Paula and I stopped up to see Dad. We got there at 6:15. He was already seated for dinner, in the cafeteria. He was alone at a table for four. I looked at the clock. He still had a half hour before dinner someone would later tell me.
He was confused. Unshaven. I asked him about the shave. Someone walked by and said it was broken. Piece missing or something. He was fussing with a napkin. Straightening it out. Laying it flat and squaring up the edges. There was a plastic cup with one sticky drop of some yellowish liquid. He started fussing with that. Repositioning it. Then he tried drinking out of it. “Its empty” I said.
He looked confused. As if he were trying to speak. His body was still and there were small sounds instead of words coming out. I thought his left eye was a little smaller than his right and that maybe he’d had a stroke. I told Paula to stay and I went looking for the nurse.
There were three people at the nurses station. I focused on the cart. There were two at the cart and one walked toward me (this turned out to be Anthony) and went and sat down at the nurses station. He was wearing scrubs. I asked if we were a doctor or a nurse. He said he was the head nurse. I told him someone needed to look at my Dad. I think he’s had a stroke or something. He can’t speak more than one syllable. We had a brief conversation. I told him who I was and who Dad was and that I thought maybe Dad had had a stroke. There was a woman in uniform a flowery green smock who said “See, I TOLD you … “ She mention something about him being weak and crushing up his pills.
Anthony asked me if I wanted my Dad to go to the hospital if he’s had a stroke. I said “Yes” somewhat emphatically. He said he would come by to look at him. I told him Dad was in the cafeteria.
I went back and sat with Dad and Paula. He was still struggling to make conversation. He tried twice more to get something out of the cup. Nothing came out. There were staff people moving in and out of the cafeteria bringing in patients. Some were sitting. I got him some water. Rinsing out the cup and filling it half way. The he drank it. I got him another inch or so of water and he drank that. I thought his throat looked funny the way he drank it.
I went back to look for Anthony and he was on the phone with a binder with notes open so I left him alone. I went back to the table and Paula was standing and there were two more patients at Dad’s table. Paula wanted to go back to the Broad St house so I took her the mile and a half back to her house. Paula gave me a hug. And went into the house. There I had a conversation with Christina about diabetes which lasted about 5 – 10 minutes. (Jack kept coming into the foyer and Christina sent him back out. ) I told her why Paula was upset. She indicated that her deceased husband had had diabetes which made me think Dad was just low on blood sugar and that it had not been a stroke at all.
I drove back to the nursing home and went back through the codes and buttons and elevator up to the second floor. There was Dad still sitting upright with the two patients and no staff. I went looking for Anthony. There was no one at the nurses station.
I found a nurse (I’ve forgotten her name but it may have been Alice) she was wearing street clothes but looked like staff. I must have asked her if she was a nurse. When she indicated that she was I told her about Dad and his diabetes and she grabbed a couple of chocolate chip cookies. I asked her about apple juice and she said that she’d look for that later as we hurried down the hallway. She gave him the cookies which he ate quickly except for a bit of the 2nd one. I got him some more water. He tried to drink the water but it just sort of made cookie soup in his mouth. I’m not sure how much went down or which pipe it went down.
Somewhere in here she must have gone away because after I had stood Dad up to try to help him breathe (he later sat back down and then stood up again). At this point the gurgling sound in his lungs was more pronounced. I’m not sure when it started. I patted him on the back a couple of times and then thought better of it. This is when Dad started walking back to his room. I didn’t know what to do but I could see chocolate chip foam on his lips and hear him gurgling and I distracted the nurse without the uniform, from another patient and said “Ma’am I think he’s in real trouble here.” Where upon she left the patient she was with and walked with us back to Dad’s room where he tried to lay down. She said don’t let him lay down and she scrambled to get some equipment. For the next maybe 20 minutes she worked on him. Got him a spittle bucket. Got an oxygen meter and a blood pressure cuff and some blood sugar testing materials too I think.
She worked on him while I held him up. Trying to get a bp. Which didn’t work. Dad had at least two long sleeve shirts on including a quilted flannel. This was still buttoned up which made me think that no one had look at him while I was at Broad St.
I held Dad and held his spit bucket while the nurse kept working on him. He was fighting her and I about the Oxygen sensor which read “83” and she eventually got him set up with O2 around his ears and in his nose going back and forth out of the room leaving me as the only one attending him while she went to get equipment.
Eventually the woman who had said “See, I TOLD you!” to Anthony, was there and was trying to take Dad’s blood sugar. She tried at least three times and ran out of testing strips. She poked his finger a third time and got some good amount of blood but it ran down my finger as I was trying to hold Dad and hold his finger steady at the same time. I told the nurse without the uniform clothes that my back was getting tired as Dad was leaning against my arm and I had one knee on the bed and one hand on Dad’s hand and I wouldn’t be able to hold him up too much longer.
