Sophie's World

8:00 PM: I'm back up at Mom's today. Sophie and I drove up last night after I spent most of the day taking care of a bunch of things at home. I did lots of laundry for mom, ordered and picked up medicine for Sophie, took care of errands in town, and visited Achilles at the vet. I decided to leave him there so that our cat sitter won't have to worry about feeding him special food. I also talked with and visited several people from church while I was home, and that helped me a lot.

I talked to Randall for a long time today. He shared lots of details about what they are doing and how it is affecting him. Given the heat wave we're experiencing here on the east coast, it was weird to hear him talk about Johannesburg having the coldest day on record for the last 8 years, and that it snowed there for the first time in something like 25 years. A little snow sounds pretty godo to me right about now. Tomorrow, he'll spend most of the day at game preserve, and he'll get a chance to rest, physically and emotionally.

I haven't really talked much about how Nannie is doing, because up until a couple of days ago, she was reading these updates, and I didn't want to be too negative about her health situation. But you could probably tell from my descriptions that she is not doing well. The primary issue right now is that she has multiple myeloma that wasn't responding to treatment, so she went on hospice about a month ago. In the last week or so, her blood levels have dropped dramatically, and it has really affected her ability to function. When I first arrived on Friday, she was still able to slowly make her way into the living room from her bedroom and eat meals in her chair. I think it was on Monday that it seemed to wear her out too much to come into the living room, so we put a comfortable chair in her room and she took her meals in that chair. On Tuesday, she really couldn't handle getting from her bed to the chair, so we let her eat meals in bed. The hospice nurse came that day and said she didn't think Nannie had enough strength to use the potty chair next to her bed either, so Mom started putting diapers on her. That was the day I went home, and it was really hard to leave. I'm glad I came back. She's been doing about the same. She is still able to eat, although not much sounds interesting to her. Sometimes she forgets how to take medicine, and other times she does just fine. But for the most part, she's pretty alert (which is pretty amazing, considering that she also has dementia). Mom is sleeping in a recliner in the room with Nannie, just in case she tries to get up. We don't want her to fall. It's probably a matter of days now, so we're just hanging out and spending time together, taking things day by day.