Everything was going swimmingly. Then mom tried to bend over in her wheelchair to get one of the dogs and her right hip dislocated (i.e. popped out of socket). Apparently it's pain that I could never imagine. She was nearly immobile.
Made my first ever 911 call, took her to a hospital in Belleville 20 miles away.
4 hours and two tries of yanking it back in later, they took her to Barnes Hospital in St. Louis where she's had most of her surgeries.
5 more hours later they get the hip back in.
3 more hours and they admit her to the hospital.
Stays in the hospital over the weekend then they admit her to a local nursing home.
After she gets settled in the nursing home the next week, I clean and close up her house, pawn her dog off on my brother, my sister takes back a small dog mom had been watching for her and trades me her other dog, Sebastian. I pack up all my stuff and two dogs and head back to Topeka.
Mom's basically wheelchair bound. She has a cast on her left leg and a huge brace on her right leg. Plus that nerve disease in her legs that means she has no muscle mass. She might be able to use a walker but she's had both shoulders worked on and arthritis in her wrists.
And insurance saw no need for her to stay in the nursing home. So a week later they sent her home to New Baden.
Fucking insurance.
In other news...
I came home to discover that deer apparently love impatiens (pretty annual flowers for you non-gardeners). I had planted over 200 of them along the border of my newly relandscaped front yard. I got a phone call while I was in New Baden saying, "Don't be mad."
I took this to mean that they'd died because he hadn't watered them. I'm the gardener in the house and I only plant things I plan on taking care of. He prefers plants he doesn't have to worry about after they've been planted. But he promised to water the finicky flowers everyday. Because one day without water and they wilt and a day later they're dying.
So of course I thought he'd killed them. But he said "They're all gone. They were there last night and today they're just gone."
"Did you mow them down so you wouldn't have to water them?"
He laughs and says he hadn't thought of that.
It turns out that deer have been raiding our front yard and ate every last one of my flowers down to the ground.
Augh.
But he kept his end of the bargain. Everything else was alive and well.
Sebastian, my sister's dog, is living with us for a while. I like to imagine he's like a kid away at camp. Or visiting his uncle's house for the summer playing with his cousins. Sebastian and Oliver are about the same age so they have the same kind of constant, "Wanna play? Wanna play? Wanna play?" energy. Which is awesome for me because, besides the walks and the feeding, they pretty much take care of themselves. Whereas before it fell on me to keep Oliver constantly entertained.
Sebastian's an awesome dog. He's a shelter dog. About three times bigger than Oliver. But when it's time to play, Sebastian just lays on the floor and rolls around will Ollie. And he hasn't peed or pooped in the house even once! Yea!
While poop jokes are always funny, poop on the carpet is never, ever funny.
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