I'm tired of cooking/preparing 3 meals a day. It's just the two of us but boy oh boy can that woman eat!! She stays slimish, I get fattish. It's bad enough I do everything here much less start making her one thing and me the other. At times I feel guilty when I buy her fast food cuz of the nutritional value....not to mention I eat it too.
pamz, good luck with the Dr., Moms doc doesn't like to prescribe xanax or ativan. He just upped her regular meds plus started her on a Parkinson's med.
It wasn't too bad of a night, mom only got up once but it was enough to keep me awake for a few hours. We have night lights in the hallway which cast a glow...and shadows. Picture this; it's 4:00 a.m., something awakens you, you lay there quietly listening... you see a shadow slowly moving towards your room. Almost zombie like... you hear "swoosh swoosh" you see shadowy hands out stretched coming towards you. haha, it was all I could do to lay there silently while she walked right up to my bed and stared. Yeegads! freaked me out!!
Ah, is it Monday? Not that it matters to me, I just lose track of days, weeks, months and apparently years... I think it was 2012 when I first arrived here.
cap, your childhood memories are, dare I say, awesome? kind of gross too but that's life eh? squirrel? does it taste like chicken?
My dad brought home a giant tom turkey, gosh, this is like 40 some years ago...he chopped it's head off and that turkey ran around headless for an hour. He was awfully tough to eat also.... I've been scarred ever since
ive been told a million times by my mom that animal feed , flour and cornmeal came in cloth bags that were of a grade of cloth suitable for making clothing . ( during ww11 ) .
my mom used to admit that if it werent for us visiting ednas house a couple times a week us kids would have starved . edna didnt mind if we got into her fridge and i vividly remember scarfing down a half stick of butter or drinking ketchup from ednas fridge . when my own family was younger aunt edna would send us home with her outdated frozen food . there never failed to be several frozen squirrels with their heads skinned but still attached . uncle red loved the cheeks , brain and tongue from the squirrel heads . make no mistake , we made meals with the squirrels but there was always a lot of cynical chatter about dinner being squirrel heads tonight . one time about 2 months from my divorce i happened to notice the ex dumping a half a pot of coffee down the drain to make a new batch . i freaking flipped out . my god on what planet does one toss coffee down the drain ? h*ll my leftover iced coffee goes back thru the coffee pot in the morning . leftover food is twisted back into the next nights dinner where i come from .
one time when we had our first new baby at home the ex refused to go grocery shopping because we only had about 20 bucks to shop with . i jumped on the motorcycle and went to the store , shopped carefully and came home with two large paper bags of food . one of my sons will still gratefully eat squirrel heads , the other has to have starbucks singles on his kitchen shelf . im bettin the one who eats squirrel heads will build himself a house before the other one does .
i like ww11 stories . the bbc online newspaper has a section called ww11 , the peoples war . it contains thousands of firsthand accounts from british people who survived even more difficult times than the americans .
our family always had a little slop bucket on the counter for kitchen waste . we always kept some super generic dog food around ( old roy ) to feed the dog but wed generously treat him to the slop bucket occasionally . the slop bucket was exclusively eggshells and coffee grounds , maybe a little scorched bacon grease . we have had no less than 3 dogs simply leave home in disgust and move in with a neighbor . they hated us too . the family of four would drive past on our trike and yell obscene things at them . the sh*tty looks we got from those animals were priceless .
had an old tom turkey try to kick my a** once in my own garage . old sid ( vicious ) . sid ended up in the freezer till christmastime wheras he became the main ingredient in the biggest pot of turkey spaghetti in white sauce youve ever seen . fed about 25 people . had an annoying billy goat who had a similar demise , cept he ended up as about 45 linear feet of link sausage . it was good sausage , happy ending for everyone but " bill " .
Tomorrow I will ask Dad what he needs and I will place the order on-line and have it delivered to his house by UPS.... yes, there might be a delivery charge and I know Dad won't like that.... [sigh].
fligirl, I think it was awesome your mom asked to help! even if it was just for a little bit. Don't feel too sorry for me ;)... my mother is several years ahead of yours and ... well, we take turns :) man, I feel kind of awful for saying that :O
herb, I know it isn't easy and I can't imagine losing all that you did. I can only hope that somehow in our after life we get a small tiny reward of peace.
The CNA brings her medication in the yogurt that she asks for. They are extremely kind. I brought her down to the dining room tonight and my God, there are white table linens on the tables, with actual 'servers' ....she had a better supper than I had. I saw cranberry juice in the glass and the first course, yes the first course, was real onion soup, with lots of onions! What does she do? She complains she can't eat 'those things' (i.e., they had thrown some croutons in to soften them up) ....the server was a very young girl (I'm thinking they are volunteers from the schools around here) and she asked her in a nice voice to at least try it to see if she doesn't like it and if she didn't, they'd take it back and get rid of the croutons.
