The kids were in sleep-away camp this week, so S and I went to visit S's parents near Tampa. We mainly went to help out with logistical things, as my father-in-law as been sick the past few weeks, and he and my mother-in-law are struggling to keep up with all the appointments and paperwork and all that. I did my part by "fixing" the scanner. For some reason, it wasn't connecting to anything anymore, so I had to go through and get it to reconnect. All I did was follow some instructions I got online, but I've come to find that this is actually a pretty valuable skill. It sounds easy, and it is in theory, but in practice you can accomplish a lot by following instructions you find online. For one thing, it often takes some sage discernment to know which instructions to follow. For another, you actually have to have the patience, stick-to-tiveness, and adaptability to follow the instructions and stay with them when they don't map perfectly onto your situation -- and you have to know when to bail. That's important too. There is a bit of an art to it all.
But definitely S did the majority of the heavy-lifting. She spent hours with her parents, setting up accounts, logging into portals, going over documents, archiving files, etc. At one point, S's mom was worried that her email got hacked, so S went through with her and changed her passwords to all her accounts and set up two-factor authentication, so that they could only be accessed by receiving a texted code. It's yeoman's work, especially considering S's parents are not exactly the most tech-savvy duo in the world. It's amazing how people can be so smart, and yet be so slow when it comes to modern technology. I mean, my father-in-law was a successful nuclear engineer for decades, and yet he was absolutely flummoxed by trying to reset an email password. When it was asking for his old password, he kept putting in his computer password for some reason.
As if all this wasn't enough already, my in-laws' dishwasher is broken, and they are having some major plumbing issues in their bungalow. The water is turned off everywhere except the master bathroom, the kitchen, and the laundry room. So, we had one shower and one toilet available for all four of us for the week. It went more smoothly than I thought it would, though. There was never a moment that I know of when somebody needed to use the bathroom but it was occupied. As I remarked to my mother-in-law about the situation, "Everything is easier when you don't have kids around." Apparently, somebody is coming today to fix the water, and the dishwasher installation crew is scheduled to come out next week, so hopefully everything gets fixed in short order.*
*Update from S: The guy did not come to fix the water today. This is in large part my in-laws own fault, however. A few weeks ago, S's sister was visiting, and she found a company to come out and fix things, but their quote was too high, so my in-laws instead went with some random handyman who a friend of a friend knows. Unsurprisingly, the random handyman is not very reliable (and who knows what type of quality his work will be, anyway). This is a very much a my-in-laws thing to do. It reminds me of when they wouldn't fix their smoke detector, ever though it had been beeping every few seconds for weeks. They have this strong immigrant mentality and don't ever want to overpay for anything, which is admirable, but it's not an overpay if it will tangibly improve your life. Plus, we are not talking about poor people here. They have plenty of money in the bank. With everything else going on in your lives is the added stress of letting this drag on for months longer than it has to worth a few hundred dollars?
And much more importantly, hopefully my father-in-law starts feeling better soon. He doesn't let on to me about it, but I can tell he is quite miserable. The problem is with his kidneys. They aren't producing enough of some substance needed (whose name I can't remember) to filter some of the toxins in your body. So, he's feeling lousy all the time. It's like he's constantly hung over. And nobody seems to know exactly what to do about it -- that's the worst part. There is some medication he can take, but it's only recently approved by the FDA. It's not a tried-and-true cure, and like all medications, its benefits must be weighed against its side effects. It could possibly adversely affect the liver, which would be really awful, as my father-in-law's liver is probably picking up some of the slack from his bum kidneys. Without a well-functioning liver it would almost certainly be even worse. So, right now he seems hesitant to go down the medication route.
That leaves diet as the only other feasible option. Apparently, there are certain foods that can make this condition better or worse, and so the idea is to eat a lot of the former and not much of the latter. This is not a great option either, though, even if it will work. As anybody who has tried to lose weight knows, changing your diet over the long-term is super difficult, and this goes many times over, when you are an 82-year-old man, who has pretty much never prepared his own food before. S's mom will surely help him with this, but she has her own way of preparing food. It's cultural and personal and deeply ingrained, and I don't know how easy it will be for her to change in this regard, either.
My father-in-law has an appointment with a nephrologist (a doctor who specializes in kidney issues, if, like me as of two weeks, you don't know what this means) next week, and then after that he is going to confer with S's cousin in India, who is a doctor, and then he will go from there. All we can do in the meantime -- or at any time, really -- is hope for the best. Right now, it's all a grim and unwanted dose of reality. Nobody wants to think that their last n years on this mortal coil will be spent feeling like shit, eating bland food, bogged down by endless healthcare logistics, being asked to make impossible decision after impossible decision about your health, while at the same time being completely dependent on others. But that's the way it is sometimes.
Philosophically, it's quite depressing if you think about it too much, and that's why I try not to think about it too much. I'm very much an optimist, and the positive spin on stuff like this is to tell yourself That's why you find joy now, wherever you can find it, while you still can. Witnessing the inevitable decline of somebody you care about isn't a reason to despair about death, it's a reason to double-down on the celebration that we exist at all. To that end, I got Queen Bee in the NYT Spelling Bee game the other day, and I feel pretty happy with myself for it. After all, it's the little things, right?
Until next time...
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