A heavy fog rolled in yesterday...



....and sometime during the night a light snow started falling.

It's beautiful outside... peaceful and serene. It's funny how even a light snow seems to muffle the outside noises, leaving a quiet, cocooned-in kind of feeling.



I wish my mood matched the peacefulness of today's snow.

For the first time since M's orthopedist brought up M needing surgery, I'm feeling like this might all have been too much.

It's not like not having the surgery done was an option... M's hip joint was being damaged further with every step he took, and without surgery he was looking at years of pain, leading to a joint that was in need of replacement when he was still a young man. I'm guessing it's easier to fix the hip of a 17 year old with schizophrenia... who still has his parent's insurance, and is living at home, than replace the hip of a 30 year old man with schizophrenia who has only Medicaid, and may be living somewhere else...

No... it had to be fixed... but the recovery period has been difficult and isn't getting any easier.

He was sick last night, throwing up... I don't know whether he caught a bug somehow, or it's connected to the reflux that has shown back up now that he's laying down so much.

I hope he didn't throw up his psych meds, that could complicate things more than I want to think about.

We seem to be stuck in a not-so-good place... His developmental disability (which includes problems with motor planning and balance) has a negative impact on his ability to maintain the "precautions" he needs, so his hip will heal well, and with as little pain as possible. The pain that comes from his problems maintaining the precautions cause his psychiatric symptoms to worsen... leaving him even less able to remember and comply with the precautions (which leads to more hip pain, of course). The pain meds help with the hip pain, but make him sick to his stomach, and sedate him enough that his balance is even worse and he just wants to sleep. Sleeping all the time doesn't help his hip get better, and makes his reflux worse. And the stress of feeling sick (with the reflux) also leads to an increase in his psych symptoms.. and everything that goes along with that.

Nothing is working together very well right now...

M's two week follow-up appointment with the surgeon is Wednesday, and I have no idea how I'm going to get him safely down the stairs and into the car, through the long (tiring) appointment without a flare up of the psychiatric symptoms and finally... get him back home and up the stairs again (especially since I'll probably have to give him extra pain medication to get through the appointment, and possibly extra psych meds as well... both of which are sedating).

I might have to cancel the appointment, but I'm not sure they'll let me.. and I really want them to do an x-ray to make sure M hasn't knocked anything out of place with all the stumbling around he's been doing. (It's not like I'm just letting him wander around on his own, I'm with him every time he's out of bed... keeping my hand on him to steady him, but he moves so suddenly and quickly, and he's so big, that I can't always stop him before he's stumbled, or put too much weight on his bad leg, or whatever...)

I guess I'll call the orthopedist's office later and see what they say...