Not only that, but she has a friend! And apparently she has a few friends. This Whoa is me is getting a bit tiring. It's not like they don't go outside, they do. Lots of the PT is done outside near a (get this one) KOI pond. I want to live there!
At any rate, she's getting so much better that I'm afraid she may just be coming home which will totally upset me.
I give up! :)
It's hard, very hard. I so get it. Today has not been a good day here either. I'm so d*mn sick of her asking where her d*mn chair is even though it is RIGHT THERE, it makes me stomach tie up in knots. The non-stop pacing as soon as the sun goes down... oh mother of all things that drives me batsh*t crazy. She'll stand right in front of me, marching up/down/up/down and tell me how bad her legs hurt but for the love all that's good in this world, she will not sit down. I hate hate hate the pacing. It numbs me as well as fills me with and anxious dread thinking the next fall is going to be the last. Either I knock her out with heavy duty drugs (which her dr won't prescribe so that's out) or I follow her around... which is just impossible, so I clear the area of any things she may trip on and pray she doesn't. I'm the one that needs to go for a long walk in the cool air to rid my body of some of the pent up angst.
Her transport chair came with a built in seat belt. In order for her to sit there and eat I use it to keep her still. She'll finish all her dinner this way and feed herself.
I've read that the pacing is just another one of those phases but man oh man this is the longest phase of them all and the up all night. That will be my undoing.
I know mom cannot remember anything for longer than a minute but she wears oxygen now and its been over a month or more and she keeps blowing and picking her nose and making it bleed and cannot understand why she is bleeding. I don't know how many times I have said to use the KY jelly and its like she has never seen it before. I keep telling her to stop digging in her nose but she continues to do so.
I sound awful I know. I just had to talk to someone who understands what this is like because as you all know no body understands what this is like..
The only thing I feel like I have control over is what I eat and how much exercise I do. I recently lost over 26 lbs which this is more like how I should be. I am in a lot of pain and I know I should take it a little easier but I just feel I have to do it.
Its my release and I seem to still be in a bad mood all the time. I really feel so badly and I am trying not to say to much to my mom because I don't want to yell at her or make her feel bad. Thanks for listening
Your Mom is certainly still keeping a good eye on you isn't she? She probably worked out that it was cheaper to spend the $100 than have to use more wood that you could sell heating the bunker. You definitely should write that book!
I miss my Daddy's stories about the old days too...and Mama's...so many of the aunts and uncles have passed as well who used to talk about those days...how I miss those stories.
I'm glad you are feeling better Jeanette...yesterday my ankle was acting up on me and for most of the day it honestly felt like I had either sprained or broke it...it must have been a pinched nerve because after a decent nights rest I felt ok today..but yesterday I was worrying if something had happened to my ankle what on earth was I going to do...it was all I could do to change and bathe Mama because the ankle hurt so bad....I think you and I live parallel lives sometimes J... :)
I miss intelligent conversation, heck I miss any sort of conversation...when my carer comes over for those few short hours 3 times a week I think I talk my head off to her. haha, the other day I jokingly told her it's like "paying for a friend". Sad thing was she said I wasn't the only caregiver that had said that to her. We tend to get so isolated... I think I can speak "dog" better than English now. hehe, reminds me of the movie, "The Emperor's New Groove" where Crunk speaks squirrel "squeak squeakity squeak squeakum squeakers".
Cap, I love your stories about Edna, I'm tellin ya, write a memoir of all this stuff and leave it for your grandkids or heck, publish it!
My grandmother, also named Edna, had a big cherry farm here in Oregon, she'd tell us how they would feed the soldiers would camp out in the orchard and he'd feed them big pots of horse stew (meat meat was I guess very hard to come by during that time) and in trade they'd do farm work for them. Oh, also how when fishing the Columbia River they'd use a horse pulled tractor to pull the giant Sturgeon in. Nowadays Sturgeon are pretty scarce here...
Truly that is one thing I miss the most... hearing about the old days. My dad could talk and would talk for hours about them, him being in the Navy witnessing the first nuclear bomb in the pacific, fishing off the ship...
I think my antibiotics finally kicked in since my head doesn't feel like it's going to explode from pressure and my eyeballs no longer hurt :) What if I really really get sick? What then? That scares me also.
youre struggling now but you will be content beyond words when your mother is no longer alive . my mothers wisdom helps me every day of my life even tho shes gone . just last week she told me to styrofoam my bunker walls . lol . her voice in my head said " theres no need to freeze your ass off to make a point about frugality . get 100 bucks worth of styrofoam d*ckhead ..