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Dr K’s Caregiver Chronicles
Diverting Tales of a Reluctant Caregiver: The Start
It’s 7:33 am on a sunny Saturday morning in September. The dew glistens on the fresh blades of grass in my parents’ front yard. Crimson blossoms are reappearing on the four massive rose bushes guarding the porch. Ivy-leaf morning glories entwine their ocean-blue flowers among the roses. The flowers had all seemed done for the season, but now they’re back. And where am I, a night owl if there ever was one, while all this loveliness sings the glories of nature’s morn?
I am inside using a heavy-duty clipper to trim the twisted toenails on my parents’ gnarled 90-year-old feet. Occasionally, I glance at my own unclad feet, praying my toes take a genetic left turn away from the paths my parents’ digits have trodden.
I do have a few things working in my favor. My medium, size sevens on a 5'6” frame are more proportional and I’ve always bought shoes that fit. Mom always had trouble finding shoes for her wide, size-ten feet. Plus, there was the vanity thing. Huge feet on a 5'3” body wasn’t terribly dainty. So, in denial, she’d buy too-small shoes. And there was the fashion thing. By the time she found out that cute shoes could fit, the damage was done.
Dad’s issues are not vanity-based. His nails curl, causing a lifelong pattern of ingrown toenails. What with the curling and the diabetes hardening and the aging, they are much more challenging to cut. Were it not for Covid, with no vaccine available, I’d be taking them both for pedicures or podiatry visits, but that’s not in the mix now. Clip! Clip! The pieces of horn fly onto the newspapers spread on the floor. After all, stepping on one of those clippings could put you in the hospital updating your tetanus shot.
Why am I here at the crack of dawn staring at podiatric monstrosities? I’m a Stanford-educated musicologist. Tenured full professor. This is not the life I planned. But. I’m the eldest of four siblings. My sister runs a Domestic Violence shelter in Nashville, an hour away. Because she’s exposed to so many needy women in the Covid pre-vaccine era, she can’t take the risk of visiting our parents. My brothers, autistic twins, are staying in a good situation with a couple that specializes in “family model” care. That leaves me.
So, I stop looking for full-time or even part-time work among the many colleges in and around Clarksville, an attractive town in the rolling hills of Middle Tennessee, a town I’d left decades ago after surviving desegregation.
Oh well, if I survived desegregation in the birthplace of the Klan, I can survive caregiving for the hard-working, confidence-inspiring parents who had supported my successes. Right? Right?
Famous last words, the first in my tales of horror.
The Tale of the Parents Who Cried Out in the Night
We have an audio monitor in my parents’ room. Cecilia, our first and only attempt at a live-in caregiver, has the receiver upstairs at night. At 3:35 a.m., my dad calls me in a panic. Both he and Mom feel sick and Mom has fallen on the carpeted floor. My cottage is catty-cornered behind them so, throwing on some clothes and walking into their back door takes all of six minutes. Of course, I’m moving at warp speed, so there’s that.
When I get there, it’s like entering gastric Thunderdome. The stench is horrible. My parents? Pitiful. Dad, sitting in the bed, ashamed. Mom, sprawled on the carpet, moaning. Cecilia, dead asleep upstairs.
First, I’ve got to suit up like a hazmat team member. Gloves, trash bags, Lysol wipes, Mr. Clean, mop, vacuum, and carpet cleaner for the room. Warm water, washcloths, body wash, and clean clothes for the parents. It takes twenty minutes to take off their filthy clothes and clean them up, seating Dad on the bathroom commode and, after leveraging her up off the floor, seating Mom in her wheelchair.
Then? Time to change their bedclothes. After scraping into the toilet, I’ve got to rinse most of the bedding and pajamas in the bathtub before I dare try to wash them. After all, I don’t want the washer to give up in despair in the wee hours.
I’ve gotten them re-dressed and given each a healthy dose of Pepto-Bismol with a melatonin chaser. I’ve cleaned their bedside pots, including the frames; mopped up the mess on the carpeted floor; applied carpet cleaner, let it dry, vacuumed it up; dusted the carpet with Carpet Fresh; sprayed the whole crime scene with Lysol; made their bed; and gotten them re-situated comfortably.
My mother, suddenly coherent, wants me to turn on the TV which, besides sugar, is their only other addiction. “Do you know what time it is?!?” I’m within a hair of adding “Bitch, please!” to the front of that sentence, but despite the strain, what we call in the South, my “home training” holds firm.
“Where did you get candy?” I inquired with what might have been a touch, the merest hint, of asperity in my voice. I’d seen “sugar-free” candy wrappers every which way as I mopped and scrubbed and disinfected. “Niecy sent it.” My sister had snuck a bag into a care package of Depends with overnight protection and bed pads. Dad, knowing he shouldn’t have it, hid the candy, and he and my mom had a sugar kegger after Cecilia had gone to bed. I put a pin in that revelation, determined to verbally pound my sister into mush at a later date. I’ve told her and Dad that not all sugar-free goods are the goods. Some are worse than sugar. Mallitol, this sweetener, had blown their frail elderly systems to bits.
By this time, I’ve peeled off my gloves and let the wall prop up my exhaustion. The melatonin is kicking in and they’re nodding off. I flick out the lights, pick up the garbage bags, and leave the room to the tune of Dad’s barely audible “Thank you,” which almost breaks me. My career military father rarely thanks anybody for anything. When friends ask why I didn’t make Cecilia get up, this is why: Too humiliating for my parents.
Slipping out the back door, I drop the bulging garbage bags in the trash shed before trudging back to my cottage. Cecilia sleeps the whole time.
The next day, she has the nerve to say, “Why didn’t you get me up?” My right palm — you know the one you slap people with? — was itching like a triple blend of poison ivy, oak, and sumac. Yet, once more, my “home training” overcame my baser instincts.
As stress relief, I start chronicling my adventures in eldercare. This started as a one-off rant, but now — 368 pages later — it has transformed, transformed like my relationship with my parents, like my life trajectory, like my sense of self.
Today there’s good news: Dad has half-filled his catheter bag, the remnant of a recent hospital stay. Other people pray for rain, I’ve been praying for pee. That’s where I am on this sunny Tuesday morning in December, six years later.
