The New Normal

I watched in silence this morning as Helen is loaded in the flat blackVan for her trip to the care center. I find it kind of paradoxical Helen's vehicle is black and the person last week I wrote about, the resident was dead was being collected by an all-white. Seems a little reversed to what it should be. Helen has been struggling for the past year. Helen would be in her apartment slip and fall and break something then be in the hospital and rehab for six weeks then come back to the apartments. She just come back last week actually and the crew was glad to see Helen and wish her the best for her reintegration. However, that reintegration did not happen. She fell again this morning early and a couple of good Samaritan apartment neighbors helped her get up off the floor back into her bed but Helen had had enough. She had made the decision to enter into long-term care. Helen said she just not do it anymore, she needed help much more help than she had available at the apartments trying to live independently.

I sat next my friend, Patricia or Pat (as she prefers to be called). Pat is older than I am, a retired educator and fairly self-assured. In fact she is on the same Board of Directors that I am regarding the apartment complex we live in. I have always considered Pat a know it all and I've come to learn that she is and does know it all. I like Pat. As we watched the van driver Stow and secure Helen in the van had confided in me that she was getting worried about herself and about how much longer she could live independently. I think the girl's has got quite a ways to gobefore Helen needs to seriously consider long-term care. The conversation was interesting. We talked about how insidious our independence wanders away from us. How slowly the process is for decades realizing only now and then that the ability to care for ourselves independently is slipping away. However, there comes a time when we start seeing that ability begins to slip away much quicker and how you almost have to accept each little or big loss as the new normal. But was also interesting, to me anyway, was how once we accept this process has started a quick will act on to the new normal knowing that the new normal is leading and perhaps the fleeting process itself is the new normal.

Each night when I roll in the bed (literally, I literally roll into my bed). Remember last year when I seem to keep falling out of my bed especially on the transfer? I firemen, my home health person, and even my brother come over and rescue me. However this year I don't know what has happened but I'm making the transfer so much better and I feel more secure. But every night as I hit the mattress and pull myself on the bed I wonder how many more transfers I have. Hopefully I have hundreds maybe thousands if I'm really really really lucky but there's a number out there of transfers that I can do and at some point will have to make a decision as to what my new normal will be. And transfers, especially gravity assist transfers are easy. It's all the other things it takes to live independently that has me worried. Everything from dressing to go be my pants and especially taking care of holes in my butt when those pressure sores happen. My body is changing and that is the new normal. I told Pat about how my spinal column is torquing and twisting causing me to put pressure on my butt in different areas. I told Pat that I recognized this is how it happens, this is how you get old and… Die. Sadly, Pat smiled and agreed.