It was the second time I’d been in this morning, checking to see what the sounds I’d heard coming over the monitor were all about. My MIL was over next to the side of the bed, almost up against the safety rail.”Are you OK?”
“Yes. I was just trying to turn on the lamp.”
The lamp is deliberately out of her reach, otherwise she’d turn it on in the middle of the night in her confusion. “Why did you want the lamp on?”
“So that they could find me.”
“Who?”
“The people who are coming for me.”
Ah. “Well, until they come, is there anything I can get you?”
“Do you know where my toothbrush is? And toothpaste?”
“Yes. They’re in the bathroom.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I don’t want to forget them.”
“We won’t forget them. And we won’t let anyone else use them.”
“You promise?”
“Yes, I promise. Now, see if you can go back to sleep. It’s still early.”
“OK.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
After my last post, and other conversations, my wife’s sister decided to come in a week early, rather than wait until her scheduled visit starting the day after Thanksgiving. She didn’t want to miss seeing her mom one last time before the end, since it seemed so sure that the end was close.
She got in late, and we chatted a bit before she retired. She asked how her mom was doing.
“Not bad. Of course, now that you’ve rearranged your schedule to be here I’m sure she’ll live until January or something.”
“Yeah, but had I not come early, she would have died this week. That’s the way of it.”
“True enough.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
There’s a common phenomenon with Alzheimer’s patients which has been known to drive care-givers nuts: that for short periods, they can rise to a level of lucidity which makes it almost impossible to tell that they are suffering from the disease. This usually happens in response to the visit of company, particularly family members, whom they don’t get to see often. As a result those family members will have a decidedly mistaken impression of how their loved one is doing, and will wonder whether the care provider has been over-dramatizing things, or what. It is insidious, in that it undermines the support the day-to-day care giver gets from the rest of the family, who think that things really can’t be as bad as they say. And it leads to a lot of tension between the care giver and the patient, since the care giver will sometimes resent the ‘performance’ put on for other family members but not them.
The solution to this is to have a family member stick around long enough that the facade fails and the true condition of the patient is shown. Since my SIL usually comes to visit for a week or more, this always happens with her mom, and she has come to expect it. This time, however, the period of performance was extremely short, reflecting my MIL’s deteriorating condition. I think that, as much as anything else which has happened in the last ten days, told my SIL that she was right in coming early.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
It was the third time I came into the bedroom. “What are you doing, MIL?”
“I want to get up.”
“Well, it’s early still. You don’t get up until 8:00. See, the clock says that it is only 6:50.”
“But I have to get up early to get to school!”
“Don’t worry, today is Saturday. There’s no school on Saturday.”
“Oh, OK. ”
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
I was napping when the Hospice nurse came to visit this past week. Because of the holiday the schedule was rearranged, and she came in the middle of the afternoon rather than first thing in the morning. I’m trying to do a lot of sleeping now, banking it while my SIL is here to help out, because the coming weeks are likely to be even more demanding. So I didn’t get to hear what the nurse had to say. It sounds like it was the usual routine – slow decline, we’re doing all that can be done, let her know if there’s a problem.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
My MIL started choking and coughing at the dinner table, disconcerting the other family members who were over for the big Thanksgiving meal. As she coughed spasmodically, her face turning red, my wife and I looked at her, and in unison called out loudly “Take a deep breath. Real deep. Hold it. Now cough real hard.”She did, and it cleared the blockage caused by aspirating some of her food. In a moment she was back to eating, her attention focused on the food before her, mostly oblivious to the reaction around the table.
“That’s the best way to clear it – she just had a bit of something go down the wrong way,” I said to the others. And from the look on their faces I realized that my wife and I must’ve appeared unconcerned and relaxed in the face of what seemed to be a sudden crisis. My SIL nodded.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
I came down from a nap this afternoon, came into the kitchen where my wife was doing some baking. The monitor to her mom’s room there on the counter, the sound of my MIL snoring emanating from it.
“Good nap?”
“Yeah.” I nodded at the monitor. “How’s she doing?”
“Pretty well. We got her up from her morning nap, and she wanted to know where her mom was. Said that she had been in bed with her just a little bit earlier.”
“That’s becoming pretty common.” It has – my MIL has said some variation on this almost every day for the last week.
“Yeah. She’s close to the veil, but fighting with everything she’s got.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to dKos.)
