Caveat: Slightly slower

It’s now Monday morning, 6 AM at my mother’s house (sans mother) in Far North Queensland.

Yesterday was a much less busy day, and I finally slept “normally” (whatever that is) last night. I’m looking forward to experiencing jetlag again after the trip back home to Alaska, in 2 weeks!

It being Sunday, I didn’t have much I could do as far as navigating any bureaucratic hoops. So I basically hung out with my mom at the hospital. I think one issue is she struggles with boredom – but she’s got enough “broken” in her mental processes that she can’t seem to figure out how to solve that. I tried to just chat with her, though it’s mostly me doing the talking. I talked about the store, my regrets about buying the store, my issues caretaking for Arthur… I told her that at least she sometimes laughed at my stupid puns and jokes, which Arthur hasn’t done for years, now. My humor relies on language play, and his language interpreter is mostly broken. Ann seems to have her humor in tact – she just struggles to retain a train of thought over any amount of time whatsoever.

We called her brother Alan (my “other” uncle) and he talked for a while via the phone. She listened but didn’t participate much. Her friend Karen came by and brought her food she liked, so I saw her eat more than I’ve seen her eat until now. Then later her friend Tash stopped by, too. Tash has been the most supportive of my mom’s friends over here, and I feel very grateful for all that she’s done. It’s clear how much she genuinely cares for mom, and she adopts a kind of parental role with her that I can’t pull off – I manage it better with Arthur. It probably comes in part with long familiarity.

Today I’ll drive back into Atherton and focus on seeing where things stand with the one care facility where we’d already gotten the ball rolling last year. I’m not super optimistic that that will work out. Tash pointed out yesterday that the nursing home / care facility in the region is quite terrible, with hundreds of people on waiting lists. So the “overflow” of people like my mother end up being hosted long-term at hospitals, which can’t be financially good for the government, footing the bill. Yet there seems to be little being done to actually create incentives (social, financial, whatever) to make for more slots in care facilities. The difficult, unpleasant news about this for us, is that Ann may end up spending the medium term at Atherton Hospital (minus a “respite” which she’s already scheduled for at the Carinya facility, but that’s a short term thing with no guaranteed transition to long-term).

I’ll report more later.

Here are some pictures.

A wallaby at my mom’s property.

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The Atherton Hospital where I’ve spending much of my time.

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Caveat: Poem #3082 “The obstruction”

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The beast was standing, quite aloof,
 it issued challenge to my path.
And birds were squacking, giving proof. 

The beast was standing, quite aloof.
 It lowered head and moved its hoof.
But then it bored. It felt no wrath.

The beast was standing, quite aloof,
 it issued challenge to my path.

– a triolet. Events which took place in my mom’s driveway yesterday.

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