Hooray for J

It's Saturday late morning and I have to get my rear in gear. Household chores await. So another 6 CD's to make the tasks more pleasant. Today is J day:

John Prine
Jewel
Janis Joplin (double whammy)
Janiva Magness
Johnny Lang
Jimi Hendrix

I hope to get a lot done, including potting the plants on the porches (does that sound like a tongue twister or is it just me?) I will have flowers even if I have to do it in the rain. Speaking of that.......never mind, that's another story!

Have a happy Saturday!

He Ain't Heavy....

As previously posted my father-in-law is now back in his own home. Both my husband and I will be making the drive to Indianapolis every week to help, hubby on Sunday evening through Monday evening, and me on Tuesday mornings through Wednesday evenings. I have rearranged my work schedule to allow this since all his sisters work Monday through Friday and can only help on the weekends or evenings. One sister-in-law has voiced concern that we will wear ourselves out doing this every week. I have tried to convince her that I will be fine because I can live on six hours of sleep per night and I really don't mind driving. (Thanks Mom for passing that trait down.) When I am in my car I have time to think, to listen to music, and to enjoy the scenery. With cell phone at hand I have time to call my family and friends and catch up on their lives. The ninety minute drive usually goes by fairly quickly. Once there, I really don't have much to do except assist with moving my father-in-law from bed to chair to sofa to table, assisting with meals, and sitting with him so my mother-in-law can take a break. So I have time to read and watch television or even catch up on some of my work if I take it with me. I am considering buying a laptop so I can write on my blog or work on my book in the evenings after my in-laws are in bed, since I am a night-owl and have trouble falling asleep without a television in the bedroom.

While there this past Tuesday I helped my father-in-law into the wheelchair and took him out for a walk around his neighborhood. They have lived in this retirement condo community for less than three years. It was a beautiful day. We stopped to say hello to a neighbor working in his garden and my father-in-law knew his name, even though he hadn't seen him for several months. As we walked past the mailboxes lined up all in a row he wanted to pull over so he could get the mail. I was surprised that he remembered which box was theirs. I was curious to see if he would remember his way around so I let him tell me which direction to turn. As we slowly looped around the pond an elderly woman passed us up. I stopped to direct my father-in-law's attention to the ducks milling around the pond but he admonished me to "hurry up and pass that lady". True to form he couldn't be outdone by a woman on foot! So we quickened the pace and sped past her. As we approached one corner we stopped to take in the wonderful scent of lilacs drifting softly through the air. He saluted the American flag flapping in the breeze. Then he directed me back to his home. He may not be aware of all around him but he has many moments that tell us he is still in there somewhere.

When I arrived back home late that evening my husband took me in his arms and said he couldn't thank me enough for helping out. But I cannot imagine any other way. I love my husband and I would do anything for him. That extends to helping him deal with this tremendous burden of caring for aging parents. We must do what needs to be done when it comes to family and friends when they need us most.

Tidy Tidbit

Playlist for the day while I clean house and do laundry:

Bob Dylan
James Taylor
Harry Manx
John Prine
Carol King
David Bromberg

6 CDs should be enough time to get it done, I hope.

Tough Love

My father-in-law is back in his home. And he is glad to be there. After his 80th birthday party last Saturday my mother-in-law took him home instead of back to the Alzheimer's facility he had been in for the past few months. He is so frail that he can no longer walk or stand on his own. He is so thin that you can see every bone in his body. Absolutely no muscle mass left. He has been withering away to nothing in that center. The family has a very tough job ahead of them in order to keep him at home. It is so important for all of us to understand the significance of what is going to be the toughest test of love for the person they call Dad and GrandDad. My mother-in-law is going to need help every single day to manage him at home. Hospice has been called in and medical equipment has been delivered to make maneuvering him easier. But the burden of his daily care will fall on the shoulders of family and friends. We are working on a schedule to spread that burden so no single family member is overwhelmed. I know from experience what lies ahead and it will take patience, courage, strength, and forgiveness to get through this without causing a breakdown in the family ties. Some may feel that they just can't do this emotionally but they will have to muster the strength and do it anyway. Some who live a greater distance away may not come to help as often but will have to help in other ways, organizing the family or calling in other resources. For my pregnant daughter who lives abroad with her two-year old it will be impossible to come home to help but phone calls, emails, video clips, and letters of support will be uplifting for my in-laws. Some have families with young children and busy schedules but children should be taught that they cannot always come first, that they may have to spend one summer of their young lives without playing a particular sport, that they have their whole lives ahead of them to pursue their interests while we have only this short window of time to repay all that has been bestowed upon us by this man of honor and integrity. It is time to dig in our heels and get to the toughest job we will ever encounter. When he is gone I can guarantee that everyone will look back on this experience and be glad that they were able to be a part of it, to shower him with the love and care that he deserves.

