For the past while, we haven’t been seeing deer come to the feeding station. The changing season and daylight hours seems to be the trigger for them coming by less often.

They are coming, though. Yesterday, I could see some hoof prints in the little bit of snow that had fallen during the night. By then, most of the feed was eaten, and I could see they’d walked around, but little sign in the snow that they ate anything.

This morning, there was no snow to leave tracks in, but I did find other signs of nightly visitors.

There were little tufts of deer fur, all over the feeding station! Their winter fur much be coming out in patches right now. :-)

With heading to the hospital both morning and afternoon, I’ve been pulling into the yard after the morning visit. By the afternoon, things have warmed up, and I can really tell as I pull out of the yard.

There was a time when this area was gravel. It’s been so long, there’s no sign of it anymore!

Getting a whole lot of gravel is just another thing on the to-do list for this place!

I was at the hospital in plenty of time for the morning visit with the doctor. My husband is doing so much better. Feet and lower legs still a bit puffy, but the shortness of breath is mostly gone. The reduction in fluids in his body has meant he’s able to do stuff for himself again, that he hadn’t been able to for a while. He was even able to sit in the comfy chair in his room! It’s a low chair, making it painful for him to get in and out of, but the back support and comfort made it worth the effort.

He’s still waiting on the tests for his heart in the city. Based on his bloodwork, the doctor has written him up for an ultrasound on his liver, but that may be (and likely is) completely unrelated to the edema. That will be in another, smaller city, not where he will be going for the heart tests, so that can be done on an outpatient basis; they’re not going to keep him in the hospital for it.

At one point, a woman had come in to let him know they’ve sent his file to a particular department, and someone was going to come talk to him about resources of this, that and the other thing. As she was talking, though, I brought up what I felt was being lost in the shuffle; the root cause of all of his problems. His back injury, and pain management problems. I’m glad I did bring it up, because she hadn’t know anything about it. She was just dealing with what they were dealing with while at the hospital; they’re focusing on congestive heart failure (I wonder what will happen when he goes into the city and the tests end up showing his heart is just fine, now that the edema is almost completely gone?) and the scare with his blood sugars. They’re talking about getting his sugars under control, increasing his mobility, and talking about weight loss. I brought up that, when he was first being diagnosed with his back injury, a spine specialist had said flat out, yeah, losing weight would probably help, but it’s not going to happen. The nature of his injury makes that almost impossible. Add in that one of the medications he’s on prevents weight loss, none of that is going to happen until that pain is under control. She clearly hadn’t known about the back injury, so we talked about his being on the waiting list for the pain clinic for more than a year already, and pain related issues, and she did even say, until the pain is managed, nothing else is going to get managed.

The down side of my husband working so hard to be a “good patient” is, things tend to get distracted away from the main problem, and all these peripheral issues are being focused on. Yes, they need to be treated, but as the symptoms they are, not separate, unrelated issues on their own.

On a related note, the doctor did the paperwork for the disability and caregiver tax credits, and I’m concerned we’ll have a bit of the same problem. The doctor can only answer for what he’s been working with, first hand, which even the form says is not necessarily the date of diagnosis. That’s fine. But where it talked about my husband’s condition, it only was about the most recent stuff from the past few days. There is nothing on the form that talks about the reason he’s on disability to begin with. I took the paperwork to the tax preparer, forgetting just how early in the day it still was. She wasn’t there yet, but I was able to leave the forms with the franchise owner. I asked for her to phone me, but I think I’ll just call her myself, before we head back to town this afternoon. I can find out how much we owe her, in the process.

Our budget is totally hooped for this month! We got our monthly shop in, and the bills are paid, so that’s the main thing. We’ll manage just fine. :-)

The Re-Farmer