Category: health

Not the Best Day

I did a lot of work around the house today. I haven’t had a day like this in a while and it hurt. My back hurt and my legs hurt and my arms hurt and my me hurt. My general outlook on life hurt too and I was grumpy and snarky and pissy and not very fun to be around. Jen was the only person I saw all day long so I apologize to her for being an ass. Sorry, sweetie. I wasn’t being a schmuck on purpose, but I was definitely being a schmuck and I’m sorry.

Karma kinda kicked me in the dick in response. It’s Nana Sitting night tonight and I got stuck behind a train in Tewksbury. At first I was on East Street and it was a massive freight train crossing the street at the Demoulas warehouse. Shit. Those trains can stop traffic forever. I was pretty sure the same train track crossed Shawsheen Street but I figured I’d double back and check for sure. Yup, I got stopped by the same train on a different road.

I thought about getting back on route 93 and heading South one exit, but that would potentially hit the same train on Salem Road (probably not, but I didn’t want to get stuck that far away from my mother’s house). I thought about going North one exit and getting off at route 133 in Andover. Yeah, that’s the way to go. But then I thought, why not jump onto Frontage road and go around that way? Frontage to Osgood to Blanchard to Pinnacle and… I hit the train again. DAMN IT.

Third time was the charm. I sat there and waited it out. Friggin’ train.

My mother was asleep when I got here, around 6:30. I had to wake her up for her 8:00 pills. Here’s hoping she has a better night than the last time I was here.

I’m watching game one of the Tampa Bay vs Florida playoff series. Pretty good game so far, about one period in. I think at 9:00 I will switch over to the train wreck that is Fear the Walking Dead. I wonder how they’ll try to top the still born baby shit from last week.

I’ve been playing loose with the intermittent fasting rules. Starting late and ending early. This week is going to be a shit show of crazy busy insanity. I’m considering the possibility of blowing off the whole process for a few days. There are some early morning things in the works this week that are going to benefit from a great big breakfast, not to mention buckets of morning caffeine. I’ll share the details when they happen.

Yesterday Was a Day

Most of you won’t get this. However, if you have an Apple Watch and you use the Activity app then this will be a little behind the scenes peek into the kind of day I had yesterday…..

Sure this is a smidge too “inside baseball” for the average web surfer, but I thought it was interesting. Whatevs, right?

Bad Night

I got to my mother’s house around 6:30pm yesterday. My sister filled me in on how she’d been during the day and she was fine. No supplemental (physician approved) pain meds, no physical complaints beyond the norm. One little memory lapse, but that’s normal.

Shortly after my sister left to go home, my mother started complaining about pain. She got her regular pain meds at 8:00pm and I thought it would be okay from there. It takes a while to kick in, but once it does she’s usually all right for the night. Usually.

By 9:30 she’d had the physician approved supplemental pain med and it wasn’t helping. Her doctor told her that if the pain ever gets too much to sit in a hot shower and just let the water run over it. She did that last night and it did not help. There are two other physician approved, prescribed supplemental meds that she holds in reserve for bad nights. I thought I could tell which one she needed just by the way she was moving around, but she didn’t want it. She wanted my dad. I texted him around 10:00pm to see if he was still awake and he called almost immediately. They talked for a few minutes, which she said helped her even if it doesn’t help the pain (aww), and we decided to go with the other reserved, prescribed, physician approved med. Dad asked me to call back in 30 minutes to give an update.

For 29 minutes nothing changed. She was pacing around the house because sometimes the pain won’t let her sit still. Just as I was reaching for the phone though she went into her room, turned off the TV, closed the door, and got into bed. Hmmm… Dad called a minute later. She was still awake, but she was calm and seemed to be relaxed. A few minutes later I could hear her snoring a little. I told dad to go to sleep. I hope he did.

I, however, was freaked. Back when I was nana sitting on Friday nights, there were times when she was bad like this, but on those nights dad always came home. I had the experienced safety net. I didn’t have that last night. I sat in the living room in the chair closest to her bedroom door with at least one ear firmly focused on her.

She had conked out around 10:30. I didn’t lay down until about 12:30. I slept for an hour, woke up to go to the bathroom (because I’m old now and that’s what old people do). An hour later I woke up again. This time I saw that her bedroom door was open. She was asleep in bed, but I had clearly missed her getting up at some point. An hour later I woke up again. This time it was 3:30am. She was in the kitchen making breakfast. I got up and asked her if she knew what time it was. She did. She said that she had been asleep since 8:00 so getting up a bit before 4:00 was normal. I told her she didn’t go to sleep at 8:00, she went to sleep at 10:30 and was having a really bad night. She said that didn’t happen.

She sat at the dining room table to eat her breakfast and I sat in the living room listening. After half an hour or so she was sound asleep at the table. I didn’t wake her up. I can’t imagine it was comfortable, but she clearly needed to sleep and I wasn’t going to interrupt. It was after 4:00am by then. My alarm was set for 6:00. I goosed it up to 6:45 and went to sleep. I woke up around 5:30 for a minute or two, long enough to see that Mom was back in bed sound asleep, then woke up again around 6:15 and I’ve been up ever since.

She gets her next round of pills at 8:00am. 15 minutes from now. I really don’t want to wake her up, but there’s pain meds in the morning batch and I don’t want her to miss them.