Undecided

Today is primary election day and I will be voting before I head off to work. I have been fairly undecided how I will cast my vote, at least for the presidential race. Ideally, my candidate of choice would be a moderate conservative or a conservative liberal.

I would prefer someone who will be tough on illegal immigration issues because we need to secure our borders in this dangerous world. We need to make changes in our immigration laws to allow more people in legally who want to come here to work and make a better life for their families. I do not think that illegals should be given a free pass because that flies in the face of citizens and legal immigrants who abide by the laws of our country.

On the issues of Iraq, I want a candidate who will not rush to bring our troops home and leave that country in worse chaos. Right or wrong, we started this mess and we need to follow through to assure that our servicemen and the Iraqi people have not suffered for naught.

I would like to see our nation's healthcare crisis addressed. I know first hand what is lacking in our system. I see patients every day who are given free healthcare, good healthcare, because they fall into the low income category necessary. The working poor and the middle class are the ones who suffer the most. Our senior citizens who have worked hard, sometimes with two jobs at once, to support their families and educate their children, are faced with having to spend down every dime and sell off all their assets before they are able to get assistance with the enormous cost of caring for their spouses with critical or chronic illness. This plummets them into poverty very quickly. It is the shame of our nation. We need to find a solution that is not income driven, at least when a catastrophic condition exists. More and more seniors will find themselves in this position as time goes on because families are smaller and spread out all over the nation.

I believe we should have as little government interference in our lives as possible. We should not have a Congress who believes that only they are capable of thinking for all. And they should all have to live by the laws that they enact. Maybe they, like in so many other professions, should be held legally liable for the laws they pass if they have a negative impact on the well-being of our nation.

I want a candidate who believes in the freedom of choice: in partners, in reproduction, in religion, in end of life decisions. The pursuit of happiness is not possible if government dictates what can and can't be done with these very personal issues.

I believe a candidate should work hard to unite the people of this nation, one who can motivate our citizens to get involved and work toward solutions that are reasonable, fair, and not a tremendous tax burden on the backs of the working people. Someone who will champion the rights of women, who will work to solve our racial inequities, and fight to keep our manufacturing jobs in this country.

With this said I am off to vote. I will be choosing a candidate that I believe is the lesser of all evils. That is a sad statement. That I would vote for the candidate that I think will do the least harm as opposed to the most good because that is all there is on the ballot is the reality of our times.

Peace!

Hell on Earth

Tomorrow I will be heading north to visit with my husband's family and friends to celebrate my father-in-law's 80th birthday. It will be a melancholy event because he is rather frail and has been in a home for Alzheimer's patients for the past several months. I know he would hate the situation he is in right now if he were fully aware or could truly express his wishes. In October last year he had a sudden change in personality after some type of vascular event that his physician could not specifically identify. He was admitted to the hospital and then moved to the geriatric neuropsychiatry ward. There he was given an assortment of powerful psychotropic drugs to "control" his behavior. He was reduced to a zombie-like state with his head hanging like a lead weight upon his slumped shoulders and his normally steady walk became a slow unbalanced shuffle. He lost bladder control and, more importantly,his dignity. I was horrified to see him like this and I tried to question the nurses about the wisdom of giving someone who rarely even took aspirin such a cornucopia of drugs. It seemed rather counterintuitive for the situation. My mother-in-law was completely overwhelmed emotionally and physically and felt she had no real choice but to put her trust in the physician's plan of treatment. So for almost two months my father-in-law remained a virtual prisoner in that geriatric unit, subjected to a myriad of different medications that seemed to do little to improve his mental agility. He lost weight and his eyes took on that hollow glazed effect of a drug addict. He was lost inside himself without a way back to reality. I suppose the drugs had the effect the physician was expecting as he became "manageable" and child-like, hence, allowing him to be placed in the Alzheimer's home where he has resided for the past five months.

