mistressofmuses (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mistressofmuses) wrote2021-03-31 08:27 pm
mistressofmuses) wrote2021-03-31 08:27 pm
March 25 - March 27, 2021 - Las Cruces, NM
(One thing I realized I forgot to mention from the trip down - I texted Alex after seeing a sign for "K-Bob's Steakhouse and Salad Wagon" and the idea of a salad wagon just fucking *killed* us for some reason.)
LOOOOONG post ahead. Maybe I should have split it into more, but oh well.
These pictures are a bit out of order from when they were taken, but sprinkled in where they fit, ha.
My grandmother didn't really want too many pictures taken of her, and due to Covid stuff, we were trying to stay pretty distanced. It was easiest to get pictures of her when it seemed like I was just taking pictures of her with Debby's pets, ha. Here she is with Tabby.
Thursday, March 25th:
My mom, Taylor, and I stayed in a hotel, since that would have made for way too many people in Debby's house. The hotel had grab-and-go breakfast, which was nice, since it meant we at least had one easy meal taken care of each day.
We headed to Debby's fairly early, and it was great to see her and Grandma. Grandma sounded great, and seemed to feel good. She's lost a *lot* of weight, and that's a little scary to see.
Apparently the original predictions when she went into the hospital on March 12th were more dire than I'd heard: they originally projected that she had about three days. Obviously she's made it past that, and she feels great about that!
She's still very mentally sharp. She sometimes forgets things, and will ask things like "how was your trip down?" or "what did you have for breakfast?" a couple of times. But then she also remembers things - like that the weekend before we went down to NM, Taylor was building a computer. So she asked them about that, and told us all about her flights to NM from OR. (Mostly good, though apparently the attendants on the second flight weren't very attentive, and a little rude.)
Though she seems to feel pretty well (tired, though plenty of that could have been from the altitude change, going from sea level to 4000 feet), the doctors in NM have still been cautioning that this is end-stage renal disease, and while her time may not be measured in days, it could be weeks. She doesn't believe it, and frequently mentioned things like "well, next year we'll do something for X holiday" and "next time you guys see me, I'll be able to get around easier."
Debby is a nurse, so she's able to help in a lot of ways that we hope will contribute to Grandma continuing to do well.
Taylor and I walked around Debby's property for a bit, enjoying the sunshine and the nice warm weather. Basically everyone in the area has chickens, and listening to the rooster next door and the rooster diagonally behind her backyard yelling back and forth was pretty funny.
Dried pomegranate hanging on Debby's pomegranate tree. Apparently the birds enjoy them. I thought they looked neat, and like the contrast against the blue sky.
The mountain near her house.
Praying mantis eggs in her butterfly bush! Glad they'll be hatching soon. :) They're good to have in a garden.
This is the stray cat that invited himself along when Debby would feed her barn cats. His name is L'Orange. He's very pretty, and lives under her house, and wants nothing to do with people except for Debby. (And that only because he's jealous of her barn cats, lol.)
We did also see Princess and Bashful (the two barn cats.) I'm all old and stuff, but I remember them as feral kittens stalking tarantulas. ;_; They're now... 14 years old, I think Debby said? Bashful I only saw briefly before she bolted. Princess didn't run, but didn't want us to get super close, so I don't have good pictures of them.
One of the important things for Grandma's health is a renal diet. This diet is challenging because it's low-sodium, but also low-potassium and low-phosphate. (Many things wind up counter-intuitive... white bread is okay, but wheat is not. Cooked carrots are all right, but raw are not. It's a lot to figure out.) Though we did get to give her the good news: Grandma, kale is on the "do not eat" list!
And oh, how we suffered for this diet (for one meal.) A friend made her an asparagus soup... but with almond as a thickening agent instead of milk or cream. And NO salt. So it was asparagus, a tiny bit of onion, and almond. It was... really bad. We dumped a ton of a sodium free southwest seasoning in it, which almost made it taste tolerable, but it wasn't good. Grandma hated it, so we hoped to provide moral support by all suffering through it (and getting rid of it faster) lol.
We went back to the hotel for a little while to take a nap, and then headed back for dinner.
For dinner we made a much better soup. Ground turkey, celery, carrots, and roasted green chile, plus some corn, all pressure-cooked into a very tasty stew. It was really good, actually, haha. (Especially the green chile. Hatch is right down the road, and MAN I forget how much I love it. I'm a wimp for heat, but the flavor of mild green chile is just about the best.)
