## 251218: a bit of a rally?  Maybe, maybe not

First off, I want to express profound thanks to everyone who has responded
to the "diary spam", it's been nothing but positive and supportive responses
and a sprinkling of heart emojis.  It means a lot that y'all are reading these
ramblings, and so far nobody's said "take me off that BCC".  Please know
that anyone *is* free to ask that, I know stuffing these things straight into
your inboxes might be viewed as a little intrusive.  The methodology seemed
to work fairly well in 2022, so I just went with it for this second rodeo but
with quite a few more recipients.  I just asserted to a correspondent yesterday
that in lieu of any suggested flowers, gifts, donations-on-behalf, etc it feels
much more important and engaging to me for people to be viewing what I put out
there along with Mom's still-growing website.  I'm working on more content to
put on the latter, and it's really going to wind up being her online memorial.
Far easier to visit than some random piece of rock in an obscure field in
sun-scorched FL.  We already decided long since that we're not doing the
typical "death thing" which is largely a big money-grab on the part of the
funeral industry.

Anyway, over the last couple of days I've spent long hours at the nursing
center, and there's been a lot of hand-holding.  Mom's been a bit more
cognizant than she was Monday morning, perceiving that I'm there, reaching
for my hands, and returning the little squeezes.  I understand that this will
have sort of a sine-wave progression as things go on, so I'll get more or less
out of her at random times.  The one thing that's pretty consistent is that
I *cannot* really understand what she's trying to say, even by leaning way
in to hear.  There are just no consonants to be had.  I really wish she were
able to express what she's thinking/feeling, it would be really instructive.
The rattly out-breath has diminished substantially; perhaps the "secretions"
are reduced because she doesn't have a lot of liquid in her to help produce
them.  We've gotten a little more fluids into her and Wednesday morning, the
CNA actually got her to eat about half a cup of "Thrive" ice cream, so even
swallowing ability is variable.  [Thrive is a brand specifically geared toward
various health sectors, containing extra protein and other nutrients and still
easy to eat particularly by those with dysphagia.]

There's also been bursts of somewhat anguished-sounding grunting accompanied
by a bit of what looks like furrowed brow, but the staff says not enough to
be any obvious manifestation of pain.  I've frequently asked if there is any
pain [as does the staff when they come in], and the answer (if any) seems
consistently negative.  So the painkillers are still working, even if delivery
is a little sketch sometimes.  The constant appears that she definitely wants
me there, so again, that's my job right now.  At least I can duck out in the
evening to go back to the house and get my own sleep, but report for duty
back at the Carroll the next morning.

It is said that the dying can remain in this "transition" state for a couple
of weeks, so given that we're on day 4 of this now, I have no idea how long
it will continue.  Mom's proven herself to be one tough lady, so she may not
have any path or concept of how to just "let go" if that's even possible.

On the assumption that this is "it" nonetheless, I gathered up all the random
prescription pill-bottles that were scattered around the house and brought
them over to the nurses for proper disposal, as even if they've got Mom on
some of the same meds they can't accept outside contributions.  Mom had a
weird way of organizing drug functionality by where they were stashed around
the house.  Morning stuff like vitamins and digestive assistance were in the
kitchen cabinet; things to handle occasional diarrhea were in the bathroom
I use when I'm here; sleep aids and things to deal with the UTIs she would
get once in a while were in the master bathroom.  There's Tylenol and various
generics all over the place.  In 2022 when I collected all that into one place
for review, when she got back home she went ballistic because I'd messed up her
organizational system and she needed to put it all back how it was.  Thus that
"system" persisted for another 3 years, but now I knew the basis for it.

