A Happy New Year

My last post covered Tuesday so there are a couple of days to catch up with.

On Wednesday Margaret felt well enough to go out to lunch for her, present, favourite meal, sizzling garlic prawns. Prawn are the in food with her and she enjoyed her lunch. At home her bedroom ceiling fan was making terrible noises and would only run on one speed. Her in Noosa we rarely get the searing heat of South Australia (40C/104F) but with our high humidity even 30C/86F is uncomfortable. We try not to use our air conditioning too much and use the ceiling fans at night. On the way home we visited the local hardware store and purchased a replacement fan.

When we got home, after switching off the power, I installed the new controller and started to assemble the new fan only to fine that the blade fixing kit had been left out of the package and I had two ceiling mounting kits instead. The old fan was identical to the new one and I was just going to put the old blades on the new fan body when I decided to see if the new controller worked. After switching on the power the old fan worked perfectly thus saving me having to get up on my steps, disconnect the old fan and mount the new one which is now a spare. There is some irony in that a new controller costs $30.00 and are difficult to find in a rural area such as Noosa and the complete fan (less blade fixing kit) was $40.00 on sale. I now have a spare fan body as a spare.

While I did this Margaret sat up in the lounge. On getting her to bed, cooled by a nice breeze from the now quiet fan I notice that her feet are both very swollen and the swelling extends up to the middle of her calf muscles. The normal treatment for this is diuretics but as these are banned at the moment and she is only having 1.2 litres of fluids a day she would end up dehydrated. She wouldn't let me take her to he GP on Thursday s0 I will have to keep a close watch on her over the weekend.

Thursday was a very quiet day with Margaret keeping her feet elevated as much as possible. We didn't stay up to welcome the New Year in and were tucked up by 10.00 pm.

Since Margaret has been out of hospital (7 days) it is noticeable that her mental state has improved. He memory is still shot but her hallucinations are much reduced. We have had some quite normal conversations. She still can't concentrate enough to read book and I don't think she gets very much out of the TV in spite of watching it most of the day. She can't make head nor tail of her favourite Computer Game, The Sims. Apparently even simulated family life is beyond her capability. She used to play this for hours.

As I have noted above Margaret's physical condition is deteriorating. She gets very breathless even just moving around the house on her wheely walker. Her feet are swollen and she is very unsteady when walking. I hope that I am not alarmist but I expect her blood tests to be poor and she will end up in hospital on a drip for dehydration and other problems. Time will tell.