If you care for a loved one who has an illness, your good thoughts might sometimes be criss-crossed with bad thoughts like the following:
– I’m so sick of you and this situation!
– You aren’t who you were and I loathe the way you are now.
– Thanks for ruining my life!
– Please stop needing me!
– Thanks for giving me the guilts!
– Why can’t you just die instead of suffering like this?
– I hate loving you.
I told Anthony that sometimes I felt like this and he hugged me close and let me cry.
Yesterday was our 20th wedding anniversary and Anthony forgot.
So did I.
[Actually, we always forget for some reason but I thought ‘So did I’ was a rather good punchline – ha!]
My mother usually reminds us but she’s in hospital and will be for some time. It was only when I was collecting stuff from her house to take into the hospital that I saw her note – ‘March 27-Ants & Julie anniversary’.
Ants is coming home for the day tomorrow – Good Friday – and I’m not sure whether to tell him about our anniversary or not because it might make him a bit sad and nostalgic.
20 years! Aren’t I supposed to get some sort of present?
[Note to other bloggers – I am having difficulty keeping up with your posts and comments – will catch up asap.]
I found some old socks –
the football socks you once wore
to get the cows in.
Your favourite socks!
But you never played football –
you just liked to run….
I put your socks on
and now I will go to bed
With you warming me.
I’ve been trying to find a word that means the same thing as ‘stating the obvious’ but, apart from ‘duh’, there doesn’t seem to be one in the English language. ‘Redundant’ doesn’t quite cut it, ínanity’ only just comes close, so ‘duh’ it is.
A close relative of Anthony’s, who only visits him sporadically, and has baulked at my suggestion of getting him wheel-chair taxied to their place, sent me an email the other day. In the email it was stated that they had visited Anthony but didn’t have time at the moment to arrange for a taxi visit. The irony and inanity of the email’s concluding sentence astounded me:
We notice that he is very lonely.
Duh!
In advanced Parkinson’s disease, it is difficult to predict how any one day will unfold. PD is the kind of disease whereby the timing of medications is almost as important as the medications themselves.
Over the many years since Anthony’s diagnosis, the medications have been changed repeatedly to ‘keep up’ with the progression of the disease. The various timings have also been altered here and there because it’s so difficult to get it right.
In some ways, I quite like the idea of unpredictability – unexpected visitors, for example. In other ways, I don’t like unpredictability -unexpected visitors, for example (ha!)
With PD (especially when it includes a bit of fresh dementia), the unexpected visitors come in the form of constant unpredctability. Today, for instance, I visited Ants at the nursing lodge just after lunch. I predicted that he would have the usual post-meal droopiness but instead he was lively, lucid and he made me laugh.
This was just as unpredicted as the arrival of four wild galahs who seem to have made this place their home recently. So I guess there really isn’t much point attempting to predict the unpredictable, and I am going to stop trying, happily!
Anthony was wheelchair-taxied home for the afternoon yesterday and I was excited about showing him what Ming and I have just discovered – a nest of guinnea fowl eggs behind the wash house, with a mother in attendance.
When Ants arrived he managed to walk unassisted from the taxi to the front veranda after Ming and I helped him out of the wheelchair. But 15 minutes later, when he had to go to the loo, he couldn’t move without my help and it was another 15 minutes before he and I were sitting down again. I knew then that there was no point trying to get him around to the back of the house to see the nest. Oh well, maybe next time.
The guinneas were the first birds we ever got and Ants loves them. If all goes well, we will have another flock soon!
jmgoyder 