If you’ve been following along with me, I’m going through a situation with my mom right now (almost exactly a year after my dad passed away) where she came quite close to death. I’m realizing in hindsight that it was only because of the quick actions of the team of nurses and doctors in the ER that she pulled through as well as she has (so far). I’ve since done kind of a deep dive on septic shock recovery (very on-brand for me to do deep dives like that simply because I want to be as informed as possible) and there are wide variations in outcomes.

Sepsis is also not something that only old people can experience. Literally anyone can suffer from that. What is it exactly? If you’re not familiar, it’s basically a serious, systemic infection that overtakes your immune system. Once it reaches the level of septic shock (one of the hallmarks is exactly what happened with my mom – a blood pressure crash), without immediate medical intervention, you can basically go into a coma and your organs start to shut down. My mom never actually lost consciousness. She was really out of it, but the ER team quickly got IV meds started to bring up her heart rate and blood pressure.

I’ve talked to her a few times now about what has happened, but she’s interpreting things differently. There was a point when she was in the ICU where she was hallucinating. To her, that was the worst thing that ever happened to her. In the state she was in, she thought the hallucinations were completely real. She honestly did not know what was happening, so I could imagine how terrifying that was. Even though I was there and telling her that what she was experiencing was in her mind, it didn’t matter. So the most terrible part of the experience wasn’t the almost dying, it was having reality turned upside down.

She’s still at the skilled nursing facility and I know she just wants to go home, but she’s still got a few days of IV meds and she’s only got maybe 1/4 of her mobility right now. Before she goes home, we (me, nurses, doctors) want her to at least be able to use a walker to do things like get to the bathroom on her own, shower, get in and out of bed, and make some food. Just in the past couple days since starting physical therapy and having to get up more, she has progressed quite a bit. So I’m hopeful in the next week, they’ll give us the green light that she can go home.

In the meantime, I feel like I’ve been working 16 hour days. There’s my actual work that I do, but then there’s errands and phone calls and spending at least a couple hours a day with my mom at the nursing facility. I’m going over to her house every day to look after her two cats. I’m trying to line up having some things done in the house to make life easier for her. I’m researching sepsis recovery and diabetes and trying to come up with some ideas for some diet changes for her.

Of course that not all. A couple months back I agreed to participate in a group yard/garage sale with several neighbors. So I’ve been collecting things from my dad’s shop, loading up my Jeep, and putting them in my garage. I’ll need to have everything organized and priced by 7am Saturday. And I have no help. So it will just be me dealing with it for 7 hours (and of course I’m going to be thinking about the only other yard sale I’ve done where Mario helped).

Last week I was also looking after the neighbor’s “stray” cat who decided to bring herself and her kittens on my deck (I’m soft, I can never turn away any cat that shows up on my deck). This past Saturday I pulled some strings at the local humane society (who happens to be a client of mine) and got mama cat into the spay/neuter clinic on behalf of the neighbor and got the kittens into the adoption program. Neighbor was thankful as they’d been trying to get the cat spayed at the clinic for months but there are only so many open slots every month. They picked her up this past Tuesday and all is well there, so good deed done.

I’m really going to have to find a way to carve out some me/down time after this yard sale. It’s just too much for an extended period of time and I definitely feel exhausted at this point. This is part of life though, so I’ll get through it.