Dearest Rachel –
I had originally thought to reference the Rolling Stones’ song about how “you can’t always get what you want” in the title, but when it comes to yesterday’s events (especially the afternoon), it most certainly wasn’t an offsetting case of Dad getting what he needed. Quite the contrary, in fact, but I’ll get to that in soon enough.
The title I’ve settled on isn’t entirely accurate either, at last when it comes to how the day started (Then again, the literal implication isn’t wrong; I haven’t been to the gym in the days since Dad fell ill, but that wasn’t what I had in mind here). While I did get engrossed in a couple of conversations with Copilot that distracted me from leaving for the office when I’d originally intended, I got there with a reasonable amount of time to work on tasks I hadn’t touched in over a week, and no one at the house to distract me from them – or to call me out for having arrived so late, not that either of the folks would have done so. And in those couple of hours, I actually managed to catch up with everything running through the camp’s books over all that time I’d been gone. So it was a reasonably productive morning; things “worked out,” if you will.
The thing is, I decided to reward myself for my efficiency with a little dip into my newsfeed before heading out to the rehab center. The next thing I knew, it was creeping toward one o’clock, an hour later than the stroke of noon I’d intended to leave by. With no better time to do so than the moment of discovery, I flew out the door without even bothering to grab a drink of ice water like I usually would do at their house, leaving me to stop at a convenience store to grab a drink instead. What I wouldn’t have done for a well-placed vending machine at this point.
But no matter. I got to the place, and to Dad’s room, where Mom was already at his side (no surprise, as the house had been deserted when I arrived; I assumed she had spent the morning with him). It would seem that the night before had been chaotic, with visits from the staff at odd hours, often just as he was drifting off to sleep. It didn’t help that his roommate had his television on until well after midnight – although that may have been partly because he didn’t have the wherewithal to switch it off when he wasn’t paying attention to it. The long and short of it was that Dad hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep, which as I’ve mentioned before, doesn’t tend to do his outlook any favors.
At the same time, he was looking forward to being evaluated for physical therapy. Not so much for the sake of finding out how soon he could be up and about, mind you – although it’s possible that the previous night may have guided his thoughts in that direction – but because while he was to be up and about, they would replace his mattress with an air mattress, like the one he was lying on in the hospital, so as to mitigate bedsores.
But before that, he was being visited by a few more staffers, as each specialty had to introduce themselves and determine what he might want (in the case of the social director) or need (with regard to the dietician). The latter acknowledged that the facility didn’t have the high-calorie liquid Dad had been using at home, and would need to order it, so it might be a day or two before it was on hand. This is a bit of a problem, since his stomach has been shrinking since he’s been on the gastric tube, and can only hold so much at any one time, so he needs something particularly calorie-dense in order to fatten up. Sometimes, I wish the two of us could swap such problems for a couple of days; I’m sure we would balance out each other’s issues over the course of a week or two.
Since the folks have several boxes of this higher-calorie food, and the house is barely a five-minute drive from the facility, I offered to bring a box over for them to use until their order comes in. The dietician seemed enthusiastic about the idea – promising to reimburse us for the food from home we would use, which seemed a little strange in terms of promises, but whatever – and off I went. It was a fairly easy thing for me to do, and within fifteen minutes I was back – although by this time, there was literally nowhere to park in the place. People were practically making up parking spaces in the lot behind the building, while others were parallel parking along the driveway. I decided to join the latter crowd, and hoped I could get away with it for a while.
When I get inside with the box, it turned out that the dietician had apparently changed her mind about the whole situation. It seems that Dad’s wounds (including the one around his gastric tube – which I guess counts as one, but it’s a necessary evil – and the bedsore on his backside, but not, apparently, the one on his leg, which none of us have any idea where it came from) need elevated levels of protein in order to heal, and to do so, they would give him specialized protein formulae in addition to his food. This seems a reasonable directive, but it so happens that protein needs to be processed by the kidneys, so they can’t give him too much, either. Now, the high-calorie food that I’d just brought has some 30% more protein in it, which would apparently overload his kidneys, and none of us wants that, so they would be giving him the somewhat lower-calorie stuff they had on hand. One would think that they could just reduce the amount of formula they give him, but this is why I’m not a dietician. Then again, she did say they needed to run the calculations, so we’ll see how this works out, too.
