Preparing for her trip...

My mom has been making plans to go see my Aunt Ruthie in Nevada.  Since all the birthday activities, she has declined in health.   She was so exhausted on her birthday it really scared me. My Mom said it scared her too.  I went over to see her today and half expected to find her still in bed and she was perky, still wheezing but a lot better then the day before.

 We waited for the Hospice nurse to come.  She was anxious, I had to give her, the "chill out" medication. (lorazapam) It didn't seem to help  She had all of her clothes all over her bed and in the orderly stages of packing for her trip.   Kelley Hannah  Joslin came over during her lunch hour and she helped her pick out her jewelry and visited for a while.  Kelley is such a sweet girl!  Very thoughtful and loving toward my mom.
Kelley had to rush off and my mom called out to her, "I love you Kelley, you should have been my daughter"  and Kelley smiled real big and replied, "If I had been, we probably wouldn't have been the close friends we were."

Judy and Kelley in the late 80's early 90's 

She is still wheezing very loudly and she was tired, so I suggested that she sit down and put her oxygen on.  She was sitting with her head leaned back on the couch cushion  and eyes closed when the nurse came.   After listening to her lungs and a quick examination.   The nurse felt that she should postpone her trip until we had the time to set hospice up for her in Nevada., so they could follow her care there.  I asked the nurse if we could order a handheld oxygen machine and she said she would look into it.  She made a phone call and the person on the other end, told her that they were out, but she could be evaluated by a respiratory therapist and possibly get one tomorrow.

Kelley Hannah Joslin and Judy  2012

  She is planning on being gone for the whole next week and return Sunday or Monday. March 15-26th.  She was adamant about leaving, she knows that her health, won't hold out forever and she wanted to make this trip while she is healthy enough to enjoy it.

While the nurse was there she told me that she wanted to take her dog to Petsmart to get her groomed before she left: because her dogs claws are too long and her dog is in pain.  I made the appointment while the nurse was there.

We dropped off Princess, her dog, and went to Applebee's for a late lunch.  I am not sure if it was just the excitement of the trip or the brain tumor, but there were a few times I felt she was just not quite herself.  We picked her dog up and I drove her home.  Once we got into her apartment, she was pacing like a lioness on the prowl.  She was anxious to get outside and sit on her benches in the courtyard.  She was really wheezing, so I told her she needed to sit with the oxygen hooked up for a few minutes and let me get her medication for her.

She left shortly afterward for the benches and I was putting her medication away and tiding up her house.  I met her out at the bench with a cup of tea, hoping this would calm her.  She drank the tea and we visited.  I contacted the Hospice nurse who was on call, to make sure I could give her another dose of her "chill out" medication.  The Nurse asked when the last dose was given, she told me that we could give her another dose.  When I got off the phone with her and my mom finally decided to settle down and climb in bed she didn't need another dose after all.  She ate some chocolate cheese cake, her friend had sent her for her birthday.  I took her dish and fork and washed it up in the sink as she drifted off to sleep.   I left her apartment and headed home.

What doesn't kill you makes you stonger...

So here I am in my garage and a random thought comes over me, I think to myself, you know my kids have never had head lice, not one of them.  I stood a little prouder as if this were an accomplishment of mine and
I somehow deserved an award for this.  I actually reveled in the glory, of the shallow thought, for a few minutes. It passed and I went on with whatever I was doing, which was probably laundry, because the washer and dryer is out there in the garage.

No more then a week passed by and I made an appointment for my girls to be seen by the doctor and planned to go shopping out at the base and  brought my mom along for the ride.  We check into the pediatric clinic and we are called back and I explain that Olivia had an allergic reaction to shrimp on new years day this year and ever since then she has been itching her head.  My husband had asked me to look at her head to make sure she didn't have bugs there and I parted her hair and casually looked; but didn't see anything, so I just dismissed it as a residual side effect from the allergy.


