The elderly relative we care for, the one who lives an hour away, suddenly had no heat on the first day the outside temps stayed in the 20's. Twice that week we had to drive over after work and stay until 1am while the utility company did its thing. We still had to get up at 4:30am the next morning. Then my husband had to use his last vacation day of the year the next week when they came to remove the old, broken furnace and install a new one. They left at 9pm, leaving her with a new working furnace but also a clogged up sink and a broken radiator, the one they installed a new steam vent on hours before but was now spurting brown water like a deranged Old Faithful! They eventually told us to get a plumber, that it's no longer a utility company job. Since my husband used up all vacation days and won't be off again (not counting New Year's Eve, when the plumber isn't working) until January 17th for Martin Luther King Day, she is now without a sink or radiator in her downstairs half-bath. OK, she can live with that.
Then her kitchen phone starts breaking. It was a $100+ phone with special volume boosters for the ringer and handset, but now it's so low that even my husband, he of the animal-ears and can hear a mouse squeak 3 rooms away while the stereo is on, had trouble hearing anything. I ordered a new special phone from a company that specializes in items for the hard of hearing and deaf, but it won't arrive until next week.
Her hearing is getting worse and she not only can't hear her alarm clock, but she no longer hears the radio part of that alarm clock even though the volume is on full blast, nor does she hear the bedroom phone ring and it's mere inches from her head. I ordered one of those loud ringers with the strobe light flasher that attaches to the phone. We had bought one last year for her kitchen phone so now she does hear that ring if she's anywhere downstairs. We also bought an attachment for the new flasher that goes under the mattress and is supposed to shake her bed when the phone rings, but my tiny cell phone vibrates more than the shaker does so we're returning that. The ringer/strobe arrived at our house the other day, but we haven't been able to get to hers yet to install it.
Why the rush to get this thing installed? She's now gotten her days and nights reversed and stays awake until almost dawn, sometimes stays up 2 days in a row. She's asleep in bed when her homemaker is trying to get in at 2pm. So it's now my job to phone her and wake her up before 2 so she can let the homemaker in. But she doesn't hear the phone! I start dialing her number around 11 am and keep trying until she answers, and last week alone we had to send the homemaker home twice because I couldn't wake the aunt up after three hours of phoning her. Only one of those days was after a 1am furnace call. We're paying over $20 an hour (three hour minimum) for a homemaker who can't get in the house because the aunt is puttering around the house at 3 in the morning instead of sleeping.
At least once the ringer/strobe is installed she'll wake up on the first phone call. Why hasn't this ringer been installed yet?
Have you looked outside (or on the TV, if you don't live in the NY/NJ area)? We got 22 inches of that ugly white stuff the other night and our car is completely buried by the drifting snow. Nobody on our side of the street has been able to dig out yet. The other side of the street got less than 6 inches because the wind blew it all over this way. Everyone across the street has already been driving their cars since the morning of the blizzard.
The snow is up to his shoulders, and that's our car in the upper right corner there.
The homemaker phoned yesterday - she has no where to park her car. The aunt's city only plowed the main streets, streets that allow no parking on normal days. None of the side streets have been plowed, and the neighbor that uses the aunt's snowblower only makes a footpath from the back door to the garbage can and down the driveway to the sidewalk, and a path on the sidewalk. He doesn't clear her whole driveway - and we don't expect him to - because she no longer drives. Luckily her next door neighbor saw the homemaker's dilemma and told her to park in her cleared-out driveway for the 3 hours she was going to be there. Hopefully their city got around to clearing side streets since then so she has somewhere to park today. We're going to ask the neighbor around the corner from her if the homemaker can use his driveway if he's not going to be home. The only other thing to do is for her to find a space a few blocks away in the town's shopping district and walk over. The service's office is there and they have a parking lot. I don't know what else to do. We may wind up having to cancel the homemaker until that city finally clears its streets.
On top of all this, my son has been sick. It started out as the sniffles and went into a full blown ear infection and strep throat. He's 27, and has been sick for all but 2 Christmasses in his life. This is the first time he's ever had an ear infection though. Even as a baby he never got them. I'm the one who always had the ear problems, which is why I'm partially deaf since childhood. Anyway, he was glum enough at the lack of employment opportunities around here and being unemployed since he graduated 2 years ago, then his best friend went away to Thailand with his family for the holiday season and won't be back for a few more weeks, then he had to get sick at at time I had to be out of the house and at the aunt's place playing with the furnace. Poor baby! He's got me now - I can't get out of the house with all this snow!
All these mini-catastrophes have upset my food and exercise routines. It's hard to get an hour of exercise in when you had only 3 hours sleep and have to drive to the aunt's place again at 6 in the morning during rush hour traffic near the Holland Tunnel. I didn't have any leftover healthy food to bring with me on those days so we relied on fatty, salty fast food to sustain us, for all three meals on a few of those days. Then comes all the holiday goodies my husband brought home from work or we got for the aunt/kid. We bought for them but they both kept waving those boxes of butter cookies under our noses. After not having any for 5 years, who can say "No?" Not me.
Luckily I insisted we hit the grocery store on Christmas Eve, when we heard the first rumors of getting more than an inch or 2 of snow. "Snow showers" is what the forecasters were saying up until then. Suddenly it was now up to "a foot or more" in a forecast an hour later. I have a freezer stocked with veggies, a pantry and extra boxes filled with all kinds of beans, tomatoes, pasta and grains. I have enough TP to last us a month. If I need anything else, my husband walks right past a grocery store every day in his journey home from work, and between our house and the light rail station he passes not just that store but about 5 mom & pop delis, a Walgreen and 7-11 if I get desperate.
My lab work was drawn the morning the aunt's furnace went out. I was supposed to get the results this past Monday, but with the doctor stranded in his home city and the office workers stranded in their homes in this one, the visit has been rescheduled for next Monday. Even if my car is still buried I can walk over there. If my B-12 is low he can give me an injection right there and I can increase the amount I'm taking at home. If my Vitamin D is low I can order a vegan version of supplementation from on-line. If the thyroid med needs to be increased the office can phone it in and my husband can pick it up on the way home from work (Since he already walks past Walgreen, anyway). Any other prescription changes will get mailed in to our long-term pharmacy, but I don't foresee anything else changing. It took a long time to get the right combo of asthma meds and I'm sure he's not going to mess with them.
One good thing about being snowed in - I have no excuse not to do my exercises, and have done my workouts every morning since the furnace business was finished, including Christmas morning. My meals have been back on plan, but with those cookies still in the house, well, a few always find their way into my tummy. There aren't that many left and I told my son last night to keep them in his room and enjoy them, NOT to try share them with us any more. They lasted this long because of his sore throat. We'll probably get him more when he's feeling better and I'm back on plan for a while and strong enough to resist them again.
After all this, I only gained one pound this month. That is a miracle in itself. With diligence and sticking strictly to my food plan, that pound will be gone before I hit the doctor's on Monday. Unfortunately I'm up 7 pounds since my last visit to him 3 months ago. I'm sure the thyroid med is going to need to be increased again.
I know I'm hoping 2011 will be better, but know it won't. Already my husband had to use one of next year's vacation days because none of the trains, busses, or light rail were running yesterday so he couldn't get to work. And with the aunt getting more and more confused she's going to need care a lot longer than for 3 hours a day. During the furnace fiasco (started because she forgot it needed to get flushed and have water added) she asked "Where does the coal go in?" even though she has had a gas furnace for over 60 years, and most days when I call and wake her she can't remember who I am. So it looks like this is the year we'll be moving in with her. God help us all!