Walking into this home is like walking into bizarro world. Nothing is real. There are outdoor scenes painted on the walls all along the hallways. Wooden fish hang by velcro on a painted pond. The residents can sit on the bench overlooking this scene and imagine they are outdoors, or wonder why they landed back in kindergarten. A painted American flag and war planes ornament the slightly cloudy sky-blue walls in one area allowing for memories of a past war or time spent in service to our country, sweet memories of fighting off enemies in battles past. In another area there is a cradle and a doll next to a rocking chair where residents can pretend they are holding some family member that they may never see again or who has already grown. There are no clocks and no calendars to keep the residents in the present for those lucid moments between medication rounds. Residents wander aimlessly around these miserable halls, in and out of each other's rooms, constantly searching for something they will never find, perhaps a familiar face or the nearest exit. They all seem to be so overmedicated, shuffling along in a never- ending cycle of confusion. I am no expert on issues related to Alzheimer's but it seems to me that the staff in this home should be focusing on keeping the residents in the present as much as possible. Would it not make sense to have calendars and clocks, to talk about current events even if they don't remember five minutes later, to have a schedule of activities to stimulate the body, soul, and mind, and to have a normal-looking environment for them. Instead of pretending to look at a pond or a golf course wouldn't it be better if they had an outdoor area large enough to allow all of them to go outside into the fresh air every day that the weather is decent? We all know what it feels like to be cooped up indoors for a few days. We call it stir-crazy. Imagine weeks, months, or years for these people with no hope for rescue from the absolute boredom. It's no wonder they are confused. A scene from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" comes to mind, when Jack Nicholson sneaks all the psych patients out of their prison and takes them to a baseball game, and I wish there was a way to give these residents a bit of reality for just one day. One tiny little resident name Chloe grabbed my arm when I walked past her as she was pushing her walker along from room to room. She looked up at me with her vacant eyes and whispered "Help me". I didn't know what she needed-help finding her room, help walking, or perhaps it was a plea to help her find a way out of the hell she was in. Every time I visit there I am thankful that I am able to walk back out.

My father-in-law's physician has finally agreed to slowly decrease the strength of one of his psychotropic medications. As a result, my father-in-law has become more alert and able to participate a bit more in conversations. He smiles more and is more appropriately animated. He recognizes everyone that visits and is acutely aware that the other residents in the home are not normal people. My husband and I picked him up on Easter Sunday to take him home for a family gathering and he recognized the streets and knew it was the way home. He also was aware that he had not been home for months. As he sat on the sofa with the dog in his lap he welled up with tears. He was happy to be back where he belonged, even if only for the day. At one of his doctor appointments recently he asked my sister-in-law for the date and day of the week because he remembered that the doctor would ask him those questions. He continues to have good days and bad days. He has lost a tremendous amount of weight and is very weak. My mother-in-law is hoping to bring him home for good if he improves enough that she is able to manage him with some assistance from family, friends, and home health. She hates that he is in that place and feels he would do better at home.

I personally believe he has been misdiagnosed. When I see him close his eyes during a prayer, smile or laugh at funny stories, cry when listening to stories of times past, and light up when he sees his grandchildren walk in, I just can't believe this is the behavior of an Alzheimer's patient. Maybe I am in denial but maybe there was a different reason for his change in mental status last fall. Perhaps another stroke that he has been slowly healing from. I don't agree with physician's doping up fragile patients who are already confused. They become empty shells of the people they once were. My father-in-law spent his whole life giving to others - to his family, friends, church, and strangers. He was the most optimistic, friendly person you could ever meet. He looked for the good in everyone. He has offered up his home to host foreign exchange students, he has picked up hitchhikers and taken them home for family dinners and offered them advice on how to improve their lives. He has served on many boards and has washed dishes at church functions. His helping hand has touched the lives of many, many people. He was not materialistic and spent money wisely. If you asked him how he was, his response was that he was grateful...grateful for the blessings in his life. He must wonder how he got to be in the place he is now, why he can't be home where he can be with his family, where he took a wrong turn to end up in living hell. I pray he comes home soon.

Environmentalisn't

Yesterday I was leafing through an issue of Martha Stewart Living that I had brought home from the office before it went to the recycle bin. I happened upon an article about a family who had built an environmentally friendly home and I was interested to see what materials were used. As I started reading the article I realized that this home in the Catskill mountains was just their winter vacation home. After renting a home on winter weekends for several years they had decided to build their own because they wanted to teach their children about nature and the environment.

Think about that statement. If this couple really wanted to teach their children to be respectful of nature and the environment maybe they should have continued to rent that existing home or perhaps bought an existing home instead of destroying another plot of land to build their own. I wonder how many trees were lost in clearing the land and getting all the equipment to the building site? How many animals were displaced or killed? I wonder how much energy is wasted every week while that house sits empty awaiting their occasional visit to ski? I wonder how much gas is used for the family to make the journey to their vacation site on winter weekends?

I think it is great that people consider the materials they use when building or remodeling but I don't think a secondary home is worthy of being the feature in an article about conservation. It should be a feature about blatant consumerism. I am tired of hearing people, especially the rich and famous, espouse how they are contributing in the environmental effort as they jet off around the world and return home to their huge estates. Who are they to speak out publicly? Perhaps we should pursue an environmental study of the tremendous amount of energy they consume and put that in the news. Then let them answer to the general public. Anyone who has more than one home should consider themselves lucky, not environmentalist.

Perhaps Martha Stewart Living and other similar publications should stick to decorating, not environmentalism. What I would like to see featured in these magazines are primary homes smartly designed with less than 2000 square feet of living space that utilize the best environmentally friendly products that are fairly affordable for the average citizen. That would be a magazine worth reading.