This post is a follow up to a post from February of this year.
My wife Andrea received an anxious phone call from her brother. He was very concerned their dad was not being quite himself.
Sometimes he was very unfocused and even incoherent.
Calls made to him by Andrea and our son Dean had prompted similar concerns.
Andrea's brother was going to be out of town for a week and wondered if we could stay with their dad at his home for awhile.
We did this following his health issues back in February. Once more we would need to as we did then to take the measure of his ability to manage himself, to remember on his own to take his medicine in the prescribed amounts and times, stuff like that.
A couple of months ago, Andrea and I took her dad to the hospital after he fell outside, injuring his leg and taking a blow to the head.
Except for some scrapes and bruises, the hospital cleared him to go back home.
But that and whatever was going on now only serve to remind us that the status quo for Andrea's dad is not sustainable forever.
So Andre and I moved in to her dad's home, to make it our home away from home.
We did have to leave him to return to the Fortress of Ineptitude each day to do our respective jobs. Her dad seemed to do fine for those hours without us.
Except for the one day we returned and his TV VOLUME WAS TURNED UP REALLY REALLY LOUD!!!
For reasons I did not comprehend, he chose not to wear his hearing aids that day.
For the most part, he seemed to do just fine. His best hours were in the morning. He and I would talk about stuff before Andrea and I left to go to work and he was very clear and coherent.
As the evening wore on each night, he was less easy to understand. I chalked that up to him being too tired to make sense and me being too tired to understand him.
I did find it hard to make time for the blog which is why last week's posting was non existent for several days.
He is a very old man who is in remarkably good health for a man of his advanced age and his overall cognitive skills seem mostly unimpaired.
He hasn't gotten involved in a war for no good reason or sought to upend decades of medical science to mess with vaccines or insist reflecting pools were damaged by vandalism instead of shoddy contractors so he's got that going for him.
Still as I said in February, his self sufficiency is not sustainable forever.
And that is something we all worry about.
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