Chapter 295 - Just a Week

We were ready for her to go to Physio on Monday afternoon, except she kept delaying, till she decided she was too stiff and pained to go, so rang and cancelled. Afternoons are far from her best times these days, although I vaguely recall until recently we avoided outside activities, postponing appointments and the like to afternoons. The opposite now seems the case. For instance, the earliest suitable appointment to see Dr Flower to jab her with Vitamin B12 was at 10am on Tuesday, even though that made her late for respite again. I parked across the street from the surgery and absent mindedly helped her out of the vehicle before I retrieved her walker from the boot (I usually assemble the walker first so that she has something to hold on to) and when I went to get the walker she said "Don't worry about it, I can do without." She took her 10am meds while waiting outside Dr Flower's room. Dr Flower complimented her on her walking unaided, seeing that as an improvement. I was tempted to invite Dr Flower to see her mid afternoon for comparison with mid morning.

Now almost mid-winter, we do without heating, although she is tending to wear a light cardigan. Just before 2pm meds on Thursday, she asked for help to remove the cardigan because she was sweating and very hot (her blouse was damp). So there she sat in her TV chair, reading, wearing only a light blouse and slacks until an hour or so later she was able to resume her sewing. She said she was tremoring so much, making herself hot. Later she replaced to cardigan.

I am concerned that she is experiencing cognitive difficulties. I think I mentioned her problems making the quilt where she worked for hours then had to un-pick her work and begin again and she seemed to be doing the same work over and over, although I did not too close notice. She has been having difficulties opening embroidery files to transfer to her Janome 10000 embroidery machine. I confess that the procedures are messy, although reasonable straightforward. Part of her problems are due to her never having really appreciated the relationships between folders, files and disks. Also she needs to use several applications for the embroidery work and with the march of time the embroidery machine is no longer supported later operating system so her old slow laptop is used as an interface to the machine. Then to save her the physical difficulty of plugging USB sticks into one laptop or the other, I set up a network drive to provide a pathway between her two lap tops, one on each side of the room, the old lap top next to the embroidery machine. She uses two software applications, a Janome one for the native format of the file type required by the embroidery machine and another (Buzz) for cataloguing and file editing. To my mind the whole mess is reasonably straight forward and if she performs tasks by rote she has little difficulty, yet the last week or so I have frequently been called, usually hours after she first experiences a problem, for which she seems to keep performing the same incorrect procedures over and over, to help her. Maybe we need to buy a new embroidery machine compatible with the latest operating system, at least that will remove some of the file transfer issues. However, now that she is showered and dressed I must help her resolve a problem she left last night, edited some files, saved them in the obviously incorrect format and then couldn't understand why the embroidery machine would not accept them. I am bothered that once a problem develops for her she seems unable to think laterally enough to escape the bind she is in. I expect too much of her.