Bubbe's Last Hurrah

Bubbe has said many times that she doesn't want to turn 100 years old.  She says "I'll be a freak, like a dog who can ride a bicycle."

I don't see anything wrong with a dog who can ride a bicycle.

But Bubbe doesn't share my opinion.  So, after a bad fall earlier this week, and another episode of worsening breathlessness due to congestive heart failure, she decided to stop taking the medications that prolong her life, and take only those that will keep her comfortable.  It's two and a half weeks until her 100th birthday.  I believe she's hoping to be gone by then.

News of the crisis and indications of its seriousness accumulated slowly.  My father happened to be there when Bubbe started feeling that she couldn't get enough air.  What looked like another normal bump in the road turned into the beginning of the end.

E-mails were circulated.  Relatives got into airplanes and cars headed for Toronto.  By the time I arrived at Bubbe's apartment on Thursday evening, she already had a crowd at her bedside.  I climbed onto the bed with her to hold her hand.

Bubbe couldn't have been more pleased.  She was having the best pyjama party of her life.  Despite being on supplemental oxygen, she managed to find enough lung capacity to chat happily with us all. Short sentences, that trailed off sometimes.  But she was definitely still with us.  Her chin was blackened by a bruise from when she caught the edge of a table during her fall on Monday; her hearing aids kept falling out; she couldn't drink water from a cup or straw because she can't always swallow properly anymore; and she has become incontinent; but with all her loved ones surrounding her, none of that mattered.

We propped her up in bed and gave her water with a little sponge on a stick (a "Swabette", officially).  She kept saying "This is the best time I've ever had!"

A palliative care nurse arrived to hook her up to medication pumps that will deliver morphine and midazolam (a benzodiazepine, for the feelings of anxiety that result from being short of breath) whenever she needs them.  We all got very serious then.  You know that when the morphine line goes in, things are for real.

It was late by then, so almost everyone left to get some sleep.  We weren't sure if that was the last time we would see Bubbe alive, so we said our emotional goodbyes.  Despite her weakness, she summoned the strength to give me a hug worthy of a professional wrestler.  It was hard to leave.

After that, I'm told that Bubbe took one dose of each of her new meds and had a good night's sleep. She woke up bright eyed and bushy-tailed the next morning, demanding coffee and oatmeal for breakfast.  This is the photo my uncle sent:

She had such a good time at her "party" the night before that it totally "charged my batteries", as she often says.  I saw her later in the day, and she was swallowing just fine (note the mug).  She looks remarkably well and happy for someone at death's doorstep, don't you think?

Anyway, the reprieve can't last.  It's inevitable that without daily diuretics her lungs will accumulate water until she simply can't breathe anymore.  I understand her decision to let go.  Beside her other maladies, her hands are numb and she has almost no dexterity.  She can't even press the buttons on her medication pumps herself.  She has also gone a bit bonkers, what with the lack of oxygen to her brain.  She can't tell what's real anymore.  When I went back to see her again on Friday, she told me about a "wonderful dream" she had had.  "Everyone in the family was here, and I was in bed, and we were having a party!"  Then she thinks that stuff that didn't happen actually did, and it's all very confusing.

It's so hard to say goodbye to this lady, I can't tell you.  It's breaking my heart.  But what can you do? No one can live forever.

The Latest Scoop of Poop

You guys, it finally happened.  My step-dad RETIRED.  At least, he sold his shares in what was, until last week, the family business.  There had been much talk of this happening over the past few years, and no action, to the point where I had stopped believing that it would ever happen.  I mean, at one point in the past he even sold the business but continued managing it, and then eventually bought it back again.  But this time.  This time I'm pretty sure it's for keeps.

Despite his failing health, he insists that he is going to start up another business.  He is already in discussions with one or more potential partners.  I wish him all the best with that, and I want nothing to do with it. 

Don't get me wrong.  I love him.  I just love him in that complicated-family-member way that can co-exist with not being able to deal with him.  I'm upset by the changes at my workplace, but not because I'm going to desperately miss him.  I feel sad and guilty about how relieved I feel now that I don't have to work with him anymore.

Anyway, the mixed blessing of working for family is now a thing of the past.  Now I'm just another average wage slave, doing an honest day's work for an honest day's pay.  I'm quite content with that.

