Whew! I’m Tired!
So, the last month or so has been rather interesting. And by interesting I mean challenging.
A few weeks back, my mom slipped on some wet grass (no goats were involved in this story). She thought maybe she sprained it and decided to keep off it, but the pain never really got better. After a few days, she gave in and went for an x-ray. Yup – broken ankle. Six weeks of a cast before they took another x-ray to see if it was healing enough to put on a walking cast or if she needed the regular cast a bit longer.
So my dad basically had to take over farm duties that she typically did on a daily basis. Seven (well, actually there were eight before he sold one) goats. Two sheep. Ten chickens. Two ducks. Various amounts of barn cats. All of them want to be be fed and watered on a DAILY basis (imagine that!).
My parents live in an old house. We are talking 1790’s, not 1990’s here. It’s been in the family since it was built. And do you know what happens when houses get handed down from generation to generation? They leave their stuff, and new stuff comes in. Then they leave all that stuff, and newer stuff comes in. Starting to get the picture? It’s crowded in the house. So much so that it is difficult to walk in the house without bumping into something.
Which, of course, makes life difficult on crutches.
I am a slow thinker sometimes. It took me three weeks to figure out my mom needed help getting around. As I had a break in book assignments/jobs, I offered to help her widen the pathways from the dining room to her bedroom (which is, thankfully, only a few rooms away on the ground floor). I was determined to get her bathroom back in shape so she could use the handicapped shower we had installed for my grandmother ten years ago. I was determined to get her clothes into her closet (I was also determined to be able to get to the closet). And it hit me that I should actually DO her laundry (and my dad’s) so it would be one less thing they’d have to think about/never get to. So all was going well.
My father called me Wednesday morning. You know, just to fill me in on a small little thing that had happened the night before. My mom had fallen/slipped when she got out of bed to go pee in the middle of the night and now she couldn’t move her shoulder without horrible pain.
Yikes – just what we all needed – she couldn’t put any weight on her bad ankle and now she couldn’t use crutches because of her pain in the shoulder. But we had to get her to the doctors for another x-ray to make sure she hadn’t broken anything there. It took us three hours to get a wheelchair that would (mostly) get down the hallway, create a very steep ramp to get her down the large stone step, and into the car.
Good news was nothing was broken. Bad news was it is probably a rotator cuff tear and would need to rest to maybe get better on its own. It might need surgery if it doesn’t repair itself, but they weren’t going to do an MRI or talk about surgery until her ankle was done healing.
So, I spent Thursday creating a wider path, finishing up the bathroom/closet project, eking out any extra room in the bedroom I could get for her, and generally packing up and stacking boxes of stuff in her office like Tetris.
Overall, I took out 9 large garbage bags; filled a 4′ recycling bin full of cardboard; did about 12 loads of wash;doubled the walking space from the dining room to the bedroom; hauled out 2 CRT monitors, 1 printer, a 6′ table, and miscellaneous junk for recycling on Saturday (plus planning for some last minute items to add – like the old toilet on the sidewalk!); and swept, and swept, and swept some more.
So that’s what on did on my week off of work. So looking forward to next week’s manuscript!