A great summer
After I had finished screwing the seat extension
into Jo-Ann's toilet, Isabel and I went out on the back porch and let Mom settle
in to her new home. Isabel looked at me and said, "You need a
vacation."
I smiled, or at least tried to. It was probably a
grimace. Ever since I had surgery to correct an overbite, smiling has felt a bit
unnatural, a tight stretch.
Isabel made a further comment that I was obviously tired and had lost too much weight. It showed in my face.
I admitted that it had been a long day, one of many in recent weeks. But insisted that I was quite healthy and in good spirits, having just enjoyed a most pleasant and satisfying summer.
I patted my pot belly and assured her that while yes, I have dropped about 25 pounds, I still weigh just under 200, about 15 pounds more than when I retired. I went on this crazy diet I told her, eating more and exercising less. Works for me.
Expensive though, fuel and corn costs have driven up the price of steak. The foods I did eliminate, mostly bread and potatoes, were the cheap ones.
Time consuming too. I gave up going to the gym for the summer, forgoing the treadmill and weights. Instead I tried to go for a long walk every day, and the occasional bike ride to neighbouring towns. So to be honest, I was exercising less intensely, but more often. When Mom got sick that everyday routine was cut down to several days a week, still more than sufficient for my purposes. The wonderful weather, alternating between majestic thunderstorms and mild sunny days, had me outdoors at every opportunity. I haven't been this tanned since I was a kid.
******
Other lifestyle changes this summer involved my intellectual intake. I went on a blog diet. That was inspired by the cover story in the July/August Issue of the Atlantic, Is Google Making Us Stoopid? (Yes Ron, this is your fault, for insisting I read it again when I said the title was an oxymoron.)
After reading Nicholas Carr on why we can't read the way we used to, I admitted to myself that I have a blog addiction. Like him I have been skimming the Internet, sacrificing depth for breadth. At the same time I keep buying books that are piling up, unread, on my overloaded book shelves.
So I gave up reading political blogs for the summer. No Instapundit, no Normblog, no Popinjays, no the other 150 or so blogs and news sites in my newsreader, which announced this morning that it has over 3 thousand rss feeds waiting for my perusal.
I couldn't go cold turkey, I allowed myself a half dozen blogs, one or two each from the local, climate change and Mac/Apple categories. As I was telling Candace the other night, at the bloggers meet, I can't make it through the day without checking Blog Windsor, her daily showcase of area bloggers and photographers. I promised her, once again, to join Flickr and upgrade my blog software. She replied, gently, that it would also be a good idea if I were to actually, you know, write something now and then.
Ya well, I'll get back to you on that. On the reading front however, I've resolved to stay off the computer each day until I've read at least one chapter from a book I'd been meaning to start (or finish.) It's working too.
I finally got around to reading Apocalypse Delayed: The Story of Jehovah's Witnesses by M. James Penton. As the author notes, it's amazing how much the organizational development of the church resembles that of the various marxist-leninist vanguard parties. Something I wasn't surprised to learn was the high incidence of mental illness in the religion, at least in the last half of the 20th century. Mom's schizophrenia dovetailed so well with her theology that we grew up thinking her strange behaviour and beliefs were normal.
I also finished How Doctors Think, by Jerome Groopman. "On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within 18 seconds." The book is not just about the errors doctors make, and why they make them. It's also a guide for patients and their families, on how to talk to their doctors, when to get second opinions, and the need to accept that even the best doctors often make mistakes and cannot cure all ills.
My summer fiction reading has been confined to a single author, Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series. Life at sea in the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. I'm up to book eight, The Ionian Mission. Thirteen more volumes to go. Check out this review by Christopher Hitchens.
Two books I purchased this week are How Fiction Works, by James Wood and Gina Kolata's Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss — and the Myths and Realities of Dieting (recommended by Peter.)
Next week, after Labour Day, I'm going back to the political blogs. There are some I want to catch up on and read all of their summer posts. Others I am going to delete from the reader, although I admired their writers and enjoyed reading them in the past. Even in retirement, there's just so much time.