After that Anthony came in and tried to take Dad’s blood pressure at least twice more. I don’t know what reading if any he got but it was around that time that I asked if any body had called the ambulance. I think I said “Where’s the damned ambulance?” Dad had been gurgling for who knows how long at this point.
Eventually the ambulance arrived and they asked what was going on and Anthony said “Pulmonary edema I think”. They worked quickly and professionally, ironic since it was the Union (Town of Union) Volunteer Emergency Squad. They asked where he was to be taken and I said “Lourdes” (Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital). A minute or two later one of them said “Wilson” and I said more loudly apparently “Lourdes”. I think I said it a third time.
Nurse Margaret (newly on the scene) asked me to join them in the hallway. She indicated that I was getting upset. As they wheeled Dad out sitting mostly upright with his gurgling sounds now quieted by an oxygen mask she said that she wanted me to meet her in the Nursing supervisors office but she wanted to talk to her supervisor first, which she did. The nursing supervisor was in the room as was Anthony and the director of the facility. Margaret came in after me and I nearly fell on the supervisor trying to make room for us all in the small office.
I told them this story. I said that I thought that between when I’d first talked to Anthony and when I came back from the group home nobody had looked at Dad. I may have said that was unacceptable. I didn’t stay long but gave them a quick overview of this story.
That was Sunday night. I asked at the ER, when did the ambulance get called? The young man from the squad said 19:25. Almost seven thirty. I’d gone to see Anthony at least an hour earlier and to the best of my knowledge, he never saw Dad till after I’d gone to Broad St, come back, and helped the other nurse out for a good 20 minutes. And that’s what I told his supervisor. It was about 6:20 when I first went to find help.
Dad’s in the ICU now. The ER staff was phenomenal. He’s on a ventilator under sedation.
The strange thing is that I told Paula I wasn’t going to take her on Sunday. (I needed a day for myself) And I figured I’d go see him Monday. At the corner of State Rts 90 and 34 I decided to go through Ithaca and down into Endicott and stop on the way, instead of going home the way I usually go. Now I wish I’d woken him up when we’d seen him on Saturday. Who knows what condition he was in then. Paula and I let him sleep.
I didn’t know this, but apparently Julia Ward Howe invented mother’s day. Wrote this in 1870.
Mother’s Day Proclamation
by Julia Ward Howe*, 1870
The First Mother’s Day proclaimed in 1870 by Julia Ward Howe
was a passionate demand for disarmament and peace.
Arise, then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or tears!
Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have taught them of charity, mercy and patience. We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”
From the bosom of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, Disarm!”
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice. Blood not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail & commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesars but of God.
In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality may be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.
A little anti-cancer gig I did along with the “Too Inspired To Be Tired” group. I didn’t vote for the name, but the cause is just. Funny how EVERYbody knows someone who has or has had cancer, and its seemingly only now getting moving as a real important issue.
Cancer is bad. Fighting cancer is good.
My takeaway from the night is that in the last 8 years the Tri-County Relay for life has collected over $600,000 to fight cancer. For some rural upstate counties without a ligitimate city in any of them, that, is spectacular!
Of course, all of us should be honored to be listed on the TIME 100 alongside the two men who will be slugging it out in the fall: President Obama, and the man who would defeat him, David Koch.
Give it up everybody. David Koch.
Little known fact — David, nice to see you again, sir.
Little known fact, David’s brother Charles Koch is actually even more influential. Charles pledged $40 million to defeat President Obama, David only $20 million. That’s kind of cheap, Dave.
Sure, he’s all for buying the elections, but when the bill for democracy comes up, Dave’s always in the men’s room. I’m sorry, I must have left Wisconsin in my other coat.
I was particularly excited to meet David Koch earlier tonight because I have a Super PAC, Colbert Super PAC, and I am — thank you, thank you — and I am happy to announce Mr. Koch has pledged $5 million to my Super PAC. And the great thing is, thanks to federal election law, there’s no way for you to ever know whether that’s a joke.
By the way, if David Koch likes his waiter tonight, he will be your next congressman.
“I think I might be dying” dad said the other day on the phone.
I called the nursing home. Talked to the social worker. Talked to the Nurse Practitioner. “Do you take him to the hospital if he’s sick? Do you treat him there? Do you know he’s not well? Are you doing anything for him? Who’s there? Does anyone even know?
I gave them a hard time. Later when I was there, there were three people in the room. The NP had assured me they knew about his discomfort and had been treating him already.
Who knows. They were all over him. Didn’t like his bowel sounds. Gave him an IV. Lunch in bed with at least 4 drinks on the tray and a bowl of ice cream and a really nice looking piece of fish.
Who knows.
