Category: health

Resolved

There was stuff going on outside of my parents house tonight and it’s all resolved happily. Kick ass, dude!

While trying to disctract myself from, well… everything, I mixed a second song. That’s it. Nothing else is ready for mixing so this is all you get tonight.

I don’t hate this one. I almost like it. The one I posted an hour or so ago is tons better, but this little 5/4 thingie is better than most of the shit I write.

On the parent sitting front, the floor fan in the living room is starting to squeak. If that sucker dies it will be like losing my closest friend. I love that little spinning bastard. It’s been so good to me over the last five months. I don’t know what I will do without it. HANG IN THERE MY FAN FRIEND!

#Sarcasm

<sarcasm>

I’m back to my parents place for the night and it’s awesome. It’s a total blast. I have no residual emotional stress relating to spending nights in the house where I was so depressed that my best friend once told me he was worried I was going to do something to hurt myself. Nope, I feel great now. Just wonderful.

Obviously those fears were unjustified, but there were times when I was worried about the same thing. All of that was in this house. Yup, I love it here. Just love being here. Sure, the day I moved out ranks in the top five happiest days of my life*, but that doesn’t mean that staying here again isn’t the most awesome, awesome thing I could do.

Being here is the best.

</sarcasm>

*Off the top of my head, could my short list of happiest moments be?…

1. Our wedding.
2. Jen saying yes when I proposed.
3. Falling for Jen.
4. Meeting the kids.
5. Moving in with Jen and the kids.
6. Buying and moving into a house of our own.
7. Harry being his old self again after a couple of days worth of near unconsciousness in the PICU.
8 & 9 (tied). Bellana and Harry graduating from high school.
10. Raising the double freedom rockets and giving a hearty fuck you to the previous 33 years of failure and misery in my life and finally graduating from college.

Like I said, that’s just off the top of my head. If I really sat down and examined my emotional state during all of these experiences, number 7 would likely jump a lot higher on that list. Possibly because the events leading up to that wonderful moment are hands down, no question number one on the list of the worst moments of my life. Like, no contest. As bad as things are now and as bad as all the bad things that have happened to me and to those I care about throughout the last 50 years, nothing comes close to being as terrifying and horrible as Harry’s time in the hospital during the first days of diabetes. That first time he got himself up out of the hospital bed and sat up in a chair and talked to us as if nothing happened… fuck me, that was a glorious moment. That was bliss. I will treasure that particular happy moment forever.

Home for Now

Another chapter in the never ending story comes to a close and I go home again. I was 36 when I moved out of that house (April 2008) and lets say for the last 10-11 years I was miserable pretty much every second I was there. Then after my mother’s cancer I was there to watch her every other Friday for… what was it… eight more years? Now for the last five months it’s been 24 out of every 72 hours, approximately. I honestly can’t put into words how much just being in the house hurts me. That’s not even considering my parents’ health situations, which by themselves are soul crushing. Just being in that house makes me miserable.

I’m going back tomorrow night because why not just destroy my soul while I have the chance, right? I know it’s the right thing to do, and I know I have to do it and I know and I know and I know. Being the right thing doesn’t change the fact that the house itself is my personal hell.

The overnights should be ending soon. Unless the universe is fucking with us, hard… and I am not willing to discount that as a possibility, it should be ending soon.

Not soon enough.

…and I go back tomorrow night.

Damn Phone

I’m here at my parents house and it’s been a relatively quiet day. I sorted out the pills, started some laundry, and did a couple of other little things. The Home Care Professional (hero) is here and she was helping dad with some things. My mother was in her room reading the paper.

I thought to myself… do I dare? Do I dare watch a show on Netflix while I wait for the laundry to finish? Let’s try it. Toast of London, season one episode three (I am trying to decide if Matt Berry is the funniest person on Earth. Still not sure, but I do know that Ray Bloody Purchase is an asshole), I put on my headphones and press play…

…and the fucking phone rings. Oh for crying out loud.

Pills

It’s 10:37am. Did you miss me? I usually have a morning hello post hours earlier than this.

What kept me?

Pills. Yeah, man.

No, seriously. I just filled my parents’ pill caddies for the week. There was a lot of back and forth with my brother and sister. There are pharmacy changes coming in the near future and it’s affecting how we go about filling prescriptions and two of my mother’s 10000000 scripts need to be refilled this week because there aren’t enough pills to get us through to next week. Their primary care physician (who is also my primary care physician) is on the case though. All is well.

The bathroom is the other issue today. Not in an accident way, just in a there-is-only-one-in-the-house way. It seems like every time someone needs to go really bad there is someone already in there. I’ve been toilet blocked twice today, and I toilet blocked someone else once. It’s minor chaos.

My mother just shuffled into the room and asked me if I was her son and did she actually give birth to me.

