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I am leaving this entry back-dated to yesterday. Shh, it still counts.
Anyway, I am going to try to recap some of this week, but I don't know if I can do it justice. It has been A Week.
So where I left off on Monday, I was about to drive to Montreal to see to my mother who had just admitted to falling and hitting her head on a chair. At the time she was more upset that there was blood all over her carpet than about the fact that she might have a concussion or other permanent damage. *sigh* I told her to call my aunt (my paternal uncle's wife) who is a retired nurse, and just talk things over with her to make sure there was no immediate danger.
I left KK in charge of all the animals, called work and told them I had a family emergency (RIP to my overtime for Easter Monday, alas, which I really kind of wanted to help defray the cost of the upcoming move), packed my bags and my CPAP and headed to Montreal. I arrived around half past midnight, and of course my mother was waiting up for me. She had a sizeable goose egg on the back of her skull, and there was a blood stain the size of a dinner plate on the bedroom carpet that she was very concerned about. I checked her for obvious signs of concussion and found none (her pupils were equal and reactive to light, she said her head didn't hurt, she knew the date/name of the Prime Minister/etc., and she wasn't nauseated or unbalanced or anything else), so I agreed to have us both sleep and go to the ER in the morning to get her checked out and to check in on my father, who was being kept overnight for additional testing.
During this time I fielded multiple messages from my aunt, and later on a call from my godfather, who had been kind enough to drive my parents to the ER the previous day.
The next morning we had breakfast and, as promised, I drove her to the ER. She proceeded to be a pain in the ass of the triage nurse, because she kept refusing to answer questions and insisting on seeing my father first. I finally put my foot down, and the triage nurse very kindly agreed to let us wait in the same room that my father was in once triage was completed. My father wasn't so much in a room as he was behind a curtain and another flimsy partition to separate him from other patients waiting longer-term in the ER. He was in relatively decent spirits and was obviously very happy to see my mother and then very concerned to hear that she'd taken a spill and hurt herself. There were lots of jokes about how that level of solidarity really wasn't necessary.
The rest of the morning was a real farce. My mother eventually got taken to another exam room, and I had about forty-seven different doctors all wanting my attention in separate places for each parent. The direct path between their rooms was forbidden to me because it was in an area restricted to medical staff, so I had to run the long way around each time and explain myself to a different security guard each time about why I was going back and forth so often. My mother was quickly cleared with a clean bill of health after a physical exam and an ECG to make sure her fall hadn't been the result of a cardiac event, and all the hospital staff kept refusing to believe that she is actually 88 years old. They'd never heard of an 88 year old woman who's never had an ECG in her life. (Money and health privilege is a real thing, folks!)
My father was seen by a lovely French doctor with the demeanour and bedside manner of a hurricane. She was just delightful, but she was a geriatric specialist who was clearly accustomed to dealing with elderly patients who aren't compos mentis, and she directed a barrage of questions at me about my father's cognition levels, his ability to function independently, whether he was able to bathe on his own, etc. I kept gently trying to steer her to ask him the questions, while my father sat there absolutely seething with indignation. I must admit I found it pretty hilarious at the time.
Eventually I was able to take my mother home, but my father was still awaiting several tests and had to stay behind again. I promised him I'd do some grocery shopping, and my mother insisted on coming with me. I convinced her that we should at least have a late lunch, since neither she nor I had eaten since breakfast, and she reluctantly agreed. When we finished tidying up after lunch, my father called me on my cell phone and blithely informed me that A) he'd left the hospital on his own and was at the local pharmacy, and B) the hospital had informed him as he was leaving that he had tested positive for Covid.
*rips out hair*
He refused to let me come pick him up, of course, and insisted on walking home, because he is a stubborn old goat. My mother in the meantime was freaking out, because a Covid diagnosis could be fatal to her due to her COPD/emphysema. She went into full denial immediately, insisting that the hospital had to be wrong, and then once I talked her down from that she got angry at me, mostly because I was the one there to be mad at. Anyway, we went through all five stages of grief in record time, I must say, and she still insisted on coming grocery shopping with me.
