Healed, injured, back to work anyway.

I'm back to watching my Dad a few overnights, and maybe a few days a week. The nursing home gave him some intensive physical therapy and then sent him back home. I might blame our medical care and geriatric systems for that, but I must admit he's better. He's at least been able to stand up, with difficulty, and take some steps. That's minimally what he has to be able to do if we're going to care for him.

Although he's old and feeble, it's a paradoxical kind of feeble. He's not diabetic in the least, has a hearty appetite and weighs almost 200 lbs, even as his skeleton is falling apart. If he can't maneuver himself into a wheelchair with help at least, or can't stand up to let us help him get his clothes on, we're going to need power equipment. Or we have to get him into a care facility.

All nursing homes, though, have long waiting lists. We don't have money. His fortune got wiped out. We'd have to count on his Medicaid to pay for it when or if we can get him in one. Today I picked up two books from the library about caring for a person with dementia.

I suspect that the rise in Alzheimer's and other dementia has something to do with long-term exposure to air pollution. Scientists have found that metal particles in the air can travel from the nose, up the olfactory nerve and in to the brain, where the results look something like Alzheimer's. My father grew up in extremely polluted central St. Louis City, where he spent all his summers playing baseball on a coal cinder lot, i.e. a toxic waste dump. 

Meanwhile, I gave myself another injury. costochondritis. I had it a few years ago, a terrible, persistent ache in the sternum and side. I thought it was a heart attack.

Assembling a new chair by myself, I braced it against my ribs while I allen wrenched some bolts into place. The cartilage in my ribs gave just a little. I didn't feel it then, but I ever so slightly treated my rib cage like movable joints. It got very painful this morning. It hurts when I breathe too deeply. Fortunately, costochondritis responds to aspirin (I can't take Naproxin or Ibuprofin). If it didn't, I'd probably go to the ER, and they'd think I was there trying to score painkillers. They'd be right, but it would be for the right reason.

However, even with all the injuries, and even with having to care for my Dad, I've become very self-disciplined and self-managed. I'm getting a ton of writing and reading done. And I've been learning, right now about OpenOffice and some of its more subtle labor-saving tricks. I'm also working on getting a GoFundMe for Dad. My writing and learning is spread out over several projects, yes, I do have that ADHD thing. But I'm confident now that I'm  going to get them all done. Every day I schedule myself, and I keep track of projects with a spreadsheet. I know that sounds eccentric, it's why I suspect I'm on the Autism Spectrum somewhere around Asperger's.

Better furniture, but my body still aches.

I'm at home, mending my aching back and hamstring, going just a little stir crazy. My back has gotten much better, my hamstring hasn't. Every morning it feels fine. Then I do something that aggravates it. I few times, I tripped on something, and ouch! I stub my right foot and my left hamstring spikes with pain. That, BTW, is exactly the way I hurt it to begin with. Today I assembled a chair. I shouldn't have done it, but my back and thigh probably can't heal without a new chair.

I can't think why. And remind me how did my back get hurt to begin with?

I ordered it from an Amazon merchant, OneBigOutlet, and it arrived fast, two days before the promised date-range began. The box looked like it had been dragged all the way from the outlet  in California.

Sashi the bomb sniffing cat gives the all-clear, but adds, "Do not disturb me."

But it didn't explode and to my relief, there was nothing missing.

So, these last two weeks, I replaced my chair and microwave. I'm in no condition take anything out, and junk pickup isn't for another three weeks. So this place has become a little cluttered. I'd give my chair to Sash as a scratching post, which is what she did with it anyway, but there's not enough room.

I had a breakthrough today on my novel. Solved a problem that was blocking the plot. That was encouraging.

My sister reports my Dad is home and she's handling it for now. He thinks he's going to court for some reason. When Anne told me over the phone, he shushed her about it. Who knows what courtroom drama is going on in his head? If only it were a complete story and the whole process weren't so sad. 

Memory illusions pt 2: The memory lens

We've all heard that time seems to accelerate when you get older. I've heard it in so many places that I assume it's consistently true. Subjective experience of time is significantly faster. It's true of me now that I'm up in the high middle age. It's September, and I expect that by noon today, it'll be October. When I wake up tomorrow, it'll be December and snowing. That's an exaggeration, but that's what it feels like.

Oddly enough, if someone lives until they're eighty, they probably feel like they spent half their time as a child and teenager. Part of it might be familiarity. Later in life we're familiar with the cycles of day-and-night, going to work, of eating our meals. The same familiarity applies to the seasons. Our brains would throw events related to these cycles in the “yada, yada, yada” file, and our passing retrospective of them would become abbreviated. 
 
However, that can't account for the entire effect. It's definitely a neurological phenomenon, not a real space-time effect. Maybe, like our aging eyes which far-sighted, maybe our memories have a similar distortion in their lenses?

I accidentally tested this out, though I didn't know I was doing it. I'm now keeping a journal and a bunch of logs like I never have before. This is likely the best documented period of my life. Last week, I tried to remember what day my father went into the hospital. I thought it was Friday, but checking my journal, it turned out to be Wednesday.  Then it occurred, I thought the news was three days old, but it was actually five.

Could it be that it's the reverse of the rear-view mirror effect. “Objects in the mirror are further away than they look”? Suppose my entire memory has that distortion? It means actual time is passing sixty-seven percent faster than recalled time. That is significant.

So, from here on out, I'm going to use my journal that way. I'm going to make an estimate of when events took place in the past and check them against my journal. I'll see if this distortion is in some way consistent.