It has been a difficult week in caring for my MIL. As noted previously, we went to a three-day trandsdermal patch to help with the pain associated with her aspiration and breathing difficulties. And that has worked pretty well. But as I suspected would happen, after her trial period with the oxygen she didn’t want to use it any longer – even when she was laboring to breathe and I offered it to her, she declined. Only once, when she was having a coughing spasm, did she consent to put up with it again. This means that she has continued her slide, probably at a faster pace than were she using the oxygen. It is a tough thing to watch.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
After a particularly rough patch of it yesterday morning, I was helping her from the toilet to her usual seat in the front room, where she likes to sit and look at magazines. As we transitioned from the wheelchair to her comfy chair, and I got her settled safely there, she looked up at me, her frail thin arms still around my neck, her light brown eyes clear for a moment, and said “thank you, son.”
In the over twenty years I’ve known her, in the twenty years I have been married to her daughter, she has never once before called me “son.” In fact, since my own parents died almost 40 years ago, no one has called me that for a very long time. It was a strange word to hear directed my way. And it touched me like no other thanks she has ever offered.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
She had a restless night last night. I was ‘on call’, and consequently didn’t get a lot of solid sleep. After I had been downstairs early this morning, trying to get her to settle down through one of her (fairly rare) combative fits, it hit me: we’d screwed up and not replaced her duragesic patch late afternoon, like we should have. Meaning that the opioid in her system had been tapering off for about 12 hours, with nothing else to mitigate the effects of pain. And with all the other difficulties her brain faces, that extra pain causes unpredictable effects.
I mentioned this to my wife, who woke somewhat as I came back to bed. Shortly thereafter, we were back downstairs, getting a new patch on my MIL, and getting her something else to relieve her pain more quickly than the patch would kick in. As we were getting her tucked back in, she whispered to my wife, asking: “who is that strange man?”
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Lisa, our hospice nurse, did her routine check of vitals, asked the usual questions about changes we’d noticed. After spending an extra long time with the stethoscope, she looked over to me and my wife, an honest but pained look in her eyes.
Later, after all the rest was done, she chatted with us on the front porch, my MIL again sitting in her comfy chair in the living room. “Yeah, there’s a lot more crackling all over her lungs.”
This came as no surprise. I’d been able to hear it myself, just in my MIL’s routine breathing. But it was a substantial change from the aspiration congestion being confined to just one part of one or another lung.
Then she added: “And her heartbeat is much more irregular.”
Ah. I asked, already knowing the answer: “Is that . . . significant?”
“Yes.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
My wife’s older sister is coming to visit from California beginning Thanksgiving weekend. Last week I was worried that my MIL might not last that long, given how things had been going. The beginning of this week I had changed my mind, since the duragesic patch seemed to help so much.
Now I’m not sure again, even though we are a week closer to Thanksgiving.
That may be the toughest thing about this, the not knowing. I mean, there are few of us who know in advance the how and when of our deaths – I’ve long accepted that, having lost both parents suddenly (and separately) just as I was on the verge of adolescence. But when you are dealing with a terminal illness, such as hospice usually aids with, you usually have some kind of time-frame that everyone understands. This is different – this isn’t cancer, or a fever, or some other relatively simple cause & effect. This is a general debility, prolonged by our caring and care giving in a way that both breaks your heart and makes you proud.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to dKos.)
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Book Conservation, General Musings, Health, Hospice, Predictions, Sleep
Last Friday I dropped a note to the Library Director I’ve mentioned in this post about this big project, basically asking why I had yet to see payment for my work when I’d been told I should see it as early as 10/19. I got the following reply right away:
Thanks so much for letting us know. We turned in the invoice and will go tracing the situation. Again I apologize for this delay. You should not have to ask these things. We are in a transition period with a “temporary” agency helping us out in our business office until we can hire some staff. I’ll ask Mr. R to also help us with this situation and we will write you probably next week with any details.
*Sigh* Beginnings are fragile times, as we learn to dance with someone new. Is this delay a portent of things to come – will I always have to hassle them to pay their bills on time? Or is it just a fluke, an unfortunate glitch which means nothing? I replied this morning:
Thank you – any help you can provide to expedite payment will be greatly appreciated. I’m somewhat distracted by our hospice care-giving for my mother-in-law at this time and don’t have the attention to spare trying to track such things down.