On the technical front, I managed to bodge up enough proxy/tunnel setup via
my external server to get around this stupid "meraki" gateway and finally
get to Discord from the facility guest network.  Why block Discord FFS, but
allow Fakebook and Twitter, which are far more toxic as a whole??  It makes
no sense, and I even asked one of their IT guys about it.  He sort of
finger-pointed that the baseline rulesets come from cisco and can get tweaked
by the customer, but apparently they didn't really think it through too hard.
The unsolved annoying thing is falling off the wi-fi calling tunnel fairly
frequently, usually by moving around within the facility even though it's all
the same network SSID through the whole complex.  I poked my tech friends about
some possibilities as to why this might be happening, and discussion turned
up a couple of other things to look at.  T-Mobile wi-fi calling uses some
variant of IPSEC, which is sometimes hard for firewalls to track.  If I don't
stay in one place, perhaps the access-point I happen to be talking to loses
some bit of that context and never updates the rest of the mesh about it?
But it doesn't *reliably* drop even if I walk around and watch the handoffs.
I'm told that wi-fi calling is a bit of a sketchy hack to begin with, and
given my superficial look at the traffic I'd readily believe that.  But it's
still been a lifesaver here as far as my overall reachability.

It was interesting yesterday to configure much of the necessary changes with
one hand on the laptop, as the other was almost entirely engaged in holding
one or both of Mom's.  Since I'm very much more a keyboard/command-line guy
rather than point-n-click, that gets challenging once in a while with key
combos like control-shift-something.  Especially when firing up tcpdump/
wireshark to try and see why the F a particular proxy experiment wasn't
working.  "Why did it FIN me after sending the cert?!" ...  because, I later
realized, I'd set Firefox to *not* proxy some domains, and after I un-set
that I was effectively clear of the local infrastructure.

More on the house-clearing front ... Mom's still got a few of the Barbie-class dolls in the closet with the knitted outfits she made on, and two of these are a "Mr. and Ms. Santa" pair. (Click image for larger view ; video is from 1989 or so when the collection was at its peak.) I grabbed these and brought them over to the social-services coordinator for the facility, offering them as additional Christmas-themed decorations to scatter around the place. She *loved* them, thought they were so cute, so they're now part of the substantial holiday infrastructure this place somehow manages to stuff away in storage over the rest of the year. I have no idea what to do with the other dozen-plus dolls that are still in the office closet here, plus a couple of bins of more outfits that aren't on a doll anymore. Some of them were on exhibit here a few years ago in a big glass case next to the main campus dining room, where they cycle through displaying various member-generated crafts.

Today (Thursday) it was time to put in the next USPS mail-hold request online,
which you can only have one of set at a time and limited to 30 days.  I sat
there thinking "crikey, has it been 30 days already?!" ... well, considering
that this all started with me scheduling the first one and leaving for Philcon
in mid-November, yeah I guess.  The next one extends to mid-January and I hope
to be largely done with this whole process and back home by then.  My next-door
neighbor is kindly holding any mail that shows up until I return.

Also, today, Mom was more or less awake when I arrived in the morning, kind of
waving her hands randomly in the air, maybe trying to grasp at hallucinations.
Then she fell asleep, and now as I'm typing this part, four+ hours later, she
was still asleep.  More sleeping is apparently a normal part of the transition
process, so no surprise.  Today held an even weirder experience.  A report had
been submitted that the air-conditioning unit for Mom's room was "leaking", and
making the drop-ceiling just outside her room door noticeably wet.  A guy from
Maintenance turned up for a look, and found that the cooling coil had frosted
up.  We shut the unit off to let it melt and drain for a while, and he came
back later to check refrigerant level.  Well, the last thing I expected to do
today was spend a while geeking about HVAC, but as soon as he realized I knew
what I was looking at we got along great, I told him all about my tiny heat
pump leak back home et al.  The system here is 20+ years old and runs on
traditional TXVs, so it can still be checked via running pressure.  