Friday, March 26:
I slept very poorly that night. Apparently I talk in my sleep, according to my mom, haha.
Grandma was more tired on Friday, and spent a lot of the day asleep. Taylor and I mostly stayed inside and kept her company, while my mom and Debby went outside and gardened.
I know that this whole thing has been very hard on Debby. Obviously, we all love my Grandma. But she can also be very critical, and passive-aggressive. And things have been hard on her - having such a severe health crisis, having to suddenly leave her home to move states away, drastic diet change - so she's not exactly at her best either. So poor Debby is having to handle all of that, which is absolutely a struggle for her, doing this basically on her own. I think the most valuable thing we could do to help her was give her time alone with my mom.
Mostly Taylor and I just sat and read - Priory of the Orange Tree for them, and The House in the Cerulean Sea for me. Grandma played solitaire on her tablet.
This picture is probably actually from Thursday, but here's Grandma and Jenna (again, I remember her as still-gawky-just-out-of-puppyhood, but now she's 12). We sat outside to enjoy the fresh air, but Grandma wasn't able to for long. Her back starts to hurt pretty severely.
This was a pretty nice picture I got of Tabby in the sun in the hallway. Debby and her then-boyfriend found Tabitha in a junkyard as a kitten. She's grown up not to be terribly friendly, lol. She bites, though not hard. She'll headbutt your hand like she wants you to pet her, and then will grab you and nibble you if you touch her. But she's very pretty.
Another of Tabby, showing off her silly tail that looks like it was grafted on from a different cat.
Taylor and Jenna. Jenna does the same thing Cy does that we call "attention paw", which is where he comes and just sets his foot on you, or tries to hand you his foot. But Jenna will do it with both paws!
Grandma and Tabby again. You can kind of see how thin my grandma is here. Tabby will play with her, though, chasing her hand over the edge of the chair, haha.
We made dinner again. This time it was egg, cheese, and green chile quiche. (Mom called it quiche, but really it was more of a frittata, since it had no crust. Though I guess baking it means it wasn't really that either, lol.) But it was very good, haha. Again, I was spoiled with the green chile, and will miss it terribly.
This was my uncle Jeff's birthday, so we video chatted with him and my aunt Kristy for a little while. Jeff will come to visit Debby and Grandma in the next few weeks after he gets his second Covid shot.
Saturday, March 27:
This was our last full day in New Mexico. Unfortunately I had the cramps from hell, though mostly they were manageable.
Taylor and I were on the "keep Grandma in the living room" duty again, so that my mom and Debby could clean out the closet in Grandma's room.
Debby... is a hoarder. Not horribly, but one of her spare bedrooms, the closet on the room Grandma is in, and some of the outbuildings on her property are very full of things. She doesn't keep trash (though most things have a layer of fine red silty desert dust all over them), but she holds onto anything she feels like she could someday use or want. (Which is understandable, since she's had multiple "leave with nothing but what you can carry" events in her life.)
But she agreed to clean out the closet (since Grandma had made some slightly snide "am I EVER going to have my own closet?" comments, despite having only been there for a couple days) while my mom was there to help. They took a load of stuff to the trash/recycling center, and loaded up more for donation, and in the end, Grandma had a clean closet for her clothes! Which she was definitely delighted by.
Taylor and I sat with Grandma and did crossword puzzles for most of the day, ha. It was fun, and mellow, and good to just sit and kind of be.
Spoke to Jeff and Kristy again, but they were both kind of dickish. Not surprising. There's a lot of drama there, but it's still obnoxious to deal with.
One other cool thing: Grandma has a lap board that she uses for any writing, or a flat surface to set things on, etc. And this is that lap board:
The Mystifying Oracle! A Ouija board before that was a brand name, ha. She said she got this when she was a teenager, so it's from at least the 40s. But it's just her favorite lap board. She said she found the planchette, too, though it's packed away. I love it, haha.
The evening was pretty quiet, just packing things back up for the trip home. Taylor and I listened to some of The Magnus Archives (since we're really behind, and the show just ended.)
I've said it several times, but while this felt very short, I was glad that we had the time. I'm glad that my grandmother feels well, even if the predictions for her health are dire. Getting to spend days with her feeling well meant a lot.
LOOOOONG post ahead. Maybe I should have split it into more, but oh well.
These pictures are a bit out of order from when they were taken, but sprinkled in where they fit, ha.
