Anybody Still There?

Life almost seems with me too much near and far recently.

Flew down to Florida to see my mom and to see what was going on with her.  We now have a person going in for two hours every day and that seems to be helping things, but she keeps losing weight. My mom not the caregiver.  Also, unfortunately all the Internet I had been stealing while down there, are now secure with passwords, so I ended up not posting while I was down there.  Not because I couldn't go to coffee houses to use their Internet, but I just didn't seem to get around to it.

Also, the goddamn touch pad continues to be hypersensitive.  Now that I'm using Ubuntu, I haven't figured out how to turn off the touch pad while I'm typing.  My wife's Acer has two keys you can hit to turn the touch pad off and then hit them again to turn it on.  This didn't used to be a problem, I don't think with any computer.

At any rate took mom to the doctor who was a pretty nice guy, but he was essentially no help.  My mother doesn't eat and doesn't clean herself any more, nor does she wash her own clothes.  Now when I say she doesn't eat I mean almost.  And when I say she doesn't clean herself, I mean she will do a sponge bath every other day or so.  So the doc. said based on our reporting, that she is definitely in the early stages of dementia.  Then he regaled us with stories of his elderly relatives, most of whom are in Africa, most of whom were doctors, and who are losing it in one way or another, but whose lives  he doesn't think he should intervene in yet.  Not a lot of help.

Back home and my chow had been throwing up every day since shortly before I'd left.  We thought that she might have some stomach irritation from the drugs from the surgery.  Nope that that simple.

She has esophagitus which is a narrowing of the esophagus which in all probably occurred from some sort of reaction to the anesthetics used in the surgery.  We took her to the OSU Vet E.R. Clinic and they took her in right away.  It was so serious she was near death, but because she is so brave and impervious to pain we had no idea.  We gave permission to do anything possible to save her (thank god we'd paid off our credit cards in January).

So what  they have done is to scope the esophagus and put a balloon down it to increase the size back to normal.  There will be another one to eight procedures at approximately one week intervals.  She is unable to eat through her mouth and for the time being she is even unable to drink.  She has a feeding tube directly into her stomach and we have to put food into it every four hours even through the night.  The first feeding was a 8:00 a.m. this morning and didn't go badly.   Noon was better for us, she took both well.

She is at $5gs and we may be only half way through the treatment.  In addition we are simply emotionally overwhelmed.  What with everything.