Health news

My Mother has been home from the rehab clinic for nine days now. Penny and she have been busy trying to retrofit her house. They've brought a retrofitting contractor in who is going to install bars for her to hang onto in the shower and who will install railings around the stairs that lead out to her garbage can and recylcing. Penny and I are also working on Mom to land some household help with dusting, vacuuming, and cleaning the bathroom and kitchen, someone who could also take out her trash. Penny helped get Mom a new chair ifor the family room, which is easier for Mom to get in and out of, and they got Goodwill to pick up an old chair of Grandpa's which was way too low. Most of the chairs/sofas in the house are two hard for Mom to get in and out of. Mom went to see our nurse practitioner, Debra, earlier in the week, and the physician's asisstant who works with Dr. Fahey this morning. In between she went to her first real physical therapy appointment (the one last week was diagnostic) since leaving rehab. Debra said her potassium levels were OK by the time she left the hospital, but Debra had her blood tested. She was still borderline anemic when she left rehab and this may help account for her limited amount of energy. The physician assistant said her progres was going OK, particularly with a lack of pain in her knee (except for sometimes at physical therapy). He tested Mom for some of the same straightening the leg and bending the knee range of motion kinds of issues that she has been working on in physical therapy. The physician's assistant surprised Penny and Mom by saying it's basically up to her to decide when she can drive and go back to work. He said her knee is really basically ready (even though she still has to work on PT and PT may keep her out of work some). It's really more the genreal health/energy/Debra kind of issues that may hold her back. Does she have enough energy for driving? Mom has wanted to get on the work laptop computer she brought home to take care of a couple of tasks - time entry, e-mails, eventually also to do real work at home. She hasn't figure out how to use the laptop with her new wireless router, and so I did call and help her figure out to access her e-mail on the Web on her desktop. Stephanie will rent a car Sunday AM and go down there and may have to help her with that, along with a rnage of other things.

Penny and Jacob have been down there for 10 days. They have done some sightseeing and a lot of visiting - leaving Mom alone a fair amount - but Penny has also done a lot in the house: pushing Mom to go through household items and books and give lots away, working with the retrofitting people, shopping for chairs, buying allergenic mattress covers, getting Mom a new mattress and box springs. Hopefully, Sthpeanie will continue this work with Mom, plus helping her use her computers, her digital camera, her new MP3 player,her new floppy disk drive, etc. Mom has appreciated Penny's persistence, but Mom may have occasionally gone along with the sorts of things Stephanie won't feel comfortable pushing her on. For example, Sthpeanie and Mom are both book collectors, and I doubt Stephanie will push Mom to get rid of more of those. Mo had already been going through her books and clothes, before surgery, but very gradually and methodically.

Stephanie may also help Mom get ready to drive and go back to work, not only by helping Mom figure out how to access her work computer files and do work but also helping her figure how she would get to and from work.

With Mom's low energy level, Mom is a little worried that she won't have the memory and cognitive together-ness to function back at work. She said she is experiencing more word blocks than before surgery. For example, she has a block on the word rehab, and so she's afraid when people ask her how things went with her surgery and all she won't be able to respond effectively because she won't be able to think of that crucial word. That's just part of the story.

We'll see what Stephanie makes of all of this. Although we have an interest in Mom returning to work, we know it's certainly remotely possible that she will never work again. Certainly, attending to PT and house retrofitting has kept her from making very much headway with a work request that came in that she wanted to honor. Stephanie is slated to be there for 12 days. We've just arranged for her to fly back on Saturday in two weeks, instead of driving.

While I was in Tallahassee I had gotten Penny a newspaper section about all the Tallahassee summer camps and had called to find out whether our Tallahassee's church summer camp was full. It was, but Stephanie stopped by there during her first week there - while she was getting Mom's car fixed - and the Christian education director - spouse of a man who was here in Louisville for a year - opted to make a space for Jacob. So this week Jacob has been at First Pres at their camp, apparently liking it. Today must have been the last day, because I'm sure they have the Fourth off. Interestingly, some of the camp counselors are First Pres teens roughly Vincent's age who used to be in Sunday school with him. Also, one of the places they were to go this week was the Panacea Gulf Specimen lab, where we took Vincent for his eighth birthday birthday party and whose Web site I perused recently when our church friends were going to be staying in nearby Alligator Point for a week (where Penny and Jacob also went).

I worried a little when they were leaving Mom home alone so much, but they seem to have done a whirlwind of seeing people and places in Tallahassee and working with Mom a bunch on her house and making progress with her. Some of the people were people I missed while I was there.

This Tuesday Stephanie's Mother went for her weekly chemotherapy treatment. Stephanie's stepfather, Bob, has also been experiencing periodic health problems, either connected with his pancreatitis from the past year or as fallout going all the way back to treatment for cancer some 15 years ago. He's been miserable sometimes with intestinal/stomach problems, just as chemotherapy and its side effects have been running Nancy down some. Nancy will see results from a test of chemotherapy effectiveness in the next few days, just as my Mom Martha will get results of her blood test.

As soon as we offered Vincent a financial incentive to get good dental check-ups - after a particular disastrous and expensive to fix verdict three years ago - Vincent has gone cavity-free. Unregulatedlly failing to floss or water-pick even here and probably doing nothing for a month in Denmark, Vincent came up with two cavities, which we will have filled in a couple of weeks. Ironically, Vincent made it for more than two years with no cavities when he had braces - which are hard to clean around - but now that he has no braces he's gotten cavities. We also aren't sure how much Vincent has been wearing his retainer- which he was pretty good about this spring. He goes back to the orthodontist in August, during the week before school begins. More dental hygiene and treatment self-discipline may be in order.