Love | jmgoyder

Dangerous driving

by jmgoyder

I haven’t written about the car accident for awhile because I have been too anxious and shaken, and have not wanted to publicize details that might seem like an invasion of privacy. So I haven’t posted photos or named the children for this reason and will not do so now.

For those who don’t know, eight weeks ago today, Ming took his little cousins and a friend for a ride on the back of his ute (truck), then lost control on gravel about 2 kms from home. I do not want to replay the horror of that night or talk about the details. Instead, I want to say how grateful I am that everybody is recovering well despite multiple fractures including spinal and that yesterday we got the good news that two of my nieces got their neck braces off and the one nephew will hopefully soon be able to walk again (but I don’t know how soon). The friend is recovering well from her badly broken arm but her best friend, my niece, will still be in a neck-to-waist brace for many weeks (she is the one who told me to stop inboxing her, beautiful brat!)

My whole family continues to support each other, with humour, empathy, a couple of arguments, reconcilations, renewed love for each other and enormous mutual support. So I am very proud to belong to such a family – my mother, brothers, sister-in-laws, and the kids – where forgiveness and generosity are so natural.

Ming has now been charged with five counts of dangerous driving causing bodily harm and tomorrow we see the lawyer and barrister who are taking his case. My family and friends have provided many character references for him that will hopefully help but we still don’t know the court date.

In Australia there are three levels of driving offences – careless driving, dangerous driving, and reckless driving, so Ming is in the middle. Of course I am terribly worried but I didn’t realize how worried I was until the wash of relief that all of the children will be okay – even my niece who is still in the brace and oh how I wish I could wear that bloody thing for her.

On the cusp of what if? it is difficult NOT to imagine how much worse this could have been. Yesterday, at another family get together, the children all said how haunted they were still and my heart breaks that they have this memory. I guess it will stop any of them from driving dangerously.

Ming, despite being very open about everything else in his life to me, is strangely silent about the accident and seems to just want it to go away. I understand that and I also understand how reading the character witness statements upsets him. Despite his shock and remorse and anxiety about the kids, he has that attitude of moving forward. I don’t understand his resilence any more than he understand my lack of it.

Dangerous driving is dangerous driving so please warn your younger loved ones that a joyride of this type is not worth it.

Australia Family Friendship Grief joy Teenagers Western Australia

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Dementia is not contagious!

by jmgoyder

A lot of people are afraid of dementia, whether it be Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease Dementia (my husband Anthony’s type), or other variations. It isn’t just the fear of developing the disease one day, it is also the fear of anyone who has the disease.

As someone who worked in nursing homes for many years, dementia doesn’t scare me at all but I guess, if you haven’t had that kind of experience it could be scary visiting a loved one who used to be the life of the party, or extremely energetic, or with a dry, sarcastic wit (Anthony) only to find them either silent or saying what sounds like nonsense.

But it’s not that scary once you get used to it – it’s not! You learn how to listen differently, you learn how to be comfortable with silence, you learn how to love the person again for what he or she is now, instead of pining for an impossible past. You learn to be unafraid, you learn how to give, you learn how to go with the flow, you learn how to treasure each and every moment no matter how bizarre or strange.

“I just want to remember him/her the way s/he was” is a common sentiment expressed by friends and family of people with dementia and this is understandable, yes, but it is also cruel and selfish and horrible because people with dementia are not dead. People with dementia might be confused, cognitively, but there is nothing confusing about the emotional need to be hugged or acknowledged or visited. Why is this so scary for so many of us?

Before this happened to Anthony, and despite my nursing experience, I, too, found it incredibly difficult to visit people I knew who had developed dementia on top of everything else they were already suffering. Can you imagine how terrible it would be to be so sick, so confused, and then abandoned?

There are not too many visitors at the nursing home where Anthony resides and, when I was a nurse, there were very few in the three nursing homes in which I worked. Loneliness is universal and has nothing to do with age or dementia. People with dementia are lonely; people with dementia are human; people with dementia are often aware of the dementia and need comfort and reassurance, or just a hug. A 5-minute visit is enough to make a bad day good.

This is not about Anthony exactly because he gets a lot of regular visits from family and friends but, because I am in there nearly every day, I see the blank, lonely expressions on many of the other residents’ faces and have now made friends with several people there who never seem to have a visitor. I have also made friends with the relatives who do visit but we are a tiny group.

And the point of this little rant? If you have a friend or relative with dementia, please don’t abandon them. They need you. If they don’t recognize you, so what? Just give that person a hug or a pat on the shoulder and then you can go back to your life knowing that you will probably have made that person’s day shine!

BTW dementia is NOT contagious! (Anthony said that to me today).

Embarrassing moments Family Friendship Grief Happiness Humour joy LOVE STORY Marriage Parkinson's disease Parkinson's disease dementia Teenagers

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When every day becomes yesterday

by jmgoyder

When Anthony was home yesterday he kept talking to the television. I would come in and out of the kitchen where he was sitting (his favourite spot) and enter an already-there conversation. I was busy with washing and other chores (something I continue to do even if Ants is home, just to keep things normal-ish), but every time I came back into the kitchen he would be talking to one of his deceased brothers, or to the now-dead stove, or to the dogs on the table (hallucinations).

