Inevitable Decline

Niles: Marrying money can have its perils. Ten or fifteen years down the line, after you've adapted to a lifestyle now totally beyond your means, you can find yourself cast aside, a hollow husk, penniless and crushed.
Frasier: Niles, Big Willy's eighty five; he's on his third pacemaker.
Niles: Ah! Mazel tov.

—Frasier, "Where There's Smoke, There's Fired" (4/30/96)

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It's been a hell of a week around my abode. I got a call on Tuesday afternoon from GF that her grandmother had had a fall, and that she was going over to St. Agnes Hospital to get checked out. This meant that I had to pick up Wee One from the neighbors' place and it might be necessary for me to calm her down a little. Wee One was doing OK, although she wondered when her mother was going to get home. As it happened, she didn't get home until sometime after midnight; I'd already fallen asleep.

During the next couple of days, some other details emerged: She'd fallen at about 9:30 AM, but nobody at the congregate facility she lives at found her until around 5:00, when she failed to show up for dinner. By Thursday night they'd determined that the cause of the original fall was a heart attack, and that she needed a pacemaker because her heart rate was so slow.

On Friday they put the pacemaker in—did you know they could do it that fast? Because I didn't. They had to use something other than general anesthesia because there's a very real danger of advancing dementia when you put someone out as deeply as that. Did you know that? I certainly suspected it after my grandfather's surgery, but now they have some hard numbers.

So the bottom line, at this point, is that Granny (what everyone calls her) is still in the hospital because there are other tests they'd like to do. She's also on heparin now, which means that she can't return to the congregate housing. If she were to fall and nobody knew about it, she could bleed out, so as nice as the apartment is—and it is a nice little place—it's no longer a viable option for her. GF and her mother have started the search for a setting with greater supervision (which probably means nursing home). GF's father is predictably dysfunctional (this is his mother, after all), and her brother is...invisible. I had a harsher word there but that one will do.

Me? I've been holding down the fort, keeping an eye on Wee One and offering whatever support I can. Before much longer it will be my grandmother going through this, and my turn. My grandmother lives with my mom in Florida, and my brother lives nearby, so I'm not close to the action as such, but I do try to participate in some of the decision-making process.

When they let me.