dcotton87's Xanga Site

Weblog

Saturday, 28 March 2009

Facing Reality

Went and visited grandma and grandpa in the nursing home today. Grandma's been there about a week now, and grandpa went earlier this week. They have their own room and it's starting to look homey and cozy, but it pains me that they have to be there at all. Grandma's memory problems are getting worse. Grandpa told me that this morning grandma asked him how many kids they have. And he's had to explain to her several times why they are in the home and why they can't go home. He is very worried about her. Then, this evening, Del says, I know you don't want to talk about this, but we need to go see your grandparents everyday, because your grandma doesn't have much time left and when it happens it will happen quick. So that brought on the water-works.
Grandma and grandpa helped raise me and my sister, they are largely responsible for our Christianity, and when I moved away to go to college (with little Ashley in tow), they sold their home and land and moved into an apartment in the same complex where Ashley and I were moving to. They watched her while I went to school, now she's all grown up and has her own baby, who isn't old enough to know grandma & grandpa very well, but could if Ashley would visit them more often. I wish she would.
Work really sucks tonight. It'd be better if I had been able to sleep yesterday, but 4 hours doesn't cut it. I'm so tired, but Doc is not sleeping, so he's up every 45 min to 1 hour, so I can't even sneak a nap. I don't understand how someone who takes 2 RX sleeping pills and 2 OTC rapid release sleeping pills can't fucking sleep. He seems to sleep fine between bedtime at around 9pm until I get here at 11, then he's up and down all fucking night, then he sleeps fine after 7am when I leave until about 11 or noon. I don't know what it is about the hours between 11p and 7a but he just can't or won't sleep. Drives me nuts!
And next month I have to go to 4 nights a week rather than just 2 because Barbara has to have her back surgery (again--which she wouldn't need in the first place if she hadn't doctor-shopped around last year until she found a butcher willing to work on her back so she could get pain pills) and will be out at least 3 months, then she starts her dental assistant internship, so she prob won't come back to work at all. Which doesn't hurt my feelings and we need the extra money, but I hate working 2 nights a week and now I have to double that.
I screwed up and drank a 5-hour energy drink tonight, knowing it would make my heart race without giving me any extra energy or make me any less tired. I haven't drank any in a long time, because they do this to me, but I was soooo tired tonight I thought maybe it would help. Well, it hasn't.
I guess I better do my chores for the night. Yay

Saturday, 21 March 2009

Grandparents

I found out today that both my grandparents will be moving into the nursing home. Grandma will go tomorrow (actually today, since it's after midnight now) and then Grandpa will join her next Friday.
I am happy that they will be together and this decision will probably prolong their lives, since Grandma needs 24/7 nursing care. I am happy they will be together. But I am very sad that they will be leaving their home and their belongings will be divided as though they have passed on. This feels like the beginning of the end and that makes me so very sad.
I'm sure I'll get used to it and things will be fine. They are both happy with the decision so I feel like I don't have the right to be sad, but I still am.
Arianna went to the ER today. She has been sick off and on for the past week, fever, congestion, etc. The doc ruled out RSV and chest x-ray was clear, ears were clear, so he said it was prob a virus. I think I'm getting it too. I've been very congested the past few days and feeling run down. Right now I feel kind of feverish, but no way of taking my temp, so who knows? Anyway, she'll be better soon, I hope, and so will I.

