the crips and the phlegms or what happens when you put a parent in assisted living

this has been quite a week for the flipflop fed. it all started benignly enough with recovery act report reviews and that lasted all of 2 hours before my world changed dramatically. my mom called a little before 9:00 am to say that she had been taken by ambulance to the emergency room the night before because she couldn't breathe. turns out she has pneumonia and was released in the middle on the night after some breathing treatments and a vicodin. of course, i felt bad, but since there was little i could do from my cubicle in the sky, i returned to reviewing reports. i pretty much stayed focused until my mom called again - that's when it all began.

after getting up from her vicodin snooze, my mom headed downstairs to get some coffee and it was there that she found my father unresponsive and slumped at the kitchen table. i'm going to leave out most of the next four days because it's just a lot of hospital stuff, but i will tell you that his sugar count was 39 when the ambulance arrived and he was in full-blown congestive heart failure. in his time at the hospital they were able to regulate his sugar and remove the equivalent of 17 lbs. of water from his body. he clearly had not been taking his medicine.

taking in to account all that has happened over the past 9 months, we decided as a family that my dad should be discharged to assisted living. the transition has been remarkably smooth - he's eating again and participating in taking his medicine. but the best parts are really all of the funny stories from the first few days -

he's one of the younger people there and all of the old biddies call him the "young fellow."

his newest friend is a 104 year old guy who doesn't look a day over 80.

he's taking a rug hooking class.

after being told that there are two wings to the building - east and west - i asked if there were gangs. my father quickly replied -"yeah. the crips and the phlegms."

humor definitely makes an incredibly difficult situation all that much easier.