With so much crap going on, I was relieved to enjoy a few small victories of late.

Here's the biggie:

I brought Waldo to the vet Tuesday and he discovered an infection in his mouth and some teeth that have to be pulled. He gave him some antibiotics at the office and gave me a syringe to do the rest myself. Uh, yeah. A dropperful of bad-tasting meds in Waldo's mouth? I don't think so. I did manage to give him the meds twice (he's supposed to get them twice a day), but he was so traumatized by it that he began jumping off the bed and hiding under it whenever I walked into to the bedroom. I felt terrible, and I wondered how I'd get him back to the vet for the teeth extraction this Tuesday.

I asked the vet if the meds were something I might put in his food, like I do now with his thyroid medication, and he said no,, it tastes real bad and that he had himself tasted it once. So I dropped the idea then, but after the two terrible episodes giving Waldo his meds, I decided to pick up a can of tuna fish on my way home tonight. I mixed just a half a dropperful of his meds with a liberal amount of tuna juice, and guess what? He lapped it all up, with relish! Success! I got him to lap up the 2nd half of the dropperful with some more tuna juice.

Can't tell you how relieve I am that I don't have to traumatize Waldo anymore!!! Phew. What a relief. I didn't know how much it was stressing me out until he drank that tuna juice.

The next big success, in my book, is that today I was able to order a "scoot" chair for my mother and with their Quick Ship program she should have it by end of next week.

She'll be discharged to Masonicare my town this Monday so she'll just have to go without it for 5 days and hopefully no falls in the meantime.

It cost $1400 but it doesn't matter because the money's coming out of my mother's funds, which in any event will be completely sucked up by the nursing home in the next 10 months. The chair sits very low to the ground and can be inclined quite a bit, making it harder for someone to get up out of the chair from a sitting position. It's not a guarantee she'll never fall again, but it seemed to make a very big difference.

Anyway, this chair is so popular they can't keep it in stock. It's made in Canada. Note to self: Buy their stock. But by going with the vinyl version instead of fabric, they had 2 in stock so I got one of the two. The social worker at Wallingford spoke very highly of it.

The same nurse suggested I look into adjustable height beds, for the same reason, preventing falls, and lo and behold this is one thing Masonicare in my hometown already has, so I don't have to buy one of those.

I was hoping next Wednesday, a paid holiday for me cus it's Veterans Day, would be a day to myself, but I had to schedule doing all the paperwork for the nursing home admission with Kristen there that day. It will just be in the a.m. so hopefully I can relax after that. Relax being a relative term.

The other bit of good news is that the woman at Masonicare assisted living said yes, we can donate my mother's 2nd dresser to them. This will make tomorrow's move so much easier. (We donated the matching other dresser to Maplewood when we moved her out of there. It was my friend Dave's suggestion, and a good one. Those dressers are like 50 years old. They're in great shape and very undated looking becus they have plain maple fronts and no hardware, but I JUST DONT HAVE ROOM FOR THEM. So they're gone. We'll only have to move the twin bed/headboard (I just bought it for mom last May) and I will use bed as a daybed, and a very nice old table my mother used as her dining room table. And the clothes, and the art on the walls.

I NEVER WANT TO MOVE STUFF AGAIN.

I think this time, after the move, Dave and I can actually go out and enjoy some lunch. I do plan on driving out to see my mother in Wallingford later in the day, even though she's coming back here Monday, just becus I haven't seen her since last weekend.