#SOL24 Day 18: Piling On

Yet another heavy day. (I feel the need to apologize, but at the same time I feel that doing so would be weird and inappropriate. This is just what I’m living this year, it seems.)

I knew coming into this week that it was going to be a bit rough. Today we had afternoon parent-teacher conferences and I was asked to sit in on a meeting that shocked me as both a parent and an educator. Tomorrow, we have an afterschool Q&A with our superintendent to (hopefully?) learn more about next year’s budget cuts and what that might look like in our buildings and classrooms. On Wednesday, I’m hoping to host an afterschool reading session for my non-tenured colleagues before they submit their portfolios for summative evaluation, and then I’m reading at our school’s first Bedtime Story Hour in years. Thursday and Friday, so far, seem to be fairly normal days with nothing else added on.

Tonight I was sitting on my couch, watching Encanto for the umpteenth time with my autistic little one, when my watch went off to notify me that it was “pill time.” I have to take two doses of blood thinner daily, at 8am and 8pm, and with the evening dose I also have to take a low-dose aspirin and several other things. These are supposed to work together to (hopefully) prevent another blood clot like the one that almost took me out nearly three years ago. I walked to my room, took my pills, and went to Elijah’s room to set up for bedtime when I took my phone out of my hoodie’s kangaroo pocket. I usually check it at bedtime so I can choose E’s clothes for the morning. When I unlocked the phone, I noticed my brother had called from his home in Nebraska.

I also remembered the conversation we’d had last week about our dad – he has COPD and Flu A, and he’d been admitted to a Veterans’ Affairs hospital for treatment a week prior. They’d done what they could and then told my brother that the COPD was too severe and that he needed to put our dad in hospice care, so he did. Dad was sent home with a nurse who visited him daily, but he was angry about “losing his independence.” The problem with that? He couldn’t get off the couch to walk to the bathroom or make himself a cup of coffee without his oxygen levels dangerously dropping, and the nurse told my brother that hospice wasn’t going to be a viable option for him. So, to a nursing home he went last week.

Tonight, my brother was calling to let me know that the nursing home had given him enough drugs to make him comfortable and that he was slipping in and out of consciousness. That he was going to put me on speakerphone and let me speak my piece to my dad. That he would be gone in the next day or two.

I told him I loved him. I was too shocked to say anything else.

See, my dad has had quite a few near-misses lately, so we’ve been down this road before…but he’s always bounced back, because that’s who he is.

But this time? He’s not going to bounce back.

In the next day or two, my phone will ring again.

It will be my brother again.

It will be the big call.

This last week was already rough with the anniversary of the loss of my daughter, and how it’s extremely likely that March will claim my dad as well.

It feels like a bit of a pile-on, to be honest.

Can March be over?