The Doctor comes in, he is an older Filipino man, he looks at Olivia's head and says: "She has fleas."  I am incredulous! I said to the doctor: "Are you sure?  Fleas really?"  He shakes his head up and down and motions for me to take a look. I part her hair and sure enough she has bugs all through her hair. The very moment he says that, Olivia throws her head back just like a pez dispenser and starts to bawl.  It was so cartoon like, we all burst into laughter.  I felt so bad for Olivia.  The whole time my mom is sitting right there getting the news too.  Her jaw was tight and you could tell she was not taking the news well. 


Now if you know my mom well, you will know she is freaked out by the thought of bugs.  We lived in Ivanhoe as a child and one time. a big black cockroach scurried out of a box from the garage and I thought my eardrum was going to bleed because she let out such a shrilling scream.  I also remember having scabies when I was younger and she almost boiled my sheets because she was so creeped out by this.  My older boys got scabies and having suffered from them as a child; I was totally familiar with the routine. You slather cream on from head to toe and wash your bedding and all is fine.  

we did a lot of nit picking in the gill home

The doctor looked at Samantha's hair and found eggs and I asked him to check me and he said he didn't see anything in my hair. I was upset.  We had fleas! Then the doctor leaves the room and comes back and informs us no those aren't fleas, they are LICE, and just then, the whole scene in the garage flashed through my head, where I was bragging to myself about this not happening to my children as if they were somehow better then the rest of the world.  I was talking to my mom about it in the parking lot and she actually hushed me because she was embarrassed someone would hear us say the word LICE.  Who cares what total strangers think!  

They had to order the shampoo it would be in the very next day.  We were lucky enough to find it on sale at the Navy Exchange that day.  I didn't want to wait one more day.  I was in a hurry to get home and take a shower and get those creepy bugs off my girls.  We also had Savannah to think about too.  

We dropped my mom off with a bottle of NIX shampoo just in case and on the way home, Samantha and I discussed how we would just be sick if we found bugs in our hair too.  We rushed into the bathroom and started combing my hair out over the sink and almost hurled when I saw the fist bug fall out of my hair.  Samantha found some too in her hair and so did Savannah.  Samantha said they had "Jazz hands" as they waved to her from the sink.  

We all washed our hair with shampoo, that kind of smelled like hand sanitizer and stripped all the bedding and put the pillows in the dryer on high heat; to kill all bugs and their eggs.  My mom went back to her apartment and we drove over there, after all the hair was treated and dried, to share our lice killer spray, we had purchased.   She didn't let me in her house, you could tell that she was shaken up.  I learned later that she told her friends at the senior housing and my sister in law.  

I think about that situation and it reminds me of a bible story I once read about David in II Samuel 24: where  King David decides to count his army and the bible says; God was so mad at David for doing this.  When I had read this years ago, I couldn't understand what the big deal was.  So what! I thought, he is the leader of the army,.the king wants to take inventory.  Oh no, that wasn't Davids intention at all, David was being haughty and boastful and he was being a bully by counting his army.  God sees the heart always.  God was angry at David because it was not his army to count it was Gods Army.  Even though David was remorseful of his sin against God  gave David a choice of three different punishments which included: 1. Seven years of famine.  2. Three months of fleeing from his enemy 3. Three days of plagues.  Which if you look at it the third choice seems like the easiest but it wasn't  David lost 70,000. men in one day.  

The fact that my kids had never had lice wasn't  my accomplishment as a mom, it was God protecting my children from a pesky parasite.  The chances that these bugs were alive and well, in our hair at the time that I had had these thoughts, are pretty much 100%, what I should have done, when this thought came to mind was to thank God that this has never happened to us and for him to protect us from it happening in the future.
   I learned what doesn't kill you makes you stronger!

(Here is some information I have just learned, because when we got home my husband was convinced we had given our dog lice too and would need to be treated.  We called our friend Tony, who works for Petsmart and he told us that Dogs don't get lice they get fleas, people get lice they don't get fleas.  I don't know why the Doctor at the Naval hospital didn't know this. I suspect he googled it and found out, but was too embarrassed to admit he'd been wrong about the fleas.)