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Feb. 2nd, 2006 07:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynThe house is very very lonesome tonight, and I am very very lonely. I took Emma the puss in for the radioactive iodine treatment for her hyperthyroid problem today, and now it is very empty without her. I keep talking to her, only to realize she's not here, or getting up to go give her a squeeze, and it just feels really, really empty. I'm scared, too, which doesn't help: that she will give herself a kitty heart attack or stroke because she's so panicky and demented that she can't calm down or adapt, that she won't eat, that it won't work, that she'll have a bad reaction and die. Or that she will be okay, but they won't let her come home until Monday, which would kill me. She is all I have left, and I am so afraid of losing her. I've tortured her horribly this past year with tons of vet visits, awful tests, the horrid medicine that made her vomit and her ears festering sores... car trips up the wazoo. I feel so guilty. They gave her a slightly higher than average dose, too, so I guess she's at a higher level of the disease. I don't know what that means in the long term, but I'm so afraid of losing her. She's the one thing keeping me going, and I wanted to do this so she would get better and be with me for longer, but... I feel like I'm very cruel to her.
I can't spend much time with Dad, either. He moved to the nursing home center of the retirement community for the in between stage after his knee surgery last week, and that means he has a roommate, a man who is there long-term. The last time Dad was there, his roommate was on the far side of the room, bedridden. I didn't have to interfere or anything. But Ray, the man who lives there, is on the inside by the door, and he seems to get very freaked out when I come down. He is generally kind of addled, anyway, but last night he was trying to ask me if he could help me, and then he got upset and started talking about his wife, and where his wife was, and how she was usually in that bed (Dad's), and saying things like "Oh boy, we have to figure this out," or "I don't know what we can do about this situation." And then he started fussing with the things on my dad's bed, and Dad was saying, "Leave it alone, Ray" in this mildly exasperated voice, or explaining that that was his stuff and he'd been here for a few days. I don't know if Ray's wife is gone, or elsewhere in the center (that's what we'd heard, but I'm not so sure now), but he can't stop fussing with either Dad's bed or his bed, arranging and rearranging his clothes, and the nurses keep having to take him out of the hallway and put him back in the room. He threw away one of Dad's undershirts the other day when Dad was in PT, and he didn't find out till it was too late. Dad looks at him with this mix of annoyed fatigue, the way he used to look at me and my sister when we were irritating him, and something I can't quite put my finger on. I want to say disgust, but that's too strong, and I almost think sadness and fear, but then not quite. Hopelessness, maybe. I think he fears being like that himself. And I am sure he thinks about Mom, and how addlebrained she was after chemo the first time. The last few days, too, he was ignoring how terribly sick she was, and she asked him, "Am I dying?" and he said no, but of course she was, painfully, horribly so. And I can kind of see that in his face there, like he's in that place and time again.
He walked me to the end of the hallway, which was pretty good considering he just got a new knee, last night just because he needed to get away from Ray's fussing and asking the same questions over and over. He's probably feeling very trapped. Compared to a lot of the older people, he's in good shape; there are people way younger than him (81) who are in much worse shape. But this is hard. And I walk down those hallways and think the people who work there should be nominated for sainthood, because it's filled with these people in wheelchairs and beds and they are sometimes totally out of their minds, or just really depressed, or space cases. Some of them are almost violent. It depresses me unspeakably to go there, even though it's a nice facility. (They have pretty birds in a cage in the center of the building, and if I can figure out how, I will put some pics up) I don't want to get like that. Maybe it will be for the best when I get the cancer my sister had, which I'm sure I will get -- maybe then I won't have to endure a worse place, alone, with no family the way I am. I'd rather go out early than to end up like that, because being alone already is hard enough.
I had no concept of the future other than that my sister and I would be the old spinster twins down the block, and we would be together until the end. But now it's totally black, very empty. In some respects I'm lucky that I'm a fan, because a lot of the people there, they can't even get into watching TV, which is all there is to do, they're all "If Matlock isn't on, I won't watch it" and I'm always content if I at least have a TV. But you have to have some kind of mental faculty, too, and that seems in short supply for a lot of folks in that stage of life. I just can't bear the thought of being like that, utterly alone. I guess that's also the appeal of being a crazy cat lady.
