Change of Plans

This is a companion piece to an earlier blog post.

I had a plan

After going through 2+ years of counseling, my father’s death, and the loss of the job I held for 13 years, I made an exit strategy for my current life. I don’t want to do the 9-to-5 office thing anymore, I want to travel for a living or at least for a while. A year-and-a-half ago, I sold everything I owned, rented my home, and moved in with my mother. 

The plan was to live with Mom and hunker down and save up enough to travel for at least a year. By spring 2020, I would have enough to equal a little over one year’s salary which felt like enough to start out with. 

The problems start

First, my renters moved out. Not a big deal, but then the rental agency I used found a wet spot in the basement and decided they could no longer rent my house until I put in a french drain and waterproofed the basement. At the very least, I’ll have some large expenses and several months of lost rental income. 

Then my mother died. 

Trip to Florida

Right after a week of taking estimates about the basement, my mother and I drove down to Ft. Meyers, Florida to visit a friend of the family for the weekend. After a day of vacation, we were in church on Sunday when Mom said she felt heavy down her left side. Luckily, there is a hospital right across the street. We drove over immediately and were admitted into the emergency room right away.

The Stroke

At first, she was fine. She passed all the stroke tests–holding her hands out evenly, saying difficult words. But while she was speaking to the neurologist, she had a proper stroke, slurring her words and getting very weak on her left side. They even mixed up a powerful (and expensive!) clot-busting drug but didn’t use it in the end. As they lowered her blood pressure in order to administer the drug, her symptoms went away. We learned later from her scans that she had had several smaller strokes already due to untreated high blood pressure. Even this one wasn’t too devastating–her speech wasn’t permanently affected but she remained weak down her left side. 

We spent three days in the Florida ICU then three more days in a regular room and for the most part, she was doing really well. We arranged to be discharged to a rehab hospital back home, and while the Florida hospital fretted about our long drive home, we ended up having a fine time. On our own and out of the hospital, we ended up giggling a lot as I helped her around.

Coming back home

After an evening and a day of driving, we arrived at the rehab hospital on Saturday night and were admitted to a large private room. Right away, mom got great help and made friends on her hall. The family visited her in her room for Mother’s Day on Sunday and the grandkids sang her songs to welcome her home.

For mom’s entire stay in the Florida hospital, she had problems with constipation which we chalked up to her laying in bed all day and not taking her regular regimen of vitamins. This continued into her week in rehab. By Thursday, she was also extremely nauseated and couldn’t keep food down at all. My sister and I asked mom if we should stay with her overnight but she shooed us out–there were nurses keeping an eye on her and she felt she was in good hands.

A turn for the worse

Early Friday morning, I got a call from the rehab hospital–Mom had vomited in her sleep and breathed in a fair amount of stomach contents into her lungs. She stopped breathing for several minutes, had to be resuscitated, and was taken to the emergency room. I arrived at the ER but they wouldn’t let me see her for hours. In the meantime, my sister and her husband arrived to wait with me. When we were finally allowed to see her–oh God, she looked so awful. So near death. 

They soon kicked us out again to move her to an ICU room where the waiting room is a full three floors below where she was. I can’t tell you what torture it was not to be with her when I had been by her side the entire time up to this point.

In the final diagnosis, it turned out that Mom had a hernia causing a blockage in her intestines. It was blocked enough for that section of her intestines to die which is what was making her so nauseated. In that first day in ICU, she had emergency surgery to remove the blockage. Doing so released a lot of intestinal bacteria into her system. Combined with the liquid already in her lungs, Mom’s body was overwhelmed with infection and she quickly developed sepsis, an infection of her blood. She was put on strong antibiotics along with heavy blood pressure meds since her previously high BP had tanked very low during all of this. Over the course of a week, there were 7-8 different IV drips attached to her in addition to a respirator and dialysis machine.

A final decision

Early in the week, we could talk to Mom a little. She woke up enough for me to tell her what had happened, which she understood and could respond to before falling back asleep. But after a few days, they paralyzed her so that her body had a better chance of recovering from the infection. And in a general sense she just never got better. By Thursday, we were asked to consider how we wanted to proceed–if we wanted to continue on life support indefinitely or if we wanted to let her go. 

The family agonized together for a couple of days but in the end, we knew Mom wouldn’t want any kind of life in a hospital bed. On Saturday, May 24th, they took her off the respirator. She passed away that afternoon. To say that this decision and this day were difficult for us as a family would be a tremendous understatement.

Post-funeral

After the funeral, I asked the family for permission to stay in Mom’s house for one month before I had to move out. For about two weeks, I was so bone tired, all I could do was go home and lay on the couch. I spent most of my time absorbed in stories, watching movies, reading books, or listening to audiobooks or podcasts. By the end of the month, I physically felt ill any time I had to leave the house. If I could stay there and everything looked the same, it was almost like she wasn’t gone, right? I felt like a drowning man fighting for his last gulps of air.

All too soon, the family made plans to put Mom’s house on the market. We got a realtor and spoke to a stager and moved half the stuff out of the house. At first, I was going to go ahead and move out but it was decided to focus on staging the house instead of totally emptying it. So right now, I’m living in the half-empty house, trying to keep it pristine for showings while moving what I can to my own house. It’s a very weird in-between stage and most days I get too overwhelmed and end up back on the couch again. 

(On the one hand, being a hermit has saved me a lot of money and I’ve watched a ton of movies and read several books. I really enjoy all of these points and might do this forever if I could! On the other hand, it’s probably not super healthy to sit on my butt most evenings and never see any of my friends.)

The Future

Once the house sells, I’ll move out and we’ll divvy up the rest of what we want out of the house in a big moving day. After that, we’ll hold some sort of estate sale/yard sale for what’s left over and donate the rest. 

When I’m back in my own house, I still have to deal with waterproofing my basement which will likely include new gutters and some additional digging up my backyard. I’ll probably make some other cosmetic upgrades to the house while I’m at it–hopefully some new paint and more plants in the yard.

Traveling

I still intend to travel. I’m only taking the bare minimum to my house with the goal of only living there a few months while I do repairs. Then I will rent it out again and go on the road. I’ll be far behind the monetary goal I have had in mind, but the sale of Mom’s house and property will be split between the four of us kids, plus some investment accounts she had. So in the end, I may be okay on that front, at least for a little bit. 

I’m not sure if back-to-back roller-coaster riding is quite what I’ll be heading into. Right now, I feel like being a professional housesitter for a while. Roaming the world, more or less at random, taking care of other people’s houses and pets sounds about right for me at the moment. But perhaps I will feel different in a few month’s time when both Mom’s and my houses are settled. I’m not holding up any big expectations for myself and am just taking a day and a week at a time. 

The blog

As for the blog, it will continue it but I may not be blogging very much in the coming months. I’m just not sure how things will go and how much time I’ll have. And how much time I still need just to crash on the couch and be sad.

I still have many things I want to blog about and I’m sure I’ll come up with more as I start traveling.

And basically, I’m not ready to give up yet. I just need to rest for a little while.