Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Four recent LJ entries started and never finished, and the one I manage to get to is this one ... Please excuse typos; I can't seem to type worth #$%^ this week and my keyboard is acting finicky as well -- and I'm too sleepy to do a proper job of proofreading and editing right now.

Wednesday night as I was pulling out of the driveway to go to band rehearsal (she said she heard me leaving), Mom fell on her face. Three (three and a half?) hours later, when I got home, I found her there, called 911, sent her off to the ER in an ambulance, waited a few hours for them to finish checking her out (shoulder sprain, bloody nose, sore neck), and went and brought her home.

She had a bad rest of the week. A total of four falls in five days. When she fell on Sunday and complained that her neck hurt more than it had before falling, she went of to the local ER again. This time I managed to convince the ER doctor to check for more than fall-caused injuries (something I didn't think to do a few days earlier), and sure enough he found an infection and arranged to have her transported to Anne Arundel (since the Bowie emergency room is freestanding and not attached to a hospital).

Usually when this happens, she spends a few nights in the hospital, and comes home with a prescripton for antibiotics. This time it's going to be more complicated (but, we all hope, better in the long run). When she's well enough to leave the hospital she'll spend an as-yet-undetermined amount of time in an inpatient rehab facility (most likely on Maryland's Eastern Shore, close to my sister and her two kids) getting intense physical therapy every day (pretty sure Mrs Allergic-To-Exercise is going to hate that, but afterward maybe she'll be able to move better). After that, she might get regular PT every week, either in-home or someplace I ave to drive her to, but that decision will come later.

Ultimately she should wind up in better shape than before she fell last week. At the moment, there's a lot of figuring stuff out, deciding things, wait-and-see, phone calls, and hospital visits. And one very mopey, needy dog who wants me to go bring Mom home right now please.

We still need to work out ways to make this house safer for Mom to live in. And I'm pretty sure that means getting somebody else in here to look after her, somebody healthier than me and better at geriatric care, either to take over or to augment me.

And how am I doing? Not yet caught up from a nearly sleepless weekend (at one point I'd slept five hours of the previous sixty), feeling more stress than I realize was piling up (last night I thought I was doing okay until I slowed down for a minute and it all caught up to me), with no stamina (when I do et a solid night of sleep, I wake up feeling robust and energetic and ready to tackle my to-do list for a change, but a mere two or three hours later I've used up all my spoons and start crashing again), and with still too much Mom-stuff to deal with to work on the backlog of taking-care-of-myself just yet. Could be worse, really. At some point things will slow down, I hope.

There's other news about my life, but this is the most "now" bit. And I've got some non-news thoughts and ideas to start writing if I ever start thinking them in chunks longer than a hundred and forty characters again -- I've been more active on Twitter lately (@dglenn) than on FB, LJ, DW, etc. (and will take part in the second queerness-and-Faith scheduled Twitter conversation (hashtag #qfaith) instigated by J Mase III this Sunday evening). At some point I need to start copying selected Tweets to here to let folks know what I get up to over there. (Not my whole stream -- there are too many fragmented back-and-forth replies in it to want to put every last drop here.) Before I return to long-form blogging like I've been meaning to (really!), I need to get back to feeling like I have the time and attention span again. In the meantime, I hope I can keep up on Sunday.

(I met J Mase III online (and hope to meet him in person someday) because of his poem "Josephine (What the Bible Says About Transpeople)".)