There and back again
Jul. 20th, 2020 08:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lauradi7dwI keep wanting to post about Audubon magazine, Portland, the USPS (call your elected folks!), and whatever random thing flits through my mind, but I feel that I should record the trip to see my parents. It might be long (turned out to be almost 1400 words), so I am composing it in Word. Another delay, because after almost ten years with this laptop, some update or other seems to have set the default font as Calibri instead of TNR, so I had to spend the time to fix it. If anyone were actually spying on me through my computer, they’d know that it will be a cold day in Hell (as opposed to a hot day in Lexington) before I use Calibri. If I decided to go with a sans serif font, it would be Comic Sans. So there. You can't tell here, because Dreamwidth doesn't let me choose a font (does it?)
For years, I’ve been going to visit my parents every couple of weeks. They have caregivers in the house, but there are lots of things they don’t do, and it seemed that my parents also have frequent medical appointments that I want to take them to. On March 11, I left my mother’s car (I’m the only one who drives it) at the remote lot at RDU. That was a mistake. In some sense, it was the *second* mistake of the day. I was scheduled to go back in a week or two (I don’t remember) because my mother had an appointment to get cavities filled. What I should have done was changed my flight, waited around until they could squeeze her in sooner, if possible, and left the car at the house, taking a cab to the airport. The writing was already on the wall, but I didn’t really think it through. My father had an appointment at the VA the day after her dental appt, and we were supposed to host the bridge club. Of course, none of that happened. And kept not happening, for months. The parking fee kept climbing. I kept imagining creeping decay in my mother’s mouth. My mother seemed just barely able to cope with some chores that got dumped on her. Instacart kept them supplied (plus a commercial paper goods company in Nevada that I ordered some stuff from, and a couple of other online sources). Kind neighbors went to the drug store when my mother’s prescription changed due to the FDA withdrawing one of her meds. They got by, but I wanted to SEE them, and to set up a system by which we can continue to “see” them. We see Arthur’s family every week on Zoom (way more than we communicated before), but my mother would be too worried about making mistakes if we set her up with an iPad for Facetime/Skype/zoom. We ordered a Viewclix screen. It is meant to require no action from the elderly parent except talking into it when called. https://viewclix.com/ For that to be true, someone has to set it up, connect it to the wifi network, make sure the screen is getting a good shot of the parent’s face, etc. In practice, from a distance you also have to call the parent and say “go sit at the screen, I’m going to call you,” but fortunately she doesn’t have too much trouble with phone calls. I finally decided that last week would be a good time, and I went for four days/three nights. I wore a mask in the house except when sleeping, and ate my meals outside sitting in a lawn chair, so that I could take the mask off and not exhale into the house’s air. Food prep with a mask is weird. I was cutting up cubes of watermelon, and couldn’t just pop one into my mouth. No finger-licking or taste testing (possibly just as well, for general sanitation). I was tested (negative) a couple of weeks previously, when it seemed that I might have to go to take over for a sick (not Covid) caregiver at a time that two of the regulars were out of town, but others stepped up and did 12-14 hour shifts to cover. I was quite careful and stayed away from stores and crowds in between, so I wasn’t *really* worried about infecting people, but my purpose in going was to help out, not to kill my parents. I stayed at a distance a lot of the time, but did touch them. Under NC CNA licensing rules, the aides can’t cut fingernails or toenails, for example, although they can use an emery board. My mother deals with her own fingernails, but I do my father’s fingernails and their toenails. That requires being pretty close. I also cut my father’s hair. I suspect four months is the longest he’s gone without a hair cut in nearly a century (he’s 98, and has had short hair since whatever age people started giving boys their first haircut in the 1920s). Hmm. Maybe it was longer several years ago when he fell backwards on the ramp and got a gash big enough in the back of his head that he had staples put in. (instead of stitches). That would have made cutting awkward. I don’t even remember how long it took to heal. My mother’s teeth have been filled. The viewclix is in place. I cut back some stuff by the bushes, which for some reason the lawn guy doesn’t do. Took some checks to the bank drive-through (pneumatic tubes!). Bought some new sheets for my father’s bed. Went to the pharmacy. Took out a pizza, which lasted them most of the week (not every day). Oh, and slaughtered five mice. It was terrible, and I’m not doing it again. The snap traps are supposed to be instant painless death, but clearly not always – the second morning, there was a little pool of blood next to one mouse-in-trap, and on the third day, a trapped mouse was barely alive when I found it. I understand that it’s upsetting and annoying to see mouse poops all over the kitchen and dining room, but phooey to mouse murder. Who knows when I’ll be back there anyway (could be months, could be tomorrow if my mother falls or something), but I have decided it’s the principle of the thing.
