Category: My Photos

One thing that’s always puzzled me about Arthur, with his incipient deafness and his difficulty with interaction: he still listens constantly to his little audiobooks, on his circa mid-2000’s Apple iPod Nano. In the times when I’ve overheard, it’s always the same books – over and over. The mystery is that given his apparent deafness and difficulty understanding, I don’t quite get what he’s getting out of them. I feel like it’s just some kind of reassurance and a way to “tune out” the confusing external reality.

We got his new hearing aids and had a new hearing test on Monday at the VA. It was a long and exhausting (for Arthur) appointment.

The new hearing aids have a feature that is something he’s long wanted: a nice low-tech, intuitive way to listen to his audiobooks through the hearing aids directly. He can just plug the physical audiojack into a little dedicated dongle, and it works “automagically.”

There’s an unanticipated problem, though – for me, not for him. For me, with his old way of listening to audiobooks, with the distinctive white Apple corded earbuds dangling from his ears, I had a nice easy way to tell whether he was “tuned out” or not. This could impact the strategies I needed to use to make myself heard and understood. Now, as he listens through his hearing aids, I have no way of knowing when he’s tuned out. And it makes a BIG difference in terms of being able to get through to him. And bearing in mind, regardless of whether he listens through ear buds or through his hearing aids, he’s often quite reluctant to turn off his audiobooks – he wants to multitask and somehow carry on his conversation and still keep listening. This rarely goes well. Then you have to ask him to turn off his audiobook – and that makes him annoyed and grumpy, which changes the way communication proceeds, too.

Generally speaking, communication with Arthur continues to become increasingly fraught and frustrating, in other words.

Life goes on. I’m pleased that the VA didn’t try to force us into any follow-up appointments. One revelation from the new hearing test: the audiologist is confident that much of Arthur’s hearing loss is the result of damage to the middle ear, instead of the more typical inner ear. In one sense, this is actually good news. Damage to the middle ear is not, generally, progressive, unlike inner ear deafness. It’s a breakdown in the ear’s ability to transmit sound to from the eardrum to the inner ear. With Arthur, we could speculate that it’s due to the 40+ years of pressure changes, up and down in helicopters. I also speculate that it has to do with his infamous “performative, world-destroying sneezes” – where he sneezes in such a way as to maximize loudness and air movement through the passages in his head, and which he’s always insisted are good for him (?!).

Ah well.

Yesterday, we stayed home and I was very lazy. I spent a lot of time talking in circles with Keith, reminiscing about old times in Humboldt – times when I was a child and he and Juli were my sister’s and my babysitters. Keith is hard to understand, because his memory issues are at a level where you can end up having the same conversation 20 or 30 times, over and over. And he seems to have lost most of his verbs and nouns and names and specificity. “The place when we did the thing was good. I really liked that!” Arthur gets mad trying to make sense of him, and staggers off, disgruntled, to lie down upstairs on his guest bed.

Today I kind of want to go shopping for a new phone – to try to prevent some of the frustrations my current phone has provided, related to my failure at international roaming (In Australia last month), related to the lack of wifi-calling functionality (for coping with Juli’s home being “out of cellphone range”), etc. We’ll see – I’m not sure the phone-salespeople are going to be sufficiently reassuring regarding these functionalities to cause me to spring the big bucks to buy a new one.

More later.

A decorated tree.

It’s predawn, 4:30 AM in Far North Queensland. Someone’s rooster has a lot to say.

Yesterday was a whirlwind, emotionally.

I started the day committed to the idea of moving mom down to Regis Redlynch, the care facility in north suburban Cairns. Some intense conversations with Ann’s friends and family. Then when I went to talk to Carinya front office about early discharge from her “respite” there in Atherton, things shifted rapidly. Carinya said they looked like they might have a spot. I said, “I need a stronger word than ‘might'” but I was of course interested! Carinya had been Ann’s actual preferred location, back when she’d been “compos mentis” enough to express a preference. Further, the spot coming available will be “higher level of care” which, I think realistically, is what Ann needs at this point.

So I spent the day hanging out with Ann at Carinya and having some conversations with various people about finances, etc. Hopefully today I’ll spend mostly filling out forms and getting the paperwork in order.

Ann was in good spirits in the morning, but as the day wore on she became despondent. Partly, she’s always been a morning person anyway – I’m the same way. I get tired as the day wears on, and my mood drops. I think my mom is the same. Anyway when I left for day she was in tears again. I drove back in the dark – which I hate to do on these narrow, busy, twisty roads, and on the wrong side of the road. But I made it back to the house and fell asleep.

Here is picture of a wallaby mom (if you zoom in you can see the joey peeking out of her pouch) and of a sunset (these pictures were taken standing in the same position).

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.

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