09-10-2013, 09:24 AM
What an idiot that community lady was. Some people. :roll:
At nursing homes, you can sign off to waive tube feeding. Mom is set on keeping Dad at the home he is at now, despite the cost, convinced that he will only live another couple of months. The cost is about $8K, which doesn't include extras, and there are a lot of those. For example, mom does his laundry at home to save some. The facility does seem to be quite caring and the trouble to move him now would be excessive. My generally paranoid mind imagines them tube feeding him at night, just to keep the rent coming in, but they get plenty of patients so that's just my morbid imagination on the run.
Mom says that she feels they did all they wanted to do, that they didn't have a 'bucket list', and that it's time. She spends her mornings with Dad but can't watch him eat because it's 'sickening' - she gets pretty broken up when she describes it. My dad has always been a good eater and she says she can see his frustration about not being able to swallow. She goes home in the afternoon and rests. She's been eating voraciously, surely to keep her energy up (she's typically a very light eater). I'll be by again tomorrow night, and my cousins, who are in S'vale too, took her out to dinner last night. They are quite close and very supportive. Coincidentally, he just lost his mom, my dad's sister, and some of their friends brought over a lot of casseroles that they can't finish as a gesture of sympathy, so they'll have my mom over tonight. They just returned from my Aunt's funeral in Hawaii last week.
I find myself vacillating between 4 of Kubler-Ross's 5 stages, omitting bargaining because there's nothing to bargain, and frankly Buddhism doesn't work like that. Being a psych student, and also being reminded about Kubler-Ross's work from Cole's mom, I'm all too familiar with grief stages. Strangely, I'm keep thinking of an episode of the Simpsons when Homer goes through the stages in a minute as Lisa describes them.
Writing has been a bitch. I can zing out forum responses and curt emails, I can't stay focused for a full paragraph of any weight. Ironically, I'm working on a cover story that has been in our queue for a few years - it's on a style that derives from one of my favorite legends, Outlaws of the Marsh, and I've been fantasizing about all of the different metaphors and such I can pull in from that epic tale to structure the article since we did the first interview so many years ago. Now, I'm just trying to get through it.
I'm going to go hit happy hour at the brewery with a partner-in-crime tonight, and I plan to work a big EDM event this Saturday to stick my head in a big fat bass subwoofer and forget it all for a moment.
Now it's a waiting game.
At nursing homes, you can sign off to waive tube feeding. Mom is set on keeping Dad at the home he is at now, despite the cost, convinced that he will only live another couple of months. The cost is about $8K, which doesn't include extras, and there are a lot of those. For example, mom does his laundry at home to save some. The facility does seem to be quite caring and the trouble to move him now would be excessive. My generally paranoid mind imagines them tube feeding him at night, just to keep the rent coming in, but they get plenty of patients so that's just my morbid imagination on the run.
Mom says that she feels they did all they wanted to do, that they didn't have a 'bucket list', and that it's time. She spends her mornings with Dad but can't watch him eat because it's 'sickening' - she gets pretty broken up when she describes it. My dad has always been a good eater and she says she can see his frustration about not being able to swallow. She goes home in the afternoon and rests. She's been eating voraciously, surely to keep her energy up (she's typically a very light eater). I'll be by again tomorrow night, and my cousins, who are in S'vale too, took her out to dinner last night. They are quite close and very supportive. Coincidentally, he just lost his mom, my dad's sister, and some of their friends brought over a lot of casseroles that they can't finish as a gesture of sympathy, so they'll have my mom over tonight. They just returned from my Aunt's funeral in Hawaii last week.
I find myself vacillating between 4 of Kubler-Ross's 5 stages, omitting bargaining because there's nothing to bargain, and frankly Buddhism doesn't work like that. Being a psych student, and also being reminded about Kubler-Ross's work from Cole's mom, I'm all too familiar with grief stages. Strangely, I'm keep thinking of an episode of the Simpsons when Homer goes through the stages in a minute as Lisa describes them.
Writing has been a bitch. I can zing out forum responses and curt emails, I can't stay focused for a full paragraph of any weight. Ironically, I'm working on a cover story that has been in our queue for a few years - it's on a style that derives from one of my favorite legends, Outlaws of the Marsh, and I've been fantasizing about all of the different metaphors and such I can pull in from that epic tale to structure the article since we did the first interview so many years ago. Now, I'm just trying to get through it.
I'm going to go hit happy hour at the brewery with a partner-in-crime tonight, and I plan to work a big EDM event this Saturday to stick my head in a big fat bass subwoofer and forget it all for a moment.
Now it's a waiting game.
Shadow boxing the apocalypse