Thank you to all those of you who were praying about my migraine. I woke up without it today and it never came back! Also, I want to assure you that Mom and I are still friends. We’re never mad at each other for very long and we laugh about it later!
When I got to Dad’s house this morning, Dad and Elaine were telling me that both yesterday and this morning when Dad was trying to get out to the family room from his bedroom, his knees gave out from under him. Both times, he had his strap on and Elaine said that she was able to soften his fall. Dad knows that he will soon have to give up sleeping in his own bed and start using the hospital bed.
After Elaine left for her women’s Bible study group, I made some lunch for Dad and myself and put it on the table, but I heard rustling coming from the family room. When I went out there, Dad was trying to get himself up off the couch, so I helped him stand up so that he could use his walker. When he first got up, I could see that his knees were bent and it took a few moments for him to straighten them. I walked him into the dining room, and just before he got to his chair, he said, “Maybe I should go to the bathroom before we sit down to eat. I started to try to help him back up with his walker and he said, “I don’t think I can walk that far!” I had him sit down on a chair while I went to get his wheelchair and help him into it. Then I wheeled him down the hall to the bathroom. When he was done, I wheeled him back to the table and we ate lunch.
I told Dad that I had something I needed to talk with him about. My sister and her family are coming up during spring break from the 21st through the 30th of this month. Given how weak Dad is and suspecting that he won’t be trying to get himself around on his own much longer, I figure he will be a little easier to take care of by the time they head home. He won’t be as apt to fall. Mark and I talked on Saturday and I told him that I would like to fly back to Tucson when Lauryn comes up. I will be flying back on the 19th.
Dad asked what I’ll do when I get back home and I told him that my pastor asked me to preach on April 7th. I told Dad that I have been assigned Colossians 1:3-23, so he and I spent the rest of his lunch reading through it and discussing some ideas for my sermon. Dad has been a Bible scholar and teacher all his life, but in the last few years, he’s been looking back at his life and all the times he offered to teach Sunday School classes or Bible studies or to preach and it hasn’t worked out. Going through sermon ideas with him felt to me a little like letting him live vicariously through me one more time.
After lunch, I wheeled Dad into the family room and rigged up the bed table hospice left for him so that he could sit up to it and do whatever paperwork he wants to do. He has been obsessing about two things since I’ve been here: getting his taxes ready for the CPA and making sure the bills have been paid. Last week, I helped him organize the receipts from various charities he donated to in 2023. Today, I decided to help him with the bills. Elaine brought out a box of bills she had already paid. She had written the date and the amount paid on each one. I sorted them all by date and then asked to see his check register.
I was shocked when I saw his check register. Dad has always had the most beautiful handwriting. The check register started on February 2nd with Dad’s beautiful handwriting, but as I looked down the page, his handwriting has become a scrawl. Income was entered on the debit side making it somewhat confusing. Towards the last entries, there was a line with the name of the company but no dollar amount written in, and dates were missing. I went through the bills Elaine had brought out and most of them hadn’t been written in. I entered them, but I had to ask Dad about some things he had entered before I could figure out what the balance had been so that I could add and subtract from there. I remember that when I got my first job as a teenager, it was Dad who taught me how to balance a checkbook and keep a record book. Working on this today showed me how far down Dad has come just since early February. It was sad.
There were a couple of things we set aside as we were going through the bills that we wanted to take action on. Elaine and Dad have both been talking about his hearing aids. He has been seeing a doctor affiliated with Miracle-Ear for the last five years, and in that time, the doctor has sold Dad three pairs of hearing aids for $6000-$7000 each. Right now, Dad is paying about $600 per month for hearing aids that he never even uses. He has been talking about wanting to return the hearing aids and see if he could stop having to pay for them. While Elaine was at her Bible study, Dad and I decided to tackle this project.
Dad called his doctor, Jim, at Miracle-Ear and told him that he has been put on hospice and that he wants to return his hearing aids and stop payment on them. The phone was on speaker phone so I could hear both ends of the conversation. When Dad first told Jim that he was dying, Jim said, “Oh, how exciting! You’ll soon get to be with the Lord!” He went on and on about the benefits of dying and going to heaven and generally trying to distract Dad from asking to stop payment on his hearing aids. Dad told Jim that he wanted to return his hearing aids and Jim started in on how he would donate the hearing aids to someone who could use them and what a blessing it would be to them. Then Dad said that he wanted to stop paying for them, and at that point, Jim said that he was with a patient that he had to get back to and that the only folks who could stop Dad’s payments were the loan company, Power Pay, and that he doubted they would do that.
When Dad hung up, I said I wanted to call the Power Pay because I could be a little more forceful than Dad had just demonstrated the ability to be. I called them and explained Dad’s situation to them and they said, “When your Dad applied for a loan from us to pay for his hearing aids, we funded the whole thing to Miracle-Ear and they are the ones he’s paying back.” I said, “That’s not the story I heard from them. They said that you are the ones who could stop the payments, so how do I get you folks and the hearing aid folks talking to each other to get this worked out?” They suggested that we return the hearing aids and while in the doctor’s office, call the loan company so that they could explain things to the doctor.
Elaine came home from her Bible study exhausted and it was wet and cold outside, but I told her what was going on and asked if she could return the hearing aids and call the loan company while she was there. She didn’t entirely understand what I was talking about, but she took the hearing aids to the office and tried to explain to them what she understood of what I said. They didn’t understand either and I guess the loan company wasn’t called to see what they were talking about. Elaine left the bill with them and came home.
She was spitting mad when she got home. She told me that she had told the doctor he was a scammer preying on the elderly and selling them multiple hearing aids for exorbitant amounts when they knew the people wouldn’t need that many hearing aids at their age. She said, “Shame on you!” When she told me that, I said, “Good for you!” She asked me to call the doctor’s office to explain what the loan company had said. She was done talking with Jim! I called and left a message for him to call me back on my cell phone.
Then I told Elaine I had something to tell her and I told her I’m homesick. When Lauryn comes up with her family, I will have been here nearly a month, so I’ve decided to fly back home. I said that by the time Lauryn leaves, Dad will probably not be trying to get around on foot and should be easier to take care of. Elaine dropped her head for a moment, and when she looked up again, she thanked me for coming to help. I thanked her for giving me the opportunity to and we hugged. I will still be coming over to give her a chance to get away for a couple of hours through next Monday and then maybe Lauryn can do the same when she comes up.
Mark and I will be coming back in our motorhome in late April and will be staying for ten days at that time. If Dad is still alive by then, I doubt I will be able to have the same quality of time with him as I’ve had since I’ve been here. I’m grateful that I was able to spend this time with Dad, hearing his stories and trying to help him with the things he has wanted to work on before he can’t anymore. I don’t want to watch him decline any further. I know that Elaine would appreciate your prayers throughout the remainder of Dad’s illness.