It has been a really depressing and dispiriting week, nothing is working, the vid show is turning into something of a mess, people don't respond to stuff and I feel trapped and hopeless, and taking Emma away has only amplified all these craptacular feelings. Stuff I tried to do has been stymied and I hate relying on people, especially because people can never be relied on. You're just really on your own in this world, no matter what. And when you don't even have your cat for backup, it's a pretty tough place to be.
I can't spend much time with Dad, either. He moved to the nursing home center of the retirement community for the in between stage after his knee surgery last week, and that means he has a roommate, a man who is there long-term. The last time Dad was there, his roommate was on the far side of the room, bedridden. I didn't have to interfere or anything. But Ray, the man who lives there, is on the inside by the door, and he seems to get very freaked out when I come down. He is generally kind of addled, anyway, but last night he was trying to ask me if he could help me, and then he got upset and started talking about his wife, and where his wife was, and how she was usually in that bed (Dad's), and saying things like "Oh boy, we have to figure this out," or "I don't know what we can do about this situation." And then he started fussing with the things on my dad's bed, and Dad was saying, "Leave it alone, Ray" in this mildly exasperated voice, or explaining that that was his stuff and he'd been here for a few days. I don't know if Ray's wife is gone, or elsewhere in the center (that's what we'd heard, but I'm not so sure now), but he can't stop fussing with either Dad's bed or his bed, arranging and rearranging his clothes, and the nurses keep having to take him out of the hallway and put him back in the room. He threw away one of Dad's undershirts the other day when Dad was in PT, and he didn't find out till it was too late. Dad looks at him with this mix of annoyed fatigue, the way he used to look at me and my sister when we were irritating him, and something I can't quite put my finger on. I want to say disgust, but that's too strong, and I almost think sadness and fear, but then not quite. Hopelessness, maybe. I think he fears being like that himself. And I am sure he thinks about Mom, and how addlebrained she was after chemo the first time. The last few days, too, he was ignoring how terribly sick she was, and she asked him, "Am I dying?" and he said no, but of course she was, painfully, horribly so. And I can kind of see that in his face there, like he's in that place and time again.
He walked me to the end of the hallway, which was pretty good considering he just got a new knee, last night just because he needed to get away from Ray's fussing and asking the same questions over and over. He's probably feeling very trapped. Compared to a lot of the older people, he's in good shape; there are people way younger than him (81) who are in much worse shape. But this is hard. And I walk down those hallways and think the people who work there should be nominated for sainthood, because it's filled with these people in wheelchairs and beds and they are sometimes totally out of their minds, or just really depressed, or space cases. Some of them are almost violent. It depresses me unspeakably to go there, even though it's a nice facility. (They have pretty birds in a cage in the center of the building, and if I can figure out how, I will put some pics up) I don't want to get like that. Maybe it will be for the best when I get the cancer my sister had, which I'm sure I will get -- maybe then I won't have to endure a worse place, alone, with no family the way I am. I'd rather go out early than to end up like that, because being alone already is hard enough.
I had no concept of the future other than that my sister and I would be the old spinster twins down the block, and we would be together until the end. But now it's totally black, very empty. In some respects I'm lucky that I'm a fan, because a lot of the people there, they can't even get into watching TV, which is all there is to do, they're all "If Matlock isn't on, I won't watch it" and I'm always content if I at least have a TV. But you have to have some kind of mental faculty, too, and that seems in short supply for a lot of folks in that stage of life. I just can't bear the thought of being like that, utterly alone. I guess that's also the appeal of being a crazy cat lady.
It has been a really depressing and dispiriting week, nothing is working, the vid show is turning into something of a mess, people don't respond to stuff and I feel trapped and hopeless, and taking Emma away has only amplified all these craptacular feelings. Stuff I tried to do has been stymied and I hate relying on people, especially because people can never be relied on. You're just really on your own in this world, no matter what. And when you don't even have your cat for backup, it's a pretty tough place to be.
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Date: 2006-02-03 05:41 pm (UTC)