My grandmother didn't really want too many pictures taken of her, and due to Covid stuff, we were trying to stay pretty distanced. It was easiest to get pictures of her when it seemed like I was just taking pictures of her with Debby's pets, ha. Here she is with Tabby.
Thursday, March 25th:
My mom, Taylor, and I stayed in a hotel, since that would have made for way too many people in Debby's house. The hotel had grab-and-go breakfast, which was nice, since it meant we at least had one easy meal taken care of each day.
We headed to Debby's fairly early, and it was great to see her and Grandma. Grandma sounded great, and seemed to feel good. She's lost a *lot* of weight, and that's a little scary to see.
Apparently the original predictions when she went into the hospital on March 12th were more dire than I'd heard: they originally projected that she had about three days. Obviously she's made it past that, and she feels great about that!
She's still very mentally sharp. She sometimes forgets things, and will ask things like "how was your trip down?" or "what did you have for breakfast?" a couple of times. But then she also remembers things - like that the weekend before we went down to NM, Taylor was building a computer. So she asked them about that, and told us all about her flights to NM from OR. (Mostly good, though apparently the attendants on the second flight weren't very attentive, and a little rude.)
Though she seems to feel pretty well (tired, though plenty of that could have been from the altitude change, going from sea level to 4000 feet), the doctors in NM have still been cautioning that this is end-stage renal disease, and while her time may not be measured in days, it could be weeks. She doesn't believe it, and frequently mentioned things like "well, next year we'll do something for X holiday" and "next time you guys see me, I'll be able to get around easier."
Debby is a nurse, so she's able to help in a lot of ways that we hope will contribute to Grandma continuing to do well.
Taylor and I walked around Debby's property for a bit, enjoying the sunshine and the nice warm weather. Basically everyone in the area has chickens, and listening to the rooster next door and the rooster diagonally behind her backyard yelling back and forth was pretty funny.
Dried pomegranate hanging on Debby's pomegranate tree. Apparently the birds enjoy them. I thought they looked neat, and like the contrast against the blue sky.
The mountain near her house.
Praying mantis eggs in her butterfly bush! Glad they'll be hatching soon. :) They're good to have in a garden.
This is the stray cat that invited himself along when Debby would feed her barn cats. His name is L'Orange. He's very pretty, and lives under her house, and wants nothing to do with people except for Debby. (And that only because he's jealous of her barn cats, lol.)
We did also see Princess and Bashful (the two barn cats.) I'm all old and stuff, but I remember them as feral kittens stalking tarantulas. ;_; They're now... 14 years old, I think Debby said? Bashful I only saw briefly before she bolted. Princess didn't run, but didn't want us to get super close, so I don't have good pictures of them.
One of the important things for Grandma's health is a renal diet. This diet is challenging because it's low-sodium, but also low-potassium and low-phosphate. (Many things wind up counter-intuitive... white bread is okay, but wheat is not. Cooked carrots are all right, but raw are not. It's a lot to figure out.) Though we did get to give her the good news: Grandma, kale is on the "do not eat" list!
And oh, how we suffered for this diet (for one meal.) A friend made her an asparagus soup... but with almond as a thickening agent instead of milk or cream. And NO salt. So it was asparagus, a tiny bit of onion, and almond. It was... really bad. We dumped a ton of a sodium free southwest seasoning in it, which almost made it taste tolerable, but it wasn't good. Grandma hated it, so we hoped to provide moral support by all suffering through it (and getting rid of it faster) lol.
We went back to the hotel for a little while to take a nap, and then headed back for dinner.
For dinner we made a much better soup. Ground turkey, celery, carrots, and roasted green chile, plus some corn, all pressure-cooked into a very tasty stew. It was really good, actually, haha. (Especially the green chile. Hatch is right down the road, and MAN I forget how much I love it. I'm a wimp for heat, but the flavor of mild green chile is just about the best.)
Friday, March 26:
I slept very poorly that night. Apparently I talk in my sleep, according to my mom, haha.
Grandma was more tired on Friday, and spent a lot of the day asleep. Taylor and I mostly stayed inside and kept her company, while my mom and Debby went outside and gardened.
I know that this whole thing has been very hard on Debby. Obviously, we all love my Grandma. But she can also be very critical, and passive-aggressive. And things have been hard on her - having such a severe health crisis, having to suddenly leave her home to move states away, drastic diet change - so she's not exactly at her best either. So poor Debby is having to handle all of that, which is absolutely a struggle for her, doing this basically on her own. I think the most valuable thing we could do to help her was give her time alone with my mom.
