Wednesday, July 06, 2005

feels like monday

I'm back at work today, for the first time in almost a week. Friday was a holiday, I'd booked Monday off ages ago for an extra-long weekend. We spent Thursday in emergency and then yesterday...well, yesterday was tough.

Emotionally, we're both pretty much feeling like wrecks. Poor LOG is not himself, he's not even the version of himself that was weak but argumentative a few weeks ago. His decline has been so fast that neither of us expect that he'll live much longer, it's that serious. I'm hoping that we're wrong. It would be wonderful if they got him back on all of his medication, if the folks at the nursing home are able to get him to eat and drink again, if he could get and moving around. We'd both love to see the sparkle back in his eyes and not that sometimes vacant, sometimes pain-filled look that we're seeing now. Even if he improved a lot, I don't think he'll ever live with us again. It seems like he'll live out the rest of his days in the nursing home.

Knowing in your head that he's in the best possible place he can be and that the care he's receiving is absolutely top-drawer doesn't really help your guilty heart. The guilt is irrational, of course. We know that we did the best we could for him and when it got to a point (like it has) that we can't look after him and that he can't stay alone in the house while we're at work, that we found him a terrific place to get the care he deserves. Somehow though, knowing that isn't helping me sleep at night. Last night I tossed and turned and just couldn't settle. I keep thinking about how excited he was to move into the new house and how he's not been able to enjoy any of it, not really.

In the meantime, we're going to visit him every night on the way home from work (the nursing home is about 1/2 way between my job and the house) and we're sorting out his finances, pre-planning a funeral, all that fun stuff. The upside of all of this sick crap is that we can pay for the nursing home with a credit card that gives us air miles. It's all about the silver lining isn't it?

Fitness wise: we continue to walk, a lot, in sweltering heat, sweating a fair bit. As far as food goes, it's either binge or starve at the moment. We're either eating too much of food that we know is bad for us or we're not eating at all. It's a bad scene but I did bring one of my "usual" healthy lunches to work today and was actually hungry for it when the time came. I feel like I've been saying "soon we'll get back to normal" for months now. I wonder though, if your life is chaotic, does the chaos eventually become what normal used to be? Maybe someday we'll get back to what I remember normal feeling like. Right now though, it feels like that's going to take us a long time.

No comments: