What a summer!  I’ve been thinking that I should be blogging instead of playing spider solitaire these anxiety ridden late nights when my brain won’t shut down and my body is wishing it would.  My now 91 year old mother has been living with us and I’d love to blog about that experience, which has turned out to be wonderful when I thought it would be stressful.  She is sweet, thoughtful, wanting to be helpful, with a very dimiinshed short term memory, which she allows us to kid her about and she laughs it off.  She sleeps a lot… I had hoped we’d have a summer of reading together her love letters and my father’s during their World War II courtship.

However, this is the summer of drought in Georgia but when-it-rains-it-pours in the Kaemmerlen/Gaare household.  We have been dealing with a terminally ill sister-in-law for me, sister to my husband.  And a series of medical disasters since March with only a week or two that hasn’t been crisis ridden.  I have been working/reworking my one-woman Rachel Carson show–during the research/writing of  her famous book SILENT SPRING, she suffered one medical problem after another, breast cancer, radiation treatments and chemo, with so many complications keeping her from finishing the book, so carefully documenting what DDT rampant sprayings were doing short term and long term to the balance of nature and ultilmately to the health of all living things.  And at the same time, her body was manifesting itself with the problems she was predicting would affect us all if we continued to use these chemical pesticides/weapons.

My sister-in-law’s health is… what we hate to admit… in a steady decline.  She is an end stage renal patient, undergoing hemodialysis 3 times a week.  Getting to that place was a process too–kidneys shutting down, peritoneal dialysis, peritoneal infections, hospitalizations, overcoming one crisis before the next one ultimately set in.  Her 7 week hospital stay this spring was the result of home dialysis, hemo needles that missed the mark, causing a giant hemotoma over her entire upper left side, leading to a staph infection that settled in her heart valves, and at first unbeknownst to us, hiding in her spine.  The vertebral decline led to the second spring hospitilization and spinal surgery and fusion.  Inability to walk. Hospital rehab, then off to a rehab center (formerly called nursing home) for a lengthy visit.  Then seemingly over the hump, positive about her progress, walking some in therapy, the left knee buckled and she broke her tibia and fibula.

The renal disease causes soft bones–falling in her case means something gets broken.  Back in the hospital.  One step forward, two steps backwards.  We start all over, dealing with many doctors, waiting for each and every one of them, trying to coordinate a diagnosis or two or three.  Ordering tests, which means days before the results, waiting for doctors, trying to find out the plan–so much waiting… and in the meantime, the patient lies in bed and gets weaker… Hospitals unfortunately make people sicker.  One thing I have learned is when you have to be hospitalized, get your family to advocate to get you out of there as soon as possible.  Is that the point of all this rambling?  I am supposed to have a point in here somewhere.  It’s hard to find the point when you’re dealing with the next crisis- in the fix this thing mode and then all will be okay.  But it’s never okay. So when do you get to the point?  When is everything fixed?  How long does the light at the end of the tunnel last?  When does reality set in?  No, I think you never give up.  There’s always hope.  You give up when there’s no longer hope.