Going the Way of The Dodo Bird

I got a culture shock this morning.

Brian and I have been straining our brains to think of things that may help my husband adjust to being in the nursing home after his stroke.

We are all making a bit of progress, in that he is not actively hostile at this point and is finding a few things to NOT complain about. 😋

One of the things he has asked for is a newspaper. He didn’t even care if it were in Thai or English. I’m not sure what his thinking is, but we decided we would try to bring him one tomorrow when we visit. It also occurred to me that he might enjoy thumbing through a magazine for the pictures.

So after breakfast, we walked to a bookstore that Brian said was close to the condo building and had magazines. (I was happy, also, to get a bit more walking in. It’s cloudy today, so the sun doesn’t immediately bore right through your brain, particularly at around 10am in the morning.)

We got to the bookshop. It was a nice place with lots of good looking Thai books, but not a newspaper or magazine in the place. Some of the reviews we had read had mentioned magazines in particular. We asked the clerk, and she looked at us as if we had two heads. She didn’t have any.

Brian looked quickly on his phone and managed to find another bookstore close by that might have what we were looking for. We got there, only to find it was closed.

SO – we went to have a chocolate and regroup.

It is obvious that at least in Thailand, magazines have gone the way of the dodo bird. Paper newspapers might still exist, but they are not in the hotels close to our condo building, and we didn’t see ANY of the newspaper boxes where you put in quarters and pull out a newspaper, as there are in the states.

I got online when we got home and looked for both newspapers and magazines. Again, there probably ARE some, somewhere, but this is making me feel really old and that this ship has definitely sailed.

People either find what they want to know on their phones or laptops. Paper magazines and paper newspapers are SO old school…

Brian is going to search again and see if there is a way he can order either one, but it doesn’t look like we’ll have anything to take with us tomorrow. 😒

It’s funny, something I thought would be easy and inexpensive turns out to be almost impossible to obtain.

On a good note, though, the nursing home sent us photos and a couple of short videos of Harvey enjoying a wheelchair ride. He has refused to do any more physical therapy, and gets actively hostile about it, but he really seems to enjoy being wheeled out onto the front porch and the front yard.

Yesterday the nursing home sent us pictures of him petting an afghan hound that someone had brought to the front porch. The short videos were of him outside the fence in the front yard, interacting with three beagle type doggies, offering them treats through the fence.

We will continue to look for other things that will bring him some comfort and enjoyment. Today’s efforts were a bust so far, but we will come up with something.