV on in time for Wheel Of Fortune so Mrs. the Poet can watch it, then turn it off when the daily insanity of network TV starts. Sometimes I turn it back on for the news and weather forecast.

With my own limited mobility I get worn out taking care of Mrs. the Poet. And I neglect my diet while trying to find something Mrs. the Poet can eat, because most of my regular diet sets off Mrs. the Poet’s delicate tummy. Seriously my rotgut diet seriously upsets her delicate gut biome and has her pooping frequently. As she puts it my digestive system is like the bottom of a bathtub while hers is like an empty egg shell. I’m still hydrating to excess to prevent kidney stones even though mine look like yellow Tic Tacs and while I know I’m passing one they don’t hurt. It’s still better to not have them, because even though they don’t hurt as in cause me pain they still could damage a kidney. And that wouldn’t be good.

And that’s about all I have to say today.

Mrs. the Poet is free from her prison

Not that she was in actual prison, just in isolation until her C. diff infection cleared up which it did yesterday. So she did some PT in the gym this morning. She still has a long way to go, but at least she’s on the road to recovery. Now she’s complaining to me about not having enough pants. The problem is her clothes have to be marked with her name so they can be washed and returned from the rehab center’s laundry. And most of her pants are too dark for the marker to show up.

So I ordered another 3 pack of sweatpants for her and also for me. Because I’m running out of clothes that fit, because everything I own is old and worn out. Now I will have clothes that fit and are not worn out. They are due on Sunday, but Mrs. the Poet’s pants will be here on Friday.

And that’s pretty much all I have for today, sorry for not being more interesting while my wife is sick.

Mrs. the Poet is almost ready for PT

Right now they had her in the rehab center for a week and her diarrhea is almost gone, she has to be clear of that before she can use the Gym for her physical therapy. We brought her peanut butter and crackers so she can get more protein to build up her endurance. The protein drink we got her makes her diarrhea worse, so scratch that. Also she has this thing where meat just makes her full which is why we are looking for alternative protein sources she can eat. She did manage to eat what the rehab center calls a cheesesteak last night, which is great improvement. And I got to give her a kiss last night for the first time since before she was transported to the hospital the second time back on 8/8. So it’s been like almost a month since we kissed.

While I was composing this I was also playing Shadowrun as The Old Man and just slashed the $h!+ out of a bad guy with my katana because I was within the lethal splash range for my grenade launcher. Another player was able to draw a bead on her and burst fire her to a lingering death. This accomplishes the payout goal of the run, get her teeth and fingers to ID her for the Johnson. We’re just brining the teeth in a convenient container, and the fingers still attached to the hands. The torso and her implants were not part of the bargain, so we’re keeping the implants to get access to her finances to make this run pay something other than pure karma. We had to end the session early so we find out how much nuyen and karma we get next week.

Hard as it may be to believe I haven’t been thinking about the Sprint-T in a while, worrying about my wife was using up those processor cycles I would have been spending on thinking about the car. So, no progress on the Sprint-T. It’s about time for me to fix dinner so I’ll call this one over for now.

Allergies are knocking me down and almost knocking Mrs. the Poet out

This will have to be another short post. I’m having allergy eyes which makes seeing the post a bit rough. But Mrs. the Poet has allergy tummy from post nasal drip carrying the pollens to her tummy via the back of her throat, which is even worse. I can barely see but she’s on meds for vomiting and diarrhea and still puking and pooping at all hours of the day or night. All I have to deal with is sometimes I get a film over one or both eyes and I can’t see for a minute or two, which is annoying but nothing like not being able to eat or drink anything without getting sick to your stomach and constant nausea. This makes me feel bad because there’s nothing I can do except try to get her to drink water and take her meds when they’re due. Also both of us are a little tired from lack of calories because Mrs. the Poet can’t eat and I feel guilty about eating when she can’t.

Well that pretty much covers everything I can post to my blog. Except my dent from where the tumor used to be is giving me fits from the nerve that got trapped and is now doing the tingling and burning routine of nerve damage. I’m used to ignoring pain I can’t do anything about, so I can ignore this too, with practice. I just could do with less frequent “practice”.

Finally got Mrs. the Poet to go to the doctor

Since I haven’t been keeping you in the loop, Mrs. the Poet has been sick. Like not real sick, just kinda poopy and listless, and borderline dehydrated but even water tastes yucky. Well they don’t think she’s gonna die and her symptoms don’t come close to COVID, so that’s been ruled out. She has a mild fever, and I’m still as healthy as a horse, so at most she has some kind of allergy with maybe an opportunistic infection on top of that so the prescribed anti-nausea, anti-diarrheal, and something for the infection they aren’t sure she has but are pretty sure she might have. Like I said her whole diagnosis pivots on the point that I sleep with her and kiss her and I’m not showing any sign of her illness. I eat just about anything with no stomach problems even though I can barely chew because I don’t have many teeth. So whatever she has is presumed to not be communicable. So if she improves enough to travel she’s not going to be a plague rat spreading disease, either. Personally, I think she has allergies because her nose is also running and some of it is post-nasal drip down the back of her throat. This is probably the source of her digestive woes.

I finally got something to use to function test the lights I got, and I’m Not Happy with the results. The turn signal lights work as expected, low until the high is activated so I’ll just leave the low on all the time as DRL and connect the high to the turn signals. The headlights are a bigger problem, half don’t work at all and the other ones only have high beams. And the warrantee has expired on the headlights. So I’m at an impasse for my lights right now, and also I’m not 100% on those test leads working all the time or that I have the polarity right on the power supply output.

Late addendum: Mrs. the Poet has had 2 servings of applesauce since noon and everything is still where it’s supposed to be, no unfortunate discharges.