I want to go home so badly I cannot put it into words. I am so tired of neglecting my family in favor of my family, you know? I was afraid to text Harry last night but Jen let me know that he was texting her, so I snuck in a couple. It’s only been one day and I miss him so much, and missing him makes me miss Bellana even more, and missing them both makes me so upset that I am here and not with Jen because I know she feels the same way, and it’s just crushing me so much I can’t even punctuate a sentence properly and I keep writing these endless run on things that when I go back to read these at some hypothetical point in the future are going to piss me off and now I am just doing it just because I am pissed off and I want my future self to also be pissed off at my grammar shenanigans and this is stupid and I am so miserable right now I can’t deal.

I think I am going to go upstairs and try to take apart a twin bed. No reason.

Fuck.

Calming Down

I don’t know if I was over reacting a little this morning, or if I’ve just been so busy at work since then that I lost perspective, but things have calmed down quite a bit today. They both took naps (I’m jealous) and the sense of impending doom I felt earlier is gone. That’s good, right?

I was expecting Bellana to drive back to Vermont today but instead she made a salon appointment and planned to spend the day in Boston (I’m jealous). That means she’s going to be at our house when I get home tonight. Actually, I might get home first, but whatever. She’s going to join us for Marvel and Burgers night. What If…? Season one episode three. It should be fun.

During the earlier days of the Covid-19 pandemic, someone bought my parents a digital picture frame that can be loaded remotely via an app. We all added tons of pictures to it and it’s been running around the clock* ever since. Today I had to go out to the porch for something and I saw a couple of old pictures on the window sill, hidden by 100 years of stuff. One had a picture of my mother’s mother. The other had a picture of my father’s mother, and a picture of my father’s brother. I thought I would scan them and add them to the picture frame. I had to dig through a pile of stuff, it felt like Harry Potter in the last movie robbing the LeStrange vault, but I was able to grab them. I was surprised to find two more pictures hidden behind my father’s mother. One had a picture of one of my father’s aunts and one of his uncles, and the other was a picture of another aunt.

I scanned them all with my iPhone and added them to the picture frame. I’m still waiting for one of them to pop up, and for my parents to notice. That might actually take a couple of days as there is a little league world series game on and one of the teams is from New Hampshire. Suffice to say, distracted.

*It doesn’t exactly run around the clock. When the ambient light level drops below a certain level the unit shuts itself off. Outside of that it’s been running around the clock.

It is Ramping Up Now

Nothing bad really happened on last night’s parent sitting shift. My mother had pain issues but she eventually went to sleep and slept through the night. My father was fine.

It’s ramping up now though. It’s 8:21am and they both are having problems and I can already tell it’s going to be a colossally shitty day. The home health worker gets here around 9:00, and I am coming back to work after two days off.

So far the only issues have mostly revolved around one parent taking too long in the bathroom which causes problems for the other parent. Happy morning, everyone. My sister is supposed to be coming with a delivery at some point today. My schedule looks clear in the afternoon so hopefully work stays quiet enough to let that go smoothly.

My general mindset right now is the same as it is pretty much every second I spend here. I feel like I am going to start screaming, and when I start I don’t know if I will ever be able to stop.

Song Number 24 of 50 (I Hope)

I mixed three songs tonight. Hot Damn! My brain feels like mush now, so I am going to bed.

My mother was asleep when I checked on her a minute ago, but she was still up. Explain? Okay. She’s sitting up on the edge of her bed, slumped over to one side asleep. I woke her up and told her she should lie down. She said she will and then went back to sleep without moving. Her back is going to be searing agony tomorrow. It’s like talking to a brick wall sometimes, except you can usually get pissed off when people act like that. I can’t get pissed off now. I don’t think she can actually process that she’s doing anything that will have a negative consequence.

It’s pretty friggin’ frustrating.

Song Number 23 of 50 (I hope)

I’m on a bit of a mixing roll right now. Only partly because my mother is having a rough night. She had all of her discretionary meds. If she doesn’t fall asleep soon I don’t know what we’re going to do. It’s quiet in her bedroom right now, and she hasn’t come a-wandering out in a little while. After I post this I will go check on her.

The song is nothing special, but I kinda like it. The rhythm guitars sounded like crap so I had to EQ them. I always feel like a failure when I have to EQ guitars. I should be a talented enough recording engineer to actually capture my own friggin’ instrument correctly. I’m only being partly sarcastic when I say that, but rest assured I am being sarcastic.

On the up side, my father was flipping back and forth between the Red Sox game (that’s good) and a little league fucking world series game (oh, that is so not good). The little league game is over. Thank the baseball gods for that.

I’m Here

I don’t know why but I’m a total mess tonight, emotionally speaking. We had both kids home for a while today and now I’m here and I just can’t deal. I had a couple of spontaneous balling my eyes out moments before I left home. It had been a couple of weeks since that happened so maybe I was just due. I don’t know. I just know I can’t take much more of this. It’s breaking me.