Dead Letter Department #128

weather report

You would not believe the sheer amount of things required to bring someone home from a skilled nursing facility (SNF, somewhat jauntily pronounced sniff), and the number of attendant questions. Walker: glidy bits or tennis balls on the bottom? Sock assist: fabric or metal? Is a wheelchair needed or just a walker with a seat? Would a wheelchair even fit in the car? First bed rail: too short. Second bed rail: will not arrive in time. Third bed rail: fine, although the instructions are absolutely maniacal on the subject of all of the ways one can die if it is improperly installed or if the person using it is a strangulation risk. Strangulation is not a particularly soothing word to think about, when arranging a space.

Toilet frame. Extra-long grabbers. Hospital socks, and when those prove too slippery on the bamboo floors at night, two different pairs of slippers. All the rugs rolled up & stashed away since they catch on the glidy bits of the walker. Furniture rearranged to provide a landing point just inside the front door, an easy place to switch from the outdoor walker (seat, brakes, etc) to the indoor walker (just a metal frame). Nightlights, both motion activated & switch on.

Easy to prepare food, coffee, medication, the peak flow meter, the blood pressure cuff, with notepads to track numbers.

Then the bed frame is too high (as expected, despite several arguments). A step, no matter how wide and grippy, would be a tripping hazard, especially at night, so a new bed frame must be bought & assembled immediately. Third bed rail is now too tall, but second bed rail arrives & is just the correct height, although it has added zest in the form of actual diagrams of people being strangled by their bed rail. I wonder whose macabre job that is, at the factory, to draw the poor dead bastards dangling out of their beds, and if they have a desk next to the same translator who mixed up ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ on the FAQ, leading to the manual proudly announcing that all parts are made of inferior materials.

A wedge pillow, since the adjustable bed is too high and the low bed cannot be adjusted. More washcloths, more dish towels, nutritional shakes, lotion, lightbulbs, small trash can for the bedroom, chucks for the bed just in case, several kinds of briefs until a preferred brand is settled on.

Then there are the lists: of additional things that need to be procured, appointments for her to make for herself & add to my calendar for transportation, my own deferred appointments, phone calls, stacks of paperwork and the annoyance of trying to deal with someone else’s filing system, which is of course never as comprehensible as your own. Somewhere in there her car needs to get jumped, to see if the battery is still going to work, and if not, yet another phone call for the list.

organizational wins

I did manage to do my taxes, and the IRS has not yet come to murder me for any accidental sins, so that’s promising.

smallish things i want

A tattoo appointment for my S memorial, a weekend away with my phone completely off, a boozy brunch with J, a new album from The National, the missing volumes from my set of the Vorkosigan saga, a rug in the right shade of blue for the bedroom, for Lindy West’s book to sell well (given the annoying discourse around it, that seems like the least that she deserves), to be able to write properly again, for the split place on the back of my hand to finally heal, restoration of the old formula of my body wash, a leisurely trip to the garden center with good weather for planting, for the deer to spare one or two lilies.

one good thing

The Bellingham Lions Club has an enormous warehouse filled with durable medical equipment: walkers, wheelchairs, sock assists, bed rails, commodes of all kinds, extension grabbers, pretty much anything you can think of that’s not a bed or a knee brace. If you arrive between 9:00 and 11:30 on Mondays and Thursday, a white haired volunteer will spring out of nowhere to ask what they can help you with, and walk you through the rows to help you choose exactly what you need. What does it cost, you ask? Nothing. Not a penny, not a dollar, although they do have a couple of old candy machines where you can wedge your donation, and I did squish a couple of twenties in there to support the project. They don’t even ask for it; you just have to spot the signs yourself.

The times I’ve been, there are two groups: people picking things out, either for themselves or someone they are taking care of, trying to decide between the various items as the volunteers stand helpfully nearby to advise, and the ones donating, who are often bowed down under the weight of the loss that has freed up the equipment. You can tell; there is just a difference in posture in someone who is returning something that couldn’t be used versus someone who is donating because their person is no longer around to use it. I have yet to peel the patient name tag off the walker that my mom is using. I hope Diane, born in 1964, just didn’t need it anymore, and that she’s now striding around with extraordinary vigor.

This means that, fortunately, the extra equipment I’ve acquired through various misfires that can’t be returned will just be routed right back again into the hands of someone who needs it. I was there this morning, and I have almost learned how to turn onto the frontage road when I’m trying to get there, instead of havering off in the direction of the airport.

More soon, and in the meantime may you find that your own taxes are unusually comprehensible this year, and that you can send them off with a delicious feeling of competence.