A Family Conference

Yesterday we had a family conference. Rebecca and Richard, and Jonathan sat round our dining-room table with Wendy and me, and David joined us by Skype from Toronto. The reason for conferring like this was a cri de coeur that I uttered a week or so ago when I was feeling more than usually frazzled by the combined weight of caring for Wendy, household chores, some professional commitments I haven't been able to fulfill on time or to my professional satisfaction - and the lack of any respite for several weeks. We talked about the need for more help. Wendy and I had already discussed this with Louise Coulombe, our palliative care physician; she had given us several names and contact details. The first suggestion from our offspring was to get this respite care as soon as possible. It was already on my agenda of things to do in the coming week; there hadn't been time to follow through on Louise's contacts between getting the names etc late Thursday afternoon and our 'conference' on Saturday afternoon. Tomorrow, Monday, we will be at the ALS clinic all morning (9 am to 1 pm) for a series of appointments with various specialists in the ALS team; so I will make a few phone calls tomorrow afternoon to arrange for and to set up some respite care. Another suggestion was for me to let the dishes pile up in the dishwasher, rather than to wash them after every meal. I'm not convinced that this would be labour-saving. All our meals now are prepared by others, the Meals on Wheels service, meals provided by kind friends and neighbours, gourmet meals from the Red Apron catering company, and meals that R&R provide from time to time. Very few of these give rise to dishes for me to wash, so all I have to wash is a few plates, knives, forks, and spoons. It takes no time at all and very little effort to deal with such a tiny wash-up, but I'll try the alternative and see if it's labour-saving. I dropped some hints that more frequent visits by our Ottawa-dwelling offspring would be welcome, and we will see if these hints are acted upon. We hope they will be. That, and a few hours weekly of additional help from one of the respite care services, should suffice for now. Later, when Wendy's disability progresses to the stage where she cannot wash, dress, or feed herself, no doubt we will need more help, but we will cross that bridge when we get to it. The same applies to problems of communicating when she can no longer speak clearly. I got the laptop computer on which I post these blogs because it has some fancy bells and whistles like speech-activated text composing - which obviously won't help when she loses the power of speech. Exploring its potential use for other kinds of communication is something else that's on my agenda of things to do. Her speech is getting a bit difficult to understand at times, so that agenda item may have to get higher priority than I've given it so far.