Of Cars, Cat Hair, and Hospitals

I made it back home to Wisconsin with little worth noting. 8 hours of driving, and I somehow managed to pay $3.44 for every gallon of gas I bought on either side of Iowa.

I pulled into my mom's house, unlocked the door, let the dog out, and brought in the load of laundry I planned on doing while I was there. No quarters, I can put it in the washer before bed, in the dryer when I wake up, and it'll be ready when I get home. The stuff dreams are made of. 

......until I opened the lid to the washer.

My mom had been in the hospital for about ten days at this time. She must have put a load in the washer the night before she left home. That was the load the washer decided to not spin out. That's right, folks, standing water for over a week, and no one had any idea. (When you have an open wound in your leg that is roughly the size of a Danielle Steele novel, you aren't going to remember about a load of laundry from over a week ago.) 

Let's just say that some of the other things I saw make me want to meet up with someone who claims to have seen it all and compare notes.

I'm really glad that my sister was able to make another trip  out there and do some major cleaning.  I wish I could have done more  than buy 2 bottles of Febreeze, trash bags, and gloves.  There was a lot of cat and dog mess that I knew would need to be removed before home health care comes in once a day to change the dressing on her wound.  Also, I've been depressed, and snuggling with the cats and dog improved my outlook on things.

The drive back to Omaha was worse than I expected. I had been planning to leave Madison around 3, because I would rather bathe in that standing water I found than drive in Madison, let alone during rush hour. My mom wanted me to wait for her mail, during which time she called me to say she was getting discharged at 2:30 to be admitted into a skilled nursing facility (SNFs are something I'm pretty familiar with). I decided to go with her and get her settled in, because, well, what better choice could I have made than to help a 55 y/o get accomodated with a bunch of 70+ y/os?

Which means I left Middleton, and not Madison, at 5:30. It's an 8 hour drive, if you stop only to empty your bladder and refuel yourself and the vehicle. That put my Omaha ETA at 1:30 a.m., which is late, but not problematically so. Until you take into account my need to shower and leave my apartment by 6:40 a.m. 

The amount of Mountain Dew I consumed on Friday is more than I've had in a year, cumulative. I got home and was so tired and hopped up on caffeine I laid in bed with my eyes open because I couldn't close them. I had taken a couple of sleep stops on the way (or tried, anyway), so I didn't get home until  close to 3:30 a.m.

My body recovered from the exhaustion pretty quickly, but my brain is taking a while to catch up.