Aside from that we had one day this past week, when four out of the five of us were completely not able to function. That has rarely happened when that many of us have been down at one time and I can assure you that life gets difficult when that happens. I ended up lying on the couch and not able to coherently put two thoughts together with any ease. I finally decided to take a shower and forget about trying to accomplish anything for the rest of the day. I think I managed to knit on some slippers.
Today, I am having a horrible time trying to see around this shifting mess of floaters in my left eye but I have felt pretty good the past few days.
Dad had some off days as well. It all started with his having to stay up and watch Sunday night football. He agreed with Hubby that he would put himself to bed. We have no idea when he went to bed but since the game didn’t go off (according to Mom) until almost midnight…. that would have meant that Dad didn’t get to bed until sometime around 1 a.m. if not later. It literally takes my dad 20 minutes to brush his few remaining teeth. And then the washing up for bed can take quite a while depending on how sleepy he is. This can be a grueling amount of time when one is trying to hurry him AND one does not hurry him because the more you do so the more he gets slower. It is not on purpose, it is just that he gets tired and any “hurry up Dad” causes him to have to stop and think harder about what he is doing. It is usually best to just chat with him or turn the TV on and wait……..and if he is putting himself to bed he might nap off and on between the splashing in the sink basin.
So on Monday, after going to bed too late he got up late and was sleepy all day. So he slept most of the day not getting the necessary fluids, and then the perpetual cycle of not sleeping well at night because he slept all day turned into a second sleepy day with not enough fluids…and when he doesn’t get the fluids he will start hallucinating. Then one morning we got a phone call that Dad was out of his head. I never quite know what to expect when I get these calls. I was pleasantly surprised to find him really not too bad. Actually, I think he had probably been dreaming and Mom thought he was hallucinating. He told me that he felt light-headed like he had low blood pressure. So I took his blood pressure and it was instead high. So I asked him if it were possible that he was just sleepy and that light-headed feeling was just him feeling drowsy. He agreed it was possible. He obviously was dehydrated from the look of his dry mouth, etc. So we had a bit of a chat about not getting enough fluid, making him hallucinate and also making his blood pressure high because he didn’t have enough fluid in his body. I also had a chat with him about staying up too late and from now on if he wants to watch late night football he was going to do it in his bed, after all, he has that cool new bed that allows for tv viewing in bed!! He agreed. I pushed a good quart of fluid into. Since then he has been better.
This morning I went out rather late to get him up and the radio was on with someone preaching a sermon. At first I thought they were just talking in the bedroom and then as I got closer I thought it was the television turned on…but when I arrived there sat Dad on the edge of the bed in an undressed state with the radio blaring at him. My parents do NOT ever listen to the radio. The radio has never been a regular part of their lives, at least not in my lifetime….So I made some mention about listening to the radio and Mom informed me they had been listening to this sermon for the past 30 minutes. Now that seemed odd to me since my parents aren’t particularly prone to be listening to Sunday morning sermons, so I rather casually said, “Oh…?”
Evidently, someone accidentally bumped the alarm switch to radio so that at 10 a.m. it automatically proved that this particular function on the clock works. I made sure to switch it off so that tomorrow it doesn’t happen again.
Then as I was poking around in one of the kitchen cabinets looking for something, I found some musty almost moldy smelling towels. Well, one does not just tell Mom these need to be washed….so I hurriedly found a sack so I could carry them out with the trash and get them washed. Tomorrow morning I will get them replaced and hopefully she will never know. Mom is a bit odd about laundry and believe me if she knew I took these to wash them she’d be miffed about it but I wanted to make sure to get all of the moldy smell out of them so I soaked them in vinegar and baking soda and HOT water.
Speaking of sneaking things back in. The day Hubby took Dad on the Honor Flight I decided to do some deep cleaning in my parents’ apartment. Part of that meant cleaning off the countertop in the bathroom and the small cabinet drawers. At times like this I try to make some “discarding” decisions with great care. Remembering that Mom knows every little thing that she owns and where she has put it, I thought that perhaps these duplicate jars might not be missed since they were covered up and looked to not have been used in quite some time.
Well last week, Hubby and I were out there visiting with them and about the time we were ready to leave Mom says, “What did you do with my face cream in the bathroom?” I put on my best deer in the headlight face and said, “umm, maybe I put it in the drawers….” I had some vague recollection of discarding of a few items,--items that probably hadn’t been used in weeks due to the dust and clutter around them…. I went back and looked so I could remember what it was that was missing….no recollection, maybe, just perhaps some tubes of something. So I apologized and told her I would think on it and try to remember. (She knows that I have some short term memory problems.)
I came back to the house and kept mentally chewing on the whereabouts of the missing face cream, then I remembered that there was a bag of stuff in my thrift store pile that came out of the apartment. With great hope I found the bag and I opened it to find a can of shave cream (that Dad no longer uses) and two glass bottles that were the missing face cream!!! Now came the hard part, how to get them back in without admitting the truth that I had intended to throw them out. So I shoved both of them into my pants pockets and asked Hubby to run decoy for me….so he went in first with Dad’s mid-day shake, and I whizzed past him and went into the bathroom to put the two lost jars back into their corner. I told Mom I had found them and put them back. I didn’t go into the details about finding them in a bag destined for disposal… Where they will probably sit unused for another period of time…
Other antics of the week—the first batch of yard birds have been put into the freezer!!