I'm cautiously optimistic about my job security.  Only time will tell.  The people who bought my step-dad's shares, already partial owners of the business, were in conflict with him for years.  At one point one of them started demanding that I be fired, after having accused me of something that I didn't do.  I hope that I was being used impersonally as a pawn in their fight.  I hope that this person does not actually hold any personal grudge against me left over from three years ago.  Those were ugly days.

If only they knew the whole story.  There was a time when my step-dad asked me to assist him in some shady activities to enhance his own standing in the fight.  These things, had they been found out, could have gotten me into big trouble.  Not only in terms of my career; but I could have potentially ended up in jail.  It was a terrifying prospect.

Of course I refused, and instead of apologizing for having asked, or being understanding of my reluctance, my step-dad proceeded to lay a giant guilt trip on me for "joining forces with his enemies" or however he put it.  He didn't forgive me for more than a year.  It was so painful and stressful, I can't tell you.

A less scrupulous employee, unrelated to him, might have gone along with his plan, in order to earn a bonus or bank a favour.  There were a lot of strong feelings in the business among many people, not just me.  Some people did strenuously take my step-dad's side.  I have definitely proved my determination to stay on the straight and narrow.  The thing is, that all happened under the radar, and even if I told the whole story to my new bosses, why should they believe me?

I guess it's a question of whether or not they want to give me a chance.  I'll have to prove myself to them starting from scratch, and I will, if they let me.  I'm good value for the money.  A bargain at any price!  Right?

Ketosis

Ken has always been prone to gaining weight.  When I met him 17 years ago (has it been that long already?) we were both in our twenties.  Even then, he wasn't what you'd call "slim".  Over the years, his weight has been up and down, but the long-term trend and forecast were both up.  It made me feel sad, because I knew that those extra pounds would shorten our time together.

A few years ago, I all but stopped making any effort to influence Ken's weight.  I came to terms, as much as I could, with the fact that I would probably outlive him, and decided that I would just enjoy our years together in each moment.  I wouldn't want to regret being a constant nag and the cause of inevitable arguments.  Still, I prayed that he would decide to change his ways and take control of his health.

And then.  Guess what!  It finally happened!  In December, Ken decided that enough was enough.  It was time to change everything.  And so he did.  He switched to a low-carb diet.  He joined a gym and has been working out with the help of a personal trainer at least 3 times per week.  He's been disciplined and dedicated, walking to the gym in cold and snowy weather, even when he's had a long and tiring day.  His diet allows him two "cheat days" per week; sometimes he only takes one.

As of this morning, he has lost 34.5 pounds.  Not only that, but he's gained a significant amount of muscle.  He has gone down one entire pants size!

I can't tell you how happy all this makes me.  Ken would be my bestie no matter what his size, aesthetically speaking, but I used to worry every day about his health.  Now that he's slimming down and shaping up, we're both happier and more confident.  I'm so proud of him.

When he first started on this regimen, i.e. spending 3 evenings per week at the gym, he said to me "This is going to mean that we have less together time."  I said "Yeah, but if you die young it'll mean even less together time!"  Plus while he's at the gym I get to watch whatever I want on TV, even those vet shows on Animal Planet that make him squeamish.  Everybody wins!

All of the Furs

I'm an animal lover.  I grew up with cats, once had a gerbil for a couple of years, and generally become enthused by all beasts with fur or feathers.  (And pigs.  And the bald versions of cats and guinea pigs, even though they look kind of weird.)

Unfortunately, Ken is allergic to all such creatures.  The fuzziest thing I get to pat in my house is my African violet.

(Apologies to Reed's Greenhouse for using your photo, however no other photograph captures the fuzziness of African violet leaves as effectively as this one.)

Because I am chronically pet-deprived, I'm a sucker for any opportunity to interact with animals.  I restrain myself from interrupting dog-walkers on their rounds, but it's not easy.  Even more challenging, my closest cat-person friends have a gorgeous kitty with silky soft fur... who absolutely detests being touched by anyone other than her immediate family.  You can't put a hand anywhere near her without getting hissed at.  :-(

Imagine my irrepressible glee when I heard about the Canadian Pet Expo!  Not only do they offer displays of cats, dogs, rodents, birds, and reptiles, attendees are welcome to bring their own pets, so long as they sign a waiver at the door.

Of course, most people brought dogs.  There were literally hundreds of (leashed) dogs in the building, sniffing each others' bums and frequently piddling on the floor with excitement.  (There were staff designated specifically to deal with this.  They wandered around with paper towels and disinfectant, cleaning up piddle puddles.  What a job.  I saw one dog in the midst of a poop accident, to the chagrin of the piddle police.  What can you do?  Poop happens.)

