Taking Care of Parents and Retiring at the Same Time

This post originally appeared in the Cameron Herald on 2020-01-16.

Many people my age are trying to figure out how to care for aging parents with retirement staring them in the face. Some of us have already dealt with those issues. Some have it all sorted. Some don’t know where to start.

As this column goes along, I’ll talk more about helping elder parents—or ourselves—stay at home longer and remain more independent while doing so. Today, I just want to introduce myself and say a word or two about my new company, Hearts, Homes, and Hands.

As you can tell from the byline, my name is Ernest Lee Bruns. I’m a junior. I chose to retire from the corporate world several years ago when I was caring for my father, who was in the last stages of cancer.

Dad taught me a lot about perseverance and tenacity. He always said, “Don’t let that old rockin’ chair get you.” He didn’t. He planted and cared for forty acres of corn the year he died. He was 92 years old, and this was his second bought with cancer. When he was in the hospital for the last time, he was more worried about his corn than anything else. The first thing he asked when he came out from his final round of chemo was about the yield.

When the doctors allowed him to go home to die, my nephew Chris and I knew we had more on our hands than we could handle and still do this wonderful man justice—even with the help of hospice and home health. Chris hired a personal assistance service to help with bathing and other needs.

I’m proud to say Dad died at home, surrounded by people who loved him and cared for him. He could look out his bedroom window and see the house where he was born 92 years before.

When Sue Ann and I started planning how we would wind down our final years without putting an undue burden on the kids, we were surprised to find out there wasn’t a state licensed and insured personal assistance service (PAS) around. From where we live, the closest ones were in Bryan/College Station or Temple. Standard has the home health and hospice support covered, but if we needed help staying at home—help with housekeeping, running errands, cooking, bathing, and so on—we’d either have to ask the kids to give up part of their lives or hire someone privately.

When you hire individuals, you’re responsible for their unemployment insurance, for their medical bills if they get hurt in your service, and for finding a replacement if they fail to show up. None of this is something we wanted to do while we were struggling to take care of ourselves or each other. You have enough on your mind at that point without worrying about finding someone to help your loved one get to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

We called my niece Kathleen to see if she wanted to help us start a PAS. She had been the administrator of the PAS Chris hired to help take care of Dad and had more than a decade of experience running a successful PAS in Victoria. She and Chris fell in love and got married the year after Dad died, but that’s another story. She came up to Cameron; we came to agreement; and Hearts, Homes, and Hands was born.

Hearts, Homes, and Hands is licensed and regulated by the state of Texas. We are responsible for providing the care you need. We’ll be there for you, even if the person originally scheduled has a “family emergency” or something and can’t show up. We cover their workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance if they get hurt and do everything necessary to ensure your peace of mind—at least with regard to caring for yourself or a loved one.

And the bottom line is this: I’m not just an owner of the company, I’m a client. We take care of you like we take care of our own—in this case, Sue Ann and me.

A Little Better

The newest calf in Dad’s herd

Chris and I arrived at the hospital after Dr. W. had come in to talk to Dad. We were running late because a bad mama cow had come up for water without her baby, and we took a while to find it in the grazer patch and drive it back up to the shady water trough where the cattle like to hang out during the heat of the day. The last thing we wanted to have to tell Dad this morning was that we had lost his new calf.

Dr. W. had told Dad he had to stay another night in the hospital. Dad took this news with surprising aplomb. The he told us the CT scan had revealed no metastasis. Dr. W. says Dad has “a long time,” whatever that means. While I know he can’t predict the future, I’m much happier with “a long time” than I would be with “a few months.” Or less.

Some of the 23 bales of hay that awaited our return to the farm

By late afternoon, I was glad that they were keeping Dad another night. He woke up from his afternoon siesta in a very crotchety mood. He was down on everything. Yesterday’s surgery and a lack of deep sleep had caught up with him. He was too weak to get out of bed without help (never mind that he is 89, and many his age have trouble like this without the excuse of surgery—or cancer). He went through a litany of all things the medical profession had done to ruin his life. Then he got started on lawyers.

I hate it when he is unhappy like this. His pain pains me, too. So, I try to find something positive to say, but he wasn’t having anything to do with that. All I could do was sit quietly and listen without comment until he wore himself down. When he returned from a long phone call, Chris finally got Dad turned onto happier subjects.

We left shortly after dinner because Dad was tired and wanted to turn in early. We got back to the farm to find 23 round bales of hay had been baled in our absence—not bad for a 20 acre paddock being grazed by nine head.

…Just Not Today

Chris and Jim wait with me for Dad to wake up. This is very stressful for all of us, but Jim wears the strain more publicly.

I am at Citizens Hospital—now called Citizens Medical Center because it has expanded so much—in Victoria, Texas because Dad is having another probing session with Dr. W. It has been scheduled for months, but I don’t like taking chances by not being here.

I drove Chris and Dad in for the 06:00 appointment, which is an hour earlier than usual. (All that meant was we had more time to wait before the actual procedure would start.) Jim and Waynette drove in from Angleton. I came in last night, which meant I missed Suna’s return from North Carolina, where she went to help Kynan drive back from a summer internship with Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

Once they finally got started about 8:30, the procedure went a little longer than the expected hour. Dr. W. gave us the news in a small office off the waiting room. The tumors have continued to grow and now take up almost the entire volume of the bladder. He was able to resect much of the tumor on the left lateral wall, but the one on the right was too hard to cut. He had spent the extra time trying to clear as much of the tumors as he could.

He said Dad needs more radiation, but the radiologist says Dad has already had all the radiation he can take. Dad has already reacted badly to the milder form of chemotherapy available for this type of aggressive cancer. The remaining chemotherapy option probably won’t extend his life but would be seriously detrimental to his quality of life. Dr. W. wants to perform a CT scan tomorrow morning to see if any metastasis has occurred.

We all agree that whatever happens next is Dad’s call. Our only concern is to make the remainder of his long life as happy and comfortable as humanly possible.

It took longer for Dad to come out of recovery than we expected, too. Waynette and I began to worry that the delay might be caused by a recurrence of the painful bladder spasms that he experience on a previous procedure. Turns out we were right. That level of pain takes a lot out of Dad. We got him up to his room and went to lunch to allow him to sleep off the anesthesia in peace.

After lunch, we stayed in the waiting room until he woke up. Jim and Waynette went back to Angleton. Chris and I stayed with Dad to wait for Dr. W. to come by. When he did, he was more optimistic than he had been immediately after surgery, just not much. I can’t imagine what Dad is going through right now.

We stayed with Dad until his normal 21:00 bed time. We didn’t talk much on the way back to the farm. What is there to say?

New Corn

The corn Dad planted just in time for the rains is popping out of the ground.

We went to visit Dad this weekend. Suna did a great job documenting much of the trip in the Ursula blog. So, I’ll just hit on a couple of the high points.

• Dad now has his doctor’s blessing to take himself off all his medications. He is completely done with his radiation, and no more chemo. Yay!
• Dad is getting his strength and appetite back. He basically (not quite) cleaned his plate at both Aunt Di’s and Don Bravo’s. (To be fair, I could’t clean my plate at DB’s.
• Between Dad, Chris, and the rain, the farm is looking better than I can remember seeing it. It is good to hear Dad talking about doing things for the future of the farm.

Cancer and John Deere

Dad and Chris discuss farm things while we wait for Dad’s new John Deere to be delivered. This should have been our first indication of what kind of day we were in store for. The smoke the driver is pointing to was actually on the other side of Cuero—more than 20 miles away The driver carries the Slow-Moving-Vehicle placard to install on Dad’s new, larger tractor while Dad wanders over to kick the tires. Chris points out something about the tractor controls as Dad moves hay. Chris buries the last of the burning hay after the fire is contained. At lest the sunset was spectacular. Maybe it was just a new appreciation of the sunset. After a long, stressful day, Dad concedes we need to take him to the Emergency Room.

This date was supposed to be an auspicious one for weddings, movies, and other things. It certainly turned out to be eventful.

I got a call the day-before-yesterday that Dad’s cancer had returned. Chris had taken him in for some tests, and they were going to keep him over night. There was a lot of anxiety and gloom in the message. The doctor felt it safer to err on the side of pessimism. I told Suna and my boss that I would do what I needed to do to tide my work project (a conference call with Singapore and some paperwork) for a few days. Then I would head to Yorktown to hear from the doctor first-hand what was going on.

It turned out that I was at the office until after 21:00, so I didn’t head out until work-time yesterday. I got the hospital just after the doctor made his rounds and determined Dad could go home. The prognosis was still very pessimistic, but Dad was chomping at the bit to get home to his cows. So we headed that direction. We did get him to eat at Whataburger on the way. He slept most of the afternoon, and we all went to bed early.

The big deal for this morning was that Dad’s new tractor was being delivered. He was excited, despite being tired and complaining of problems with his catheter. Some minor adjustments, and he said everything was good. So we went outside to wait.

Dad couldn’t stop talking about the new tractor. He listed all of the features it had that the old one didn’t. He was especially proud that after using the old tractor for three years, the dealership offered him a thousand more in trade than he paid for it to begin with. When it arrived, a huge smile broke through the fatigue covering his face.

The driver unloaded the new tractor and got it set up while the salesman talked with Dad and Chris about a spreader Dad wanted. It had been laying in the yard for almost two years and had accumulated some sun damage, which resulted in some small breakage around the edge. Dad finally agreed to take it as-is for the price the salesman said he couldn’t reduce.

After they left, Dad was agitated that he couldn’t play with his new toy. Chris and I finally gave in. We decided that if he left it in turtle mode, it wouldn’t be any rougher than riding in a car. Dad climbed in to the cab. You could feel the joy radiating out of that tractor as he moved the eleven bales of hay that comprised the total output for the year. The drought hit hard, even though Yorktown has had more rain than the Hill Country.

After the hay was all lined up neatly along the fence, Dad wanted to hook up his disc so it would be ready when he was able to work the fields. That’s where the trouble began. The bold that forms the top pivot of the three-point connection was rusted solid. A spark from cutting that bolt loose set the grass under the implant alight. The fire spread quickly as dry grass fires are prone to do.

Neighbors were showing up to help within just a few minutes. The woman from across the road got Dad to sit in her pickup while Chris and I, soon to be joined by others, fought the fire as best we could until the fire department arrived. We may have had it mostly contained, but we would not have been able to hold without the massive amounts of water they could dump—much more than the puny water hose I was using.

All-in-all, we lost only a couple of acres of dry grass, but we lost half of the hay crop. We would have lost it all if Chris hadn’t driven the tractor through the fence and pushed the unburnt bales into the empty field across the driveway. Chris showed he could make the tractor dance while fighting the fire. The house was unharmed as were most of the implements. Two of the rubber wheels on the planter melted, as did the valve stem on a tire that must have been 20-years-old. Very little damage indeed considering the potential for disaster.

After Chris finished burying the last of the burning hay, we went inside and ate some pulled poke tacos for dinner. The meat came out of a plastic tub. The tortillas were store-bought, and the cheese was the lowest-price sliced variety at the store. It was delicious.

Then Dad said he thought we needed to go to the emergency room. His doctor was out, but the answering service said to have the ER nurse call his on-call when we got there. It turns out that the anti-clotting medicine they had prescribed for Dad causes the clots to become gummy, and one had plugged the catheter, causing Dad a lot of pain. They decided to keep him over night to make sure all of the clots were cleared out.

A Day Waiting in the Hospital

Citizens as it looked when I was born. It’s more modern now, and it takes up more than a block.Photo source: Ancestry.com

I know I haven’t been keeping this blog up. But here’s the setup: Dad needed minor surgery, and I made the trip to wait with him. I had parked the RV there on a previous trip, so all I had to do was get there. This is the day of the surgery.

Early morning this! Dad needed to be at Citizens Hospital—it has now self-promoted to a Medical Center—around 07:30, so we had to be off about an hour earlier. That isn’t difficult for early risers like Chris and Dad, but for us former alleged musician types, it’s closer to the time we’d rather head for bed than the time we’re programmed to arise—no matter how much reconditioning we’ve done in the years since. We piled into the Black Dodge, and Chris was kind enough to stop for coffee before we got out of Yorktown.

We made it to the hospital and got dad checked into his waiting room. (His procedure would normally be day surgery, but The Doctor wanted to keep him overnight because of the remonteness of Da Farm. But nobody had told the hospital that. Or nobody who mattered.) And there we waited—Dad formost, but also Chris, my brother Jim, his wife Waynette, and me.

08:00

08:30

09:00

09:06—They came to take Dad away. We walked him to surgery. We were told the procedure would take a little less than an hour, and recovery would take another hour. Then we could find Dad in his Day surgery room. (Remember the bit about nobody telling the hospital about The Doctor wanting to keep Dad overnight?) So we went to breakfast, barely making it to the commissary before the gates (literal gates) were closed at 09:30.

For those of you unfamiliar with Victoria (and who really is?), the commissary at Citizens hospital is something else. Many locals make it an dining destination. So much for the myth of bad hospital food! We all had hearty American breakfasts filled with too much bacon and too many carbs. We ate like that one meal would have to hold us all day even though we didn’t yet know the truth of that.

10:15—We went back up to Surgery to wait for a status update.

10:25—The Doctor told us everything went well and he had taken “random biopsies” to check for any tumerous recurrances. We would just have to wait for Monday (if the stars align in a way that rearranges the fabric of space-time but doesn’t open a portal for the return of the Old Ones, and everything else goes well) or later (more likely) to know what the next steps in Dad’s treatment plan will be.

Citizens has an aquarium filled with really interesting fish like this neon blue thing. The aquarium is in the waiting area near my favorite napping spot.

11:15—We started asking where they will take Dad so we can be there. “The day surgery room where they got him from.”

“But,” we explained again, “The Doctor wants to keep him overnight.” Of course, nobody the people in surgery were aware of that. They directed us to Admitting. Admitting doesn’t know about post surgical room assignments. “That’s all handled by the Surgical nurse.” This time we asked a different Surgical Staffer, who verified that post surgical room assignments were indeed handled by Sugical Staff when the patient is ready to leave Recovery. A few minutes later, she tells us, “He'll be in 638. They’ll be bringing him out in a few minutes, and you can follow him up there.”

This little fella is waiting at the farm supply for someone to take him home. My friends tell me his name is Buford, and kids love to ride him and practice roping.

11:55—True to her word, a few minutes later, we saw Dad wheeling by and start to follow. But the elevator ws full. No worries; we kew the room number. We caught the next ride up to the sixth floor and begin looking for him. Unfortunately, there is no room 638. We all confirmed that we had all heard the same number. Then we found him in 628. He was still on another plane, phasing in and out of our reality, so we each told him we love him and we’ll let him sleep it off in peace. Then we drove off to buy fertilizer.

13:30—We found Dad still sound asleep and went downstairs to wait and inadvertantly nap.

15:00—We returned to find Dad somewhat awake. We spent the next few hours watching him gradually shake off the anesthesia and rejoin our world. We joked and told old stories and picked at each other mercilessly—you know: the kind of things families do to pretend they are not having the shit stressed out of them.

18:45—They brought Dad dinner. We made a show out of telling him what there was and getting the nutritionist to “sell him the menu” instead of just saying, “here’s food.” If you offer Dad something to eat, he’ll invariably say, “No, I’m not hungry right now.” But if you tell him what it is, he’ll realize he likes whatever is being served and start to take interest.

After getting him to eat a little of his dinner, we could that he was starting to get tired. We bid him a fond adeiu (or is it a bon fondu?) and headed off to eat too much at a new Chineese buffet. Our old favorite Chineese buffet is now a Mexican buffet—still run by the same Chineese staff. Imagine that.

20:15—We made it to the farm. Chris spread the fertilizer he bought earlier and put 400 gallons of water on the Jiggs he is sprigging over the pipeline right of way. Jim and Waynette went to bed in Dad’s trailer. Chris and I stayed up talking about nothing in particular until way too late.

The Viewing

Caption: Photo by:

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The Viewing was hard. It was the first time in several years I had seen Dot or many of the relatives there. Sadness abounded. But we each had an opportunity to say a private good-bye. I was proud that my brother held up well.

