The ongoing personal impasse

Here’s a short list of things dad was busy doing during the second half of the semester, when my classes went virtual and I was trying to keep all the classes and students going. We had a system set up while I was working a certain number of hours and on a fixed schedule that was not leaving him unsupervised very much, but when #saferathome happened, first, all the reasons for that organization of the schedule disappeared (but I was advised to stay on it) even as he was simply not able to leave me alone while I was working. So I did end up spending a lot of time away from him, trying to get lectures recorded and seminars zoomed. And he was only supervised for part of that time, and while he was unsupervised, he managed all this.

• cutting into the kitchen ceiling to install a skylight
• taking doors off the kitchen cabinets
• getting credit-card phished four times
• getting talked into installing malware on his computer over the phone
• confounding the cable system to the extent that we had to have a service call (and then refusing to stay six feet away from the repairman)
• confounding the cable system a second time and hovering over me constantly until I fixed it (since I didn’t want to spend an hour yelling at dad to stay away from the repairman)
• tripping all the breakers in the house at least once
• revving up a chain saw to clear a fallen tree
• trying to pry the door off the washing machine because I happened to be away from home and he thought I wasn’t drying the stuff in the machine fast enough.
• burning brush on a windy day.

I may have forgotten some things.

This in partial explanation of why I didn’t have much energy for blogging the last 2-3 months. I’d hike myself to work and dread coming home to whatever I find.

And it goes on. Last night dad had been in bed for an hour, and I was sitting in the living room, when he got up and asked if the refrigerator was running.

“I guess so,” I said. “Why?”

“I tripped some breakers,” he said.

I didn’t want to get into a discussion about that (although I then went to see if the freezer was running) but I wondered exactly what he’d tripped, and why. Or if he hadn’t tripped anything but was dreaming about having done so and just woke up and believed it was true.

We’re also having some issues with a neighbor who’s decided to take over the brush clearing in our yard because “obviously your father needs help.” Yesterday he cleared the clump of brush outside our dining room window, where the songbirds lurk and we often watch them while eating.

Anyway.

The sum total of time I have had away from dad, when not working or sleeping, since I returned from London, is 8 hours. And I spent three of those hours returning from taking him somewhere or picking him up.

That number gives me serious pause.

And it looks like our senior helper arrangement is crumbling (I won’t get into that whole story).

So on Sunday I had a brief meeting with our geriatric consultant and she laid it out in pretty stark terms:

When you need help outside of a crisis (like now), HL can’t/won’t intervene. So it’s really on you. You’ll either have to wait for a crisis to happen, or you’ll have to decide.

~ by Servetus on June 16, 2020.