#274
Post
by Pandemonium » Fri Nov 11, 2011 9:31 pm
OK, I really don't like whining about personal problems but the last month has been a piece of work.
Almost a month ago, my father-in-law who lives in Tucson, Arizona discovered he needed heart valve replacement surgery. Even though he's 84, he's in remarkably good health otherwise and sharp as a tack so he was a good candidate for "robotic" non-evasive valve replacement. Unfortunately, when they started the surgery, they discovered his valve was in worse shape than they thought and wound up doing the full Monty - cracking his chest and doing it the old fashioned way. He has three kids - my wife, another daughter and a son all spread across the country. So they and myself were taking 4 - 7 days apiece to fly to Tucson and supervise his recovery and keep him company and take care of his wife who's also in her mid- 80s. About 7 days in, while the other daughter and later my wife were in town with him, he developed pneumonia while in ICU and had a couple nights that he nearly cashed his chips in.
So my turn to go there was the last 8 days. Probably unsurprisingly, his wife took more of my time and had some very serious issues that needed addressing. She's fried from the experience of being there for her ailing husband and seeing him laid out unable to speak (he has a trach valve now), very frail and imo, was over-medicating herself either on purpose or accidently. She needed full time care and was very vulnerable. I had to take away the car keys, help set up a full time in-home care service and set up the "Guardian Alarm" system (the clichéd "help, I can't get up" panic button she wears that calls 911 for her).
Now if that wasn't enough, she's a very crafty woman and has some fairly negative faults. A fer instance - this one guy working in ICU that was her husband's day shift nurse was originally from Mexico, had a bit of an accent. Dude worked his ass off to take care of her husband through the worst of it, nice guy. She's hard of hearing and kept saying "I can't understand you with that accent... do you get paid in dollars or pesos... if it's dollars, why don't you speak English?" Another rehab nurse who was Pakistani - "my husband works with your people all the time, most of you are fine people." Holy fuckin' shit. As soon as I left last night, this morning I'm getting calls from the agency that she refused to let her caregiver in the house and wanted to cancel the service because she wanted her independence and my wife and I had to talk her into letting the woman in to be there for her.
It's like I'm sort of the outsider being the in-law in all this and I had a conference call before I left with the brother and sister and my wife and basically said "you guys need to come up with a long term plan that may include someone moving there, moving them locally to one of the three of us or even getting power of attorney and putting them in a home." To compound shit, there's some serious dysfunction going on with the brother who also happens to control much of the parent's savings which is quite substantial.
I was supposed to come back home on Wednesday but the woman was so out of it - I mean Michael Jackson loopy, I wound up canceling the cab already on its way to pick me up, changing my flight to last night and taking her to her doctor, getting her evaluated, finding out what meds she's supposed to be on and rounding up over 30 bottles of extra prescriptions laying around her room some dating back to 2009, many of which were drugs like Hydrocodon, Morphine, Diazapam, etc from several different doctors and destroying them.
Thankfully, the husband has turned a corner and is starting to slowly recover but it's going to be a long 2 - 3 months before he's ready to go home......
) but nothing to the extent that crater describes... 
