Loaded up, hooked up and moving on

I had to take two shots to get all our vehicles in the picture this morning before we left Nipawin. Its 23 years since I arrived in Nipawin a little bit earlier in the spring. Something about towing a truck must appeal to me though because that's how we arrived. We had my rusty little '72 Toyota hooked behind the Big 10 chebbie and both of them loaded down with furniture. The Toyota was really just a collection of rusty sheet metal travelling more or less in close formation and herded along by remnants of blue paint. I bought it to use as a trailer during the move and so that I would have something suitable for a commuter vehicle to take to work. My regular driver at that time was an '83 Towncar and Terry had already made it pretty clear that it wasn't going to be acceptable parked in front of the shop.

As I recall the Toyota was reasonably reliable mechanically - it must have been because I drove it for close to a year after we arrived in Nipawin. But it was a rolling disaster in the body department. One day when I was driving out to the acreage on the flats east of White Fox I hit a huge puddle (more like a small lake) in what the RM jokingly called our road at that time. I got wet almost to the waist because it turned out that the several layers of indoor-outdoor carpet which I had previously assumed were resting on the floorboards actually WERE the floorboards.

Today we barely got out of Nipawin in time to say we left in the morning. The cubevan performed flawlessly all the way to Prince Albert and we got settled in at our favorite little campground on the south side of town. Then we hustled ourselves over to the rental house and got busy slobbering paint onto the window frames. That took about 4 hours and its going to take another coat tomorrow but it is already looking much better. The old shutter boards likely haven't been painted since Marilyn built the house 20 some years ago. They slurped up the paint like a dry sponge.

Tonight we discovered that we have either packed the tripod for the internet satellite dish in the cube van (unlikely) or lost it somewhere. Its hard to imagine how we could have lost it but we certainly don't know where it is at this instant so I guess that qualifies as lost. Fortunately this campground provides substantial picnic tables so the dish is now vice-gripped to the edge of a picnic table. I need to make a run back to Carrot River this week so I will stop and check the barn at the old yard but we're both virtually certain its not there.

On Thursday I got a call from the nurse at Victoria Park. As is usually the case with those calls it wasn't good news. They had shipped father off to Pasqua Hospital and they are not prepared to have him return to Vic Park. This didn't come as a complete surprise to Marilyn and me. When we were there last week moving him to his new suite we noticed a dramatic deterioration in his condition compared with when we were in Regina two weeks earlier. The pattern of his Parkinsons has always been wavelike with the lows always lower and the highs never as high. Clearly he is in a low now but if or when he recovers he will be in worse condition than he was and at some point he will be beyond the ability of Vic Park to handle. He is falling regularly now and he appears incable of learning that he can't do the things he once could.

Two years ago now when he first started needing to use a wheelchair we got him a manual chair and attempted to teach him how to use it. As long as I walked behind him and told him "put your hands at the top of the wheels, push forward" he could run the wheelchair just fine. However the instant that I stopped telling him to put his hands on the wheels and move them he would stop doing it and he was simply incapable of learning that most basic of new tasks.

I believe the same congnitive disfunction is now preventing him from learning how to ask for help. I think his days now consist of him blundering about trying to live his life and regularly tipping over. The staff at Vic Park do their best but they clearly can't be with him 24 hours of the day. And he clearly can't learn that all he needs to do is press his button to get assistance. Which leaves us in the horrible position of having to consign him to that which he has always feared namely some kind of institutional care where he will likely be strapped into a bed. Fortunately Cara at Vic Park has taken the initiative and responsibility for the decision because it is a decision that my sister and I were incapable of making for father. I'm not sure that he needs the change in care immediately but Cara has made it clear that he can't come back to Vic Park so that effectively means that he needs the increased care immediately.

Meanwhile Marilyn's antique aunt isn't doing well either. She is incredibly weak and in constant pain from her surgery last winter. There is a line in Masonic ritual which says, referring to Mother Nature, "until in our final hour she instructs us how to die." Unfortunately in Anne's case, despite her being well past ready for the instructions, they just aren't forthcoming.

Getting old sucks. I'm still convinced that, for the most part, getting old is preferable to the alternative but there comes a point ..............