******
Jo-Ann just called. She's going over to Mom's apartment this afternoon, and can pick up the items I was supposed to get on my next visit. She says Mom is doing better and is no longer talking about a court challenge to our dictatorship.
Three weeks ago Mom left a message on my phone that led me to believe she was having a stroke or heart attack. When I tried to return the call, there was no answer. I called 911, and then Rick and Jo-Ann, and started driving to Windsor. A few minutes later Rick called to say that the paramedics were taking Mom to the Hotel Dieu hospital. She was delusional and her blood pressure was extremely high. She kept talking about spirit voices that were threatening her and stealing her drugs.
Turns out she had stopped taking her meds. Something she's done many times before, but not in the last decade. Not since Dad died.
In July Mom read an article in the paper about nursing homes using anti-psychotics, such as the one she takes, to quiet down patients with dementia. This is an unapproved use, has no known therapeutic value, and can result in some nasty, sometimes deadly, side effects. She asked me if I was aware of those risks and I said "Yes, but in your case they are worth taking because you get very sick without them."
As always, she insisted that she doesn't have a mental illness. I reminded her of our deal. If she wants to go off psych meds she has to go into a hospital under a doctor's supervision and convince him to monitor her withdrawal. It was only because she had agreed to this that I had agreed to her living alone. (That, and the daily visits she used to get from Windsor PACT. Regrettably that supervision ended when we insisted on changing doctors.)
She knows there is little chance of any psychiatrist going along with such an arrangement, given her history. So she apparently decided to try and fool us. And she did for a while.
Then Diane started calling me, saying there is something wrong with Mom. When I visited (I bring Mom her pills once a week) she complained of pains in her leg and chest and said she was not sleeping well.
I took her to see our family doctor, who discovered her kidneys were passing protein, and that her blood pressure was up. He wrote a script to address those issues, ordered an x-ray, and said he wanted to do more tests on her next visit. On the way home she startled me by laughing to herself. I asked her what was so funny and all she would say was that at her age she was happy to be alive.
Two weeks later, when the paramedics found Mom's pill tray, it was obvious she hadn't taken any of her medications for at least several days. After she was treated in emergency her blood pressure and sugar levels returned to normal, and they released her, telling me to get her in to see her psychiatrist asap. He recommended we have her admitted to the psych ward at the hospital where he practices, in Chatham. She didn't want to go, but I reminded her of Ontario's draconian Mental Health Act, and said her choices were my car or a police cruiser, in handcuffs, followed by a one hour ride in an ambulance, in a strait jacket. She remembered.
The last two years for Mom have been her happiest and healthiest in decades, even though she broke her hip and had to endure a painful operation to remove some skin cancer. Unfortunately, even under the best of circumstances, she couldn't resist risking another crisis.
Although we argue with Mom as if she had made a deliberate decision, we don't really believe it's her fault. She's been on the minimum dosage of risperidone and we suspect the drug had become less effective, for metabolic reasons outside of her control. Now she's on a higher dose, 3 milligrams a day instead of two. Still a conservative amount, far less than her previous shrinks had prescribed.
We've told her she is no longer allowed to live by herself. Legally, that might not be true. She's got a good lawyer who strongly believes in protecting the rights of the mentally ill. But this morning, after they had breakfast in the garden, Mom told Jo-Ann that maybe living with her is not such a bad idea after all. We'll see.
******
Max emailed while I was writing this, to say that McCain has picked his VP nominee, Alaska Governor Sara Palin. An excellent choice. I rushed into the living room to turn on Fox News, just in time to watch the live announcement by the two of them. That's how I've been following the election lately, on YouTube and the cable networks, and following up tips from Nav, Max and Kate. And of course reading the Windsor Star and Maclean's and the Atlantic. But no blogs, honest. (Okay, I did take a peek every now and then.)
I was wondering how McCain would respond to the very successful Democratic convention. Now there are two sets of debates to look forward to.