So we’ll see. And I mention this because it does sort of sum-up how I am feeling now, as we enter into the closing weeks of my MIL’s life: distracted, tired. Yes, we’re now getting more sleep, and that helps a great deal – but still, the emotional stress has cranked up along with the demands of routine care giving, as I have tried to outline in all my posts related to this. I do have work to do, as does my wife, and then there is the routine of just getting through the needs of ‘normal’ life. But to a certain extent such concerns fall by the wayside as we turn more of our focus to giving my MIL a good death, as comfortable and pain-free as possible – all the while trying our best to pace ourselves, since we have no way of knowing exactly how much further this marathon has to go.
Jim Downey
*** Update, 10:00AM November 5 ***
Got word back from the client:
Good news. The check was sent out Friday (November 2), so you should receive it within a day or so. As suspected, the turbulence in our business office is to blame for the delay. We apologize again.
So, provided nothing gets ‘lost in the mail’, looks like we’re off to a decent start. With institutional clients, I usually expect them to take upwards of a month to process payment, and this client would not be tardy.
Fingers crossed.
Jim D.
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Hospice, movies, Science, Science Fiction, Star Wars
When my MIL’s hospice nurse was here the week before last, she clearly saw a decline in my MIL, as I noted here. What I didn’t mention in that post was that one of the things she suggested we consider was to move to a transdermal patch to help alleviate some of the pain associated with the breathing difficulty my MIL is starting to develop. (When people start to develop pulmonary aspiration problems, the coughing and gagging can be quite painful and cause a great deal of distress for both the patient and care providers.) Pain relief and comfort are our primary concerns with my MIL, but choosing to go to a derm patch of a powerful drug could well contribute to hastening her death – a common concern about all opioid-class drugs with the elderly. My wife and I discussed the matter, agreed that it was an option we should consider if conditions worsened.
Well, when Lisa (the hospice nurse) came this week, it was clear that my MIL had continued to develop aspiration congestion in her lungs. And we’d seen several instances of very painful and frightening coughing fits, usually late in the day when she was tired. My MIL was exhibiting additional effort at breathing even when just sitting at rest. We talked it over again with Lisa, and decided to give the derm patch with the lowest dosage a try, in spite of the potential problems.
Lisa also recommended using an oxygen supplement for my MIL, to ease her breathing problems. We discussed it, and agreed to give it a try. Lisa left, saying she’d make the arrangements for getting the derm patches to us, and would have an oxygen set-up delivered to the home, both that afternoon (this was Friday).
The guy from the medical supply place called, then came over to deliver the oxygen machine. We got a back-up tank of compressed oxygen as well. He walked us through the operation of this machine, which concentrates O2 from the air and delivers it in a regulated flow at whatever volume you need. It’s about the size of a kitchen trash can and sounds just like the food cooker ‘Aunt Beru’ was using in the original Star Wars movie.
When my MIL got up from her afternoon nap, we got her settled in her chair in the front room, where she usually looks at magazine and whatnot. And we showed her the new oxy set-up, explained that it would help her breathe when she was sitting up. To say that she looked on it with a dubious eye would be understatement. I’ve mentioned before that Alzheimer’s patients don’t respond well to change, and as far as she was concerned, this new-fangled thing with the tubes coming up to her nose was just more than a little weird. But we convinced her to give it a try.
A short while later Lisa came by with the derm patches. We got one on my MIL, and discussed how we should change the mix of her other pain meds once the new drugs got into her system (a derm patch takes 12 -18 hours to saturate the system, then delivers a constant dosage for a period thereafter, in this case about 60 hours). Lisa also checked to make sure we had the oxy set-up correctly, just to be sure. Everything was fine.
So, results since then? The new pain meds have definitely helped my MIL. She has been sleeping better at night, and seems more free of pain. But she has also been inclined to just stay in bed more, particularly the last two mornings. The oxygen has also been a clear help, and she is working less hard to breathe when she is sitting in her chair.
The difficulty is that she pretty clearly doesn’t like the oxygen delivery system. The tubing coming up to a simple cannula is strange and distracting, and she wants to fuss with it or just take it off altogether. We told her that we wanted her to try it through this weekend, to see if she could get used to it, but that if she still didn’t like it, we wouldn’t force her to wear it.
