Gary BUTTERWORTH Online

WASHINGTON, DC, USA

I can’t believe it’s only midnight.  It feels so much later.  I guess that’s because I got up at 5:30 this morning to clear a clogged toilet and make my weekly 4-hour commute.  

Since I feel like I have all this extra time at my disposal (I usually go to sleep sometime in the wee hours), I think this is a good time to make Dan Dean (my only remaining loyal reader) and myself happy and write a boring, general update that will let you know where I’ve been the past few months and, hopefully, get me back on track with normal updating.  After all, my website will turn 5 tomorrow; it should be active for it’s big day!

So, where have I been?

Grandmom’s hospital stays

Like most things in my life recently, my absence from blogging is at least partly related to my grandmother.

Shortly before Christmas, my grandmom was hospitalized with a heart arrhythmia.  She stayed in the hospital for about a week; then, she went to an in-patient rehabilitation home for another week. 

(She hadn’t really been injured, but my grandmother is frail from age, and a week in the hospital de-conditions her body and weakens her.  So, standard practice is to send her to rehab to do exercises for a week before coming home.  She has been several times now, and it really helps.)

My grandmom came home right after New Years, but her new medications just weren’t doing the job.  Less than three weeks later, she was back in the hospital after an extremely severe episode of ventricular fibrillation.

That’s about as bad as heart problems can get, but my grandmom’s a fighter.  She bounced back, and after a week or so in the hospital, it was back to rehab for what was supposed to be another short stay before going home.

Well, it was not to be.  While at rehab, my grandmom fell and hurt her knee.  It took about two months before she had regained enough strength to come home.  

While she was away, my life returned to “almost-normal” after about 14 months of making her my main priority.

While she was away

I spent plenty of time visiting my grandmom at the hospital.  But, after she was “out of the woods,” I decided that she was well cared for in rehab, and I should use the time for myself.

My grandmom was housed in a wonderful short-term rehabilitation facility.  Brand new, clean, state-of-the-art facilities, friendly people, good food, etc.  I am positive that she was well cared for.  Honestly, I was a little jealous of her temporary home.  But she just complained about it; she just wanted to go to back to her house.  Set in her ways, I guess.

I felt a little bit bad about going out and having fun while she was so unhappy with her situation, but I decided that there was nothing wrong with having some Gary time.  She was well cared for, and it’s hardly like I was ignoring her.  My mom was visiting at least six times per week, and I was visiting three or four.

On the other days, I tried to live as much like a normal person as I could.  Living in the suburbs with freedom but without a car was a little bit of a challenge, but my mom helped me out by letting me borrow hers pretty often.

I got to work a lot of extra hours at work.  I got accomplished a lot, and it felt great.  

I decided I wanted to take a vacation.  I found an amazing deal on airfare to Costa Rica: $270 round-trip from DC, including taxes and fees!  I figured out my itinerary (four soccer games!  a volcano!  Food!), selected a youth hostel, and packed my bag before bed, planning on booking my ticket first thing the next morning and jetting off 3 days later.

Alas, I woke up at 4 am in a cold sweat…the sickest I had been in years.  I think I might have had the flu, and it took over a week to recover fully.  I tried to rebook the same trip a couple more times while my grandmom was away, but airfares went up (although they were admittedly still affordable), soccer teams went on the road, and flights left from inconvenient airports at inconvenient times.  I decided against it, and I’m not sure if I regret that or not.

I felt a little sorry for myself for not getting to take my big trip, but I really can’t get too down on myself.  I had a lot of fun.  Work, as I mentioned, went great; I love my job!  I also got to go to three hockey games (DC, Richmond, and Princeton–expect a post and arena review of Richmond’s SPHL team), a soccer game (DC United), a basketball game (Syracuse at Villanova!), a movie (“I am Legend”), and a concert (Finch).  I got to spend a lot of time with Tiffany, and we went out to eat a few times.  :-)

So, while there wasn’t really anything spectacular, I had a lot of nice times while my grandmom was healing.  I wanted to focus on getting out of the house and living a semi-normal life.  I suppose my activities gave me more to write about, but I didn’t want to waste my prescious free time blogging away in front of a computer.

Now that she’s back

Things are a little tougher than they were before, but not significantly.

After having three months of pseudo-normalcy in my life, I guess it’s not surprising that I’ve struggled a little bit the past few weeks, but it really hasn’t been that bad.

She came back home on March 22, and she’s glad to be back.  At least she was when she first came home.  Now that she has been home for a few weeks, she has absolutely no recollection of her three months away.

She is mostly the same as she was before, but not quite as sharp.  Her mind and body have both deteriorated slightly more, but not significantly. 

Me?  I’m missing my freedom a little bit, but I seem to have returned to my normal routine.  I’m doing fine.  I stay up late, sleep late, and head to DC for work on Wednesdays and Thursdays.  Work is going great, and I’m loving it.  The rest of the time, I spend at home.  I spend lots of it on the computer.  Which means that now I really have no excuse for letting this site atrophy!

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Link du jour: The Washington Redskins’ cheerleaders are heading to South Asia to represent my favorite (cricket) team in the new Indian Premier League: the Bangalore Royal Challengers!

Filed under: alzheimers, Life, Links, Nana