So there he is beltline-deep up in the drop-ceiling on a ladder mucking around,
and suddenly the building fire alarm starts whooping and the hallway fire doors
release the holding magnets and swing closed, about to mash the guy's extension
cord.  I was like "what, did you pull on the wrong wire up there?" while
holding the door open so he could rescue his vacuum cleaner and cord.  No, it
was actually a controlled test, to train the facility staff in response and
procedures.  This time they just converged in the lobby and discussed what to
do if they *had* to actually evacuate patients.  They finally shut off the
alarm and Security came around and reopened all the doors into the wings, and
the HVAC guy returned and we spent the next while geeking a bit more while I
helped stabilize the R410A tank on his ladder when he went to top up the
system a little.  And Mom continued sleeping blissfully through all of it.

He finally figured out that the water loop that serves as the heat-sink wasn't
flowing right, so the heat from the condensing side wasn't being carried away. 
He had to bypass the electric water valve that was stuck closed -- normally
actuated by one of those cheap little gear-motor units they often use in the
industry, which had failed.  So we'd still at least have our basic climate
control, and he would stop back later to check on it.

After all that excitement, the staff came by to clean up and reorient Mom,
for which I generally exit the room because it's the more body-intimate stuff
I'm not doing.  After that she was more or less awake but quite unresponsive,
just staring vapidly into space and not tracking any movement, so that little
"rally" of yesterday might have segued down into a valley of lethargy.  As the
afternoon wore on, I was feeling like a little siesta might be good for *me*
too, and now that I'd re-routed some of the room wiring so the big electric
easy-chair had power again, I opened it up and sacked out on it for a bit.

So the sideline thought I'd been having is those stories about how pets can
sense when their owners are dying or dead, and stay by their humans' side
effectively mourning for quite a while.  Here's a sampler, although it deals
with scenarios in both directions.  Even though unlike pets, I understand
the dying process and why people die, I've been feeling a little like that,
modulo going back to the house to sleep when I can.  What's notable is that
when trying to google for such scenarios, the vast majority of results
describes the other way around, when humans have to say goodbye to their
dying pets.  "Read it and weep", as they say ... even though stuff like that
has nothing to do directly with Mom, in the present context it can trigger
another one of those little "moments".  The vet industry agrees that yes, pet
owners *should* stay with the animals, especially during euthanasia, until
it's all over.  See prior rant about the inverse, though -- in that case,
in FL at least, we have no choice but to just wait.

And given how today's been going, I may not be waiting too long.  But let's
still not jump the gun on anything, and remember that "it" could happen any
time including in the two minutes when I step out to the lobby for coffee.
I got a bit of a nice break from it all this evening, when I headed over to
the main dining room to have a scheduled dinner with some of Mom's newer
friends.  That went nicely, and we exchanged useful bits of local knowledge.

For those happenings, I have to put on what I call the "monkey suit" -- the
better black jeans, a collared shirt, the non-ratty china flats, and if we're
in the "formal" side any given evening, a jacket that still happens to fit
me.  Yeah, closest I ever get to "real shoes".  Because in this somewhat
conservative environment, they still have dress-codes for eating.  How quaint,
really.  I've told many people that it reminds me strongly of that first-class
dining room in the Titanic movie, where the radical disparity between the
wealthy and the subservient is even more pronounced, but there's definitely a
little bit of that here too.  These distinctions manifest around a superficial
disguise, which as we saw in the movie doesn't really mean a damn thing or
reflect anyone's actual *merit* as a person.  I touched on this in 2022's
"saga-wrap" section too, but that was more about barefooting.  I have very
mixed feelings about the concept of a "uniform", which we use to visually
place people into certain social classes, and in many cases the concept is
absolutely humiliating.   But the staff in just about every sector of this
place is generally great, very dedicated, and committed to providing the
best and most care-free life experiences for their clients.

Even more amusing for me is how I've been here so often over the past 8 or
so years, I've learned so much about how the place operates, where things are,
and the general infrastructure and how it's staffed.  I could almost pass for
a long-time resident in my conversations, and at my age I *would* qualify for
residency anyways.  But no, I'm definitely not moving to Florida.  I value my
snow, my seasons, and my engaging hiking locations too much.