Life this year...
It's been a long time since I posted, so brace yourself, this is gonna be tl;dr - I won’t blame anyone for not reading on!
This year has been too eventful. You all probably remember that in July, our old housemate committed suicide in her room in our house. I am still angry and upset about this and though I try not to think about it, I sometimes randomly flash back to hearing the shot, and smelling the gunpowder, and feeling the dread of knowing what I would find when I went downstairs. It’s not fun. She was a major hoarder, and we had to clean out massive amounts of her stuff from her basement room (quite large) and her half of the garage (and as we later discovered, OUR half of the garage too). We filled up (to the brim!) *two* huge twenty-yard roll-off dumpsters with crap, and also donated a bunch of stuff to charities. Her family helped with much of that, which was good, but I still resent having had to do it at all.
As part of getting the old housemate’s space ready for a new tenant, our landlord decided to recarpet not only the basement, but the main level of the house as well, which meant we needed to get all of our stuff out of that level. We decided while we were at it that we’d get one of those roll-off dumpsters for ourselves and get rid of a bunch of stuff we never use, and also clean out our half of the garage. That’s when we discovered how much of her stuff was actually hiding on our side of the garage, so at least half that dumpster got used to dispose of more of the housemate’s stuff, though the rest was ours. It was a good thing to do, and I’m happy we did it, but it was a lot of work.
We found a new housemate, and just after he moved in and about the time we were just starting to get everything out of the garage and back into the main house (and had hopes of possibly using the garage as ... gasp! ... a GARAGE) the Floods of 2013 hit. Fortunately for us the main and upper levels of the house weren’t badly affected, but the basement flooded 3 times and the new housemate ended up having to put most of his stuff in the garage. That meant we couldn’t access the items we had stored out there and planned to bring back in, because it now has furniture and piles of heavy black trash bags full of random stuff in front of it. The landlord is still working on getting that room useable, but he’s going with the least expensive contractor he could find which means the guy only works sporadically so it’s taking forever! I assume at some point it will be habitable and our housemate will return, but in the meantime his stuff is all randomly piled in the garage and we can’t get at much of our stored stuff OR use it for cars (which, now that frost and snow are returning, would sure be nice!). Oh, and while he was exiled from the house due to the flooding, the new housemate developed a major medical problem that put him in the hospital for a while and now he’s now home recovering with family, so even if we wanted to ask him to come organize his stuff so we could get at our stuff, he probably couldn’t do so. I’m also paying for a dead Comcast box every month (the floodwaters killed it) because I have no idea where in the bags of his stuff in the garage it might be so I can take it back and get it off the bill!
THEN (yes, there’s more) the same night the flood hit, my mother had a fall at her assisted living facility. They took her to the hospital, where they did not find any new broken bones or signs of a new stroke but she was bruised and shaken up, and they did discover an old compression fracture in her back. The floods meant that the hospital was short-staffed so it took them a while to get around to deciding that since she was still complaining of pain several days later, they would do a procedure to super-glue the old fracture. That was supposed to fix everything so they then sent her to a rehab facility to get PT and OT, but she was still complaining about severe pain and she wouldn’t really cooperate with the therapists and mostly just lay in bed, and was so anxious and depressed that they put her on an anti-depressant and an anti-anxiety med as well as being on muscle-relaxants and painkillers. Because of the glacial pace at which anything happens at a rehab facility, it took another week or so to get her in to see a doc about the pain. Based on her description of the pain, I had started to wonder if her pain might be her sciatica flaring up, so I told her to ask the doctor about that. And lo and behold that was exactly what the problem was. So once she was reassured that she had not actually broken her back in the fall, she started to be a bit more cooperative with therapy, but unfortunately by that time, she had lost muscle tone and regressed to a point very similar to where she was right after the stroke three years ago. She can’t walk with her walker any more, and is now in a wheelchair, needs help getting in and out of bed, etc.
Since her old assisted facility is only licensed to do ‘light’ care, when her insurance ran out and she had to leave rehab, her old place wouldn’t take her back. Unless she can get to a point where she can do more of her own care, she won’t be allowed back. So I had to call around and find a place for her (my brother seems to be in serious denial about her condition and is barely helping at all with anything). I discovered that due to the flooding, most of the Boulder assisted-living facilities were full up with refugees from a couple of facilities which were badly damaged by the floods, so there was nothing in town. I did find a really nice place about 15 minutes toward Denver, and we managed to get her installed there over the weekend. She’s discovered that an old friend of hers lives there, and was able to get her hair and a mani-pedi done at their ‘spa’ for the first time in almost two months, so she seems pretty pleased with it so far. It’s very expensive but unlike me she has good financial resources. She’s currently there on a temporary basis, she has 30 days to improve to the point where she can return to the ‘light care’ place where she was before, but if she does not improve she will become a permanent resident at the new facility. She still hopes to return, but I have my doubts. She just seems to have deteriorated so much in the past month! Before the fall and the subsequent issues she was pretty much on the ball, mentally, but now she is really fuzzy and easily confused. The doc would not even sign off on her doing her own meds any more. :/
At first, I thought it was just that she was on too many meds, but she stopped taking the anti-anxiety and muscle-relaxants so now she’s mostly just on what she was on before, plus an anti-depressant and the pain meds and though her affect is more alert, she’s still easily confused and just doesn’t seem to be able to think clearly any more. Example: she called me Monday morning just to say hi. Then she called me Monday afternoon and said she hadn’t talked to me since Saturday, which was not so- I saw her Sunday and talked to her Monday morning. Then she called me again Monday evening to tell me she had lost her glasses. I asked her if she had them at breakfast and she said "No." so I said they must be in her room, since she had them the night before, but she said they looked in her room already. Then she said she probably took them off when she was in the salon getting her hair and nails done, but that by the time she figured out that was probably where they were, the salon was closed, so she left them a message to look for her glasses when they opened again. I said "But you told me you didn't have them at breakfast! How could you have had them at the salon if they were already missing at breakfast?" and she says "Oh, I guess I was confused about what day it was. I did have them at breakfast." :(
I just wish things would stop sucking so much.
You can also view this post on http://kelliem.dreamwidth.org/243086.html
This year has been too eventful. You all probably remember that in July, our old housemate committed suicide in her room in our house. I am still angry and upset about this and though I try not to think about it, I sometimes randomly flash back to hearing the shot, and smelling the gunpowder, and feeling the dread of knowing what I would find when I went downstairs. It’s not fun. She was a major hoarder, and we had to clean out massive amounts of her stuff from her basement room (quite large) and her half of the garage (and as we later discovered, OUR half of the garage too). We filled up (to the brim!) *two* huge twenty-yard roll-off dumpsters with crap, and also donated a bunch of stuff to charities. Her family helped with much of that, which was good, but I still resent having had to do it at all.
As part of getting the old housemate’s space ready for a new tenant, our landlord decided to recarpet not only the basement, but the main level of the house as well, which meant we needed to get all of our stuff out of that level. We decided while we were at it that we’d get one of those roll-off dumpsters for ourselves and get rid of a bunch of stuff we never use, and also clean out our half of the garage. That’s when we discovered how much of her stuff was actually hiding on our side of the garage, so at least half that dumpster got used to dispose of more of the housemate’s stuff, though the rest was ours. It was a good thing to do, and I’m happy we did it, but it was a lot of work.
We found a new housemate, and just after he moved in and about the time we were just starting to get everything out of the garage and back into the main house (and had hopes of possibly using the garage as ... gasp! ... a GARAGE) the Floods of 2013 hit. Fortunately for us the main and upper levels of the house weren’t badly affected, but the basement flooded 3 times and the new housemate ended up having to put most of his stuff in the garage. That meant we couldn’t access the items we had stored out there and planned to bring back in, because it now has furniture and piles of heavy black trash bags full of random stuff in front of it. The landlord is still working on getting that room useable, but he’s going with the least expensive contractor he could find which means the guy only works sporadically so it’s taking forever! I assume at some point it will be habitable and our housemate will return, but in the meantime his stuff is all randomly piled in the garage and we can’t get at much of our stored stuff OR use it for cars (which, now that frost and snow are returning, would sure be nice!). Oh, and while he was exiled from the house due to the flooding, the new housemate developed a major medical problem that put him in the hospital for a while and now he’s now home recovering with family, so even if we wanted to ask him to come organize his stuff so we could get at our stuff, he probably couldn’t do so. I’m also paying for a dead Comcast box every month (the floodwaters killed it) because I have no idea where in the bags of his stuff in the garage it might be so I can take it back and get it off the bill!
