Y Usted?

So I secretly wish I could write these daily stories as episodes of Days of Our Lives. Or better still, a telanovella. Maybe you could read with an accent in your head. Or maybe you could pretend all sentence endings alternated between question marks and exclamation points.

When last we visited the hospital...

Aunt's head was lolling back and forth in a stupor. The heavy meds have been halted but there is still unexplained stupor to diagnose. Possibly anesthesia that was slow to wear off, continued med reaction. They're doing tests. One frustrating bit is that the staff on the osteo floor doesn't have a sense of who she is when she's not sick in the way that the people on the telemetry floor did. To them, ranting old lady who can't feed herself is par for the course.

On the other hand, she was sure there were elephants behind her and when we finally left she kept pushing off the covers to join us to see the elephants. She also did not want to clean the pool at the lodge and laughed like she understood when I said greathusbandbob was not pregnant.

Goodhusbandbob told me that I sounded like I understood what she was talking about the whole time. I credit that with an amazing episode of NPR's This American Life in which they shared the story of an improv comedian talking in the now with his mother in law who was suffering from Alzheimer's. The moral of the story was meet them where they are and go where they take you.

Back at school...

My email-at least the parts about the potential grievances- was met with an email to all staff apologizing for rookie mistakes and thanking me (publicly) for heading her in the right direction. So. No more state policy is being violated but I've been informed that county policy says my scheduling assistance will no longer be needed and shouldn't have been employed in the first place. Which is sad. Because today I sat in a two hour meeting with four other people watching their brains catch up to the complications of the task- a learning curve I worked through around three years ago. It was like drowning in slow motion.

If you still have some sort of dramatic visualization going on in your head while reading, imagine (slow motion underwater if you want to go that far) an art teacher grabbing a discarded schedule out of the gym teachers hand because he kept referring to it to solve problems instead of the more recent schedule he was supposed to use.

In the category of self-care...

I feel like including this category is necessary mostly to remind myself that it's important.

Aunt's condition is such that I will be going back to hospital rather than to Zumba tomorrow night. I do have tennis shoes in the car and I may find a way to get my body active between school and hospital because.... Wait for it....not even kidding... My body says it feels like running and sweating. What the what???

My classroom is in the beginning of the year minimalist state that I love the best. I found some extra storage spaces and if I'm responsible (and pretend like I never did end of the day bus duty) I will be able to maintain a truly clutter free environment. At. School. I told the custodian and she laughed and laughed and laughed but perhaps she will rue the day.