Oh Hello, Stress

It never rains, but it pours, right?

I’ve been super busy the last few days.

A while ago, my grandma took a bad fall. We took her to the hospital afterward and they said she was ok, except for a broken wrist. A few weeks later, she was complaining of back pain, so my mom took her to the ER. They think that she had a bad fall again and was so disoriented that she didn’t tell anyone. From the second fall she had five broken ribs and three broken vertebrae. They admitted her and found that she also had a merca infection and possibly bronchitis.

My grandma is 91 years old and has never really enjoyed life. She is ready to go and has refused treatment. Unfortunately, every time we try to sign her up for hospice, she is just too “well” and they won’t take her. So now she is at a medicare-paid rehabilitation center. If she does better, she might be able to go live back at her assisted living place. If she gets worse, they can move her to a nursing home. To complicate matters, she has been hallucinating really awful things happening to her, so she is always upset when we go to visit. And there really is no reasoning that these things aren’t happening to her, you know?

As if that weren’t enough, my mom has been really run down from running back and forth to see my grandma… and last week she (my mom) was feeling sick, so she went to the walk-in clinic where they told her it was food poisoning and gave her a prescription for Cipro. It was not food poisoning.. and the Cipro killed everything in her system except for the bacteria that was making her sick. Awesome, huh? She got a lot worse. On Sunday, I took her to the ER where they promptly admitted her and started her on IV antibiotics. It turned out to be a bad stomach infection and she’s home now, but it was a really stressful few days.

Things are a little more back to normal now – thankfully! And tomorrow is Natalie and Dave F.’s wedding, so hopefully my Dave and I can get out and have some fun.

I’ll leave you with some pictures. While my mom was in the hospital, I took care of her dog, Luci. On Monday night, Dave and I walked her to Beverly Park at sunset. It was a really nice, peaceful time that we all really needed.

Welcome to Sick Ward C

I’m home sick today…. ick. It’s a pain because Dave is leaving tomorrow for a conference in San Francisco where he is presenting an application he wrote and I want to be supportive and help him get ready… but for all intents and purposes, I’m a bit dead to the world.

I thought I would use this time to catch up on some photos that I meant to post earlier. I spent a big chunk of last weekend at my mom’s house getting ready for Easter. My mom was dogsitting the neighbor’s dog, Torres.

This is Torres.

He is a sweet dog… but sometimes he drives my mom’s dog, Luci, a little crazy.

This is Luci.

Luci had the last laugh when she played with his toys.

And this is my cousin, Lindsey, holding the neighbor’s cat, Fenway.

Fenway lives next door, but spends a lot of his time inviting himself in at my mom’s house. He eats the food, uses the litter box, and sleeps on fresh laundry – not quite the perfect house guest…. but he did let Lindsey carry him around a bit.

In other news, I’ve sort of lost my head. I got a little caught up in the excitement of virtual quilt bees and joined one regular one and one mini one.

The regular one is The Bee in My Bonnet and it is comprised of 12 women. We’re in the process of figuring out the details and hope to start in May. Everyone in it seems really friendly and ready to create beautiful blocks.

The mini one is through swap-bot. There are only three of us and we’re sending to each other at the same time. The plan is to send a little bit of fabric and instructions on the blocks we want to each other…. then add fabrics from our stash and make four blocks for each person. I went fabric shopping the other night:

I can’t decide what kind of blocks to request! I know that I want the dark blue to frame the blocks, but.. apart from that, I keep changing my mind. I guess I’ll have to make it up pretty soon because the fabric bundles need to go out in the mail tomorrow. Eek!

In other news, I’ll be dragging my sick butt out of bed tomorrow at 4:45am to drive Dave to the airport…. yaaayyyyy.