I apologize for the lack of a post yesterday, but when I finally got home Saturday night, I was so brain-dead-tired that by the time I got something to eat, bed was all I could think of.
I showed up at the hospital Saturday morning with mom’s purse and some clothes I had brought for her from home all tucked into this canvas messenger bag I have. I had her little calculator and her bank statement, and she reconciled it. I had gotten her mail, which included a check she needed to deposit, which I did for her this morning with the banking app (I use a different bank, and I’ve used their app for a couple of years now — great time saver!). Then she made a little list of all the things she wanted me to bring from home for her. (Insert here the obligatory allusion to the song from Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, The Mikado).
We learned from mom’s nurse that she would indeed be discharged that afternoon and that people from The Garrison had said they would be coming to get her to take her there at 4:30. Then the nurse told us that the way it usually happens is that when transport teams are coming to get you, they will either be half an hour early or two hours late. Just our luck that the Garrison people did not come for her until almost 6:00. (Waiting for something to happen is a lot more tiring than you’d think!) But finally the Garrison folks came. She was able to get up and transfer to the stretcher, but it is obvious she has lost strength. So the Garrison folks wheeled her off, and I hiked off to my car to follow.
They had already gotten her to her room and put her in bed by the time I got there. I put her extra clothes away and the toiletries she’d brought from the hospital and put all the essentials like tissues and her cell phone where she could get at them. By the time we got her situated, it was sneaking up on 7 o’clock.
This morning, I went to her house to get the things on the list, got her mail, and headed north. It was almost 10:30 by the time I got to The Garrison, which is on the other side of town over by the University and University Medical Center. She had already eaten breakfast, which she liked. She seems to be settling in well.
Today, when I left The Garrison to return home, I was putting my key into the ignition when I caught some movement out of the corner of my eye. It was a local denizen going about his business on a Sunday morning. Young Jack went his way, and I went mine.
I’m glad mom was discharged on a weekend as this will give her some time to adjust to her new surroundings before she actually starts physical therapy. Now that she is out of the woods and on the mend, I am going to step back and let the rehab people do their job.
We don’t yet know how long she will be at the rehab facility, but she has decided that when she leaves rehab she will go to assisted living. Which assisted living facility she will go to has yet to be decided. We first need to determine what her care needs will be before we start looking. The next hurdle will be deciding which assisted living facility she will go to.
To returned to the regularly scheduled program, I haven’t knitted a stitch for over a week.
This afternoon, I was working on the Letticia shawl and solved a problem with the lattice lace that had been bugging me since I started these shawls — that ugly line of stitches that was at the right side of the lattice lace. It’s going to involve purling through the back loop, though.
Which is to say, I frogged the entire shawl. Tomorrow, I’m going to rework the pattern to change the appropriate purl stitches to ptbl stitches and add an extra stitch in between each of the lattice lace panels.
I’m also going to see if I can’t also add an extra stitch to the outside of the border to give it a little more substance. After all the tumult and stress of this past week, I need to take a little time to be quiet and still, and knit up the raveled sleeve of care – to coin a phrase.
The Owl Underground 