Weekend Woes

This weekend just past started a bit sooner than I was planning, when I came back into my room from brushing my teeth at 6:45 am to see that I'd missed a call on my cellular phone. Checking the message, I discovered it was from home, and my grandfather (who was in the hospital) had had a couple of seizures that night and was doing quite bad. They were calling the family in.

So I finished dressing, ate a rushed breakfast, called the Archives to say I wouldn't be in, threw my luggage into the car (I was already planning on going to Olds for the weekend, but not until after work), bought gas, and was off to Red Deer.

Arriving there, I joined Oma, my dad and his four siblings, two of the daughters-in-law, and one of my older cousins in the hospital, all of us having arrived expecting the worst, and after seeing Opa, I'm inclined to think it was well-warranted at the time. Opa looked pretty bad on Friday morning.

He ate breakfast on that morning though, and seemed to have stabilised after a rough, rough night. A bit shaken, the extended family broke up around noon. I went home and picked up my planned weekend a few hours early.

Meanwhile, my next oldest brother has been "moving" this month. It's been something of a glacial process because he really doesn't like change and he got talked into moving out a month early, while the rental market was still pre-back-to-school, so while he has a place and has been slowly moving stuff there, he's not exactly budging from Olds all that fast.

Anyway, I got caught up in this when he decided he should probably get a second load of stuff up to Red Deer while I was home, thus utilising my slave labour, helping him haul a truckload of boxes and a couch up two flights of stairs. Let me say that I'm glad I'm not around to "offer" any further assistance.

Not only is my brother moving to Red Deer, but our pastor of eleven years has been transferred to one of the parishes there, to the heartache-laden trauma of my nine-year-old sister, whose distress I've attempted to allay somewhat by telling her about the new priest (who I know somewhat from St. Albert), but she has more less refused to be consoled. Personally, I give it about a month before she discovers that Fr. Maurice is an awesome priest, but in the meantime I'm just as glad not to be at home this week.

We stopped in to visit Opa again before leaving Red Deer on Sunday, after unloading my brother's stuff and going for supper, and he looked amazingly better--almost back to normal. Weak, yes, but talking and sitting up and eating (in his own words) "to beat the ban".

This is the problem, if I may call it that, with calling the family in where Opa is concerned... he's got more lives than the average cat. He survived a colostomy six years ago that came right on the heels (>48hrs) of an aneurysm surgery, which is as nasty as an open heart surgery. They actually sent him home to die a month after that, but no sooner had he gotten back into his own bed and started drinking some iced cappuccinos than he began to slowly recover.

His problem right now is dialysis... His kidneys are almost completely shot, after a couple years of kidney trouble, and he started that this week, after getting the stents earlier this year, and I think (from the sounds of it) that the chief problem this week was the shock to his system, which is supposed to be really nasty to begin with. You also tend to lose some blood in the process, because the cleaning breaks down some of the blood cells. Whatever the case, it gave us quite the scare...

The thing is, it's only a matter of time. Opa's in sound mind and about as active as his increasingly limited stamina will permit, but his kidneys are simply the only organs that have actually failed. At age 85, everything else is worn out and who knows how close to following suit. All it takes is one little push and the whole system will cascade.

Personally, I don't think that's such a bad scenario. At 85, no one can say he's not had a full life and he's avoided senior's homes and such completely. If he slides into the afterlife in the next few months I'd call it more of a perfect ending than a tragedy, though definitely liable to cast a blue cloud over the family for a while. In the meanwhile, however long Opa has, I'm a little bit jumpier over his prospects than usually, and I'll be eyeing the voicemail suspiciously for a while. If I don't have cause to go home until Thanksgiving, that's probably a good sign indeed.