Mom & Me Two Archive

...I've been blithely keeping double copies of everything here as daily posts and archives. It finally caught up with me and I had to copy over four months of daily posts to my hard drive and delete them off my ISP's server in order to continue publishing. I'll probably delete the entire past year's dailies shortly. As it turns out, though, I've got my search engine set to search the dailies and not the archives. I need to change that. I didn't think about it when I began using Atomz. I just wanted to make sure duplicate searching didn't happen. However, it makes more sense to exclude the dailies and include the archives from a page count perspective. Thus, until I find a few hours to do this, the first four months of 2004 won't be available for search. Not that it matters. Very few people search my site. But I thought I'd mention it just in case you're one of those few.

    This evening we talked a little about congestive heart failure. She doesn't have chronic CHF but when she's extremely sedentary, which she's been for the last couple of months (in part my doing, although, she loves being sedentary and doesn't fight me when I allow her to be) she begins to develop slight swelling in her feet at night and a bit of a dry hack, both signs of fluid retention pressuring a heart working harder than it likes. In addition, over the last week or so I've had her on oxygen almost constantly during the day when she's up even though she's mostly been sitting. Combined with her elevated (for her) blood pressure, she's obviously experiencing a bout of CHF-lite. None of the symptoms are yet worrisome. If you didn't look at my mother's feet as often as and with the attention that I do you wouldn't consider them swollen. You definitely wouldn't notice the dry hack or you'd dismiss it as the effects of the extremely dry winter air; the humidity today, for instance, hovered around 6%. The spate of elevated blood pressure? All the physicians she's had are so thrilled with her diastolic that they don't consider her systolic a problem, especially at her age. Despite what could be considered the minor state of her symptoms, I've been considering that I need to get her moving again. As you know if you've been keeping up with us, I started this some days ago, with varied success. Tonight, though, I decided, now that we're initiating earlier wake-ups perhaps it's time to approach increased movement from a different angle.
    While we were in the bathroom readying her for bed I pointed out the slight swelling of her feet and her more aggressive use of oxygen. I explained everything in the above paragraph then added, "You don't have chronic congestive heart failure, Mom, but anyone can develop it and one of the best ways to go about this is to be as sedentary as we've allowed you to be for an extended period. Otherwise, you're doing fine, I'm sure your hemoglobin is good, no colds, few allergies, excellent appetite, excellent everything else, so, you know, it's time to move, again."
    The funny thing is, today (which has been a fairly well motivated day for her and positively busy for me) maybe an hour after lunch I started setting up the chair and foot platform for exercises. I told her as I worked that we were going to do a short session again.
    "No!" Loud, clear, startled and determined.
    I laughed. "Come on, Mom. Only a half hour, maybe a little less, no standing ones, just the sitting ones. You can do it."
    "Absolutely not!"
    I laughed again. "Why not, Mom?"
    "I did those yesterday! I think I deserve a rest, today!"
    "Well, no, I think our last session was a couple of days ago."
    "It may as well have been yesterday!"
    Funny, funny woman.
    I lost this one. That's why I decided tonight to take a different approach. I think the approach worked, too. She was very attentive.
    "You know, Mom, CHF can take out just about anyone if they let it. It's especially good at taking out people who are suffering from something else. But, you know, you're not severely anemic, you're not having problems with sodium, we seemed to have licked the UTI problem, you're in very good health so it's silly to allow CHF to develop and take you out now. Let's wait for a really good reason."
    She understood and agreed. Of course she was also on her way to bed. It's easy to agree with just about any kind of plan for "tomorrow" when one is on one's way to bed. We'll see how it goes.

    Something else I wanted to mention. I think my phone message has offended someone to the point of causing us a problem. Yesterday while I was at Costco (gone maybe an hour and a half in the afternoon) one of the local flower shops attempted to deliver an arrangement to my mother from one of my sisters. I knew it was coming, waited a while but couldn't keep Mom up any longer. When she laid down I headed out. Naturally, the florist arrived 15 minutes before I got home, Mom was asleep and didn't hear the doorbell and the shop left a note asking me to call for an alternate delivery time. I did. I noticed, though, as I picked up the phone that the shop had also called to leave a message on voice mail which means they heard my message.
    Although the employee to whom I spoke wasn't the same employee who left a message (different gender), once I mentioned my name and address her delivery was curt and demanding. I faltered but didn't connect her attitude with my voice mail message. I figured it's been a long day for them, she's probably up to her ass in flowers and about ready to sit on a few arrangements. I took her attitude well and promised her we'd be home all day today except for a short sprint to pick up an Rx between 0800 and 0830. You'd think a florist's shop would attempt redelivery of an arrangement early the next day so the flowers remain fresh. This has been my experience. It has also been my experience that, on heavy business days, florist delivery trucks are on the road early-to-late. No delivery attempt was made today. I thought about calling but my internal, mean little holiday elf decided, nah, let's see how long it takes them to deliver, on purpose, an arrangement of wilted flowers, which I, of course, will refuse; let's see what excuse they invent for taking direct offense at us because of my voice mail message.
    My mother and I spent a fair amount of time today discussing "The Undelivered Flowers". She agreed that I not call. "They know what they're supposed to be doing," she said. "If they don't do it we don't accept the flowers and they don't get paid. What's the name of that shop? Your message [she's heard it; I insisted the day it was recorded that she listen to it] isn't that bad. If they can't deliver flowers in a timely fashion they shouldn't be in the business."
    It's great to have a mother who's always up for some decent trouble.
    I may be wrong, someone may have died, but despite this, if the arrangement is not as fresh as it should be I don't care what excuse they come up with, the arrangement will be refused and I'll immediately call MCS to report the problem, have her contact her florist and get her money back. Nothing like the possibility of some holiday fireworks to get me going! Apparently the same is true for my mother.