Catching Up

I am in catch up mode a bit. Life has been somewhat eventful for the last week or so. You see last Thursday week Jude ended up in hospital yet again. Fortunately, this time it was the local one, so there was minimal traveling involved. What happened was effectively my fault, but I'm not beating myself to death about it. I do feel guilty, yes, but not in an all encompassing, soul destroying way. If Jude held me responsible for what happened, then yes I would feel substantially worse, but she doesn't, bless her, so we both just put it down to live & learn.

Lately, we have been trying her with small cups of coffee & a taste of wine on her toothette sponges just to moisten her mouth & at least give her the taste of it. Anyway, I was eating a particularly tasty orange Thought a tiny morsel of it might bee good to suck on just for the taste of it in her mouth. Jude agreed. It wasn't, so out came trusty Igor, the suction unit. Jude started to get a little panicky as she was getting very short of breath & reflexively bit down hard on the suction tip & dislodged a tooth.. Lots of blood & mucous & the 3rd call for an ambulance in as many weeks. He thought it was incredibly funny when I asked him for frequent flyers points. I followed along with her BIPAP & a change of clothes & got there just as they were transferring her from the ambulance stretcher to a hospital bed. AS I got there, the driver said, "Is her face always that color?" "No! " says I, then all hell broke loose.

The upshot was that it took 4 doctors something like 4 minutes to get her back for me & in the end it took shock paddles to do it. I know this terrible affliction will eventually reach out a cold bony hand & take her from me, but thankfully, it wasn't this time. It wasn't right, it wasn't time & I wasn't prepared to let her go at that point.

She is home again & recovering now, but still very frail & fragile. I can't praise the hospital doctors & nursing staff enough. Admittedly, either Jude has worked with them as a Friend of the Emergency Department, or I have grown up & gone to school with a lot of them as well but still... It's a lovely new hospital wing with very enlightened views. I was even allowed to bring our little dog into the room & have her on the bed, where she sat with her head on Judes arm gazing soulfully into her eyes, but all is right with the world now. Jude is snuggled up in bed with a cat curled up with her & the little dog has deserted me for the warmth of the fire in the lounge.

We've had problems with her BIPAP as well. Wouldn't shut off, wouldn't turn on, going in & out of test modes & all sorts of weird things, which are bloody wonderful at 2.00 AM when you are trying to get her in & out of bed for a potty stop. I was all set to go through to Waikato for an evening appointment with the Sleep Clinic, but I managed to fix it. All it is is a worn stop start button that you have to very carefully pick out of its hole every once in a while. I'm going to send a picture of it through to them & see if a replacement is available. It's useable now though which is good.

Then there was the saga of our new cordless paging system, (Wireless Doorbell) It's been working intermittently for a while now. I replaced the batteries but that helps sometimes, sometimes not. I tracked it down though. You see I tape the bell push to Jude's get out of bed frame, which is made of steel tubing. The body of the bell push has an adhesive pad on the back of it which I haven't to date used, but it has compressed to being paper thin & this has been killing the signal. A small bit of hardboard attached to the sticky pad has solved THAT problem.

Now for the good news. We've had a good weekend. Jude has been spoiled rotten. Chris & Mel came down for the day on Saturday, bought some lovely flowers down with them & Phil & Jean came down as well, stayed the night & left about lunchtime today. We haven't really had all that much to do with Jean, but she is a lovely lady & really went out of her way to make a fuss of Jude which was nice. Its all left Jude very tired, but the weekend is a good tired with some happy memories.

Well that's about it. This coming week I'm going to see about getting Jude's teeth cleaned up, getting her hair tinted & trimmed & I'm going to try & overcome a personal phobia I have regarding paper work & get some done that seriously needs doing. All good positive stuff.