Mostly Taylor and I just sat and read - Priory of the Orange Tree for them, and The House in the Cerulean Sea for me. Grandma played solitaire on her tablet.
This picture is probably actually from Thursday, but here's Grandma and Jenna (again, I remember her as still-gawky-just-out-of-puppyhood, but now she's 12). We sat outside to enjoy the fresh air, but Grandma wasn't able to for long. Her back starts to hurt pretty severely.
This was a pretty nice picture I got of Tabby in the sun in the hallway. Debby and her then-boyfriend found Tabitha in a junkyard as a kitten. She's grown up not to be terribly friendly, lol. She bites, though not hard. She'll headbutt your hand like she wants you to pet her, and then will grab you and nibble you if you touch her. But she's very pretty.
Another of Tabby, showing off her silly tail that looks like it was grafted on from a different cat.
Taylor and Jenna. Jenna does the same thing Cy does that we call "attention paw", which is where he comes and just sets his foot on you, or tries to hand you his foot. But Jenna will do it with both paws!
Grandma and Tabby again. You can kind of see how thin my grandma is here. Tabby will play with her, though, chasing her hand over the edge of the chair, haha.
We made dinner again. This time it was egg, cheese, and green chile quiche. (Mom called it quiche, but really it was more of a frittata, since it had no crust. Though I guess baking it means it wasn't really that either, lol.) But it was very good, haha. Again, I was spoiled with the green chile, and will miss it terribly.
This was my uncle Jeff's birthday, so we video chatted with him and my aunt Kristy for a little while. Jeff will come to visit Debby and Grandma in the next few weeks after he gets his second Covid shot.
Saturday, March 27:
This was our last full day in New Mexico. Unfortunately I had the cramps from hell, though mostly they were manageable.
Taylor and I were on the "keep Grandma in the living room" duty again, so that my mom and Debby could clean out the closet in Grandma's room.
Debby... is a hoarder. Not horribly, but one of her spare bedrooms, the closet on the room Grandma is in, and some of the outbuildings on her property are very full of things. She doesn't keep trash (though most things have a layer of fine red silty desert dust all over them), but she holds onto anything she feels like she could someday use or want. (Which is understandable, since she's had multiple "leave with nothing but what you can carry" events in her life.)
But she agreed to clean out the closet (since Grandma had made some slightly snide "am I EVER going to have my own closet?" comments, despite having only been there for a couple days) while my mom was there to help. They took a load of stuff to the trash/recycling center, and loaded up more for donation, and in the end, Grandma had a clean closet for her clothes! Which she was definitely delighted by.
Taylor and I sat with Grandma and did crossword puzzles for most of the day, ha. It was fun, and mellow, and good to just sit and kind of be.
Spoke to Jeff and Kristy again, but they were both kind of dickish. Not surprising. There's a lot of drama there, but it's still obnoxious to deal with.
One other cool thing: Grandma has a lap board that she uses for any writing, or a flat surface to set things on, etc. And this is that lap board:
The Mystifying Oracle! A Ouija board before that was a brand name, ha. She said she got this when she was a teenager, so it's from at least the 40s. But it's just her favorite lap board. She said she found the planchette, too, though it's packed away. I love it, haha.
The evening was pretty quiet, just packing things back up for the trip home. Taylor and I listened to some of The Magnus Archives (since we're really behind, and the show just ended.)
I've said it several times, but while this felt very short, I was glad that we had the time. I'm glad that my grandmother feels well, even if the predictions for her health are dire. Getting to spend days with her feeling well meant a lot.
no subject
I love the lap board! I'm now wondering what kind of messages you would get if you used one as a mouse mat.
I am married to a hoarder like that, and it's infuriating to be surrounded by all this stuff all the time, but every so often you do need something and they triumphantly go "I have one of those!" then you have to concede that maybe keeping it all these years was worth it after all :)
I'm glad to know your grandmother is feeling well. I'm sure she must really appreciate the visit.
no subject
I love it, too! But oooh, that would be neat. Until you accidentally summon something, haha.
I have to watch myself, since too easily I can give in to some minor hoarding tendencies. But then I'm the same way - needing something I got rid of is very frustrating, and it's so rewarding to need something I hung onto. (Though since we're in a studio apartment, there's not MUCH I can hang onto, ha.)
I definitely hope she appreciated the visit. I think she did. I know that I did.