Hello, hello! Jack and I are back.

Our situation really hasn’t changed, though. My mother is still hovering in the shadowlands and I’m still spending most of my time at her nursing home. Mom beat the infection that began her decline and she did so without antibiotics. Her Dr. and I decided to withhold antibiotics because they would prolong her death, but her body didn’t get the memo and took care of it anyway. Now, she’s bedridden with heart failure, weakened, confused and barely taking anything by mouth, but she’s full of fear and not ready to die. She has near constant anxiety and calls out for help all the time, even when I’m sitting with her holding her hand. When you ask her what help she needs she tells you “I don’t know” or she says nothing at all. It’s difficult for her and for all of her caregivers because we feel helpless to keep her calm.

Mom’s pain is mostly well controlled, except for when she needs to be turned. That’s a painful process, but staff have it timed half an hour after her morphine injection and she generally falls asleep quickly afterward. She has medicine for the anxiety too, but it often takes 2 doses to settle her. That’s likely because it’s a part of her personality and not a new symptom. Mom has borderline personality disorder (not just my opinion – she’s had at least 3 psychiatrists tell her this over the years) and she’s struggled with anxiety most of her life. The calling out for help actually started about a year ago when she was hospitalized with pneumonia and congestive heart failure. Back then, on one of her better days, she told me that she needed help because death was stalking her. I think that same fear is what’s driving her behavior now. Staff here are great, but they don’t have the time to give mom as much reassurance as she needs, so I’ve been spending my days hand-holding, forehead kissing and doing my level best to calm her fears in this final stage of life.

So, that’s our basic situation and it means that Jack and I are walking closer to home and often at odd hours. It could be like this for while, too, so I’ve finally organized wifi for mom’s room and we’ll see how it goes.

This out of focus photo is from yesterday when Jack and I went to the Vansittart Pond. It’s fuzzy because I’m laughing and trying to back away from Bubba who really wants to wipe himself off on my pants. He’s covered in mud up to his neck from racing through the mud chasing frogs. It was awesome. The frogs were pop, pop, popping and plop, plop, plopping in all directions. Dozens of them, like a wave moving through a stadium crowd, down the length of the shore. Jack’s tail was at high mast and he was wearing his goofiest grin and when it was all over he was so happy that I just couldn’t get mad about the mud.

While I was waiting at a stoplight today I watched a woman bend over to pick up her dog’s poop. She wore an expression of total disgust on her face and after she’d bagged the offending item she held it gingerly between her thumb and index finger as far away from her body as her arm would reach. She then took about 10 steps, stopped and set the bag down in front of a light standard and walked away.

I’ve seen bags of poop on the ground a few times and I’ve always just assumed that someone forgot it. I’ve done that – set the bag down while I fiddle with my camera and then forget to pick it up.* This wasn’t that, though. This was deliberately making her dog’s poop someone else’s problem. Someone like me who walks with a trash bag because I don’t like litter.  I think there should be a rule that if you aren’t prepared to deal with your dog’s shit then you shouldn’t have a dog.

 

*I almost always go back to pick it up.

Jack doesn’t do a heavy shed in the springtime because normally we go to the east coast for the summer. There he swims in the cold water of the Gulf of St. Lawrence almost every day and he needs a bit of extra fluff for insulation and added buoyancy. This year we fooled him, though, and stayed home in good old hot and humid Ontario. The poor boy spent his summer with too much hair and despite all the hot weather he kept his undercoat. Now, as the weather cools down Jack has finally decided to shed all that hair and OMG is there a lot of it. His undercoat is blondish and it wads up in tufts that pull out like feathers and explode into handfuls. It’s almost like magic. That photo was taken after only a few passes with our Marcus Magic Comb and there seems to be no end to the hair that comes out. I can brush him until my arms are sore and still the hair keeps coming. Anyone want to borrow a dog for a few weeks?