Montpelier
For years I’ve been recommending that each of us, especially as he or she gets older, should try to do one new thing every week in order to remain vital, keep learning and get ready for the exponential changes that are already upon us — scientific, demographic and cultural.
This past week, however, I’ve begun to question that old dictum. I’ve discovered that imagining what it’s like to be in a hurricane can’t hold a candle to what it’s like actually to be in one. YouTube may post some horrific videos, but they don’t ruffle your hair much. This most recent new thing I’m doing is a lot harder than I imagined.
As many of you know who’ve been following these weekly pieces, Mother’s been in and out of hospital and rehabilitation centers for the past 15 months or so. It’s a cancer that can’t be treated with either chemotherapy or radiation, or by surgery until she’s strong enough to stand the procedure — which she’s not, yet.
Still, the occupational and physical therapists at her last nursing facility helped her improve a lot, from near-immobility to the point at which she finally was able to get discharged, though wheelchair-bound, to home care.
During those 15 months of batching it, I developed routines, a daily order, places for everything I use, and even mnemonics to assist my aging brain to remember stuff it needs to. The place was hardly what anyone would call joyful — cooking and dining alone, occasional lunches with friends, twice-daily trips to the nursing home to chat, watch the news or read to Mother. Even the arrival of a new puppy about a month ago didn’t add as much happiness as responsibility; I’d forgotten that a puppy is spared execution only by being irresistibly cute until it stops chewing everything from slippers to wicker baskets.
From time to time, as Mother slowly regained some of her strength, the therapists asked me if I was ready to assume full-time care of her if she came home. It was fairly easy to say yes. How tough could it be to cook a couple of meals for two instead of one, change a diaper every so often, do the laundry and take over transportation by all means from a wheelchair to a walker to transfers in and out of chairs and the car?
Those imaginings were as far short of reality as Plato’s famous shadows on the cave wall. Reality is not a cheerful breakfast at a sunny 7 in the morning. It’s a puppy suggesting cheerfully that it’s time for her to go outside about 5; and then, when the back door latch clicks, an anguished voice from Mother’s office, where the hospital bed is, to be gotten up and helped to the bathroom.
There follows a steady succession of laundry (with silent thanks for a washer and dryer that work), three different breakfasts, watching the puppy outside after her breakfast, transfer chair movement around the house for Mother, ending up in the living room; trash removal, dish-washing and scrubbing the kitchen. Meanwhile, the person I’m caring for has the disturbing habit of wanting things now and then — a glass of juice, a cup of coffee, a blanket.
To a person who is neither to the caring manner born or trained, nor easily able to navigate the jungles of bureaucratic language and criteria on official forms, the various Vermont agencies for the aging, poor and long-term disabled are incredibly helpful. It’s literally true — not a political talking point — that many thousands of families, without government health care assistance, are one mishap or stretch of bad luck away from bankruptcy and penury. Mother’s months of care in the rehabilitation centers would have done us in, and the cheerful, helpful home health care people who show up at the house twice a day are reminders of our good fortune.
Even the expensive appliances she needs are available in the most surprising places. When we were looking for a way to afford a hospital bed, a helpful home nursing specialist in Williston found one for us in South Hero and brought it halfway here. Mother’s sleeping peacefully in it as I write. Another man here in Montpelier runs an equipment exchange called Wayward Wheels, which collects used or discarded devices in good condition and lends them free to whoever needs them. We’ve scored a “transfer chair” and a slide board for getting an immobile patient into and out of a bathtub. None of that would be affordable except for him; government aid does have its limits. It’s wonderful to feel so surrounded by people eager and able to help so much.
So the house has been transformed by two significant events from Bachelor’s Hall to a bit of a madhouse. We’re able to focus now more clearly on where we want to get with the disability, as well as the cancer. And who knows? We may get there.
Meanwhile, an interesting side effect: Kiki, the puppy, who was the first to interrupt my reverie, was progressing slowly toward doghood under my consistent old-fogey leadership. Still, she had to spend most of her days in her crate. But she was crate-trained in her infancy by a lovely woman in Texas; and as soon as female Mother arrived home to stay, Kiki suddenly blossomed, and now can spend hours in the house without destroying anything. Although I think I know where a well-chewed zipper slider I found in the front hall today came from. Oh, well. With regard to all three of us, to quote author Tom Ryan, it’s “Onward, by all means!”
Willem Lange can be reached at willem.lange@comcast.net.