******
Anyway, it's been a good summer. And I have high hopes for autumn too. Might even take a vacation.
Isabel made a further comment that I was obviously tired and had lost too much weight. It showed in my face.
I admitted that it had been a long day, one of many in recent weeks. But insisted that I was quite healthy and in good spirits, having just enjoyed a most pleasant and satisfying summer.
I patted my pot belly and assured her that while yes, I have dropped about 25 pounds, I still weigh just under 200, about 15 pounds more than when I retired. I went on this crazy diet I told her, eating more and exercising less. Works for me.
Expensive though, fuel and corn costs have driven up the price of steak. The foods I did eliminate, mostly bread and potatoes, were the cheap ones.
Time consuming too. I gave up going to the gym for the summer, forgoing the treadmill and weights. Instead I tried to go for a long walk every day, and the occasional bike ride to neighbouring towns. So to be honest, I was exercising less intensely, but more often. When Mom got sick that everyday routine was cut down to several days a week, still more than sufficient for my purposes. The wonderful weather, alternating between majestic thunderstorms and mild sunny days, had me outdoors at every opportunity. I haven't been this tanned since I was a kid.
******
Other lifestyle changes this summer involved my intellectual intake. I went on a blog diet. That was inspired by the cover story in the July/August Issue of the Atlantic, Is Google Making Us Stoopid? (Yes Ron, this is your fault, for insisting I read it again when I said the title was an oxymoron.)
After reading Nicholas Carr on why we can't read the way we used to, I admitted to myself that I have a blog addiction. Like him I have been skimming the Internet, sacrificing depth for breadth. At the same time I keep buying books that are piling up, unread, on my overloaded book shelves.
So I gave up reading political blogs for the summer. No Instapundit, no Normblog, no Popinjays, no the other 150 or so blogs and news sites in my newsreader, which announced this morning that it has over 3 thousand rss feeds waiting for my perusal.
I couldn't go cold turkey, I allowed myself a half dozen blogs, one or two each from the local, climate change and Mac/Apple categories. As I was telling Candace the other night, at the bloggers meet, I can't make it through the day without checking Blog Windsor, her daily showcase of area bloggers and photographers. I promised her, once again, to join Flickr and upgrade my blog software. She replied, gently, that it would also be a good idea if I were to actually, you know, write something now and then.
Ya well, I'll get back to you on that. On the reading front however, I've resolved to stay off the computer each day until I've read at least one chapter from a book I'd been meaning to start (or finish.) It's working too.
I finally got around to reading Apocalypse Delayed: The Story of Jehovah's Witnesses by M. James Penton. As the author notes, it's amazing how much the organizational development of the church resembles that of the various marxist-leninist vanguard parties. Something I wasn't surprised to learn was the high incidence of mental illness in the religion, at least in the last half of the 20th century. Mom's schizophrenia dovetailed so well with her theology that we grew up thinking her strange behaviour and beliefs were normal.
I also finished How Doctors Think, by Jerome Groopman. "On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within 18 seconds." The book is not just about the errors doctors make, and why they make them. It's also a guide for patients and their families, on how to talk to their doctors, when to get second opinions, and the need to accept that even the best doctors often make mistakes and cannot cure all ills.
My summer fiction reading has been confined to a single author, Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series. Life at sea in the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. I'm up to book eight, The Ionian Mission. Thirteen more volumes to go. Check out this review by Christopher Hitchens.
Two books I purchased this week are How Fiction Works, by James Wood and Gina Kolata's Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss — and the Myths and Realities of Dieting (recommended by Peter.)
Next week, after Labour Day, I'm going back to the political blogs. There are some I want to catch up on and read all of their summer posts. Others I am going to delete from the reader, although I admired their writers and enjoyed reading them in the past. Even in retirement, there's just so much time.
******
Jo-Ann just called. She's going over to Mom's apartment this afternoon, and can pick up the items I was supposed to get on my next visit. She says Mom is doing better and is no longer talking about a court challenge to our dictatorship.
