Wed, 11/5

Everything is going mostly smoothly at home these last 2 days. Mercy is taking good care of Mom. The lifting is quite intense for her and she seems to have aggravated an old back injury. I think tomorrow we may start using our new hoyer lift which is a hydraulic lifting device for just this kind of situation. We can probably use it for lifting back and forth to the commode and in and out of bed/wheelchair. But all in all, Mercy is very patient and caring and has good intuition about Mom and what she needs. She's gotten the feeding down and has learned all the little tricks to positioning Mom comfortably. We seem to be working well together, when she has a bad night with Mom, I'm around during the day to relieve her so she can get some rest. Then she's around later in the day when I need to be helping the kids and shuffling the dogs around between rooms and in and out of gates! Molly accidentally let Daisy into the kitchen tonight when Mom's dogs were there, there was another bad fight and Daisy got bitten on her opposite hind leg. I was thinking to keep her home until her antibiotics were finished, but I may wind up having to ask my neighbor friends to take her, medication and all. Mom's dogs actually fought with each other today which I've never seen before. I'm afraid Cubby got a good mouthful of Blackie's ear and they were full-on growling at each other. I'm sure they're pretty turned around about where they are and what they're doing here!

Mom seems to be doing OK, just not very able to get comfortable for very long at all. Right now it seems very hard to tell the difference between when she's saying "yes" and when she's saying "no". Sometimes I have to ask her again and again and I'm trying so hard to read her face but still can't tell which she's saying. Then when I ask too many times and she gets too frustrated, she winds up yelling her answer... which must feel to her like she's really TELLING me but I STILL can't understand! It's just all frustration, all the time. Alot of people have asked if we've tried a "blinking system" where she blinks once for yes and twice for no, but she really doesn't have the focus to do that. Her eyes are so WIDE and scared-looking all the time, I don't think she could do the blinks. Plus, mostly I think she doesn't want a "system". She wants to just be able to communicate! Sometimes I hold up my right hand for "yes" and left hand for "no" and ask her to look at one or the other. It's pretty easy to follow her eye movements, but more frequently, she seems to be getting confused about which hand is which or she'll look from hand to hand, like she's having a little trouble making sense of the command. I don't know. Can you imagine not being able to communicate even yes or no to the most simple questions all aimed at achieving bodily comfort? It's just the most frustrating thing I could ever think could happen to somebody. My Mom has just always been the most giving person... so giving of herself in such a patient and selfless way. She was always so fun to vacation with because she would just go along with whatever everybody was doing. She always just went along, that's how she was. In the middle of a big group of people all trying to decide which way to go, what vacation activities to partake in... she was NEVER controlling or demanding or selfish, she just went along with whatever everybody else decided, whatever sounded fun. In January when we vacationed in Hawaii... even though she was sick and not getting around well, she did everything! She went kayaking down a river to the Pacific Ocean, she went riding on an ATV through the red dirt of Kauai, and she put her sneakers on and walked to the beach every day. She went up and down the stairs from one floor of our house to another without complaint and at the end of the day she sipped her glass of wine while relaxing in the hot tub. She was always just so happy to be with everybody, she was happy just that we all got together and got silly and made her laugh. She was always happy to just be in the mix... laughing and being silly. When it feels like the most frustrating thing in the world that she is in this condition, we just try to remember her that way. She would NEVER want to be demanding, she would HATE that she has to be this way. You can still look deep into her blue eyes, you can still see her in there, full of love and laughter.