[There is no real quiz bowl content in this week’s edition.]
At 8:30 Sunday night, I sat down in the passenger seat of the car, and said "I can't believe we got away with it."
Six hours earlier, my mother and I arranged to have my father taken out of the long term care facility and put in his car. We drove him back home, and got him into the house. This was not our plan. This was not what we thought should have been done, but this was going to be his first time back home since December.
I haven't really mentioned my dad in a while here because he was sort of in a state of equilibrium. He had gotten through the stroke, had another mini one, and then managed to get in quick succession: probably COVID, probably RSV, and then thanks to some combination of those, a never-before-seen round of shingles. But since bottoming out with that in February, he's been slowly working his strength back.
After months of not really getting out of bed, he started doing more than just the recommended PT. And he's been a lot more focused on good days than he was before. He still has his bad days, and when they come they're not good at all, but they're fewer than we saw last year. But that doesn’t stop us from feeling guilty about not bringing him home, or not visiting more regularly.
Part of me knows he is not coming home, part of me knows he's got too many roadblocks in front of him, chief among them that my mother can't provide him the support he needs all day. But I also have been on the other end of that in the hospital, where you're being checked in on with frightening regularity, when you’re not sure if you’re making it home. If you don't have hope in that situation, and something tangible to punch against, to infuriate, you don't come back from it.
But we were doing this against our will, my mother and I. My aunt visited for most of April and May, ostensibly to help out my mother, but she really gave my mother something to punch against. My mother at 87 is fiercely independent, and having taken care of two sisters to their end, really didn't need the help my aunt was providing. When my aunt got it in her head to try to bring my dad home for Memorial Day dinner, and enlisted my cousin to drive him back, behind our backs, we flipped the table. We managed to kibosh the plan (there were going to be 25 people coming, and we'd have to both cook and take care of his needs throughout, and of course, having this sprung on us as I flew to Atlanta felt like splitting the cooler heads so they wouldn't prevail.), but before we got wind of the plan they had said it to my father. Both my aunt and cousin beat a hasty retreat home before the sun was down Memorial Day. But they had put the idea in his head.
So there we were on Father's Day, trying to do right by him, and trying to make sure he didn't fall and knock back all his hard-won progress. Feeling guilty because we hadn't gotten him home yet, but angry because we were forced into it.
The stair step
When you look at my folks' house, you are going to see that they built it on the expectation of having more kids than they did, but you'll also see that they did not build it for their old age. Everything is spread out, it was built on the side of a slope for long vistas, and every way into the house has at least one step up. All the handicapped accessibility that 1969 could not give a damn about. So all the exercises they were doing all this time to get him able to come home.... orthogonal to task. He may be able to walk 50 feet, but that wouldn't even get him from the bedroom to kitchen, leaving him in the entry hallway right in front of the main stairs down. They weren't letting him climb stairs, and we certainly couldn't have him do that even in therapy with spotters.
When we got him out of the car, he wanted to walk to the front door (40 feet) We agreed only under the conditions that he had his walker in front of him, one of us opening doors and clearing the path in front of that, and one of us with the wheelchair behind him. So our little caravan made it about 20 feet before he decided he'd better save his strength for inside. Thank God for that.
We still had to get him up the one step, but at least if we rolled him into position, it was just one effort. We were able to set it up correctly, walker on the doormat, the wheelchair on the outside landing, and us in position to catch him in either fall possibility. It essentially got rid of the step from the equation, and my dad just had to stand up from essentially a low bench and grab on to a rail. As problems go pretty easy.
If you're wondering where my wife the nurse was in this, she was taking Catie to see her dad, who was also in the hospital. He had fallen a couple weeks back and scratched his cornea on landing, and has been in the hospital since. She wasn't enthused by our plans, but she conceded it would work if we were careful. They were coming back for dinner.
We didn't do much prior to dinner with him, it was just an hour of talking, like we'd done at the hospital, except he could see the bird feeder outside, his buddy the cat, and the house. In some of his worse moments he'd gained the delusion that we were demolishing his house rather than my grandmother's house in Houston. Hopefully we've quashed that delusion for a while, maybe permanently, since we drove him past the new Sheetz that occupies that corner.
My mother and I made a meal for five: Baked salmon, Spanakopita Scalloped potatoes (exactly like it sounds, the layer between the potatoes is homegrown spinach, feta, dill, oregano, nutmeg butter) , asparagus (not from the garden), salad (from the garden), and a raspberry pie (from the bushes along the driveway.) While I fretted over the potatoes, which I made way too tall a dish of, he had rolled himself into the living room, and fell asleep. After I decided there was nothing more to be done but wait for cooking to conclude, I sat down at the kitchen table. And two minutes later, my dad came walking in, pushing the wheelchair backwards in front of him. I hit a tone and volume I hadn't heard since Catie was three and running towards the end of the parking lot where it slopes down hard to the street. "WAIT!...Why don't we use the wheelchair as a wheelchair?!" And with that he realized what he was doing, and sat down again.
We waited for my brood to arrive, and realized the potatoes weren't done, but everything else was. As things go pretty normal, we took the top layer off, found the rest weren't tough, and proceeded to eat. My mother plotted to turn the remaining berries into a pie for the nurses on his floor. He got presents for Fathers Day, though some of them were ones from Christmas. It was a weirdly normal Sunday dinner.
By eight, he was feeling tired, and my wife took him out on the wheelchair the proper medical way over a single step, and we helped him into the car. We drove him over, and as the sun slid over the hospital roof, we waited for them to take him in. I slumped into the seat of the car, and let my mother know we had dodged a bullet. If he had decided that he wasn't going back, we'd have had an ugly fight, and it would have ended badly with us having to remove him by force. But for right now, he realized he was better off at the hospital, building up his stamina. That's the goal now, to be able to do this trip repeatedly and better each time. He still needs a goal to push against.
The thing about this was that I knew about the plan since Friday, when my mother told me my aunt was encouraging him to ask for this. And like those moments after hearing of the Memorial Day plan, I was rattled. Though I had worked a full evening in the garden and yard, I couldn't rest, or even feel tired. Finally, at 2:30, I put myself in bed. And because I couldn't sleep, I flicked through facebook. And then I got a message.
Some people you have as friends because you just want to have warning if they're near, it's not dread, you just don't want to be surprised. A message of just "hello" from them at 3am is one of those pit of your stomach worries. And so now feeling just enough of sleep to feel like it was disrupted, I scrolled back in facebook, and found that they were dealing with a parent who had just had a stroke, in fact both of them.
But because facebook is for keeping friends all around the world, but they had no one in their timezone up. It wasn't that I had any special knowledge of the situation, it was just that I was awake, and struggling through the long-term effects. So I started typing, everything I could tell them about what they were about to face, and how it's going to be tough, but you have to keep your optimism and hope. After about 40 minutes, I finally hit send, and almost immediately fell asleep.
Next week I'm going to be in Sandusky, Ohio again for my daughter's dance nationals, enjoying the irony of the waterpark named for a desert. I will have written the entire article for next week shortly after this, and queued it up. We will return to normal programming next week.