Monday, January 28, 2013
It was very strange, getting up in the morning after the sun
was up. Gery always left for work before me, but because neither of us were
going anywhere, we slept in. I took Sarah to daycare so I could make phone calls,
but I had to make Gery ride along with me because leaving him alone was just
too much to handle. Even for the half hour it would take, I couldn’t have
managed to leave him unsupervised after seeing him have those seizures. We went
in, I tried to briefly explain things to the director, but she had questions
and Gery had a lot to say.
I called the neurosurgeon to make an appointment. I was
transferred to the physician’s assistant who would come to handle absolutely
everything for me from Gery’s disability paperwork to my FMLA paperwork to labs
and prescriptions and coordination of his many, many evaluations and
appointments. She asked me to keep the phone by me so she could get back to me
with an appointment time. I assumed it would be a week or so, since Gery was going
to be seeing a big cheese. Wrong. The appointment was scheduled for the next
day.
I texted Gery’s parents and sisters to let them know, and
his mom said she would come along. I was grateful. My ability to understand all
this was limited (though I asked a lot of questions, did a lot of research, and
came to know much more than I ever thought possible), and she both knew the
right questions and was another set of ears to remember information.
**Gery was not a reliable historian of the things that had
happened that brought us here, and he was still unable to move information from
short to long term memory. He was often confused and frustrated, and relied a
lot on me and the people he was with to answer simple questions. I came to the
point where I would not send him out with anyone who couldn’t keep him from
getting agitated. Immediate family and extremely close friends, yes. People who
could remember that he liked a steak burrito with hot salsa and no beans at Chipotle,
and not ask him what he wanted. It sounds so silly and simple now. Rearranging
deck chairs on the Titanic.
I know I called my office and his and spent a lot of time
setting up availability for us both to be off, but I don’t remember the details
of the conversations. I know I talked to friends from college, to extended
family members, and that when I went to talk to him about it, he was asleep. He
started napping all the time. He had apparently been falling asleep every day
after work – he would pick Sarah up, come home, and fall asleep. She didn’t
tell me until after he was gone. Not that it would have made a difference for
him; I wish I’d known that she was pretty much unsupervised for an hour every
afternoon.
I woke him, made him ride along to pick Sarah up, and we
came home and I made dinner. A normal end to an extremely abnormal day. The
next day was even stranger.
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