Tuesday - September 25, 2012

A full day shot to heck

Had to bring the MIL home from the hospital yesterday. Again. We’re at that point where she’s in just about every week. We know the nurses and aids on that wing of the hospital on a first name basis.

Still, it took up the whole damn day. Or I should say the entire day was spent on her and her needs. 

From 5:30am, when the wifey was up shopping online for a bariatric bedside commode, because ... um, because it’s needed. And even that shopping has been hell for her, because the medical supply market is even more vulturine than the funeral products market. Sure, it’s all online, but the same product that you can create an account as “DR. yourname” and get it for $89 wholesale sells online for a variety of increasing price points from $127 (a, b, c, d) up to nearly $300. Vultures. And that makes it hard for her to decide, and wastes HOURS, because she doesn’t want to get some cheap POS for her mother, etc. So after 6 days of her shopping onlin every morning, I took over and found the best product and price in about 8 minutes.

I went to the factory website, found out that they only make the one model that looks like this, and that the variations on it are merely color codes. -1, -2, etc. One is gray, one is white, one is unpainted steel. As if anyone gives a damn, for a poop chair for a dying woman. Now order the damn thing please. Oh no, I’ll do it this evening ... yeah uh huh, when I’m at bowling league, and she’ll be able to run through the hundreds of models available, AGAIN, for the 154th time, and waste another 4 effing hours on this nonsense. And then resent how much time she’s spending on her mother’s care. WTF? WTFFF?

Yeah, Ok, whatever.  You guys don’t want to hear this. It’s just one example of the circle jerk inefficiency built in to a “caregiver” situation when such care is done by close family: they aren’t even half a step removed from things, so they can’t be objective to anything. Ever. But days get consumed this way. Weeks. And yesterday too. We could have gone bowling, or shopping, or out for a nice fall walk, or done a whole lot of things together ... because this is at least the 5th time the MIL has been released from this hospital, and we know it never happens before 3pm. NEVER.

But then we had to wait around at home because of this and that and you never know what will happen or when the doctor will stop by her room at the hospital and ... crivens. Before I knew it, it was 3:30pm, so now we go and get her. And then when we got her home and hauled her up the stairs into the house, we had to stick around a few more hours until the sister could get in from work to cover for the overnight shift ... and by the time we stopped in at the grocery store for a quick bit of shopping and then whacked together some pasta for dinner, it was after 8. A whole day spent on a single 90 minute task. And the phone is ringing, it’s the MIL, trying to rag me because now her cellphone is receiving text messages. I’d put both daughter’s numbers on speed dial for her at her request; the numbers were already in the phone’s memory, but she’s never bothered to even look at the phone to figure out how the contact list works. She just dials. So now she’s getting a text message and it’s my fault. So MIL, what is the message? What’s it say? “How should I know” she says, “I can’t be bothered to look at it.” Miss Queen High and Mighty. But she can call me up, interrupt my dinner after sucking dry my entire day, to try and give me a ration of shit about it? I don’t think so.

I suggested to my wife that she find a commode with a really extra wide opening. I got the look.

Posted by Drew458     on 09/25/2012 at 07:34 AM   
Filed Under: • Family • Health-Medicine •  
• Comments (4) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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