On the way down, I was pleased by the cleaning, masks, and distancing in the airport and on the plane. On the way back, not so much. JetBlue is still doing the leave the middle seats empty booking thing, but they make an exception for families traveling together. From BOS-RDU, I was the only person in a few rows. I had a row to myself from RDU to Boston, but the row directly in front of me had a mom and two kids, the row directly behind me had a mom and two kids, and there were a couple of family pairs nearby. The kids had all done a great job in the terminal about wearing masks (better than a number of adults, despite repeated overhead announcements), but it seemed that once they were on the plane, they were done, and let the masks down some. I am doing the self-isolation thing in the house. (Massachusetts is “urging” it for incoming travelers, not requiring it, and I don’t know how they’d enforce it anyway. We aren’t South Korea, where every arriving person gets a tracking app and goes into official quarantine). We had done a lot of planning and prep in advance about this. I am staying mostly in the guest room, including sleeping, and using the downstairs half-bath. Arthur is sleeping in our bedroom, hanging out in his home office, and using the upstairs bathroom. I am not going into the office, he isn’t going into the guest room or downstairs toilet. For rooms of overlap (most notably the kitchen), we have window fans facing out while I’m there and for a while afterwards, and I wipe down every solid surface I touch in the kitchen, etc. We are eating at different times. After the car ride home from the airport (me in the back seat, windows open, masks), we supposedly haven’t been closer to each other than 6-8 feet, but I think we messed up once on the stairs yesterday and were closer. Probably fine. I have to decide whether to get tested again or just wait it out.
For years, I’ve been going to visit my parents every couple of weeks. They have caregivers in the house, but there are lots of things they don’t do, and it seemed that my parents also have frequent medical appointments that I want to take them to. On March 11, I left my mother’s car (I’m the only one who drives it) at the remote lot at RDU. That was a mistake. In some sense, it was the *second* mistake of the day. I was scheduled to go back in a week or two (I don’t remember) because my mother had an appointment to get cavities filled. What I should have done was changed my flight, waited around until they could squeeze her in sooner, if possible, and left the car at the house, taking a cab to the airport. The writing was already on the wall, but I didn’t really think it through. My father had an appointment at the VA the day after her dental appt, and we were supposed to host the bridge club. Of course, none of that happened. And kept not happening, for months. The parking fee kept climbing. I kept imagining creeping decay in my mother’s mouth. My mother seemed just barely able to cope with some chores that got dumped on her. Instacart kept them supplied (plus a commercial paper goods company in Nevada that I ordered some stuff from, and a couple of other online sources). Kind neighbors went to the drug store when my mother’s prescription changed due to the FDA withdrawing one of her meds. They got by, but I wanted to SEE them, and to set up a system by which we can continue to “see” them. We see Arthur’s family every week on Zoom (way more than we communicated before), but my mother would be too worried about making mistakes if we set her up with an iPad for Facetime/Skype/zoom. We ordered a Viewclix screen. It is meant to require no action from the elderly parent except talking into it when called. https://viewclix.com/ For that to be true, someone has to set it up, connect it to the wifi network, make sure the screen is getting a good shot of the parent’s face, etc. In practice, from a distance you also have to call the parent and say “go sit at the screen, I’m going to call you,” but fortunately she doesn’t have too much trouble with phone calls. I finally decided that last week would be a good time, and I went for four days/three nights. I wore a mask in the house except when sleeping, and ate my meals outside sitting in a lawn chair, so that I could take the mask off and not exhale into the house’s air. Food prep with a mask is weird. I was cutting up cubes of watermelon, and couldn’t just pop one into my mouth. No finger-licking or taste testing (possibly just as well, for general sanitation). I was tested (negative) a couple of weeks previously, when it seemed that I might have to go to take over for a sick (not Covid) caregiver at a time that two of the regulars were out of town, but others stepped up and did 12-14 hour shifts to cover. I was quite careful and stayed away from stores and crowds in between, so I wasn’t *really* worried about infecting people, but my purpose in going was to help out, not to kill my