Unexpected trip

My dad is in town(ish), having a procedure done on his heart. It is non-invasive and, I thought, posed no serious risks.

Right before he and my mom made the trip up here, they found out that my maternal grandma, who has pretty severe Alzheimer’s, was in the hospital in New York (where she lives) with a touch of pneumonia. My grandma has no family near her who could take care of her, and my mom decided to leave Denver Thursday morning and fly out to see her. So they took two cars.

On the drive up, my mom spoke with her mom on the phone and learned that my grandma didn’t know where she was or what she was being treated for, and that the nurses in the hospital wouldn’t help her to the bathroom—they just brought her a bedpan, which they then left her painfully laying on top of for hours.

Of course, this totally freaked my mom out.

She got her flight switched to Tuesday morning and is now in New York. No real updates on my grandma’s status, which I assume means my mom has everything under control. But it left things in a weird limbo with my dad.

I was supposed to go down to Colorado Springs last night and stay the night in the hospital guest house, which is where he went after being discharged from the hospital. We (Branden and I) were going to get dinner with my dad, then Branden was driving our car back home and leaving me there to drive Dad to Durango today in his car, then I’d fly home. Last night, he sounded great and healthy and, while not 100%, probably about 45% of his usual awesome self. The plan was a go.

I picked Branden up from work at six and we started driving down to the Springs. Google Maps reported three accidents between us and the Springs on I-25, and the usually-seventy-five-minute drive was going to be an hour and forty-one minutes. That put dinner at almost eight, which is really late for my hummingbird-like husband.

We’d been driving for about thirty minutes (and still hadn’t gotten out of Denver) when I realized that I had left my pills at home.

I will clarify: my pills include my MS medication and my Adderall, both of which are daily pills and neither of which I can afford to do without.

So... the only option was to turn around and go home. And with the traffic the way it was, that meant staying home and coming back the next day.

At that time, I was under the mistaken impression that I was driving Dad home on Thursday, and that our plan for that night could be easily transplanted to the next night. Of course, that wasn’t the case and I’d need to be in Colorado Springs between ten and eleven a.m. the next day to drive to Durango.

Ugh.

But not impossible.

I asked for (and received) a favor from my good friend Fletch, who agreed to drive me down the next morning. I’d go into work with Branden, he’d drop me off at a light rail station and I’d take the light rail to Fletch’s, then off we’d go. Easy cheesy.

But this morning, I got a call from my dad at seven a.m. He said he didn’t want me to come down. There had been freezing fog overnight: the visibility was terrible and the roads were worse.

But more importantly: he was going back into the hospital. He’d had a bad night and felt short of breath.

So I’m home now, blogging and trying to work up the motivation to work more on my book and trying to put out of my mind that I haven’t heard from him since then, and I haven’t heard from my mom, and I’m worried and scared. I tried to look at it as a relief. I can’t.

But worrying doesn’t do any good either. So I’m going to keep trying.

Wish me luck.