Part of me wanted to give the people who were taking care of dad, a really hard time. Part of me wanted to thank them for all they were doing.
There IS a thing going around and he DOES have Crones disease. Some times I don’t know even what I should be doing.
Yet every time when he says something confused and I correct him. Either I can make him remember, or convince him of the truth about which he is confused, or he simply defers to my opinion.
Saturday was different.
When I saw him Saturday, a day or two after they had taken the residents to dinner somewhere, I asked him where he went.
“Detroit.”
“Dad, it wasn’t Detroit. Where’d you go?”
“Michigan”
“Dad, Detroit is four or five states away. It takes 15 hours to get there. You didn’t go to Detroit.”
“You don’t know. We got on that bus. We were rolling along at 80 or 90 miles an hour! We were on that bus for at least an hour!”
Typically his hair is always combed. Usually he’s clean shaven.
Not Saturday.
“Scranton maybe? Or Syracuse? They’re both about an hour away.”
“Detroit. You don’t know. That bus was rolling along at at least 90 miles an hour.”
I never changed his mind.
He never showed any perception that his comments didn’t make any sense.
We couldn’t find his hat. Maybe he left it on the bus. “That bus rolled along pretty darned fast. At least 80 or 90 miles an hour.”
I thought how glad I was that I never let him drive again after he got home that day. How I’d given his car away. I thought about the day when The Talking Hands people had had a picnic and we met him up there. How I watched him make a left when he should have gone straight and I sat and waited to see if he’d come back. He did and went the other wrong way and came back. Next he turned toward me and I pointed him in the right direction. That day I knew he was confused. But he drove ok and he found his way home. That day he could still drive.
Saturday he couldn’t tell how far it was to Michigan. Saturday, for the first time, he never noticed that he made no sense at all. Saturday I couldn’t convince him about basic facts.
They were covered in mud, though the raod was dry. “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” was playing on my podcaster.
I’d already been on the road long enough to go through 2 1/2 hours of Total Talk Nonsense. It was still shorter than a trip to Montezuma and I was just in the mood for a relaxing drive. When I saw the pickup in front of me weaving across the middle I decided I didn’t need to go into the mountains on that route. I’d already avoided one accident with that clown!
While I waited at a driveway, for an oncoming car to clear, I could see the full sized Ford pickup behind me wasn’t watching me stop on the two lane road, left signal on, so that I could make a K turn in a driveway. When the nose of the ford came low to the ground as it approached me I could tell he was not going to be able to stop in time. So I skipped my left turn and went 100 yards up the road while the pickup truck barely missed the guardrail.
I turned around and went back to Rt 17. It wasn’t my day to take NY Rt 30 through the Catskills.
Sometimes when I take Delware County 10 along the Cannonsville Reservoir, usually in fact, I turn after the 2nd bridge and go back through Trout Creek. Today, I had two “Wait Wait’s” to listen to, it was mid afternoon and a run along the reservoir might net me a photo of an eagle in a tree by the side of the road. It has, right there, in the past. It was cloudy, but maybe my backlighting problems would work better in a bright but clouded sky. So I headed to Walton.
Just cruisin’. Listening to Roxanne Roberts and Peter Sagal, I didn’t see the people sitting on the rocks by the side of the road, till they waved. So I waved to the people on the side of the road as I went by. It was wet and they were sitting on rocks which seemed strange in a way that hadn’t made it into words in my brain yet. I don’t think I noticed the mud across the road, or the piece of front bumper. Just them sitting waiving to me … Wait … they were sitting on a car! On the side of the car! On the door. In a ditch. In a ditch?
So I turned around. Stopped. Put my flashers on. There was on one around so I offered the two of them a ride. A man, in his sixties, squinting. A young woman.
They were both covered in mud.
Do you want me to take you to Walton?”
“No” said the man. “I’m just trying to get my wife out of the car. She’s still in there.” He was strangley calm. The young woman too. I hesitated to look in the car. They were too calm.
“No. She’s alright. She just can’t get out.”
I peaked in. They were clearly in shock. The car laid in 6 inches of water in a ditch, just a car width from a Catskill Mountain spring fed, wet rise maybe 300 feet. The rocks were wet and the car was on its left side. The man was looking into the front seat cavity talking to someone. I hoped whoever was in there wasn’t horribly injured when up popped his wife’s head. She was about the same age, completely covered in mud and with a small trail of blood off the corner of her mouth, but calm. She also couldn’t climb out of the small, what looked like a sedan style 4 WD new black import.
She couldn’t get out. She was climing on the steering wheel and the central console and just couldn’t get her waist up through the passenger side window. I told her we’d catch her if she could just tip herself out of the door. She couldn’t
So I tried 911, but I knew in those mountains… Yes, they’re mountains. You can’t get cell signal with Sprint. Then I thought of my work phone. Verizon has better coverage. It tried roaming 911. It said something like “Emergency messaging” but it never connected.
