WOMEN AGES 50+ FOR APRIL 2020

Loved getting to know many of you a little better, thank you to all the answers to both mine and Machka's questions.

Isn't it funny how we assume our experience is the same as everyone? Witness Heather's tomato fetish.

As for me, I grew up with Sonic Drive-Ins. On Friday nights that was the place all the boys would go cruising, either with their girlfriends or their buddies, and drive pickup trucks that were far too loud up to circle the Sonic to see who was there and who wasn't, and then do the same thing at the only strip mall in town, where there was a certain section of the parking lot called "The Sittin' Hole," where you would talk to other people. The conversations were from your cars/trucks mind you. If someone actually got out of a vehicle, it was probably to start swinging punches. American car and truck culture wasn't just pervasive, it was unavoidable. If you were walking around town you were busted broke, or just broke up, or your vehicle just broke down. It was never a good thing.

If I seem nostalgic, it's only because it was a time when I was incredibly innocent, not because it was such a good time for me. Vivid memories, but snapshots, times of high emotion, whether good or bad.

On the subject of emotion, I can't help thinking of my sister-in-law, Brigh. Her 28-year-old daughter committed suicide last weekend. I never met the daughter, but of course my husband did, and of his six sisters, Brigh is my husband's favorite, so it broke his heart. One of our board members who I think so much of also lost her 34-year-old son in an accident this weekend.

One author said, "In the English language, there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parent whose child dies." We literally have no words for the fulfillment of our worst fear.

Pensive in Arkansas,
Lisa

April 24, 2018 ... my husband got a speaking valve and could talk through the purple thing in his neck. At that point, his only word was "Yeah". He was also deep in Post Traumatic Amnesia and has absolutely no memory of this time.

But fortunately, he was breathing on his own and was not using a ventilator anymore. He had been on a ventilator for almost a month. I've got a pretty good idea what it takes to keep a person breathing ... and the exhaustion a person feels trying to breath on their own when they start to wean off the ventilator.

In addition to spending about a month on a ventilator, he also had pneumonia just about the entire time. They had tried so many different antibiotics and were becoming worried because he wasn't getting better. But they did tell me that once he was able to sit up, he should start to recover from the pneumonia ... and he did.

My experience with a nebuliser is this. At times the nurses had to remove the speaking valve to suction and attach a nebuliser.




Given his accident and resulting circumstances 2 years ago, we are both a bit worried about COVID-19. So we're trying to follow the suggestions I made in an earlier post.


Machka in Oz