It's Sunday evening. Sitting on the couch with my wife. She is laying down and falling in and out of sleep. The Ravens and Steelers are playing. The Steelers are wearing these horrible looking bumble-bee uniforms. I guess they are throw backs, but I think they are throw ups.
We got back from "down home" around two hours. Heather and I visited my Aunt Rose before we left home. Aunt Rose is my last living sibling and his only sister. She is in the hospital now due to a bout of pneumonia. She did not look well. Over a year ago Rosie (what we really call her) went into the nursing home and has never left except to go to the hospital, occasional doctor appointments and my wedding. She had started falling at home. It got to the point where she would fall down and just stay on the floor and sleep. Dad would often find her still on the floor the next day. We thought it was a side effect of some medication. It turns out it was part of a bigger issue. She was having some major memory issues, I guess. And apparently she had just developed a lack of interest in many things.
Since she was falling so much, we thought we should put her in the nursing home. To keep her safe. To provide better monitoring. We were really concerned she was going to have a disastrous fall. We had no plan for this to be a permanent thing.
And now here we are, over a year later and she's still in the nursing home. Her decline seemed to happen so rapidly. She was talkative, lucid and seemed somewhat responsive to physical therapy at first, but after a week, she couldn't walk and she was unable to maintain a good conversation with anyone. I want to say more about Rosie, but it's later and I'm getting tired. And to be honest, this is not an easy thing to blog about.
After this entry, I have only two more days of daily blog entries. I can't believe I've really kept this up. Forty days. Wow.
Thanks for reading.
