One reason I've been so distracted

My mother-in-law lives in Tulsa, in a pretty good nursing home, University Village. She's been there about four and a half years; originally she started in an assisted living apartment but kept falling and passing out. The facility had warned us that when people finally move into a facility like this, even if they'd been living in their own home (as she had) and driving (which she did), a lot of times all the hidden health issues they've got become obvious because someone is there to see them and notice.

So long story short, she ended up crashing and never really recovered from that. She moved into Skilled nursing but didn't make progress with the physical therapy. So that was no longer an option, as her insurance wouldn't pay for the sessions without some forward progress.

But she's been if not happy, then content. She's watched her shows, sometimes a little football, she's had friends and family visiting, also her former co-workers and we'd gone done periodically (Kent more than me). 

Then the pandemic hit, and we thought "well this will be it, she'll catch the coronavirus and since she stays mostly in bed, it will make short work of her." But she didn't get it, and in fact her facility did really well staying on top of the positive cases they did get.

Last fall, she had what ended up being a stage 2 melanoma removed from her arm. She was too frail for a PET scan, the gold standard to determine if cancer is elsewhere but had an MRI. That MRI came back clear.

On May 25, Kent's birthday, University Village called and said they thought she was having a stroke and they'd sent her to the ER by ambulance. The ER doctors said she wasn't having a stroke but something was clearly going on so they ran other tests.

She has a couple of malignant brain tumors. Turns out they are glioblastoma (GBM). GBM is a grade 4 fast-growing and aggressive brain tumor. She's been rated a health risk of 6 (the highest/worst rating) and her life expectancy is probably about six months-ish.

Kent ended up going to Tulsa the day after his birthday, and did not come with me to Nashville to see our family there. He made the right choice for sure, and I would have gone with him if he needed me. But he told me to go to Nashville, that it would be OK, he would be able to see our family again. I felt guilty but I went alone. 

Christmas past (but in a good way)

My mother-in-law’s estate sale was this weekend—not that she’s dead, far from it. But since she’s moved into the assisted living/nursing home, there’s no point in keeping rooms full of stuff or a house she no longer needs. So we needed to dispose of  all those belongings, and then get the house sold.

The estate sale industry is pretty weird, at least to me. Getting the sale scheduled was a chore. I don’t know if that’s because the people who do this have other jobs or if that’s just the norm for this line of work, but everything was hard to pin down.

As a side note, the woman we bought our house from used an estate sale company before she moved out. Her parents had lived here for over 30 years, and she’d lived here with them through their illnesses and eventual death, and this place was packed with stuff (including a casket in the basement—isn’t that strange?).

They do a lot of the work, though. They sort and label everything, publicize the sale, and provide staff to work at the sale. Afterwards, they box and donate everything that’s left. In the case of the company we used, they prefer that the family not hang around during the sale. That sort of bothered Kent (what are they hiding?) but it also made sense. I can well believe that people get a little weird watching their possessions or their parents’ possessions going for a song, and get emotionally worked up.

One thing my mother-in-law has always loved is decorating for Christmas. When I first met her in 2002, she was still putting up three or four fully decorated trees along with lots of other Christmas decorations (her Santa collection is impressive). She made a lot of her decorations, and really enjoyed getting everything set up just so. Even as recently as five years ago, she put up two trees. In this last house, she only had room for one and of course now she'll need to display a couple of small items since there's no room for a tree.

Kent was in Tulsa as the estate sale people were organizing everything into categories, and he told me they’d put all the Christmas items into one room. He said it was pretty cool to see all those things together, so I asked him to take a photo. Here it is: