Mom report

Mom got out of bed quite late today; I showed Dad what to do to prep lunch for her, so that I could go out and work on the front yard. Leaf collection took some time, but the job wasn't nearly as arduous as the last time I performed the same task. This time around, instead of nearly twenty bags of yard debris, I had only about five. The next time I do the front yard, about two weeks from now, I probably won't have more than three bags. The back yard, which I'll be doing next week, will be similar: except for the space underneath the evil tree (the one mentioned in the previous post), the back yard is looking almost pristine. At best, a light dusting of leaves covers the yellowed grass.*

When I got back in from today's labors, I saw that Mom and Dad were at the kitchen bar, and Mom was eating a very late lunch. Knowing Mom, I can assume she started much earlier, possibly as much as 90 minutes earlier. Such days are awkward: because the meal schedule has been thrown off, I tend to treat Mom's lunch and dinner as one long meal, done in phases, instead of as two distinct meals. What usually happens is that Mom will end up eating a super-small dinner, then will be ravenous the next day at lunch.

Dad said that Mom was too sore to sit on her barstool, and that she had been standing there, eating her meal, since she had come out to the kitchen/living room area. Mom is probably still bruised and aching from her fall a while back, and according to Dad, she's starting to ache all over from the various places where we grip and push her to get her into, out of, onto, and off various places, like car seats, toilet seats, beds, couches, stairs, ramps, and yes, barstools. Her hips are sensitive, as are her ribs. With so many blood-thinning medicines careening through her body, I'm worried about the implications of bruising. For normal people, a bruise isn't a big deal, but for people with a tendency to bleed, bruises can be dangerous.

More worrisome, however, is that Mom has a runny nose today. She's had the occasional cough or random sniffle before, but in each case, Dad reassured me that her condition was only temporary, and he was always proved right. This time, though, Mom's nose was undeniably runny, which may be cause for alarm. I've spent my life since September 28 doing my best to keep Mom from catching whatever I got that day; now, it seems, Mom has caught something entirely different. Her immune system is pretty shredded at this point; we'll have to watch how this runny nose progresses, and if signs worsen, we'll need to take her back to her infectious disease specialist for an antibiotic prescription. In the meantime, we've given her some cold medicine (after checking online about drug interaction, of course).

6:06PM: Mom finished her meal about 15 minutes ago, and is now on the living room couch, comfortably on her back so as to relieve pressure on her fundament. I'll be making dinner soon; for Mom, who ate late, this will simply be Phase 2 of lunch.

UPDATE, 6:39PM: Here's a recent picture, probably from before Mom's oversleeping incident from two Tuesdays ago, showing Dad and Mom asleep in bed.

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*NB: Our weeds, however, are still green, as is the onion grass.


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