The Traveler Returns

Well, that was hectic. And crowded -- every flight I was on was completely sold out. And of course, for both of my longer legs (between Atlanta and San Antonio) I was stuck in a middle seat. Bleh.

But I'm glad I went. Grandmom was thrilled to see me, and it gave Dad a bit of a break from trying to keep up a conversation with someone with no short-term memory.

She was both better and worse than I feared -- she was stronger than I'd been braced for, and she not only recognized me right away, but remembered my family's names without prompting. (Mostly. Yesterday morning, I think I caught her avoiding using Alex's name in the hope that I would say it for her.) I took my laptop, and she loved looking at my pictures.

She tired quickly, though -- Dad and I visited her in one-hour increments, and even those short visits wrung her dry. By the end of them, her speech was slurring and her eyes growing cloudy with exhaustion. She's on oxygen about 90% of the time, and she can't sit up or dress herself.

My dad and uncle are trying to figure out what to do. She's never going back to living by herself, but they'd like her to be able to have her own room, at least. The facility she's in now is top-notch, very high quality and excellent staff, but it's in Texas, which is pretty horribly inconvenient for both my dad and my uncle to get to. Right now, they're taking turns living in her apartment, but once they've officially turned her over to the assisted living facility, she won't have an apartment any more for them to stay at, which will make it pretty expensive for them to spend a lot of time with her.

My uncle's looking into the facilities in Atlanta, where he lives, but even if they find a place that will take on an assisted-living resident (and many places require that assisted-living residents start out as independent residents first) there's still the question of how to get Grandmom there. She's not strong enough for the drive, and even if she gets that strength back, she'll require medical attention along the way that my dad and uncle aren't qualified to provide.

There aren't any easy answers.

But I'm glad I went, painful as it was. The smile on her face as she skipped through my pictures of the kids was worth it.

I might try to make it a quarterly trip. We'll see what happens.