THEN (yes, there’s more) the same night the flood hit, my mother had a fall at her assisted living facility. They took her to the hospital, where they did not find any new broken bones or signs of a new stroke but she was bruised and shaken up, and they did discover an old compression fracture in her back. The floods meant that the hospital was short-staffed so it took them a while to get around to deciding that since she was still complaining of pain several days later, they would do a procedure to super-glue the old fracture. That was supposed to fix everything so they then sent her to a rehab facility to get PT and OT, but she was still complaining about severe pain and she wouldn’t really cooperate with the therapists and mostly just lay in bed, and was so anxious and depressed that they put her on an anti-depressant and an anti-anxiety med as well as being on muscle-relaxants and painkillers. Because of the glacial pace at which anything happens at a rehab facility, it took another week or so to get her in to see a doc about the pain. Based on her description of the pain, I had started to wonder if her pain might be her sciatica flaring up, so I told her to ask the doctor about that. And lo and behold that was exactly what the problem was. So once she was reassured that she had not actually broken her back in the fall, she started to be a bit more cooperative with therapy, but unfortunately by that time, she had lost muscle tone and regressed to a point very similar to where she was right after the stroke three years ago. She can’t walk with her walker any more, and is now in a wheelchair, needs help getting in and out of bed, etc.
Since her old assisted facility is only licensed to do ‘light’ care, when her insurance ran out and she had to leave rehab, her old place wouldn’t take her back. Unless she can get to a point where she can do more of her own care, she won’t be allowed back. So I had to call around and find a place for her (my brother seems to be in serious denial about her condition and is barely helping at all with anything). I discovered that due to the flooding, most of the Boulder assisted-living facilities were full up with refugees from a couple of facilities which were badly damaged by the floods, so there was nothing in town. I did find a really nice place about 15 minutes toward Denver, and we managed to get her installed there over the weekend. She’s discovered that an old friend of hers lives there, and was able to get her hair and a mani-pedi done at their ‘spa’ for the first time in almost two months, so she seems pretty pleased with it so far. It’s very expensive but unlike me she has good financial resources. She’s currently there on a temporary basis, she has 30 days to improve to the point where she can return to the ‘light care’ place where she was before, but if she does not improve she will become a permanent resident at the new facility. She still hopes to return, but I have my doubts. She just seems to have deteriorated so much in the past month! Before the fall and the subsequent issues she was pretty much on the ball, mentally, but now she is really fuzzy and easily confused. The doc would not even sign off on her doing her own meds any more. :/
At first, I thought it was just that she was on too many meds, but she stopped taking the anti-anxiety and muscle-relaxants so now she’s mostly just on what she was on before, plus an anti-depressant and the pain meds and though her affect is more alert, she’s still easily confused and just doesn’t seem to be able to think clearly any more. Example: she called me Monday morning just to say hi. Then she called me Monday afternoon and said she hadn’t talked to me since Saturday, which was not so- I saw her Sunday and talked to her Monday morning. Then she called me again Monday evening to tell me she had lost her glasses. I asked her if she had them at breakfast and she said "No." so I said they must be in her room, since she had them the night before, but she said they looked in her room already. Then she said she probably took them off when she was in the salon getting her hair and nails done, but that by the time she figured out that was probably where they were, the salon was closed, so she left them a message to look for her glasses when they opened again. I said "But you told me you didn't have them at breakfast! How could you have had them at the salon if they were already missing at breakfast?" and she says "Oh, I guess I was confused about what day it was. I did have them at breakfast." :(
I just wish things would stop sucking so much.
You can also view this post on http://kelliem.dreamwidth.org/243086.html