Well I gotten thru yesterday's funeral without too much drama. It was a small but lovely funeral on what turned out to be the near hottest April day on record, 37C (98F). The weather has remained so hot, often into the mid-30s (mid-90s) and today is hot yet again. Anyway a few of my workmates were among the small turn-out at the funeral, the rest of the numbers being made up by members of mother's and Pasco's side of the family, mostly representatives from the Bartolone, Dawes-Smith, Kerr, and Davies. It was nice but unexpected to see my workmates there, they must have gotten the details from the paper. My boss was there too and he gave me a few extra days off work, so instead of going back tomorrow I now have vacation until Monday. The wake was at the Dawes-Smith where most of us sat in the nicely shaded patio area. I was finally back home not long after lunch to contemplate my future life without Sally, I soon kept myself busy, more reorganizing of the house and garage.
The nights are the hardest, so dark and lonely except for the many ghosts! LOL! I usually crash out soon after dinner, sleep for a couple of hours, then wake up and if I can't get back to sleep I just get online on my computer whatever time of the night it is until I am ready to crash out again. It is still hot at night so is harder to get back to sleep, these are literally summer conditions and it's April !!
Today I hit the board running, did more work in the garage, went to the shops, more errands, and now just stopping long enough to do this blog though I will probably go back to the shops when I am through. Just mainly living on takeout and "junk" food at the moment but won't be much longer. I still do have all of mother's recipes, and I will make a lasagne tomorrow. Mother made the best lasagne on the planet. There is a reason why she worked at a restaurant of an international hotel back in the days of my childhood, and in later years worked with my Aunty Dawes-Smith for camp catering! She worked in camp catering right up to when she became too sick to be able to work!! So I will start using her recipes again, do what I did before all those years ago in my bachelor-hood, cook up whole casseroles etc from mother's recipe on the weekend, and divide up into portions for me to live on through the week. And I won't be able to use lack of time as an excuse, there is no more attending to Sally's medical needs, dressing her wounds, attending to her toileting needs, bathing her, etc.
So first I lost my mother and now I lost my wife, so I must have killed one too many China-men in a past life! LOL! At least mother's passing was expected, the illness was terminal and was just a matter of time before it finally took her. But Sally was most unexpected, she had her health problems but I didn't think it would kill her!! But in hindsight, her life has been in danger for some time, and it was pure luck that she made it this far in two years!! Her immune system was virtually non-existent, and so those ulcers and staph infections were really dangerous. As long as they kept on her skin she'd be fine, but once it gets into the blood, the poison spreads like wildfire to the rest of her body, and with no immune system, that is what killed her. I now realised she have had close calls in the past, her life had been in danger before, getting to the hospital just in time to stop the infections spreading. But they couldn't kill the infections, no antibiotics worked, so all they could do was to manage the infections, and for her to go into hospital when the infections looked like it would about to flare up. The home nurse was usually the one to determine whether her life was in danger and would send her to hospital. But in the last few weeks the home nurse stopped coming, and circumstances conspired to take Sally's life away. She couldn't get up without my help due to the design flaw of her recliner chair, and the hospital had no money to replace her chair with a more modern chair without the design flaw, and due to occupational health laws the nurse is not allowed to lift her legs or otherwise help her up. Therefore the nurse couldn't check her sores which were mostly underneath her legs and her butt . And due to my work commitments I couldn't always be there. In the last weeks of her life I spent every lunch hour with Sally, but it wasn't good enough for the nurse whose schedule doesn't always allowed her to come during lunchtime but at another time of day, and she only came once per week anyway. So the nurse basically gave up and just told me to keep checking Sally's sores. But as they say I am a physicist not a medical practitioner, so I wasn't expert enough to tell whether the sores were life threatening or not.
Also I thought even if Sally did become sick, as long as I got her to the hospital soon enough she'd be ok. But it wasn't to be. Once the infection had gotten into her blood, her fate was sealed. The doctors couldn't do anything. Sally was too weak to be able to cope with any surgery. So there was no choice but to wait for her to die, which all happened within 3 days!!! As they say, the rest is history!!!!
Anyway I now have the rest of the week to try reorganise myself and get my schedules and my diet back on track before going back to work on Monday......
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