Happy Friday morning, everyone!

Note: If you didn’t figure it out by the post above, all of the medications she takes are prescribed, and all of the medication delivery plans we follow came from the doctors who prescribed said medications. We aren’t making this shit up on our own.

I Brought It

I brought the CPAP machine with me. It’s in its case…

I think I’m afraid to use it though. My mother has been having a really bad night. She finally fell asleep a little while ago, but I’m afraid if I use the machine, the background noise it makes plus the deeper sleep it brings I won’t hear her if she wakes up.

Catch 22, yeah?

Duh

I’m at my mother’s house, nana sitting for the night. As soon as I pulled up to the house I realized I forgot my Air Pods Pro at home. Damn it. I’ve sort of been relying on the transparency setting to let me listen to music or podcasts while I work while still being able to hear what my mother is up to.

Duh. You dope.

CPAP Blues

I didn’t want to do it, but I’ve made a command decision. From now on, when I stay at my parents house I am taking the CPAP machine with me. If I’m only going to get three hours of sleep at least it will be decent sleep. Part of avoiding it was because I didn’t want to lug a jug (hehe, lug a jug, that rhymes) of distilled water back and forth. So I filled up the tank and then dumped it into a water bottle. I’ll take one night’s worth of water at a time. Ugh.

I’m doing it, damn it.

Monday Night Nana Sitting

I am staying at my parents house every third night. Last night was one of those nights. I’m sort of seeing a trend. I can’t sleep well here. I know I would sleep better if I brought my CPAP machine, and I am going to have to start doing that, but that’s not the issue.

The issue is falling asleep. Another issue is staying asleep. There have been a few nights now where my watch tells me I got less than four hours. Sometimes it’s because I go to bed at a decent hour, wake up a couple hours later, and then can’t get back to sleep. Other times I just can’t fall asleep to begin with.

The last time I was here was Friday night and it definitely fell into the latter category. I was trying to sleep around midnight but I was still awake around 3:00am. Then I was up before 7:00. Saturday and Sunday nights I slept great, at home, but all day Monday I was still really tired. Last night I did okay. I fell asleep around 10:00pm, my mother was already asleep which helps, but I woke up again around midnight. I eventually fell asleep but I woke up again a few more times and finally stopped trying to sleep around 5:00am. My watch tells me I got six hours. My body tells me that’s about right.

I should be bringing the CPAP machine. The only reason I don’t is because it’s a pain in the ass to break down and set up and the idea of doing that two out of every three days just pisses me right off. It’s probably worth it. I just don’t wanna.

On a mostly unrelated note, last night I decided to explore the Netflix looking for something to watch. Somehow I hit on Mystery Science Theater 3000. Not the original show, note the Comedy Central show, not the SciFi channel show, but the recent Netflix show. I had only watched a couple of episodes. They were good. I just never got around to watching more. Something on the list of episodes grabbed me though.

Ator.

In the long history of MST3K there are a few movies that stand out as being so much worse than the norm that they become legendary. One of my personal favorites is a little classic called Cave Dwellers. Back in the old days my MST3K watching friends and I learned that Cave Dwellers was a sequel. The first movie was called Ator, the Fighting Eagle. You don’t actually need to watch the first movie to follow the second because there is a flashback in the second movie that literally shows every noteworthy “plot” point from the first.

I had never seen Ator, the Fighting Eagle and I always wondered why MST3K didn’t do an episode on it. Well now I know they actually have, and I watched it, and it was TERRIBLE. Our heroes tore that turkey to shreds in glorious fashion. I was sitting in the living room watching it on my computer with headphones on all by my lonesome and there were a bunch of moments when I literally laughed out loud.

Tip of the hat for the self referential riff where they made a joke out of the “how much keeffe is in this film? Miles O’Keeffe” line from Cave Dwellers. While the episode was wonderful, it was still nowhere near the original. Cave Dwellers is worth it for things like, “stupid rock. Stupid, stupid rock” and Joel singing “Ator, Ator my sweet friend.”

As I get older I sometimes forget how much fun terrible, awful, what-were-they-thinking, movies can be.

Ambulances Again?

Last night when we went to bed we saw that there was an ambulance parked in front of our neighbors house. From the little we saw, it did not look like they were taking anyone to the hospital. They were casually packing up and leaving when we first noticed them. Still, it was scary.

This morning just as the work day was kicking off another ambulance and a fire truck pulled up to the neighbors house. Shortly after, a second ambulance came. This time they did take one of the gentlemen next door with them. The second ambulance didn’t take someone, but one of the crew got out and went into the front seat of the first ambulance. Not sure what was going on there.

They all had come and gone within about 10 minutes. I hope our next door neighbor is okay. I’m really tired of ambulances. The universe needs to knock it off.

Stressful

I just did something super stressful.

My mother takes a ton of medication. She takes various pills in four batches throughout the day. She has one of those pill caddie things that let you sort out pills for morning, noon, evening, and bed time for seven days at a time.

The stressful thing I did?

I filled the pill caddie.

Yikes.

Saturday is the agreed upon caddie filling day, and since I’m here today and it’s my first Saturday covering (save for one, but that day the caddie was filled early), today became my first pill distribution day.

Again I say, yikes.