We had a slight setback last night in our pre surgery care for Linda's mother, as we wait for the Covid virus to move on to somewhere else. Without getting into the gory details let's just say it involved fainting, blood, and gauze, and that was just for me.
It did get me thinking that this journey was going to be a little bit more difficult than we had imagined. It also made me admit that Linda and I may not be the best people equipped to care for our aging mothers.
I saw this story, above, and my first thought was, "there are only six mistakes?" I'm pretty sure we made fourteen just last night. Clearly, if you are going to be charged with the responsibility of taking care of your mother you probably should have been a parent yourself first.
The lessons learned from taking care of a small child, including how to remain in control, would be invaluable to us right now. As many of you know, we made a decision to not have children, and never regretted it, until now. Really, we can't control the dogs, so how could we possibly have taken care of a child.
Then you get into the teenage years, and we watched our friends ride this roller coaster from a safe distance, and smiled at each other and said "whew, that could be us." Another missed lesson opportunity for us now as you deal with your parent who has dug in her heels and won't do something.
All of these events could have given us so much more of a foundation to deal with the things we are dealing with right now. Instead we are flying blind, and making bad choices, on a daily basis. More times than not we find ourselves looking around for some help and direction on how to deal with things, and all we have is each other, and neither of us knows what the hell we are doing.
I realize that taking care of an adult is not the same as taking care of a child, although some days I'm not so sure, however, just having that card file of experiences to fall back on must be a bit more comforting than remembering how you failed to train your pet to stay or sit.
Lately, it has felt like this is our house, as the pressure has ramped up on us to take care of Doris, without hurting her more. Last night was a scary reminder of how we need to be even more vigilant in our oversight and not get complacent. She is fine this morning, thank goodness, and mostly back to her normal self, but, jeez, what the heck are we going to do if things get worse.
If you make a serious mistake with a child, they are mostly resilient, and will bounce back. It seems much more serious to be taking care of a senior as there is much less room for error.
The good news is so far we haven't killed anyone, but it is early in the process, and we really need to get better fast.
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