The last couple of days have been challenging. I’m a reasonably calm person. I won’t say, “nice,” because it’s hard to judge from the inside. But I have found that most people don’t have trouble dealing with me.
I have been on my last nerve the last couple of days with my husband. The idea of a hole in the back yard dug by my friend with the backhoe beckons.
Friday we were driving home from errands and it was so hot the dash cam was hanging from its cord when we got in the car. I put it back up and we started home. My husband wasn’t happy with its ‘attitude’, though, wanting it to tilt downward more. I change the thing three times as we drove. He suddenly pulled to the side of the road, yelled at me, and did it himself. I did NOT bite him in the leg, although I have to admit I thought about it.
Later when we were converting fluorescent fixtures to accepting LED tubes, he had trouble getting the legs of the step ladder to close. He started acting like a two-year-old having a tantrum and I told him I would handle it. He looked at me as if I had sprouted another head and then threw up his hands and said, “Okay, YOU do it!” and left the room. I did it and put the ladder back in the garage.
Later, he asked me what happened with the ladder. When I told him, he went to the garage to check, obviously not believing me. He came back inside, saying nothing. Later, he asked me how I got the legs to close. I explained what I did. He looked at me a minute and then went back to reading.
To his considerable credit, this is a man who has fixed things his whole life. He can look at something and figure out how it works, figure out why it isn’t working, and figure out what to do to fix it.
In the past couple of years he has had two mini-strokes. He is doing remarkably well, but he has trouble speaking at times, has difficulty typing, and gets frustrated with stuff like smart phones (which I have to admit are smarter than both of us together). Most of the time he handles the changes very well, even with humor. A lot of the time you can’t tell anything has changed.
The biggest thing I’M seeing is the change in temperament. He has to ask me to figure out how to change which chime sounds on the driveway detector, and this HAS to be frustrating for him.
We’re trying to get the lowest price possible on a medication he takes. We’re in the “donut hole” on Medicare for the first time ever, and the price for this med skyrocketed. I found a place where we could get it more cheaply. He said he would rather write the manufacturer because he saw a deal they were offering. Several days have past and we haven’t heard from them. I asked him about it and he said he had heard from them and put it in his important folder on the computer. When I read it, there was nothing about the special price. He didn’t remember telling me about any prices. So now I’ve written our doc to ask her for a prescription so we can get what he needs.
Whole new “ballgame” and it’s difficult to deal with since I’m older than dirt.
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