14 Minutes

I taped this sometime during the early morning hours.  Don’t mind our disheveled looks.  🙂

Grandma Dorothy

I ran inside for five minutes, to change her sheets as she had just ordered me to do.  By the time I came back outside to the porch, where I had left her, Grandma was gone.  I frantically searched the house, the yard, and the shed.  I ran across the street to my parent’s house and quickly learned that they hadn’t seen her either.  Rowan stayed with the neighbor and I made a quick plea on FB for prayers, and combed the streets with my mom and dad.

Grandma started her day off pretty rough.  She woke at 1am with the same neck pain she’s been suffering from for over a week.  She’s been to the ER once, the doctor’s twice and PT several times.  She’s on pain killers and muscle relaxers, and nothing seems to be easing her pain.  By 6am, she was up again for the rest of the day, disoriented and slightly combative.  She was convinced all day that someone was visiting and I was keeping her from seeing them.  She thought someone was going to the airport to drop them off and that she was going to go too.  Several times she started down the sidewalk in an attempt to make a break for it.  I led her back, but she kept trying to leave.  Eventually she sat down on the porch and told me to change her sheets.  Relieved that she was willing to let the whole airport thing go, I willingly obliged.

Shortly before I was going to give up, and call the cops, my 12 year old neighbor spotted her, in the passenger seat of a car, windows rolled up, two layers of clothes on(that’s how she dressed herself this morning), and sitting in 115 degrees for over twenty minutes.  She was physically fine, but mentally she’s a mess today.  She was going to sit there until someone took her to the airport.

The day went downhill fast from there.  She started to do some very bizarre things: chewing on a pillow, stripping naked in the living room, trying to put everything she picked up between her toes, trying to walk through walls, and saying some very random statements.  She outright refused to go to bed until 9:30, and this is from someone who has gone to bed before 8pm since I’ve known her!

The most heart-warming and heart-wrenching thing I’ve ever seen is my dad rub his mother’s back for over an hour, until she fell asleep

She’s fading fast, and I miss her already.

In like a lion…

Oh my gosh you guys, it’s been an insane couple of weeks.  The biggest event was my grandma breaking her ankle.  It’s left her immobile and completely dependant on me.  I went from being able to leave her on her own for a few hours to having to get a babysitter to stay with her if I needed to go to the grocery store.  The stress of the whole thing sent her into a downward spiral mentally.  She was convinced she was in a nursing home, that people were constantly coming in and out to visit her, she was having conversations on the phone with no one on the other end, and for the most part, she didn’t know who I was.  She’s fairly stabilized now, but, WOW!

What did Rowan do during the whole time?  Ride his bike!  As long as I’m wasn’t forcing him to eat, sleep or bathe, he was on his bike.  If it was raining, he was riding in circles around the dining room table.  My son loves him some wheels.  He doesn’t know it, but he’s getting his very own two-wheeler for his birthday.  Actually, he’s getting it within the next month probably.  I want him to be able to have it for the summer, and not have to wait until the end of August.  Stature wise he still fits on his tricycle, but mentally he’s in the Tour de France.  He just can’t go fast enough on a three-wheeled baby bike. 

There isn’t much else to update on, except maybe that Rowan harvested the first ripe strawberry from our garden, and kept telling people that, “I grewed it myself!”  Despite the look on his face, he enjoyed the fruits of his labor.  🙂

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