I guess for someone who just came home from vacation, I really should not be feeling like today’s reading from the Book of Job in which he laments the day he was born, but I really think that I am the Born-Loser.
I came back from my cruise to Alaska to be faced with a lot of issues concerning my Uncle Bob. Uncle Bob is my father’s older brother. While he is only 70, he has a lot of medical problems, and my parents really allowed him the illusion of independence the five years after my grandmother (with whom Uncle Bob lived) died. With my father’s illness last fall, and then his death, I promised my dad that I would look after Uncle Bob, and became his power-of-attorney. Uncle Bob agreed to move into assisted living, last February, so I thought that things would become much easier for Mom and I. How wrong I was. While I helped Mom as much as I could, Mom really was the one who cleaned out Uncle Bob’s house to get it ready to be sold. But we did sell it pretty quick, so we thought it would just be visiting Unlce Bob.
I did not realize that assisted living really means, “pay $111/day, but we don’t help him with really anything.” He seems to have constant doctor appointments, and we have to take him (mostly Mom). They call to complain regularly (Uncle Bob is hard of hearing, so they find his TV/radio too loud).
At the end of August Uncle Bob seemed to take a turn for the worse. He fell at 4 a.m., and needed 7 staples in the top of his head. A week later he fell again, this time breaking his ankle. He had surgery on Labor Day for that, and then got transferred to a rehab hospital attached to the assisted living and nursing home facility he is at. That first weekend I thought he was going to die. He was so out of it; I had to go up to feed him one night. Mom has been doing his laundry. It turned out he had pneumonia. He is better now, but he is not improving in rehab as much as he should. It seems as if he has no motivation.
They really cannot keep him in rehab much longer, and the assisted living place will not take him back because he needs too much help with everything (but we are still paying $111/day). I thought it would be an automatic “step up” to the nursing home, but they have no beds, and do not expect one for 2-3 months. So they want us to move him to another nursing home until he can get into the one there. I think if he is never going to get back to the level where he can function in assisted living, we should just find a permanent nursing home placement. They want me to fill out the paperwork ASAP, but they do not call back to tell me what they think his long term prognosis is.
Today I have been mostly doing Uncle Bob’s paperwork and banking (the real annoyance is that the application for the nursing home is the same, just check a different box, as the one that I completed to get him into assisted living, but they needed a new application anyway). Mom met him at the dentist; oh yeah, all of his upper teeth are falling out. Mom has been running all day for him too. This has not been a great way to come back from vacation.
I will try to find time to write about the cruise to Alaska; it was very beautiful. I was the chaplain onboard, which had some cool things too. I did read a fantastic book, With God In Russia, the story of Fr. Walter Ciszek, S.J. Read it if you have not yet.
Share This