Bit of a quick turnaround compared to some previous blogs but things have changed a bit around here since #56.
You know what’s a good thing about a hospice? It’s quicker to write than hospital.
Hospice has been on the cards for a while now and although my first wife said she was keen on that option rather than staying home till the end, she didn’t exactly want to hurry it up. Wanted to keep some normality in our lives I think, like still being at home and listening to me say cunt a lot while I drink piss.
There’s heaps of obvious positives about being at home but there’s also some negatives as well. The main couple that spring to mind are there’s always noise and distractions like Pudding pissing, shitting or spewing on my clothes and side of the bed, as well as family living noises that are both comforting, but now more so annoying when it’s peace, quiet and calm she seeks.
Fuck man, even the pressure caused by airflow from doing the sign of the cross on her can upset her, that’s how sensitive she’s become to pain.
But there’s also pros and cons about hospice too. She can still hear me say cunt, for one but secondly they got a dedicated team of carers who aren’t just some dude letting down his Westy natives with his unskilled and inexperienced ability in coordinating and supplying drugs to his first wife. Admittedly these are legit drugs for pain and not some backyard crack whore scene.
Yeah, we got a tree in our backyard for pissing competitions with some mates but we’re still pretty much a crack whore free zone to be honest. For the record, I’m the Pee Tree reigning champion.
Back to the story though. Some days and night’s we’d get through not too bad with pain control from various forms of painkillers but not always. My little Dalmatinka’s body and her pain levels change daily so it’s a battle combating the grief of constipation caused by painkillers versus the pain they prevent.
After another less than average night’s sleep, my first wife woke up yesterday to tell me she thinks it’s time to go to hospice.
By far the main con about hospice though, is that it’s usually a one way street. So watching her being taken away in an ambulance wasn’t exactly one of life’s greatest pleasures for either of us, but especially her.
The problem with hospice right now though is that there’s too many people dying so there’s no room for her. That kinda sucked but there’s a work around which we’re happy with after living it for a day. The palliative care team rent rooms from both Redland’s Public Hospital and Mater Private Redlands. We were gifted a very large private room at Mater Private and as I write this my little squirrel sheila is finally getting some deep (mostly) uninterrupted sleep.
I think everyone including moja mala Hrvatska zena, myself and medical staff all agree being here is the better option, as I can concentrate on being her first husband and not trying to play doctors and nurses… although, I gotta admit it ain’t as much fun as I thought it’d be in my teenage years. Tricked me, I’m thinkin’.
So yeah, we’re now at the hospice scene and although it’s only been a day, we can’t speak highly enough of Marjana’s treatment or the medical staff. They’ve been absolutely brilliant. I think it helped that one of our awesome oncologist nurses was also there in the ward and thinkin’ she may have let slip that we’re not mongrels, or at least the first wife ain’t.
I was even gunna try jump in on one of the first wife’s sponge baths under a two for one deal until I saw her main nurse was some big muscly as dude. Nice as dude too.
I’ve been reading all ya messages sent to my first wife and she loves ’em and very much appreciates the love.
We also both love the fact people seem to quite like us and I guess, how we come across in these blogs. That’s all cool and shit but just don’t want y’all thinking our lives have always been filled with trauma and grief from fucked things like cancer, or even that our life together has been plain sailing without dramas and shit.
For sure, me and the first wife have had a great life together and considering everything, we still do right now. But we’ve had our fair share of rough times even back before my former elitist beauty therapist put a spell on me with her little battering of her eyelids trick… and beer, wine, Croatian cured meats and a rope to lure me into entwining our lives.
No surprise here really but the same goes for these married years due to me stumbling – sometimes from Jagermeister but also because she was always wrong and I was always right and she was deaf and I wasn’t and she was blind and I wasn’t and she snored and I didn’t and she did annoying things like leaving the vacuum cleaner as a trip hazard and I didn’t. I think I got the fault blame around the right way but maybe not (wifey laughed most at this paragraph).
It hasn’t taken me until these final hard yards to understand this but I do now see it in 4K compared to hearing it through AM radio. Long term marriages, de facto and partnership relationships are a team game and by surviving not only the good times but also the bad together is important as fuck. There’s no place on earth I’d rather be right now than where I currently am, next to her as she whispers her squirrel snores to me. I know she’d be sitting in the same chair I’m in, if we swapped health places.
But we ain’t done just yet though.
This blog wasn’t gunna have a quote of the day until, when reading it to her, I got to the last couple of paragraphs and she grabbed my hand, looked up at me and said “Don’t cry ljubavi. I’m not dead yet.”
I guess what I was trying to say in this long winded way is that Marjana is now in a hospice.
Woodstock's blog 