Because while this would probably lengthen her life, if it is decreasing her ‘quality of life’, it isn’t worth it. It is the exact flip side of the ethical considerations of whether or not to use the transdermal patch, where quality of life is improved but there is a risk of shortening her life. And that’s not a neat and easy calculation to make. We know that she is entering the final weeks of life, but there are no clear mile-markers indicating just exactly where we are on this journey. We want her to enjoy as much life as she can, but that is a judgement call as to whether it is better to go for a longer period, or for more comfort.
And no matter what choices we make, we can never be entirely sure that they were the right ones.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to dKos.)
I just lost my temper. I just had a full-fledged screaming fit, eyes bulging, veins throbbing, face beet red. At a 90 year old woman who knows no better, who is confused by the world around her due to Alzheimer’s, who is likely dying.
Why did I just do this reprehensible thing, and why on earth am I admitting to it in a public forum?
The first part of that question is the more difficult one to answer. I did it out of frustration, exhaustion, and fear. Frustration because she (my MIL) has been exhibiting compulsive behaviours all morning which drive me nuts (tearing things out of magazines, wanting to write on the back of photos in the little album she has, ‘cleaning’ up some lunch mess with a kleenex and in the process smearing stuff all over the table top and making more work for me.) This sort of thing rapidly gets under my skin – it’s like some small kid pestering you with a behaviour that they know will drive you nuts. Except, of course, that in this case she doesn’t really know what the hell she is doing.
Exhaustion is obvious. Though I have been getting a lot more sleep, this is the end of years of being a care-giver. I do not have ‘reserves’ to draw upon. I only have a worn and fragile veneer of sanity. I have had the discussions with her which tripped my outburst hundreds of times. Sometimes, like this one, I just snap.
Fear? Because she is dying. Because in some sense, while I know that we have done everything humanly possible to care for her, and extended her life by years . . . I will still feel a sense of failure as a care provider. I hate to fail at things. I fear that others will think less of me because of that failure.
So, why tell on myself, here, in this way? Because this is part of what it means to be a care provider. You lose your temper. You scream, you shout, you act in mean and petty ways. You will lose your temper, or your sanity, now and again. And if you are to be effective as a care giver, you then have to catch your breath, forgive yourself, and get on with the task at hand. None of us are saints. We’re all frail, fallible human beings. You have to accept that, if you have any hope of getting through this. Because you can’t just take the day off to go relax, or turn this project over to someone else. You have to deal with your own outburst, then get over it as best you can. You have to keep going, whether you want to or not, whether you feel fear, or exhaustion, or shame.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to UTI.)
…about care-giving and throw it out the window.
At least that is somewhat what it feels like as we’re entering what is likely the final weeks of my MIL’s life. The routines we’d established previously (Alzheimer’s patients typically like routines – it helps keep their world a little more ordered, a little more secure and predictable in amongst all the other changes they are experiencing) are starting to break down. My MIL is becoming somewhat less predictable, her sleep/awake cycles disrupted, et cetera. What were simple things she could do for herself now require greater supervision and instruction. She tires more easily, and the “sundowning” effect I’d mentioned previously tends to occur earlier in the day.
And there are the medical indicators, as well. Lisa, the hospice nurse, was here this morning for her weekly check-up. Following that, we chatted for a bit outside. As I wrote a week ago, she also sees the signs of end of life approaching. Drop in blood pressure. Decreased heart rate. Congestion in her lungs. It probably won’t be long, and Lisa wanted to make sure we have what is necessary to keep my MIL comfortable through it.
She also told us that we’re doing a marvelous job in providing care. Bittersweet, but as I said back when we started this round of hospice, good to hear.
Anyway, as we enter into these final weeks, the routines to which we’ve all become accustomed are starting to dissolve. To use a musical analogy, we’re shifting from playing well-known and rehearsed classical pieces to playing something which requires more improvisation – it’s not ‘free jazz‘ yet, but that’s where we’re likely headed. As the end grows closer, we’ll likely need to discard the sheet music altogether. This will be difficult, but will likely only last for a limited amount of time. I’m comfortable with predictable routine, and largely prefer to have some order to my life, but know full well that I am capable of dealing with uncertainty for at least a while.
At least that’s been my experience so far. I guess we’ll see how it goes this time.