One little girl, I'd say around nine years old, brought a small, black cat on a leash.  The cat wasn't freaking out, but it's also fair to say that it wasn't relaxed.  

Someone else brought a pet pig in a special stroller.  The pig was around the size of Babe, and had a similar Mona Lisa smile.

Within Toronto city limits it's not legal to keep a pig as a pet, so people were going nuts over the pig in the stroller.  The woman who was pushing it around couldn't stand still for more than five seconds without drawing a crowd of would-be pig-patters and selfie-seekers.  The pig didn't seem to mind.  The woman ignored the hangers-on, more or less.  If I had been in her shoes I would have been annoyed by all the attention, but to be fair you can't bring a pig to a pet expo and not expect to be followed around like the Pied Piper.  

And now, here are some photos that I didn't steal.

"I would like to smell your phone please."

Beautiful Bengal cat.

"Why would anyone want a skinny pig when they could have cutie pies like us?"

This guy had the softest ears.

Miss Fuzzy-Face here was very friendly.

*snorty breathing*

Bull mastiff; weighs more than me.

This young kangaroo was so done with humans.  I'm pretty sure I heard him mutter to one persistent woman "Eff you and your endless attempts to get a roo selfie, mate."

And there you have it!  My compulsive need to pat furry beasts has been satisfied... for now.  

One Stitch

TGIALW.  (Thank God It's A Long Weekend.)  This week was...  I can't even.  Dentist appointment.  Angry clients at work yelling at me, followed by angry staff yelling at each other.  Step-dad-generated unnecessary drama: two incidents, on Wednesday and Thursday.  Generally depressing weather following by an ice storm.  Hormones.  Existential angst.  Etc.

Alongside all that, I had my annual, dermatological mole check.

**If you are LL Cool Joe, you are officially excused from reading the rest of this post, as it contains some medical details which could give you the heebie jeebies.  Everyone else will probably be okay; it's not super-gross.**

I have never minded going for my mole check, because there's nothing to it.  Show up, put on a paper gown, get looked over by the nice lady doctor, get dressed, and go home.  No injections, no blood draws, nothing invasive or embarrassing.  Until this time, obviously.

Last year she took a photo of a funky mole on my left arm that's shaped like a donut.  This year it had gotten a little darker.  She looked at it through a magnifier and pronounced that it looked "completely fine", but that she'd like to take it off just to be safe.

"Lie down on your right side, and I'll grab my sharpest knife so that I can gouge that sucker out of your skin right now."  I am paraphrasing, but that's the essence of what she said.

What could I do?  People have died of melanoma on both sides of my family.  When the dermatologist tells me that she wants to cut me, I'd better go along with the plan.  Dammit.

It didn't hurt.  I got a local freezing, and after that I couldn't feel a thing.  That didn't stop me from having an anxiety attack, because that's just how I roll.*  The doctor was super-sweet to me.  She put a cold cloth on my forehead, got me a cup of water, and patted my leg maternally.  When I continued to shake, sweat, and hyperventilate, she asked her just-as-nice receptionist to come and keep me company so that she could move on to her next patient.  The receptionist gave me cookies, and did a great job of distracting me from myself so that I could settle down.

*I did warn the doctor, before she even gave me the local freezing, that I might go faint on her because of my medical phobia.  It's not within my control once I get triggered, but at least she had fair warning.  I do what I can with soothing self-talk, but I can only prevail for so long against my hyper-terrified subconscious and clearly very effective adrenal glands.

I survived, finally got my act together, and fled the office, with instructions to get the stitch removed in ten days.  The teeny-tiny wound isn't sore unless I accidentally knock it against something.

Now I am minus one dot, which is weird.  All my life I have been accumulating brown spots.  I have never lost one before.  I wonder if my arm will look significantly different to me without it.  RIP dot! You will be missed.

The Dad Bod

The last time I wrote about my step-dad, I complained that he was sleepy, forgetful, and occasionally confused.  I thought that he might be suffering from a sleep disorder.  Turns out it's congestive heart failure.

