Yes, life is happening all around me right now. Some are good, some not so good. Some…well, who knows.
Finally, after months of having to put it off again and again, I scheduled cataract surgery–got appointments set up and flight reservations made. All together, it takes about three weeks to get both eyes done from initial consultation and exam through actual procedure and follow-up, one eye at a time.
Not an hour after I get everything scheduled, I see an email message from my brother-in-law that my mother is in the hospital. We must have been on the phone for the better part of an hour, talking about how she has been, what she says to me versus what she says to my sister and him. You would think that because she lives with them, she would share more information with them. But you have to know my mother. She’s a real handful at the best of times. At age 88, she is still kicking around and refusing help from anyone unless absolutely, positively necessary. And she doesn’t like being “in the way.” She has gone out of her way to avoid allowing herself to feel that she is home. I can guarantee that this is not how she is treated; this is just the way she is. So she also does not tell her family everything that she is feeling physically, either. 
Until about a week ago, that is.
That was when she fell and couldn’t get up because, for the first time, she could not feel her legs. She was near a wall in her room, so she was able to pull herself up into a sitting position until my brother-in-law got home. When I spoke to her several days after this first happened, she told me she had been falling fairly regularly, but she was never hurt and she was always able to get up. She also didn’t bother to share this information with the household. As I said, she’s a handful.
Right now, she has congestive heart failure, pneumonia, and one or two infections that are being treated. She is fairly strong, but she is in a semi-delirious state and keeps pulling out her IVs and pulling off her oxygen mask. As I write this, she is being sedated, mostly to keep her from pulling life-sustaining equipment from herself, I think.
And while all this is going on–just after I made appointments for badly needed eye surgery–we are also trying to buy a house. This is not an easy task at our age (66), and we need to dip into our retirement funds to make it work. If we dip into them the wrong way, we will be left penniless into our old age, even though my husband is still working full time and doesn’t plan to actually retire until he is at least 70. Basically, he wants to work as long as his employer is willing to keep him on.
So much is going on right now that can once again hamper something so important to me–arranging to be able to see enough at night to drive and maybe even read a physical book instead of using a reading device or a computer. And I need to be able to drive at night, since my husband does not drive at all–doesn’t now, never did.
I wish I could be with my mother to provide some relief to my sister and brother-in-law, who are with her all the time. But I’m no good to anyone without the ability to see at night. And I am reasonably certain that my mother, despite this current setback, will be on her feet and being ornery again in no time.
And I wonder: will this be me in twenty years? Probably not, but who knows?
So why am I worried that I may need to postpone my own needed surgery yet again? Maybe it is because I’ve had to do it so many times before during the past three years…
No good dwelling on that too long. What will happen will happen, regardless of my own needs and desires. As always, I will roll like a shell in the ocean waves that surround the tiny island on which I currently live…
#educ_dr
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