Grocery shopping with my mother is an exercise in patience. We had to go through the produce aisle four times and then ask an employee because they didn't have the specific oranges she wanted. "But they ALWAYS have them!" "Clearly they are not here today." "But they ALWAYS do!" And when we asked the employee, they confirmed that they did not, in fact, have those specific oranges, but would we be interested in one of the other five varieties they did have? (We would not, as it turned out.) We got a good chunk of the shopping done, but she also wanted to go to Atwater Market, which turned out to be closed at that hour. If I'd been by myself it probably would have been fine, but my mother is not the speediest person on the planet these days.
Anyway, we got home and found my father returned and in a bit of a bad mood, understandably so. He had brought his prescriptions from the pharmacy, and later on we got my mother's "emergency Covid" prescriptions delivered as well. She is only to take them if she develops symptoms, and they're basically pneumonia buster meds (prednisone and doxycyline). We also gave my mother a home Covid test, which came out negative, at least.
I explained the best practices of quarantining to my parents, and recommended that at minimum if they were in the same room together they should be wearing masks. I also recommended getting a HEPA filter to my mother, and she seemed amenable to the idea. I don't think they will be able to keep up with masking or distancing, because they like being together too much, and they're both terrible at masking for various reasons. *sigh* I can only keep my fingers crossed and hope for the best.
I also updated my aunt on the latest developments, and called my godfather to let him know about the Covid diagnosis because he was in his presence unmasked for several hours on Monday, so both he and my godmother are at risk of getting Covid (which they both just got a couple of months ago and are barely recovered from).
On Wednesday morning I went out to get more groceries for my parents, enough to keep them stocked up for at least a week so they don't have to worry about going out while my father is still contagious. It might be longer, but they're not set up to keep more food than that, so we did the best we could with what we had.
Since then I've been checking in when I can, and so far they seem to be doing okay. I have aged about ten years this week, but that was to be expected.
Okay, that is it for the parental unit update. Onward to the rest of this night shift!
Anyway, I am going to try to recap some of this week, but I don't know if I can do it justice. It has been A Week.
So where I left off on Monday, I was about to drive to Montreal to see to my mother who had just admitted to falling and hitting her head on a chair. At the time she was more upset that there was blood all over her carpet than about the fact that she might have a concussion or other permanent damage. *sigh* I told her to call my aunt (my paternal uncle's wife) who is a retired nurse, and just talk things over with her to make sure there was no immediate danger.
I left KK in charge of all the animals, called work and told them I had a family emergency (RIP to my overtime for Easter Monday, alas, which I really kind of wanted to help defray the cost of the upcoming move), packed my bags and my CPAP and headed to Montreal. I arrived around half past midnight, and of course my mother was waiting up for me. She had a sizeable goose egg on the back of her skull, and there was a blood stain the size of a dinner plate on the bedroom carpet that she was very concerned about. I checked her for obvious signs of concussion and found none (her pupils were equal and reactive to light, she said her head didn't hurt, she knew the date/name of the Prime Minister/etc., and she wasn't nauseated or unbalanced or anything else), so I agreed to have us both sleep and go to the ER in the morning to get her checked out and to check in on my father, who was being kept overnight for additional testing.
During this time I fielded multiple messages from my aunt, and later on a call from my godfather, who had been kind enough to drive my parents to the ER the previous day.
The next morning we had breakfast and, as promised, I drove her to the ER. She proceeded to be a pain in the ass of the triage nurse, because she kept refusing to answer questions and insisting on seeing my father first. I finally put my foot down, and the triage nurse very kindly agreed to let us wait in the same room that my father was in once triage was completed. My father wasn't so much in a room as he was behind a curtain and another flimsy partition to separate him from other patients waiting longer-term in the ER. He was in relatively decent spirits and was obviously very happy to see my mother and then very concerned to hear that she'd taken a spill and hurt herself. There were lots of jokes about how that level of solidarity really wasn't necessary.
