The Longest Day

Wednesday ...

• Up at 6:15 to get ready as the nurse was due at 8 to admit Skip to the new visiting nurse agency and, more importantly, to train me to administer IV antibiotics. Yes, your hero, her Crankiness, has to perform the twice-daily IVs.
• Turn Skip, make coffee, take out the dogs, and so on. Get dressed as I figure I should make an effort to meet the nurse for the first time in street clothes and it's pj's every day thereafter. (Today, I graced the nurse with my leopard print flannels.)
• Nurse calls at 8 to say she is on her way but has to stop at the office. She'll be here at 9.
• I dust and vacuum the bedroom, do some other random cleaning. Throw in the first of 4 laundry loads for the day (lots of sheets and blankets came with Skip from the hospital. Gotta clean those cooties off.)
• Nurse calls again. Yada yada yada. She'll be here at 9:30.
• She shows up at 9:30. Meets dogs out in the front yard. She likes dogs (a plus). Immediately makes a positive impression as she's warm and friendly. I love her professionalism, her knowledge, and she trains me very well on the IV, primarily by not taking over but letting me do it with her observing.
• She leaves around 11:30. Phew! I've got a job interview at 3 and still have to bathe Skip (no aides yet from the new agency), feed her, feed myself and shower. Finally get out of the house just in time to arrive at Starbucks for the interview at 3:01.
• The interview goes well. Really, it's not too much of an interview as this guy works for the guy who was my boss at another company for 11 years so I'm a known quantity. It's a part-time sales job I can do from home. Will know more details soon.
• Home around 5 with a mocha frappucino for Skip. She's in fairly good spirits; still happy just because she's home and not in rehab.
• Skip has slipped down in the bed a bit. I pull her up.
• Do as close to nothing as I can for an hour plus.
• Feed Skip dinner at 7:30. She's pretty weak and we're having a sesame noodle dish (the noodles are hard for her to manage) so I literally feed her. The dogs stand at ready beside her so I can give them lit bits of pupperoni treats.
• More laundry. Dishes.
• On to the second IV. This time solo. I get out the instructions and follow them end to end. Got some bubbles in the line, how I don't know. Worked very hard to flick them out of the line (research online after the IV was started told me the small bubbles are not a big problem). Finally got the IV started. Was supposed to take 2 hours but it went on quite a bit longer. Fiddled with the drop rate to speed things up a bit. Finally done around midnight. Off to dreamland.
• At 2:50am, Skip wakes me up because of a problem she's having. I hate being awakened in the night; fortunately this happens infrequently. However, I hit a very low, highly cranky state. It's 62 in the house and that is cold! Spend about 20 or 30 minutes taking care of Skip. Adjust the alarm from 6:15 to 7:15 to make up for lost sleep time. Addy says, well Mom as long as you're up, why not take me out? Man, it's really cold outside! Then, back to bed. Out pretty quickly.

This morning, the 7:30 nurse visit turned into a 9am arrival (are we sensing an unwelcome trend?). Still no home health aide scheduled. Spoke to scheduler; she just got Skip's info on her desk this morning. Grrrrr. They don't have aides on the weekend!! Grrrrr. Can't wait to drop this agency like a hot rock and go back to the folks we've been using for years when the IV process is done (our prior folks don't do IV's for some reason).

Off to the Dentist

I took Skip to an oral surgeon today to have a tooth extracted. We were there for well over 2 hours, but it all worked out very well. The dentist used novacaine rather than anesthesia so it took quite a while for the numbness to really set in, which accounted for most of the time we were there. The extraction itself only took about 5 minutes.

For a while, we were on a bit of a hiatus for Skip going to the dentist because we couldn't figure out how to get her transferred into the dentist chair. Up until about 3 years ago, I would use our "pick and plop" move for the transfer: put Skip's wheelchair beside the dentist chair, grab her upper arms, pull her up out of the wheelchair, swivel her around to the dentist chair and then plop her down. It's been so long since I've done that, as I tried to remember the steps, I couldn't believe I really did that move multiple times in a day for every transfer, day after day, for many years.

So, anyway, as I was saying, Skip had to stop going to the dentist for a while as we tried to figure out a new way to get her into the dentist chair. We finally realized that putting a twin sheet folded in half under Skip in the wheelchair could work like a sling to lift her with. We first tried it with MW, Skip's intrepid aide. MW is strong and very tall for a woman, perhaps a bit taller than me and I'm 5'11". She stood at Skip's head, me at her feet. Picking up the four corners of the sheet, we were able to transfer her safely into the dentist chair. Woo hoo! MW has had 2 shoulder surgeries since then, so we hornswaggled my brother into helping out. Today's transfer was absolutely the smoothest ever. The dentist's assistant even commented on how it was the best she'd ever seen.

We filled a Tylenol with codeine prescription on the way home and Skip took one even before the novacaine wore off to try to minimize the pain. After an early dinner, I put her to bed. When I came in from doing the dishes, she told me her tooth was bothering her and I suggested she try to sleep. Shortly after assuring me she couldn't fall asleep before 11, I heard her light snoring. It's 9:30. Sleep well, Skip!