Ming cannot stand it – he just can’t. He says, “Mum, I love Dad but I just can’t tolerate him!” I understand his point of view; after all, he is only 19 and his dad is nearly 78. On the shy side of 50, I am in the middle of this all the time so, when Ants comes home – and I do this as much as possible – I leave Ming with him while I go to the toilet to cry. No, not self-pity – just so hard to remember how good it once was and how bad it is now.

I miss all of our wonderful yesterdays just as much as Anthony does. But Ming doesn’t remember and he has no recollection of Anthony ever being well. Every day, lately, he has asked me for a hug and every day I have given him a hug, even after our ferocious arguments, about the car accident, about many things….

Sometimes it is hard to be positive but I have enormous faith in both Ants and Ming and I think that is reciprocated to me. I hope so.

Family Friendship Grief Happiness LOVE STORY Parkinson's disease Parkinson's disease dementia Teenagers

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Showing off, peacock-style!

by jmgoyder

King (blue) and Prince (white) have taken a liking to flirting with the peahens just outside my office door. Needless to say, and the pictures show this I hope, the two white princesses are indifferent. King and Prince have a fraught relationship, but they never fight because Prince, being younger, always capitulates and stops showing off when King comes along.

Gutsy9 came to my office door, a bit confused, and wanting a pat!

Animal Australia Birds Happiness Humour joy Wings

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Tick tock

by jmgoyder

Anthony has a lot of antique clocks – a magnificent grandfather clock, three carriage clocks, two mantle clocks and one cuckoo clock. All of them chime on the hour and some on the half hour.

Well they used to.

Ever since Anthony went into the nursing home, all of the clocks have stopped. Mostly this is because Ants always did the clock winding and he never really taught Ming and me. Also, once Anthony wasn’t at home any longer, there didn’t seem any point any more, and letting all of the clocks stop seemed a natural reaction to his absence. My love of their chiming diminished in equal proportion to my increasing grief (if that makes sense, which it probably doesn’t!)

I finally got my act together a few months ago and invited a clock man over to have a look. He serviced all of the clocks, got them going again and showed us how to wind them without overwinding them and pronounced one of the carriage clocks as too far gone. Well, Ming and I lasted a week, so all of the clocks have once again stopped.

Oh the guilt. And the silence! If you are used to the constant chime of clocks, the silence is like a thrum of nothingness. I miss the noise of the clocks, the complaints of people staying with us who said, ‘how can you stand it?’ I miss all of those hundreds of Sundays when Anthony wound each clock with such joy until he forgot how to.

The other day, when I brought him home for the day, he tried again with his favourite clock.

It didn’t work.

Tock tick (no, that is not a typo).

Family Friendship Grief Happiness LOVE STORY Marriage Parkinson's disease Parkinson's disease dementia Teenagers

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Breaking nursing home rules!

by jmgoyder

For the last couple of days, I have brought Anthony home for the day. On Sunday, friends came over to see him/us so that was fantastic but yesterday he opted for a quiet day with just Ming and me. Today, I just went in late (4pmish) and grabbed him to come with me to do a few errands: groceries, returning dvds, pizza for Ming etc.

So, as I was trying to get him to walk to the door and outside to the car, I asked the couple of nurses who were helping us if they liked pizza. Their eyes lit up (as mine do when I hear ‘pizza’) so I said I was going to get pizza for Ming and I would love to bring them some too. Then, a very interesting conversation ensued:

Nurse 1: We’re not allowed to accept gifts.
Me: It’s not a gift – it’s pizza!
Nurse 2: I like pepperoni.
Me: What is the problem? I hate these stupid rules.
Nurse 1: Well, if you give us anything, and we accept it, it could be misinterpreted as bribery.
Me: What?
Nurse 1: No, no (laughing) we know you but the rule is that if we accept any gifts from relatives we might be in trouble because it might seem like the relative is doing it to get better care for their loved one.
Me: OMG but I bring chocolates and pistachios and olives in all the time and share it around. Does everyone think I’m a briberist?
Nurse 2: Of course not! We know you but we just have to be quite careful about this sort of thing, because of the rules.
Nurse 1: I like Hawaiian.
Me: Okay, so when I come back with Ants, I’ll just put the pizzas at the desk anonymously?

Both of the nurses nodded and we all had a chuckle but as Ants and I drove around town doing my errands and then ordering the pizzas, I asked him what he thought about the bribery nonsense and he said, “That’s what it’s like at the school, Jules.” (He always calls the nursing home ‘the school’).

Anyway, I wasn’t taking any of this seriously until we got back to the nursing home. The first thing I did was to place three large pizzas on the nursing desk (nobody was there so my secret was safe). Then I went back to help Ants into his room and chair. I turned his light and television on and then we shared a bit of his own pizza, then I left.

On my way out, I heard one of the kitchen staff quizzing Nurse 2: Where did those pizzas come from?
Nurse 2: I have no idea – they just appeared! But I am really grateful.

As I leapt to the exit door for a quick getaway, Nurse 2 called out, “Have a great evening, Julie.” I just hope that when they eat those pizzas, they also eat the boxes because my fingerprints are on them!

