Good morning, all!

I felt that after last week's bombshell I owed you all an update rather than eerily returning to my ordinary OTs like nothing had happened (I hate it when people do that, don't you?).

My mother's husband has been accepted to an assisted living facility with a locked-down memory care unit. This facility has been actively pursuing my mom to get her to put her husband there, but not (I think) in a creepy way. For instance, my mom was having trouble transporting him somewhere (I think a doctor's appointment) and the contact person at this facility commandeered the facility's bus to take him there. I'm usually distrustful of anyone trying to sell me this hard, but so far, things look good. They also have an affiliated companion service, a company that works almost entirely for them, meaning that my mother doesn't have to find a companion service and be their primary contact person. I don't know if that means they're going to provide companions 24/7, or just 12 hours a day, as it was at the last facility.

Now again, I should point out that all this costs, and costs plenty (you might be surprised how much). It would not be available to working-class people, nor, of course, the poor; it might not even be available to middle-class people less well-off or more encumbered with debt than we are. I try never to take my eyes off that fact. There are any number of intellectual pitfalls and moral bogs into which one can stray, particularly as an American, if you take your eyes off that fact even for an instant. Nevertheless, I'm glad that there is a facility that we can afford that looks like it might work.

At the hospital, they increased his dosage of anti-psychotic medication, something I feel should have been done long before, and I don't understand why his own doctor didn't do it. He's been hallucinating, speaking gibberish, and hasn't been recognizing, for instance, a human foot as something he shouldn't pick up in his hand. Also, he thought the kitchen counter was trying to kill him. At any rate, it's been done now. Initially, things looked like they were going well on the newly-adjusted medication, but then he didn't sleep at all night before last, so I don't think they consider him stabilized. However, the doctor at the assisted living facility is going to be tinkering with his medications anyway, so I'm cautiously optimistic.

Cross your fingers; I really hope this works. I'm not sure what the next step would be.

To all of you who have sent me messages of support; thank you so much. I'm going to get back to you personally; it's just that, in the midst of all this, I've also had to manage a long-distance land sale that required my mother's notarized signature, and it was very difficult to extract her from the business of dealing with her husband to get that signature. It was really important that we sell this land (which I had acquired years ago in an ill-advised attempt to start an ecovillage, but that's another story). We would have lost the deal if I didn't get the signed, notarized documents back to the real estate agents in Tennessee yesterday, so as you can imagine, my stress was through the roof. In the midst of this stress, knowing that you all care about me has been a mental oasis. I will be touching base with you soon.

How are you all today?