parents. I stayed at a distance a lot of the time, but did touch them. Under NC CNA licensing rules, the aides can’t cut fingernails or toenails, for example, although they can use an emery board. My mother deals with her own fingernails, but I do my father’s fingernails and their toenails. That requires being pretty close. I also cut my father’s hair. I suspect four months is the longest he’s gone without a hair cut in nearly a century (he’s 98, and has had short hair since whatever age people started giving boys their first haircut in the 1920s). Hmm. Maybe it was longer several years ago when he fell backwards on the ramp and got a gash big enough in the back of his head that he had staples put in. (instead of stitches). That would have made cutting awkward. I don’t even remember how long it took to heal. My mother’s teeth have been filled. The viewclix is in place. I cut back some stuff by the bushes, which for some reason the lawn guy doesn’t do. Took some checks to the bank drive-through (pneumatic tubes!). Bought some new sheets for my father’s bed. Went to the pharmacy. Took out a pizza, which lasted them most of the week (not every day). Oh, and slaughtered five mice. It was terrible, and I’m not doing it again. The snap traps are supposed to be instant painless death, but clearly not always – the second morning, there was a little pool of blood next to one mouse-in-trap, and on the third day, a trapped mouse was barely alive when I found it. I understand that it’s upsetting and annoying to see mouse poops all over the kitchen and dining room, but phooey to mouse murder. Who knows when I’ll be back there anyway (could be months, could be tomorrow if my mother falls or something), but I have decided it’s the principle of the thing.
On the way down, I was pleased by the cleaning, masks, and distancing in the airport and on the plane. On the way back, not so much. JetBlue is still doing the leave the middle seats empty booking thing, but they make an exception for families traveling together. From BOS-RDU, I was the only person in a few rows. I had a row to myself from RDU to Boston, but the row directly in front of me had a mom and two kids, the row directly behind me had a mom and two kids, and there were a couple of family pairs nearby. The kids had all done a great job in the terminal about wearing masks (better than a number of adults, despite repeated overhead announcements), but it seemed that once they were on the plane, they were done, and let the masks down some. I am doing the self-isolation thing in the house. (Massachusetts is “urging” it for incoming travelers, not requiring it, and I don’t know how they’d enforce it anyway. We aren’t South Korea, where every arriving person gets a tracking app and goes into official quarantine). We had done a lot of planning and prep in advance about this. I am staying mostly in the guest room, including sleeping, and using the downstairs half-bath. Arthur is sleeping in our bedroom, hanging out in his home office, and using the upstairs bathroom. I am not going into the office, he isn’t going into the guest room or downstairs toilet. For rooms of overlap (most notably the kitchen), we have window fans facing out while I’m there and for a while afterwards, and I wipe down every solid surface I touch in the kitchen, etc. We are eating at different times. After the car ride home from the airport (me in the back seat, windows open, masks), we supposedly haven’t been closer to each other than 6-8 feet, but I think we messed up once on the stairs yesterday and were closer. Probably fine. I have to decide whether to get tested again or just wait it out.
no subject
Date: 2020-07-20 04:27 pm (UTC)This is a weird and familiar feeling for me as well. Mandatory Family Fun is every Friday, and it's the parents, me, and both sisters. Admittedly, we've been slipping on getting all five of us, but given that I ordinarily talk to mom and Al about once a month, and dad and Shannon much less frequently, it's weird. Nice, and I don't regret it, but weird.
Food prep with a mask is weird. I was cutting up cubes of watermelon, and couldn’t just pop one into my mouth. No finger-licking or taste testing (possibly just as well, for general sanitation)
Oof, yeah. It's good that I don't generally have to make Serious Food For Other People, because I am absolutely a health disaster --taste things, lick the spoon and go back to stirring, etc. (I _can_ turn all these behaviours off if I am cooking for people I'm not otherwise fluid bonded to, but it's hard and requires vigilance.)
I am mildly phobic of mice, and the two times I've been in situations where they've been killed have been awful, and I felt absolutely terrible for having to pass the responsibility off to someone else to deal with the body. Five is terrifying, I'm so sorry.
I'm glad for you that you got to see your parents, and I'm sorry that it's surrounded by so much *waves hands vaguely in pandemic*.
~Sor