Three weeks ago Mom left a message on my phone that led me to believe she was having a stroke or heart attack. When I tried to return the call, there was no answer. I called 911, and then Rick and Jo-Ann, and started driving to Windsor. A few minutes later Rick called to say that the paramedics were taking Mom to the Hotel Dieu hospital. She was delusional and her blood pressure was extremely high. She kept talking about spirit voices that were threatening her and stealing her drugs.
Turns out she had stopped taking her meds. Something she's done many times before, but not in the last decade. Not since Dad died.
In July Mom read an article in the paper about nursing homes using anti-psychotics, such as the one she takes, to quiet down patients with dementia. This is an unapproved use, has no known therapeutic value, and can result in some nasty, sometimes deadly, side effects. She asked me if I was aware of those risks and I said "Yes, but in your case they are worth taking because you get very sick without them."
As always, she insisted that she doesn't have a mental illness. I reminded her of our deal. If she wants to go off psych meds she has to go into a hospital under a doctor's supervision and convince him to monitor her withdrawal. It was only because she had agreed to this that I had agreed to her living alone. (That, and the daily visits she used to get from Windsor PACT. Regrettably that supervision ended when we insisted on changing doctors.)
She knows there is little chance of any psychiatrist going along with such an arrangement, given her history. So she apparently decided to try and fool us. And she did for a while.
Then Diane started calling me, saying there is something wrong with Mom. When I visited (I bring Mom her pills once a week) she complained of pains in her leg and chest and said she was not sleeping well.
I took her to see our family doctor, who discovered her kidneys were passing protein, and that her blood pressure was up. He wrote a script to address those issues, ordered an x-ray, and said he wanted to do more tests on her next visit. On the way home she startled me by laughing to herself. I asked her what was so funny and all she would say was that at her age she was happy to be alive.
Two weeks later, when the paramedics found Mom's pill tray, it was obvious she hadn't taken any of her medications for at least several days. After she was treated in emergency her blood pressure and sugar levels returned to normal, and they released her, telling me to get her in to see her psychiatrist asap. He recommended we have her admitted to the psych ward at the hospital where he practices, in Chatham. She didn't want to go, but I reminded her of Ontario's draconian Mental Health Act, and said her choices were my car or a police cruiser, in handcuffs, followed by a one hour ride in an ambulance, in a strait jacket. She remembered.
The last two years for Mom have been her happiest and healthiest in decades, even though she broke her hip and had to endure a painful operation to remove some skin cancer. Unfortunately, even under the best of circumstances, she couldn't resist risking another crisis.
Although we argue with Mom as if she had made a deliberate decision, we don't really believe it's her fault. She's been on the minimum dosage of risperidone and we suspect the drug had become less effective, for metabolic reasons outside of her control. Now she's on a higher dose, 3 milligrams a day instead of two. Still a conservative amount, far less than her previous shrinks had prescribed.
We've told her she is no longer allowed to live by herself. Legally, that might not be true. She's got a good lawyer who strongly believes in protecting the rights of the mentally ill. But this morning, after they had breakfast in the garden, Mom told Jo-Ann that maybe living with her is not such a bad idea after all. We'll see.
******
Max emailed while I was writing this, to say that McCain has picked his VP nominee, Alaska Governor Sara Palin. An excellent choice. I rushed into the living room to turn on Fox News, just in time to watch the live announcement by the two of them. That's how I've been following the election lately, on YouTube and the cable networks, and following up tips from Nav, Max and Kate. And of course reading the Windsor Star and Maclean's and the Atlantic. But no blogs, honest. (Okay, I did take a peek every now and then.)
I was wondering how McCain would respond to the very successful Democratic convention. Now there are two sets of debates to look forward to.
******
Anyway, it's been a good summer. And I have high hopes for autumn too. Might even take a vacation.
Posted: Fri - August 29, 2008 at 06:57 PM
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Published On: Aug 30, 2008 12:46 AM
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Published On: Aug 30, 2008 12:46 AM