Can't Think of a Title

What am I saying? I can't even think.


My mother had an amazing memory until she lost it to Alzheimer's. She also had an incredible record-keeping system. It was called her calendar. Her hand writing was awful due to that silly idea someone had way-back-when that left handedness was a mortal sin, or something. She always knew what we did and when we did it. No one else could read it, but she could, and it was there in black and white.

Then, there is me.

My blog is my memory. Some days I am absolutely shocked when I read it. I barely remember adding those posts that happen late at night.

Anyway, I digress...

My dad had such a frightful incident Saturday. The skin on the leg that he had cellulitis in (i remember it was five years ago, because they celebrated their 55th anniversary in the hospital and now they have been married 60 years.) is very fragile. He had been telling me about a spot on his leg that was not healing, but that isn't even the spot that bled.

When he was hospitalized five years ago with cellulitis, they gave him an antibiotic that caused him to hallucinate. Of course, my dad being my dad, he didn't tell anyone. But at one point he asked me if I could see the brightly colored flowers on the wallpaper dancing around the room.

I can say that I most definitely did not see any such thing.

There wasn't any brightly colored wallpaper, even. Nor flowers.

They changed his meds.

Now back to Saturday and that nasty bleed. The paramedics wrapped his ankle in a pressure bandage and the on-call doctor felt sure that as long as he was stable (and he was) he could wait to see the doctor on Monday.

Now, me being me, on Monday I got a migraine. It was time. No news there. But, it was a crazy bad one, which meant that I dared not drive. It might possibly have something to do with the stress I was still feeling about my dad having another NEW 'thing to watch'. I will just tell you right now, that I don't DO blood. It's like some people with needles. Those don't bother me. But show me many many large puddles of blood and then show me the trash bag filled with towels that had cleaned up 'the worst of it' and I will show you me, laying on the floor in a dead faint.

So, THGGM graciously took my dad to the doctor. She gave him a prescription for an antibiotic, and an appointment for an ultrasound to check for blood clots (blood clots?! hum. i saw NO evidence of those saturday! he is on blood thinner, obviously.) Anyway, they wanted to be sure, so THGGM took him there, too. The report was all good, and there were no blood clots.

Back to the dancing flowers...

When I talked to my dad this morning, he mentioned that he had been having nightmares. Cars up in trees, people dangling out of them, people who have been dead for years surprising him, really weird stuff.

Then, I remembered.

Hmm. That antibiotic. I found the pill bottle. Oh, that name rings a bell.

That was the antibiotic from five years ago.

I called the doctor and got him switched over to something less nightmare/hallucination inducing.

His leg looked much better tonight.

And this may seem odd, but now I can see those bright dancing flowers on the wallpaper that weren't there five years ago...

(it was a year ago today that i rode in the back of a police car to go look for my mom who was out wandering the neighborhood.)