Well, this is a complicated day. Or something.
My father is....maybe...dying. It's hard to say. He's in poor health generally, has been in hospitals and nursing homes for the last 14+ months, less six weeks at home at the end of last summer, and he's in one of his declines. I've seen him snap out of them, though, so it's really hard to say if this is the final decline, or what.
I do know that it tore my heart out yesterday when I said I was leaving (because honestly, I was exhausted, what with one thing and another, and I just couldn't stay any longer) and he asked if he needed a sweater and I told him he had to stay. Of course, it cheered me up somewhat when he said, "That's horseshit!" but then I got sad all over when he subsided and said, oh, okay.
I just don't know. I've seen him at death's door before. I've thought about what to lay him out in. I've discussed where to have his wake and funeral. I've been here. But not quite here. Not quite.
It doesn't help that my mother died in April, in 1983. That really doesn't help me at all. It doesn't help that he's my second parent, or that he's 85 and I'm 55 and that's a really long time to be used to someone in your life.
He's been in a nursing home in South Windsor for the last six months, give or take. He's had a vein transplant (which worked), and he's had various scares and alarms through that time. He just had a fistula installed for dialysis--not now, but in the future, but I'm honestly wondering if that was even necessary...if he's going to make it for the dialysis.
When his mind is there, I'm okay. I'm even okay with his dying, to be truthful. But seeing him weak like this, unable to figure out what the day and date thing in his watch is, that breaks my heart.
But you know--he doesn't have dementia. A week ago, or less, he was correcting my mental math when I was talking about how many bags of pellets I'd bought. Dementia simply doesn't set in that quickly.
And then there's me. I'm trying to lose weight, partly because I can see all too clearly what happens if you don't take care of yourself--the nursing homes are full of those people. The one who really scared me was the one at the nursing home before this--she was probably my age, morbidly obese, in a motorized wheelchair--but she had a tattoo and her nails done, so she was not that different from me--though I don't do my nails--and she scared the crap out of me. Every time I didn't want to go to the gym, I looked at her and out the door I went.
So I'm doing Weight Watchers for the skeighty-eighth time. I may as well be up front--I started it in January, weighing 249 pounds, one short of the dreaded 250. I've bounced up and down, and this morning I weigh 238, which actually makes me pretty happy. And I'm planning on going to the gym. But I also know what happens--either I hit a plateau, or I just get friggin' tired of measuring every bite that goes in my mouth, and I just start stuffing myself. Compounding the issue is the fact that I have a bad hip--I've been diagnosed with arthritis--and I think my protective way of walking has caused various tendons and ligaments to shorten up--and it hurts. It hurts less when I lose weight, which honestly, you'd think would make me do it. Pain is an amazing motivator. To a point, I guess.
So, here I am, like a million other women, I suppose, in the sandwich generation--overweight, middle-aged, with a dying parent. Yee-hah.
I just tried to get the doctor who was dealing with my father...he's not working, he's not even working at that hospital, and I know how opaque it can be to deal with hospital bureaucracy. So I'll try at the nursing home this afternoon--try to get there at shift change so I can talk to the day and the evening shifts.
Oh, yeah, and I need to get to a doctor myself, so that I don't inflict this on my children, but it's at the point where it's been so long that any doctor I go to will read me the riot act, and I don't want that. Actually, I have one picked out, and I'm waiting till I hit 230, so I can say, see, look, I've lost nearly 20 pounds since the beginning of the year! And maybe she won't yell at me quite as bad.
Wish me luck.