Jim Downey
Made a routine trip to the big-box store this morning, to stock up on catfood. I got one of those large boxes of 48 cans of different flavors my cats like. And when I went to put it away, the “easy open” tab didn’t. Instead, I wound up just destroying the whole box, ripping and tearing, so I had access to all the cans included.
It felt wonderful to be so destructive.
There are days like that for all of us. After a trip to the store, dealing with idiots who don’t know how to negotiate a check-out line. Or sitting behind the twit at the stoplight who somehow misses that the light changed and the cars in the other lane are passing him, getting his shit together just in time to slip through a yellow light and leave you sitting there for another cycle. Whatever it is, you just want to take out your frustrations in a safe and relatively sane way.
I have these days a lot. Part of it is just the toll of being a long-term care provider for someone who has a tenuous grip on reality but can be amazingly stubborn and focused in her determination to do something unsafe (or just highly annoying). But part of it is simply the effect of long term sleep disruption/deprivation that goes with providing care around the clock. I’ve known this for ages, and written about it several times. Anyone who has had insomnia, lived with an infant, or just had a bad string of luck sleeping for a few days will understand completely how grumpy and intolerant it can make you.
Well, it’s worse than you thought. At least, it’s worse than the people who study neuroscience thought:
Walker and his colleagues had 26 healthy volunteers either get normal sleep or get sleep deprived, making them stay awake for roughly 35 hours. On the following day, the researchers scanned brain activity in volunteers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they viewed 100 images. These started off as emotionally neutral, such as photos of spoons or baskets, but they became increasingly negative in tone over time—for instance, pictures of attacking sharks or vipers.
“While we predicted that the emotional centers of the brain would overreact after sleep deprivation, we didn’t predict they’d overreact as much as they did,” Walker said. “They became more than 60 percent more reactive to negative emotional stimuli. That’s a whopping increase—the emotional parts of the brain just seem to run amok.”
The researchers pinpointed this hyperactive response to a shutdown of the prefrontal lobe, a brain region that normally keeps emotions under control. This structure is relatively new in human evolution, “and so it may not yet have adapted ways to cope with certain biological extremes,” Walker speculated. “Human beings are one of the few species that really deprive themselves of sleep. It’s a real oddity in nature.”
In modern life, people often deprive themselves of sleep “almost on a daily basis,” Walker said. “Alarm bells should be ringing about that behavior—no pun intended.”
Gee, ya think?
Sheesh. I need to go find another box to destroy or something.
Jim Downey
Thursday morning the hospice nurse (Lisa) came for her weekly check-up for my MIL. She went through, did the usual stats, talked with my MIL about how she was feeling, whether she had any pain, et cetera. I like Lisa, she has a quiet and caring way I’ve found typical of hospice nurses.
After she was done, my MIL wanted to lie down and rest a bit, so I helped her with that while my wife went out to chat with Lisa. Once I had my MIL settled and secure, I joined them. It was the usual conversation, filling in Lisa on our observations of how my MIL had been doing the past week, letting her know of any TIA episodes and whatnot, discussing any additional scheduling and so forth for the coming week. Lisa had been unable to bring some of my MIL’s meds with her, since the pharmacy at the Hospice hadn’t had a chance to get them filled. She said that she’d drop them by late in the afternoon.
The rest of the morning was routine, and we had our regularly-scheduled respite care that afternoon from 2 – 6. My wife wanted to work, and I had errands I needed to run, so we agreed to meet at 4:30 for an early dinner at the brewpub near her office.
Over sandwiches and a good dark ale, sitting out on the patio of the brewpub, enjoying a lovely warm autumn afternoon, we talked about my MIL’s health. No, not so much exactly how she was doing (we compare notes on that regularly), but of the likelihood that the end is near, and what that would mean for us and the other family members. Even with a fair amount of chatter around us from other patrons, it was a quiet and relaxed conversation, exploring the emotional landscape of an upcoming death. Both my wife and I have lost other family members often enough that we know this terrain. And we know that while we will grieve, and need to learn to re-integrate ourselves back into regular society, there will also be a sense of relief that this long and difficult time is over.