Of course, Dot’s kids—Kay, Cindy, Bobby, Jan, and Glen—were all there. My niece Gaylene drove in with her husband and mother. There were lots of great nieces, great nephews, and their kids. Dot’s former boss drove in, and Kay’s current boss, who also knew Dot, was there, too.

Cindy works at the local Best Western, and her boss comped all the rooms for the family. I thought that was a kindness above and beyond. I certainly appreciated the gesture, even though I did’t stay there.

Afterward, we gathered at the Boot Hill RV Resort where I had a space next to my nephew Chris’s bus. Chris and I went to Wally World, and he bought a bunch of stuff to serve at the wake. He broke a smoker, table, and other supplies out of his bus and set up a Wii for the kids, many of whom were too young to understand what was going on.

It sure was fun (and soothing) watching the kids run around and play while Chris grilled burgers and dogs. The adults spend time catching up on the intervening years and slowly coming to terms with mortality.

When we get settled, I’ll post a bunch of the pictures on Facebook.

John Deere Green

Dad sits in his new tractor.

See the album on Facebook.

This was a long Saturday. I started, as usual, by oversleeping. Mom once gave me a plaque for my bedroom door that reads, “There has to be a better way to start out the day than by getting up in the morning.”

Suna had a beading class in the afternoon. So after reviewing the calendar earlier this week, I determined that this would probably be the only weekend this month that I could make the trip down—even a day trip.

Other than just seeing Dad again, I wanted to meet his new tractor. After five years of arguing with him, we were finally able to talk him into the tractor. Not only does he deserve the new tractor, he needs it to be able to stay on the farm and continue working it. He hasn’t had air conditioning in his old tractor for several years. I believe this lack contributed to and worsened his recent health problems.

Chris and Beth were again spending the weekend at the farm. Chris was busy fixing things that, being neither a farmer nor a welder, I had no idea how to fix. He built a couple of new stands for Dads implements. Dad had been propping these implements on rickety collections of scrap lumber and stone.

After lunch, Beth and I drove into Victoria to buy a connector I needed to hook up speakers to the new TV Chris gave Dad a couple of weeks ago. It took much longer than I thought because we made several pointless stops, learning, among other things, that the Radio Shack in Cuero no longer exists and that the Best Buy in Victoria Mall is a dark and scary place.

While we were doing that Dad took a nap and Chris fixed the generator on Dad’s friend Robert’s antique tractor. By the time he got back, I had smoked sausage coming off the grill, and Beth had made another big batch of Grandma’s German sweet rice. Chris was a little miffed that we hadn’t called to rescue him. He spent five hours total for a half-hour’s work.

I headed home about 22:30, glad that I had taken the truck even though I didn’t see any deer on the side of the road. Maybe I should be glad because I didn’t see any deer. You’re more likely to hit the ones you don’t see.

Farewells

My nephew Chris made the trek from Bozo’s Port. He and his wife went back early Sunday via my Dad’s.

Photo by: Parker

After the wedding, Suna and I honeymooned at a local hotel, where we had champagne as a midnight snack and for breakfast. Sweetness and Suna’s family joined us for brunch at the hotel. Sweetness went home to her kids from the hotel, and we went home and spent a quiet day catching up on important things like Facebook and family.

Today we said goodbye to the Prince and Suna’s sister. We dropped the Prince off at the airport and went to lunch with SS at the new Kirby Lane. The food is as good as ever, but they have completely ruined the atmosphere. The interior of the new restaurant seems to be designed to amplify the least sound enough to raise the ambient noise level past the threshold of pain. This was at 13:30, and the room was far from full.

We left after a tasty but deafening meal and visited the Amish Furniture store down the sidewalk. Then we took SS back to the house to pick up her rental car and said farewell.

Everyone eventually made it home safely, and our house is returning to its “normal” levels of chaos.

So this week I am grateful to have formed a new family and to feel so welcome in it. I am grateful to everyone who traveled to attend Thanksgiving and the wedding—and to everyone one who just crossed town. I am grateful to everyone—Parker, SS, Elizabeth, and many others—who helped the wedding come of smoothly. And I am grateful to be able to enjoy some relative peace and quiet at home again.