He had an episode a couple of years ago during which his feet and ankles swelled up, and he had to take a course of diuretics.  Then he decided that he was fine.  He never followed up with his cardiologist.  Of course the diuretics didn't cure his heart problem; they only treated the most visible symptom.  His heart failure progressed.  He should have continued to take medication on a long-term basis.  Instead, he neglected to visit a doctor until last month, when he was so weak and tired that he could barely walk up a flight of stairs.

He thought that he had asthma, which he has suffered from in the past.  Actually, it was pulmonary edema (fluid accumulation in the lungs), which was slowly suffocating him.  No wonder he looked 75% dead.

He finally went to see a cardiologist and a respirologist, who scolded him and put him back on diuretics.  He'll be on a high dose until he's less waterlogged, then he can go on a maintenance dose.  It's not a quick process.  I just saw him for the first time in three weeks, as long as he's been taking the medication, and he still looks 50% dead.  He's up and shuffling around, but he gets winded after a few steps, and he's noticeably pale.

The hardest part is that he makes it harder.  He goes into denial.  He puts off seeing doctors.  He won't let my mother take charge of his appointments.  He insists on driving himself to the appointments he does attend, although I believe that, in the state he's in, he's not fully alert behind the wheel.  He also tries to hide his illness from people, but that's just crazy.  Anyone with two eyes and a brain can see that he hasn't just got the flu (which is one of the excuses that I've heard him make for his fatigue).

What can we do, my mother and I?  Take it day by day.  We tell people and then tell them to pretend that they don't know, so that he won't be upset.  (We're telling certain people who should know for his own safety, in case he collapses in their presence and they need to have information for first responders.)  I asked the cleaning lady who is at his office in the evenings to keep an eye on him if she ever finds him there alone.  She was very understanding.  "I have a father too.  I know how it is." she said.

We put as much pressure on him as we feel that we can without triggering his rebel-without-a-cause impulse to dig his heels in and be contrary.  I asked him yesterday to please give my mother permission to make an appointment for him with a general practitioner, because he hasn't seen a family doctor in a dog's age or longer.

In the final analysis, he's still a responsible adult who will have to live or die with the consequences of his own choices.  If he ends up dying sooner than was technically necessary, I refuse to feel guilty.  We can only do as much as he allows us to do.  He'll be as stubborn as a mule until his dying day, whenever that comes.

Food, friend, or foe?

It's not always easy to discern the difference between food and not-food.  Here is evidence:

Dog or bagel?

Shar Pei or croissant?

Labradoodle or fried chicken?

Chihuahua or blueberry muffin?

Shar Pei or towel?

Admittedly, towels aren't food.  However.  I think I've made my point.

Segue to: the Jelly Belly candy company's product called Beanboozled.  The flavour menu on the box looks like this:

You picks a colour and you takes your chances.  

A co-worker friend of mine bought some for her kids at Christmas, but after about 5 minutes of taste testing, the kids were done.  My friend brought the two leftover boxes of crazy beans to work with her, to see if anyone would try them.  There were a couple of brave souls who took the plunge.  One guy was so grossed out by the mere thought it that he started retching and had to leave the room.  She didn't manage to give very many of them away.

So guess who got a whole box of these babies to take to Game Night?  This gal right here.  

Flavours vary from one one "edition" to the next, so my set didn't contain any Skunk Spray/Licorice or Moldy Cheese/Caramel Corn, but the remaining flavours quite were sufficient for our purposes.

If only I could share the videos I made...  But sadly I cannot, because ANONYMITY.  So you'll have to settle for a recap.

Toothpaste was the least offensive.  It's just strong mint.  Our box held very few pale green beans, and all of them were lime, no grass clippings. :-(  Even more disappointing, we got plenty of tutti-frutti, but no stinky socks!  Come on, beans, you should let us try at least one each of all the horrible flavours.

Baby wipes were in there, convincing but not too disgusting.  Booger was slightly worse.  "Salty", was how it was described.  We didn't find any rotten eggs, but there were some leftover beans at the end of our experiments, and some of them were yellow, so they might have been in there, lying in wait for us.

The worst two were canned dog food (super-smelly!), which made one of the kids almost puke; and vomit, which Ken described as "unpleasant".  "Like someone ate durian, threw it up, and mixed it with sugar, and I'm eating it."  I offered him a tissue, however, he wouldn't spit it out.  He bravely ate his whole vomit bean, and then complained that it was stuck in his back teeth.

I didn't eat any.  My excuse is that I was too busy doing the video.  Pretty good dodge, right?

Would you try these?  Which flavours would you risk?