Home After Thanksgiving

We’re back home in Columbus after a long weekend of travel. Due to Susan’s work schedule, we couldn’t leave for Pennsylvania until Thursday morning. We dropped the dogs off on Wednesday night, as the boarding place was not taking drop-offs on Thursday morning. We got out early on Thursday and arrived at my parents’ house about 3:00 on Thursday, after checking in at the hotel. Due to their health and our schedule, we ended up going out to dinner. The problem with going out to dinner on Thanksgiving is that there are no seconds, there are no leftovers, and there is no turkey carcass to pick. I would much prefer to eat at home.

We braved the Black Friday crowds, did some shopping for work clothes for Susan, and got to visit with my cousins on Saturday. This morning, we hit the road about 10:30, and the traffic was horrific. It added about an hour to the trip, but we’re home.

Many of you have asked about my father and his progress. We spent some quality time with him. The good news is that the hemorrhage has completely re-absorbed, and that he’s doing well physically. He has a deficit on the right side, but he’s learned to compensate for it, and does so quite well. He can walk pretty well with his cane, and he can get around reasonably well. He can feed himself, and he’s actually made remarkable progress from a physical standpoint. However, his speech is definitely a mess. I can only understand about half of what he says, and then have to figure out the rest from context. It’s a major challenge. Although the speech therapists continue to work with him three days a week, with a nifty Apple Power Book notebook running some very specialized (and astonishingly expensive) software, I don’t see it getting any better. He also has a ton of trouble processing names. My cousin David–his nephew–visited yesterday, and my father called him Raymond all day. He knows David’s name, but with things being jumbled, it comes out as Raymond. He called me “hey you” several times, too. When he’s not thinking about names, he does pretty well. However, when he actively thinks about names, that’s when it gets all jumbled. It’s kind of amusing, but at the same time, it’s very frustrating for him and for my mother.

The most difficult thing for me is that for the first time, I saw him as a little old man. Up until the day before the stroke, he’d managed to avoid the ravages of age. Even at 86, he was very active and very vigorous. He still drove, he still worked a little bit part time, still did crossword puzzles, did all of the grocery shopping and most of the cooking, and never, ever looked or acted his age. What shocked me on Thursday was the realization that the stroke has finally enabled Mother Nature to catch up to him. He now looks and acts like an 87 year old guy. He’s frail, he needs a cane to walk, he’s cold all the time, and he’s finally acting his age for the first time. Never having seen it before, it really caught me off guard.

But, he’s still alive, and all things considered, he’s doing as well as I could possibly have hoped, given the scope and extent of the stroke.

Now, I’m hunkered down on the couch for Sunday night football, wearing my brand-new Philadelphia Eagles hoodie. The question is: just how badly are the Patriots going to whup up on the McNabb-less Birds?

I hope everyone had a good (and filling) Turkey Day. Tomorrow, it’s back to work and back to the Late Unpleasantness.