White flies in my brain

Friday, the plan was to finish drafting the agenda for a non-profit board retreat I've been hired to lead, then write up the summary of deliverables I've agreed to generate for my city government client. A good completion, I thought, to a piecemeal week.

The phone rang. The Chute Director said mom had fallen in the night, is okay, but may have some bruising. The mail came, with more items for mom than for us - a frequent occurrence. Then the hospice social worker called to see if I wanted to talk about my concerns about mom's finances or anything else. I told her this uncertainty is stressful, and that I was now going to the Chute to check up on the situation. Enough said.

Mom was very distressed, in a wheelchair, wringing her hands and talking in sentence fragments. She said "girl" and "mother" many times in these fragments, but I couldn't piece together any meaning. She was clearly frightened and disapproving. She had not eaten or drunk anything at either breakfast or lunch, and did not want to go back to bed, join the circle, or even move, and put her feet down to brake against any attempt to get her out of her room.

A wonderful aide came in and got mom to agree to "come out and sit with me", making her invitation personal and relaxed enough to succeed. Then the activities lady gave her a simple puzzle, and mom was completely engrossed in short order. She even began to sip from her glass of Ensure. We took a brief trip outside to the patio, but she was too nervous to stay long, so we went back to the puzzles. Those seem to work.

By the time I left, it was 3:30 pm, too late and too wrung out to be effective. I emailed the nonprofit lady and said I'd have the draft agenda after the weekend. No way my brain works for that kind of thinking now. And the city deliverables summary will also have to wait. I have so many things that would be great to do, and so little brainpower to do them.

But I saved a plant today. One of the plants on the patio tray had the worst case of white flies I've ever seen. I brought it home, pruned away leaves and sprayed it with a soap mist to scatter the flies. I believe it will recover. It's a Gerber daisy, and might just bloom again in my lifetime.