The Mom & Me Journals dot Net
The definitive, eccentric journal of an unlikely caregiver, continued.

Apologia for these journals:
    They are not about taking care of a relative with moderate to severe Alzheimer's/senile dementia.
    For an explanation of what these journals are about, click the link above.
    For internet sources that are about caring for relatives with moderate to severe
        Alzheimer's/senile dementia, click through the Honorable Alzheimer's Blogs in my
        links section to the right.

7 minute Audio Introduction to The Mom & Me Journals [a bit dated, at the moment]

Monday, September 22, 2008
 
I haven't been absent...
...really, I've been here but buried in the other sections of these journals, now known as the "Archives". I've been correcting links, going forward archive by archive, and reattaching search engines to everything as I go. I've just started on the fourth archive, the one for 2006. It's going quickly, since I'm not reading posts, just scanning for links, checking them, correcting them, if necessary, and going on. I'm even checking and correcting external links and adding links to articles I cite from the New York Times, since they have opened their archives to the "unregistered" public within the last year. It's surprising how many websites either rearrange their pages, move or extinguish over time.
    A fair amount of what has been going on in our home is showing up over at The Dailies or at Life After Death Sentencing. If you haven't been over at either, Mom is recovering slowly but surely. She's having a few problems with feet swelling (minor), which, I think, is due to the fact that it's been difficult for us to figure out a strategy for getting her up to pull her slacks down, but I think we may have overcome that tonight. Since she was having trouble raising herself from her rocker for a moment for me to pull down her slacks, we tried having her rise with my help then attaching her to the walker, but she's got the heebie jeebies about the walker, right now (I don't blame her; she fell while she was using the walker), so, as soon as her hands were on the grips she'd fall back into the chair, giving me no time to grab her slacks and pull. We tried having her hold onto my shoulders, too, while I pulled her pants down, but I almost fell over backward from the weight of her leaning on me, so we decided that wasn't a good idea. We tried standing her with my usual assist and transferring her hands to the arms of the wheelchair but even with the wheels locked it isn't sturdy enough to stay in place while she leans over it...and, again she collapsed back into the chair before I reached the back waistband of her slacks. I'm having her attempt to raise her arm straight out in front of her at odd times during the day. I also take hold of it, have her relax, and stretch it out and move it up. The results are better when I'm doing it, but she is recovering some movement on her own. I am now convinced that she didn't fracture anything...just received a very bad muscle whack. Her shoulder isn't a problem at all, anymore, just the back of her bicep and sometimes her forearm, which occasionally aches from the additional load it's taking on when she rises or walks. She's on pretty constant acetaminophen, 500 mg at a time, four times a day. She decided to refuse it, tonight, but after the transfer from the rocker to the wheelchair in the living room as we were heading in for night prep, she commented that her legs were aching from "all the exercise" she'd gotten today. When I asked her, again, about "taking a Tylenol", she assented.
    She is still completely enwrapped in Touched by an Angel episodes. I'm not sure what we're going to do when we get through the four seasons that are available. I'm hoping, if she's still heavily into them, that she'll have viewed so many that repeats will work. Otherwise, maybe I can get us back to reading, again. I've tried over the last week and Angel episodes are continuing to trump books.
    I'm seriously backed up on stuff I am planning to post; a couple of book reviews, another essay, etc. But, I suppose, it's probably better to be behind than to have nothing left to do!
    Maybe I'll do a little more link checking before turning in. I'm figuring that I should be able to migrate this journal over to the domain in a week or less. I'm not going to wait to check links in The Dailies until after everything is securely domained. Between the archive and the current area on that section there are 1500 posts and counting. The minor sections, like the food section and the moving archive, will have to wait, too. So will the movies section. I'm figuring I should be able to migrate this journal and reattach the search engine in about a week...then I can breathe a little more slowly and take the rest of the link checking as it comes.
    Later.
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