Friday, 20 February 2009

Friday the 13th

I haven't written in awhile, and the sleep diary thing is just out the window, I guess. Last Friday, Feb 13, 2009, my father-in-law passed away at home. It was quick and unexpected, but he lived long enough to say goodbye to his wife. He suffered a massive heart attack. We were there within 15 minutes, and Del got to hold his hand and say goodbye to him, although he was already gone by then. It's been the craziest week. Friday night was spent dealing with the deputy, the ME, visitors, family, etc. Saturday, more visitors, more family came in, had to make arrangements at the funeral home. Sunday was the viewing, more family came in and more visitors. Monday was the funeral at Ochelata Baptist Church, then left to follow his body to Eldorado for graveside services on Tuesday. Then took Carolyn to Witchita Falls to be with Arlene & Bill, and we drove home. Made it home about 11pm Tuesday night. Wednesday (yesterday) we went to Carolyn's and cleaned all the food out of her fridge, did some laundry, washed dishes, vaccuumed, got potted plants from church and brought to her house. And tonight I'm working, Del is doing a double tomorrow, I'm working tomorrow night, we're both off Saturday for the Robin Williams show at Brady Theater, then Del is pulling another double on Sunday. It's going to be awhile before we have any breathing room. Carolyn will be home Saturday from Arlene's. I think I'll go stay with her at nights when Del is working, so she doesn't have to be alone yet. Mornings are her hardest times, because that's when her and Marvin really spent quality time together.
I never thought I'd ever say this, but I already miss Marvin tickling my ear with his finger everytime he walked by me. I'll miss hearing him and Carolyn call each other "asshole" (all in fun, of course). I hate that Arianna won't remember him--he loved her sooo much, and she just loved crawling on him. She would crawl up on the couch when he was watching TV and she would get on the back of the couch and rub his head, just rub while they watched TV together. If he was sleeping, she'd crawl on his lap and push on his eyelids with her fingers, saying "eye, eye, eye," until he opened them.
All weekend I kept expecting to walk in and see him sitting in his spot on the couch with the TV blaring, or standing over the stove warming his hands. Okay, I gotta stop now, before I boo-hoo again.

Sunday, 11 January 2009

I'm working tonight, (well, it's 5:30 in the morning, so I guess it's not night, but...) and the patients are asleep, so I'm bored. I go in the office closet where all the pt's books are kept and I find old photo albums. So I start with the first one and it's pics of my pts when they were at college. Him, studying to be a doctor, tall and handsome and young, the football team's quarterback. Her, studying ?, thin and young and beautiful. I look at them in these past lives and picture in my mind the way they look now, and sometimes I have to really search the pictures on the page for resemblences to the ones in my mind. I'm looking at their wedding pictures, pictures of their first apartment (and subsequent ones). There are cute little quotes out beside some of the pictures, or at the tops of the pages, in Doris's neat handwriting. Married in '45; I think, my Dad was born that year. I think how my grandparents' lives compared to the lives of the well-educated, financially stable people in these pictures, who now, in their old age, have the financial means to pay $18/hr for the privelege of 24/7 personal in-home care. My father's parents, at the time he was born and my two pts were getting married, were extremely poor, having one two-year old boy already, and living in a two-room shack with no running water or sewer, no electricity. They would have two more boys, still living in that shack.
Then, pictures of Doc's time in the service, stationed at Ft. Leavenworth. In 1948 a new car ($900) and the birth of their first son, now a very successful dentist who has probably never known the kind of financial failure that has plagued those of my parents and their parents. 1950, the year my mother was born, also brought the birth of a second son to my patients, as well as a new home. Doc is fast becoming a very successful doctor, while Doris hosts cocktail parties and brings up the boys. My mother's parents were struggling to survive; her father taking whatever jobs he could find, usually blasting rock for quarries. My grandmother stayed home and raised her children like Doris did, but with much less to survive on, and no cocktail parties for enjoyment! I'm sure she worried constantly about grandpa blowing himself up in those quarries or caves.
I looked through three fat photo albums, all the while Doc is becoming more and more successful, building a practice, along with a brand-new office complex. The family moved to a very large home on the west side of town and joined the Country Club. They travelled every year to places like the Black Hills, Hawaii, California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, DC, Canada, the list goes on. The only travelling my father's family did was back and forth to California, trying to make a living somewhere; my mother's family went to Montana once, to Texas, I think once, so my grandpa could work blasting rock or any other kind of manual labor that he could find.
I saw pictures of a country club party called a Poverty Party or something like that, Poverty Something, where everyone was dressed in what they considered clothes of poverty, and they drank and danced and laughed. They didn't know poverty! Even their "poverty" clothes were crisp and new, untorn and clean. My mother told me once that as a child, for her birthdays, she wanted a store-bought cake so bad, but they couldn't afford it. She was embarrassed to have her friends come to her birthday parties because her cakes were always homemade, with thin powdered sugar frost rather than thick buttercream icing. She was the youngest of the family, and always had to wear her cousin's hand-me-down clothes. Very rarely got new clothes until she was old enough to get a job and buy them herself.
I asked Doc once what made him want to be a doctor. He said he didn't know, he just always wanted to be one, and he was lucky enough to have the financial ability to become one. There was a doctor in the town he grew up in, and the old doctor knew of Doc's ambitions so he allowed Doc to follow him around and go with him on country calls. He was Doc's mentor. My grandfather (who is right about the same age as Doc, give or take) grew up too poor to even have dreams of what he would become when he grew up. By the time he was 10 his mother was dead, his older sister had to quit school to take care of the house and kids, and my grandfather had to quit school to go to work. He worked on the WPA. He left home and worked for the WPA, which paid him something like a dollar a week, but he only actually got to keep ten cents; the rest was automatically sent home to his family for necessities. He never finished school, had no hope of ever being able to afford college, probably never even crossed his mind. He worked at whatever he could find and was never afraid of a hard day's work. He never knew the inside of a country club, or how to swing a golf club, or the beauty of Niagara Falls.
Now, Doc and Doris are wonderful, loving, Christian people and I am not at all begrudging them their luck or diminishing their accomplishments. I never was so involved in anyone's life who had always had so much; so much success, so much money, so much standing in the community as these two wonderful people. So it has never struck me before, the incongruity of the lives of the Have's and the Have-Not's. It is such a different way of life, that I saw in those pictures, than that to which I have always been accustomed and which my family has described to me. I have always heard people talk about the Great Depression from the standpoint of poverty, and the consequences that period of time had in the lives of the rest of my family. I have never known anyone who was actually, if not rich, at least comfortable during that horrible time in our nation's history, and the pictures I saw tonight were of people who obviously had never experienced the awful hunger and feeling of defeat that poverty brings. I wonder if anyone at that "Poverty Party" that night gave a thought for those in this world who are really poor, and if they did, I wonder what that thought was and if it led them to do anything about it. Or did they just drink and dance and laugh and go home at the end of the night without a care in the world, other that what to do with ugly "poor" clothes they would never wear again?

