So taking time off yesterday didn’t work out so well. I practiced organ in the morning, so it would be free if Peter Sykes and Greg Crowell dropped by in the afternoon so Sykes could see it. After that I dropped in on my Mom at the hospital. She was not a happy camper. She was ready to go home.

Her room was under a C diff quarantine so I had to gown up and put on gloves to enter. She was barely coherent. I checked with the nurse about taking my tablet in to Mom’s room to show her pics. They said I could if I swabbed it down afterwards. They agreed I could clean the screen myself after I got home.

So I showed Mom some videos of Lucy and pictures of Alex. She seemed interested and a smile played on her lips. As I was leaving, one of the nurses said that crankiness could be a sign she was feeling better. Nurses know shit, that’s for sure.

I came home and had lunch. I was working up the ambition to go and exercise since I was feeling exhausted anyway and have had to skip exercising for a while due to a full schedule of stuff, when the hospital called and said that Mom was being released and when would I like to pick her up.

Actually the release person was very weird on the phone. First she talked like they would take Mom home if I wasn’t going to. Then when I said I was going to get clothes for mom, the person on the phone said she could wear her nightgown and they could put a nurse scrub bottom on her to get her home. I told her it was a bit cold for that. We set a 4:30 PM release time. That would give me time to go exercise, go get Mom’s clothes and arrive at the hospital with the car.

This is what I did. The ride from the hospital to the nursing home reminded me of another ride I took with Mom. The one where she was delirious about Dad and kept telling me to stop the  car so she could get out and I could go on with Dad.

She didn’t want the car stopped yesterday, but she did say that she should just  come home with me. After all, she continued, she no longer had a room at the nursing home. I tried to reason with her, but all she did was get quiet.

I got her to her room. But the attendant said that there was no nurse on the premises at the moment. She also said that it would be best if I went to Meijer and filled the prescriptions the hospital sent home with Mom. This is not the way her meds are handled. But the delay of getting them through the usual channels would be a couple of days.

So I took my little body over to Meijer. They still had Mom in the system at the pharmacy there. I’m not sure that mattered, but by 6:30 I had the meds and what I could remember from the list of stuff on the fridge at home that I needed from Meijer.

I’m hoping today will be a bit more like a day off.

NYTimes: The Poet of Light

This review inspired me to re-visit the poetry of Richard Wilbur.