SANDWICH GENERATION GRANDY MAKES THE RIGHT CALL

Nothing fires up the way back machine like sorting through my mother in law’s pictures and finding shots I’d never seen. Two parents, two kids, two dogs. We like two.

I am in a storage space in my house throwing away rings of gauze and squirt bottles of skin care and wound cleaner.

It’s a throwback moment with Grandy, my mother in law who passed two years ago.

If I had PTSD I would have been thrown back. Instead it was a sweet memory. But still harsh.

I was prepared for the sort of things that required reams of gauze and wound cleaner. As a former Army medic, then a dad of two active boys, I knew how to use a band-aid.

I was roommates with my in-laws who’d had a rough patch and been scammed and skinned. And that’s not a metaphor.

Some old people have thinner skin that a bump will rip open and release like a window shade rolling up their arm or leg. Grandy was one of them. If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like under your skin? Yikes.

All of the skin care and gauze was to prevent infection in the wounds they suffered. Father in law developed a pressure sore on his leg where the dog liked to lay instead of his lap. And I missed it.

Leg dog?

The home nurse said wounds like that never fully heal. She’s probably right if you don’t pack the hole regularly and change the bandage on time. That was my goal. It healed.

Finding pictures with the emergency stuff changed my gears, shifting from Grandy to my kids and wife gear. Luckily I have an automatic transmission. Or is it a traumatic transmission?

The best part of the Sandwich Generation? Sharing how kids grew up. This was a growing moment for everyone.

For example, I got a call at 2:30 in the morning, my mother-in-law on the line. It sounded like Grandy was on her last breath.

She lived downstairs and had fallen out of bed on the wall side, not the open side, and somehow ripped her skin. But I didn’t know that yet.

She lived in the open air lower apartment. We didn’t call it a basement.

I was upstairs in the penthouse when she called. I recognized her voice and waited for her to tell me the problem.

She didn’t so I knew it was a biggie. Just listening to her ragged breathing was signal enough.

I went downstairs and found her on the ground with a bloody trail on the carpet curving from the open side of the bed where she laid to the wall side where she’d started her crawl to the phone. You didn’t have to be an expert wildlife tracker to figure out what happened.

It was wild.

She was in a nightgown, a peach colored spaghetti strapped rig, and she hadn’t lost control. I know I would have.

It felt odd that the the first thing I noticed was the clean state of her nightgown. I blame training. When I saw all the blood I thought, ‘infection.’

I didn’t want anything in a wound that produced that much blood. ‘Sterile field?’ I thought.

Grandy was a little bit of a control gal, and this was no exception. I surveyed and decided what do. It looked like a crime scene. I helped her to sitting, then standing, and patched her up. No 911 this time. We talked it out until she was ready to go back to sleep.

There was a lot of wound care, but she had wounds I couldn’t quite figure out. How did they get there? It looked she’d rolled around in barbed wire.

So much between people is hard to decipher, but not so hard when they’re bleeding on the floor.

Standing and sorting first aid gear in storage explained everything a caregiver needs to know: you’ll never do enough to make a loved one the way they used to be, and you’ll be shocked how the past fits into the present.

Still, the goal is making a run at ‘better than it used to be.’ You’ll never win that race, but persistence is the key. Everyone appreciates the effort. Besides, what else is there to do but kick ass to move the needle just a little.

Discovering a stack of old photos on the same shelf as wound cleaner and gauze tempered my memory of what it was all about.

Especially this one:

Kids pick up ideas from their surroundings. Look at the artist. Just like his Grandy.