Thursday, 25 December 2008

Men!!

So, knowing I would have to work tonight, I stayed up last night until almost 4 am, so I could sleep today. Between coming in to tell me something or calling me on the phone, my husband woke me up four times today. One would think that since he also works nights, he'd understand, but...
Anyway, at 7pm I went to lay down for a few more hours (after being woken up for dinner at 6, which was totally unnecessary). I didn't take my phone to bed with me bc I was sick of hearing it ring while I was trying to sleep. I told him I wanted up at 10pm. At 10:40, he comes in to wake me up; he had fallen asleep watching TV!! This has happened before, and I should've known better than to count on him, so I blame myself as much as him, but it's still infuriating. I had to rush around and made it to work right at 11. Last time this happened, it was a morning I had just come off a night shift and we were supposed to be at my parents' at 1pm for Sunday dinner. I laid down for a few hours and asked him to wake me up at 1145. Well, I'm sleeping real good when I hear, "Oh, shit!" I look at the clock and it's 1:30. We were an hour and a half late for Sunday dinner because he had fallen asleep.
When it's HIS nights to work, he sets his alarm for 9:30 pm, always sleeps through that and starting at 10 I go in every 5 min to remind him to get up. Usually, he will finally drag ass out of bed about 1020. It's so frustrating that I try so hard to make sure HE gets up on time, but he can't do the same for me! When he's sleeping, I try to be so quiet, I don't even watch TV usually, so that he can sleep. I don't wake him up for stupid shit, like "what do you want for supper?" the way he does me. I figure if he gets hungry enough, his body will wake up, and then I can fix him something to eat or whatever. It should also be said that when he goes to sleep, he's out like a light as soon as his head hits the pillow; always been that way. We've been married 15 years and he still hasn't got it through his head that I CAN'T fall asleep that quickly. If I'm asleep inside of an hour after lying down, I consider it a miracle. So, when he wakes me up for stupid shit 5 times a day, that's at least 5 hours of sleep I'm missing out on. And he wonders why I'm so pissy all the time.
On a happier note, he DID get me the most awesome Christmas present! Two almost-front-row tickets to see Robin Williams at Brady Theater on Feb 21st, which is just two days after our anniversary! So, that will be a fun weekend. I'm so excited!!!!!!!!!! I love Robin Williams! Other than the Garth concert back in 1997, this will be the best show I've ever seen.
Okay, I'm done ranting now. Merry Christmas everyone!