“Vacation” is in quotation marks intentionally, because the largest part of our somewhat-shortened week was spent at my parents’ house, and this part of the week was, well, less than relaxing, with the bulk of the time spent visiting with Dad in the rehab facility and helping Mom out at home.
For new readers, Dad has been hospitalized, then in a rehab facility, then hospitalized again, and now in another rehab facility, recovering from a fall and subsequent head injury, and now working on focus/memory and overall strength. Here’s a bit of background from June.
We hadn’t been able to visit since Easter, though I’d been talking to my parents, and I knew that my mom was quite concerned that my dad wasn’t eating much and was losing a lot of weight (or, in my dad’s point of view, he just wasn’t all that hungry, needed to lose weight anyway, and mom is just nagging him), but it was still startling to see just how much he’d changed: thinner, especially in the face, a very short haircut due to the recent surgery, and, well, in a wheelchair — though by the end of the three days that we were there, I’d kind of gotten used to his new appearance (which in a way, looked more like the Dad from old pictures when he and Mom were young, so familiar in a way), and was less bothered by the wheelchair because, in a way, it gave him more mobility than his last round of rehab, two years ago, when he spent much of the day, when not at therapy, sitting in a chair anyway. And he’s not unable to walk — at our last visit, he surprised us by rolling over to his walker and walking into the bathroom.
But Dad has changed mentally, too. He’s always been the one handling the investments, while Mom handles the day-to-day bill paying. With my parents’ permission, my husband looked at some parts of their finances to make sure everything was in order — and there are some issues, nothing severe enough to think they can’t manage their money, but they probably ought to have some oversight. It’s also clear that his mental sharpness and his memory and overall understanding, while much improved from the first days after his accident, are still a far ways from normal.
The ironic thing is that, for years and years, he’s said that he’d leave the house only when he’s carried out (meaning, directly to the funeral home), but now, though he hasn’t come out and said so directly, he has implied that he’d be perfectly willing to move to a condo or senior residence of some kind, only to have it turn out that now Mom is the roadblock, unwilling to consider other options even if a move would improve her own quality of life as well as Dad’s — and she has difficulty keeping the house up, and we spent a fair amount of time helping to sort things out (and, just before our arrival, my sister-in-law and her teenage daughter were visiting and did a lot of cleaning), and the boys helped with lots of yardwork. Happily the youngest is now old enough that he doesn’t need a lot of direct supervision (though he played on the iPad and watched a lot more TV than he otherwise would have been allowed), and we took them mini-golfing one day and to a movie the next (Guardians of the Galaxy, which we decided would be OK for the frequently-fearful 7-year-old after reading several reviews that it was lighter and less intense than other recent superhero movies, despite its PG-13 rating).
So that was my week.
How was yours?
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