Australia Embarrassing moments Family Friendship Grief Happiness Humour joy LOVE STORY Marriage Parkinson's disease Parkinson's disease dementia Western Australia

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My baby chick becomes a show-off!

by jmgoyder

This is Gutsy9 flaunting her unusual feathers today. She is ‘pied’ – half blue and half white. We still don’t know who her parents are exactly because we have too many peas (three whites and 12 blues) and none of them wanted her so she was mine from day 1. (Previous posts describe this).

Peafowl are tactile defensive (they don’t like being touched) but they will take bread or any other tidbits from your hand if you are patient. G9, having been hand-raised by me, is unusual in this respect. For example, today, she came up to me when I was hanging out the washing and she sort of purred until I reached down to stroke her neck and every time I stopped, she chased me for more.

Happy birthday Gutsy9!

Animal Australia Birds joy Wings

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Ming’s scoliosis decision

by jmgoyder

Yesterday Ming made the decision to have the surgery on his spine and we will know when in the next week or so. The decision was not make lightly and no longer has anything to do with aesthetics (originally he was more upset to see that his straightened spine was now five degrees more crooked than it was post surgery in February 2012.) Now it is more to do with the ache at the site of where he fractured a length of titanium when he lifted something too heavy on our farm some months ago.

Apparently the fractured piece will not be replaced but instead will be mended with some sort of screw, then anchored to neighbouring vertebrae with more titanium and surrounded by bone from the bone bank. The operation will only be two hours this time, with no spinal cord monitoring required (the original surgery was around nine hours).

There is no guarantee that he will be straighter but there is hope that the pain will go away. The surgeon is now insistent that he stops all manual labour, not just now, but forever, which is something we were naive about last year. I guess we thought that once he’d healed he would once again be able to do anything he wanted to do; we didn’t understand the foreverness of his scoliosis condition, or perhaps we just didn’t want to accept it.

As with everything, Ming is coping much better than I am with the prognosis – surgery or not – but I am doing a very good job of hiding how sad I feel that my great, big, strong footballing, motorbike riding boy will never be able to bend, turn, lift etc. like most people can. So, yes, I am a little tragified but he isn’t and is very philosophical, which is great.

It’s all going to be fine.

Family Grief joy Teenagers

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Not sure….

by jmgoyder

Tomorrow, Ming and I will go up for our final appointment with the spinal surgeon before corrective surgery is scheduled for the titanium fracture Ming caused by lifting something too heavy for his ‘new’ back. (He had surgery last February to correct a 75% scoliosis).

I am in two minds about further surgery. Okay the titanium fracture was a shock (mainly because I/we didn’t think titanium was breakable), but also because Ming has been in pain ever since – not agonizing pain, more crampy, achy pain if he has to twist, turn, lift etc.

Ming wants the corrective surgery, to hopefully solve the pain problem, but he also wants to be straight again. After the scoliosis surgery, his spine/scar/back looked almost straight and he was delighted in a double-whammy way; he was tall again and his asthma abated. He was amazingly accepting of the fact that he could never play football again, or go trail-biking on his motorbike. In fact, he has been told not to run, cycle, or even play volleyball or badminton because of the jolting effects these activities might have on his wonky back.

Now he is crooked again and he doesn’t want to be crooked.

The surgeon has already said that corrective surgery may not work so tomorrow I will be ready with some specific questions. Maybe we will opt out of further surgery – I don’t know. It has to Ming’s decision now that he is 19 – not mine.

I’m not sure….

Embarrassing moments Family Grief Teenagers

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Bravo to my family

by jmgoyder

I have been refraining from talking too much about about the accident for the sake of my family’s privacy but it was an enormous relief today to welcome home my niece finally out of hospital yesterday. My brothers and sister-in-laws, and their older children (not involved in the accident), and our mother, have all been through hell of course. Ming, Ants and I all saw my niece in her brace, and her best friend (also in accident), and we even had a few laughs.

The previous week, Ming and I ventured down to see my younger brother and sister-in-law’s three children and it was wonderful. The children were so hilariously philosophical and my sister-in-law cooked a better meal than I have ever cooked (according to brat, Ming!)

Of course, physical recovery for all five children will take time but the fact that they are all out of hospital and home again is a wonderful thing and the idea of moving forward now seems possible. For many of us, the psychological and emotional damage will probably take longer. Children have a much better resilience than adults – thank goodness!

As the children don’t read this blog, I just want to say here how much I admire my brothers’ families – each, single individual has contributed to the love we share and, even though this is getting overly sentimental, I just have to say that I feel blessed to have such a family.Our mother has been a rock and, weirdly, I have felt Dad’s presence throughout this horrible month.

Bravo to my family and bravo to Meggles!

Family Friendship Grief Happiness joy Teenagers

41 Comments »

jmgoyder

wings and things

Dangerous driving

Dementia is not contagious!

When every day becomes yesterday

Showing off, peacock-style!

Tick tock

Breaking nursing home rules!

My baby chick becomes a show-off!

Ming’s scoliosis decision

Not sure….

Bravo to my family

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