hiddy neighbors

Hey folks! Yes, I am still around. I am either in Alabama--like now--or back home, and if I'm home I'm either grading online, in class, or grading endless essays that seem to burgeon mysteriously as I sleep. In fact, my idea of personal hell is a stack of student essays that never gets any smaller no matter how fast and long and furiously I grade. Sisyphus never had it so bad. Well, okay, I'm not having my liver eaten out, but that's next, I'm convinced.

Anyway, my mom went in the hospital almost two weeks ago. It took a while for the PTW to diagnose her with a pseudomonas SuperBug, highly resistant to antibiotics. She's had to have fluid drained from around her lungs and have a centralized IV inserted in her chest because she ripped hers out and her arms were too swollen with fluid to get another IV in. She was in ICU for a while, but she's out now and in a regular room. I'm trying to get her moved from here to there.....there being much closer to me, near my home....because I can't keep driving the twelve hour round trip every few days. Found out today she can't switch hospitals in mid-stream, though, or Medicare won't pay for it. Anyway, what a monumental task everything has become. And I'm still faced with what will sure to be her refusal to move to Georgia.....PLUS I found out today that the ambulance drivers I've hired to take her from here to there (that's a $2000 ride, in case you've ever wondered) cannot legally take her anywhere that she refuses to go. And she will refuse. Oh yes. Has for the last 2.5 years. And now I've arranged for a moving company to show up tomorrow and move her stuff from her assisted living home back into the house here (where I sit now, where I grew up, where I swore I'd never sleep another night, but hotels were getting too expensive), so essentially she will have nowhere to go. She can't stay there any longer, though, because she'd fallen five times in a week before she went in the hospital and they don't have the capacity to watch her round the clock. Not sure how I'll handle the issue of getting her from NW Alabama to NE Georgia. Maybe I'll be hit with a brilliant solution by the time she's released from the hospital. I'll handle it when it comes up. Experience shows that telling her anything in advance is not the m.o. as she simply becomes more and more and more adamant in her mind that she WILL NOT do whatever it is you're wanting her to do.

So yeah, that's the partial view from here. Peace for now.