The rest of the morning was a real farce. My mother eventually got taken to another exam room, and I had about forty-seven different doctors all wanting my attention in separate places for each parent. The direct path between their rooms was forbidden to me because it was in an area restricted to medical staff, so I had to run the long way around each time and explain myself to a different security guard each time about why I was going back and forth so often. My mother was quickly cleared with a clean bill of health after a physical exam and an ECG to make sure her fall hadn't been the result of a cardiac event, and all the hospital staff kept refusing to believe that she is actually 88 years old. They'd never heard of an 88 year old woman who's never had an ECG in her life. (Money and health privilege is a real thing, folks!)
My father was seen by a lovely French doctor with the demeanour and bedside manner of a hurricane. She was just delightful, but she was a geriatric specialist who was clearly accustomed to dealing with elderly patients who aren't compos mentis, and she directed a barrage of questions at me about my father's cognition levels, his ability to function independently, whether he was able to bathe on his own, etc. I kept gently trying to steer her to ask him the questions, while my father sat there absolutely seething with indignation. I must admit I found it pretty hilarious at the time.
Eventually I was able to take my mother home, but my father was still awaiting several tests and had to stay behind again. I promised him I'd do some grocery shopping, and my mother insisted on coming with me. I convinced her that we should at least have a late lunch, since neither she nor I had eaten since breakfast, and she reluctantly agreed. When we finished tidying up after lunch, my father called me on my cell phone and blithely informed me that A) he'd left the hospital on his own and was at the local pharmacy, and B) the hospital had informed him as he was leaving that he had tested positive for Covid.
*rips out hair*
He refused to let me come pick him up, of course, and insisted on walking home, because he is a stubborn old goat. My mother in the meantime was freaking out, because a Covid diagnosis could be fatal to her due to her COPD/emphysema. She went into full denial immediately, insisting that the hospital had to be wrong, and then once I talked her down from that she got angry at me, mostly because I was the one there to be mad at. Anyway, we went through all five stages of grief in record time, I must say, and she still insisted on coming grocery shopping with me.
Grocery shopping with my mother is an exercise in patience. We had to go through the produce aisle four times and then ask an employee because they didn't have the specific oranges she wanted. "But they ALWAYS have them!" "Clearly they are not here today." "But they ALWAYS do!" And when we asked the employee, they confirmed that they did not, in fact, have those specific oranges, but would we be interested in one of the other five varieties they did have? (We would not, as it turned out.) We got a good chunk of the shopping done, but she also wanted to go to Atwater Market, which turned out to be closed at that hour. If I'd been by myself it probably would have been fine, but my mother is not the speediest person on the planet these days.
Anyway, we got home and found my father returned and in a bit of a bad mood, understandably so. He had brought his prescriptions from the pharmacy, and later on we got my mother's "emergency Covid" prescriptions delivered as well. She is only to take them if she develops symptoms, and they're basically pneumonia buster meds (prednisone and doxycyline). We also gave my mother a home Covid test, which came out negative, at least.
I explained the best practices of quarantining to my parents, and recommended that at minimum if they were in the same room together they should be wearing masks. I also recommended getting a HEPA filter to my mother, and she seemed amenable to the idea. I don't think they will be able to keep up with masking or distancing, because they like being together too much, and they're both terrible at masking for various reasons. *sigh* I can only keep my fingers crossed and hope for the best.
I also updated my aunt on the latest developments, and called my godfather to let him know about the Covid diagnosis because he was in his presence unmasked for several hours on Monday, so both he and my godmother are at risk of getting Covid (which they both just got a couple of months ago and are barely recovered from).
On Wednesday morning I went out to get more groceries for my parents, enough to keep them stocked up for at least a week so they don't have to worry about going out while my father is still contagious. It might be longer, but they're not set up to keep more food than that, so we did the best we could with what we had.
Since then I've been checking in when I can, and so far they seem to be doing okay. I have aged about ten years this week, but that was to be expected.
Okay, that is it for the parental unit update. Onward to the rest of this night shift!
