9 April 2025
It's been a few days since I my last update and some of them have been good and some haven't been as good. So I thought I'd take a page from the baseball season and hit for average.
Which is to say that her weight is stable (if dropping a few ounces the last two days) but she's refusing to eat any solids (unless you count ice cream, which the kitchen forgot today, as a solid).
Working with the physical therapists means she doesn't walk as far as with the RNAs (who only walk her) but she gets more challenging work. In our last episode, she was climbing stairs for the first time since Halloween. And in the last few days she done that three more times.
One of those times wasn't a great success. She couldn't lift her feet to climb the last two steps. So Cassie lifted them for her. But then she tried to sit down on Kevin's leg rather than stand up and turn around. And she started screaming, "Help me! Help me!" with the two of them on either side of her.
That brought a third therapist (with a chair) to the stairs. She put the chair at the top of the stairs so Joyce could sit on something besides Kevin.
It also brought Deb, who manages the therapists, over to the stairs. She tried to reassure Joyce and get her to stop screaming. Unsuccessfully.
But once she was seated, she was ready to go back down. I reminded her to 'Go Down With the Bad,' as the saying is, and added, 'the Left leg,' so the therapists would know which one we were talking about. She did.
When they finally get her in the wheelchair again she looks at them and asks, 'Do it again?' They laugh. Nobody wants to go through that ordeal again.
Cassie did get her to walk to the bathroom in the room the other day. She had Joyce sit on the toilet and reach for toilet paper. Then get up using the hand rail and walk back on the walker to her chair. But that's as far as the toileting has gotten.
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NOW THAT YOU have some kind of baseline to judge what's going on, let me tell you about those two opinions.
We were in the gym when a CNA came in to tell us we had a visitor. It was Sister Eileen, who had once run Seton Hospital and had put me in touch with ANX, the hospice service that I used for my mother.
We caught up with her and went down to the Pacific Room so the three of us could sit around a table and chat. There's no room for a Kleenex in the rooms themselves.
She's 86 now, has better vision in one eye than the other, is still driving and has two hearing aids, one serving as a backup if the other's battery dies.
She asked about my double vision. "Do you see two of me?" And caught up on Joyce's progress. And she asks about my feelings about my mother's passing. I tell her I have happy memories of my mother every day. Which reminds her of her twin sister (she was born fast a minute before her when her mother suddenly became a code blue) and confides she still enjoys talking to her and even wrote her a letter. "Oh, memories," she says. "Yes."
Then she looks at Joyce, who has been quiet, and tells her she notices a marked improvement in her since her last visit a month ago. Her color is better and she seems stronger. "And I'm a nurse, too," she says to her. So she should know.
That pleased Joyce.
She gave us both a blessing before she left. Which couldn't hurt, we figured.
Today Joyce ascended the stairs again. But she was wearing her black Skechers instead of the slippery huaraches she's been wearing. They're lighter and the sole grabs securely.
She went right up, easily. Then Deb came by and watched her go down the stairs in a flash. No screaming, no problem.
Deb asked me if I thought she was ready to go home yet. Medicare, apparently, has been wondering about her progress.
I pointed out these weren't real stairs but shallow ones and she has about a dozen or so real ones to navigate at home. I also mentioned she hasn't progressed with toilet training and still isn't eating solid food (she refused a piece of homemade seafood pizza I brought her the other day). So I don't think I could manage her at home even with help. Yet.
She agreed, she said. She was just asking for Medicare Part B, which likes to see progress. And, she added, there's been amazing progress.
Yes, but it's slow progress with her. The other day was a bad one but she's been better since March. There will be bad days, Deb acknowledges.
I had the feeling that we're not far from losing the Part B help she's getting from the physical therapists.
I'm also wondering if the Memantine and Lexapro have had time to kick in. In talking about her physical achievements, it's never lost on me that the real devil we're fighting is dementia.
So there's two positive opinions about her physical progress. And I was pleased to see her playing the right hand of a few classical piano pieces today, too. She's still relearning them but progressing.
Progress. That's the word of the day.