Since it's been so long:
Me first: My blood sugar went nuts earlier in the year with the addition of a newer headache medication. Getting rid of the medication helped, adding new medication helped more, and adding Maybelle helped most. I'm doing well on all fronts physically with rare headaches. Emotionally is tougher because:
Hubby: His back just sucks. He's in pain all the time, which makes him cranky, which makes me cranky.
Babygirl: The kidney is hanging in there. There was a brief scare with a wildly abnormal level of one of her anti-rejection medications that made us have to run 70 miles one way for a re-draw (and they lost the results so it took a week to get them, so tell me again why we didn't just get it done across the street and wait a week while they sent it out?), but that resolved. I think I might have had her on the wrong vitamins (seriously, that's all it takes to screw this stuff up). The headaches were doing pretty well (missing one day of school a week is pretty good) but then she caught a cold and maybe missed a dose of meds and we ran out of some of the right vitamins and then they kicked back in and now she has another cold and now she's had a headache for at least five solid days and I'm waiting to hear from the headache doc.
Mom: Dementia alternates between 'sucks' and 'entertaining' depending on the topic of conversation, hovering in the 'sucks' direction the majority of the time. When someone is visiting she 'shows off' by passive-aggressively aggreeing to take her medications and then simply sitting there and not doing it, despite reminders every 5 minutes, for up to over an hour at a stretch until I get ugly and in her face about it, and then she cries. Same with bathing. Or she picks things like penises as the topic of dinner conversation. Or both. But clearly she is weakening, and she is coughing more, and a couple of times she has said, "I think I am going to die soon." She's right, but she doesn't remember anything about why.
Paying off the medical bills every month? $500. Living in a house where everyone around you is suffering pretty much all of the time and being able to do nothing at all about it? Priceless.
DeeDee