At least I know I got this story straight from her since, after listening to her instructions at the front desk, we both went back to the room, where I reiterated what she had told me to the folks, and she didn’t correct me once. She even commented how “nobody usually listens to me” regarding her instructions, so I think I must have done well to decipher her accent.
A few hours into my stay – including a few times of poking our noses out of his room to gawp at a dolly with what looked to be the mattress Dad had almost literally been dreaming about – his occupational therapist arrived to see if Dad couldn’t get up out of bed, and take a walk down the hall toward the communal dining area, still clad in his hospital gown (Mom was making a list of things to bring from the house as they occurred to them in the moment; several changes of clothes were now added to it). They’d coordinated the moment with the maintenance team to get him out of bed so that the mattress – which was, in fact, the item sitting in the hallway – could be brought in and installed in his bed.
That news seemed to drive him, as he got up with startling alacrity. And while he had to be wheeled out to the hall, when they asked him to stand and walk (with the wheelchair behind him the whole time for whenever he ran out of energy), he make his way more than halfway down the hall before conceding that he needed to rest and be rolled the remainder of the way. And this is one interesting aspect of returning to the same recuperation center as from a previous crisis; the therapists pointed out that he was more ambulatory within these first twenty-four hours than he had been the last time he had arrived there in December of 2023. All in all, a hopeful sign. Then again, he was motivated by the promise of a new bed.
We stayed in the dining area for a while, waiting for Lars to join us (all the while I was studiously trying to keep my back to the television blaring from one wall of the room, lest I get engaged in watching the antics of Gidget on screen) as well as giving the maintenance crew time to install and inflate the air mattress. Eventually, he arrived, and we filled him in on the events of the past day or so. And while Mom and Dad conversed in the dining room, Lars and I took the closest thing to a walk we were going to have this week, circling the halls of the care facility.
At some point, nearly an hour into his visit, we made our way back to Dad’s room. The mattress was there, and supposedly was still inflating, but that process should have taken only half an hour, or so we’d been told. A nurse came by to give Dad his third feeding of the day, and pointed out that she couldn’t put him to bed after all that exertion, because “[his] head would be lying on metal” if she let him lie down on it as it was. Sure enough, what should have taken half an hour hadn’t been accomplished in an hour and a half. Dad instructed me to check in with the supervisor of the place to find out what the story was.
When I did, she followed me to his room, and confirmed that that’s not what’s supposed to have happened. He’d basically been given a defective mattress, and they would have to remove it and put him back on his old mattress for the time being. The good news is, he was so worn out by having been up and about for so long, that the old mattress was welcome and comforting, and he was happy to be in it regardless. It seemed a shame that this wasn’t going to work out, but this was the way things went for now.
At this point, I got his permission to take my leave, so that I could go home and go out to dinner with Daniel. Unfortunately, while we had planned on taking Meema out to dinner, she wasn’t as keen at the restaurant suggestion Daniel had proposed, and while I had offered to take him there anyway when I got home, the fact that he wasn’t going to be able to introduce her to the place had dampened his enthusiasm. So he and Logan were already watching anime when I got home, and it took nearly an hour or so before I realized that he wasn’t wanting to go anywhere at all, and I would have to shift for myself if I wanted to eat anything. Obviously, at that point, I wasn’t in the mood for an all you can eat meal either, even if it was Japanese food.
So yeah, a lot of things didn’t work out the way we intended them to. That’s how life goes sometimes. And it’s why I always ask you to keep an eye on us, and wish us well. Since so little goes the way we plan it to, we could use all the help we could get.
Letters to Rachel 