And that evening, when Lisa dropped off the ziplock with the pill containers from the pharmacy, she also left a handful of different publications from the Hospice, all of them variations on the theme of ‘how to prepare for approaching death’. Yeah, we’d seen most of this material previously in one place or another, but it was evident that she felt we needed to review it now. Getting that was an outside confirmation of what my wife and I had discussed previously, and a lot of what I’ve written about in recent weeks. I suppose we really are getting close.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, General Musings, Hospice, Predictions, Psychic abilities
It was a half hour before lunch yesterday. I checked in on my MIL, who was sitting in the front room, reading. Doing this regularly helps her feel less anxious, gives her a chance to ask questions or if she needs something, since she doesn’t always remember that she can just call for me.
“How’re you doing?”
“I’d like to get up and look out that window.”
This is unusual. “Um, why?”
“Because I want to see what’s so interesting out there.”
“???”
“There was a man here a few minutes ago, and he was looking out that window at something.”
No, there wasn’t – we’d been alone since my wife left for her office 90 minutes earlier. “A man?”
“Yes. There was a man there, looking out. He seemed to be very interested in something.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
I was on-call last night. It’s a lot easier to do this now that it’s only a couple times a week. My MIL had been restless early on, so I went to check on her about 11:00.
“You OK?”
“Yes. But I need to get up.”
“Do you need to use the toilet?”
“No. I need to make room for the other people.”
“???”
“All the people who are here. I need to let them use the room.”
“No, it’s OK – this is your room, and they’re happy to let you sleep here.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
At 5:30 this morning, she was stirring. I went downstairs to see what was going on. My MIL was over at the edge of her bed, against the rails, trying to reach the lamp on her bedside table (which we keep out of range of her reach on purpose).
“Whatcha doing?”
“Trying to turn on that light.”
“Why?”
“Well, so I can see the other people.”
“???”
“The ones who are here for dinner. I want to go to dinner with them.”
“It’s 5:30 in the morning.” There’s a bright digital clock on the table, but she usually forgets to look at the indicator for AM/PM.
“Then why are the people here for dinner?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll go ask them. But you can go back to sleep, and we’ll be sure to get you up when it is time for breakfast at 8 o’clock.”
“OK.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
It was a little after 7:00, I was just sitting down with my second cup of coffee and catching up on the news online. I heard my MIL stirring again, went to investigate.
“Do you need something?”
“I’m trying to see if I can get my head through these bars.” She means the bed rails.
“That’s not a good idea. You could get hurt.” She won’t be able to, anyway, but still it’s not a good idea for her to be trying it.
“Oh. OK. Well, I called my family in Boonville, and the oldest boy is going to come and get me.” I think she’s thinking of my wife’s cousin Bob, who died earlier this year.
“Well, I’ll be sure to come wake you when he gets here. But you can go back to sleep until then.”
“You promise?”
“Yes, I promise.”
Makes you wonder.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Book Conservation, Feedback, Habanero, Health, Hospice, Science Fiction, Sleep, Writing stuff
I’ve been busy this week trying to finish up the first batch of books for the new client, and have to deliver them tomorrow. So I apologize if postings here have been a bit light. But I thought I would post some updates on recent events . . .
My MIL is still doing pretty well, in spite of my concerns in Fever. Her fever did abate for a while, but yesterday it was back up, and higher than previously. We still cannot identify the source for it, but the Hospice nurse will be here today to do a check-up, and we’ll see if she has any ideas.
I’ve slept every night this week! Amazing what a difference it is making already, even if I haven’t fully settled back into sleeping deeply on the nights when the respite person is here. Normally, my wife and I will split the other four nights a week, but she helped me out by taking the Tuesday night shift so I could be well rested for doing my conservation work (see above). I will probably still need months of regular rest to be fully restored, but at least now I no longer feel like I am constantly dragging. Remarkable.
Hits here to the blog crossed the 6,000 level yesterday. As it turns out, downloads of the novel may well have crossed that threshold yesterday as well – I’ll know later today. It’s close, anyway.
Oh, one last item . . . I wrote about the First Habanero some weeks back. Well, now I’m happy to say I’ve harvested and dried and given away dozens of the Red Savina habs, and have even gotten a few of the Devil’s Tongue. The garden season is wrapping up, but I hope that I’ll still get a bunch more ripe habs, and will undoubtably have a whole bunch of green ones (which have a nice flavor but don’t develop their full heat).
Well, I need to get back to work. May not post again until tomorrow night, or this weekend.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 