Then it dawned on me!
“What about the hatch? If the hatch will open she can walk out.” And this is what she did.
The young woman was the girlfriend of their son, just dropped off at school at Delhi. She stayed with the old man. I tried to get them to all come into my car, so that I could take them to the hospital in Walton. “I’ll stay here” he said. The young woman stayed with him.
The wife said I’d hate to mess up your car” while I was finishing putting fast food bags in one of the trash bags I keep in the back seat. I had to clean out the back seat in order to make room for her.
In the end, only she came with me. We stopped at a watershed police station just outside of Walton. The front door was locked. The side door was locked. No answer on the speaker after I pressed the button. So we decided to head for Walton.
Then the police came out. They took over. They brought her inside. She was really covered in mud and it stank. I stank.
Took my name and number. I saw three police officers at least and two went out to help with the accident.
Back at the wreck an 18 wheeler had stopped and a couple other cars.
The policed took my name and number and said I could go.
The back seat of my car is a muddy mess and my pants and shoes reeked from standing in the culvert and helping the woman out the hatch of her car.
But aside from that little trickle of blood. All appeared to be fine, though I think they were all in shock and I wished they’d have come with me. The man kept looking into the car. He kept saying I can see anything. But they all, also, said they were fine. All were ambulatory. And all were covered in mud.
That car was exactly the color of the wet rocks and if they hand’t waved not only would I have not seen them I don’t know if anyone would have. Right next to the road. Right next to the wet mountain rocks, they were invisible.
Jen and I met up at the wildlife refuge, knowing it would be a good sunny spring day and the eagles were already sitting on the nest at Mud Lock. It was time for the Osprey and the Great Blue Herons to be back in their homes for the season.
The air was chilled. A breeze blew. And nobody was home! At least at first
The man at the desk in the Visitor Center saw an osprey just arrive for the first time this spring as we were there inside and the camera on the nest where Albert and Ethel live. Most of the wildlife drive was abandoned. We stopped at Tshachi Pool and didn’t see much. Nothing but a goose at May’s Point.
We did see two Osprey in the trees by the nest near the campground. Until we got to the Towpath Road we didn’t see any herons. Once there however, there were lots of them.
Someday I’m going to feel like I’m all caught up and that I have time to write perceptive and touching blog posts again. Ok, maybe I never did that, but I can dream!
For now. Check out todays YouTube vid. And listen to the guy swear in Swedish or whatever it is. And call me gullible but I think its real!
The drinking game in the fall will be the “Move America forward” game. All the kids are trying it just for the primaries, and its dangerous.
If you have a child in college, warn them about the upcoming conventions. The primaries have been dangerous, but if this really takes off in the fall and we have a whole country filled with college students taking a drink everytime a pundit or politician uses the phrase “Move America forward”, we could lose large portions of our young people.
And we need them to become the taxpayers of the future …
Had someone on it who talked about how the Obama Administration is suppressing whistleblowers. And we know he signed the National Defense Authorization Act.
I’m not defending Bradley Manning. I’d need to know a lot more, but I keep telling those idiot Repbulican’s who call Obama a Socialist, that he’s really a Conservative. Today, on Up With Chris Hayes he looked more like a Neo-Con.
Its just that the best Republican’s are reactionaries and the worst are just batshit insane!!
This may actually be more relevant today than when FDR said it. The bad party, the over the cliff party, those you-know-whos who’s name I won’t mention because then adds for them show up in my blog, WANT TO DESTROY THE NEW DEAL!
There was a very smart law professor on Melissa Harris-Perry’s show this morning saying (basically) that the Supreme Court has ruled that incidental slights to religion do not rise to a cause of action against the first amendment, if those injuries were not a direct attack on religion.
At least that’s the basic point. The Catholic Church had no cause of action regarding the most recent dust up about employers providing pregnancy prevention prescriptions.
This was not an attack on religion.
However, Obama backed down and we now have a generally agreeable compromise. Fine.
Just a reminder, here is that part of the first amendment to the constitution, relevant in this circumstance:
” Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …”
This was never an “Attack on religion” as John Boehner suggested, but rather an ill considered move politically by the White House.
The prevailing legal authority comes from:
“Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971) For a law to be considered constitutional under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, the law must have a legitimate secular purpose, must not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion, ”
This law has a legitimate secular purpose and does not have the primary effect of inhibiting religion. The Catholic Church still can oppose pregnancy protection. This is an equal protection issue for the women who work for Catholic institutions.
That said. It was a dumb political move and President Obama was wise to retreat from enforcing a law that would create great soundbites, even though it wouldn’t interfere with anyone’s professions of faith.
