Mom had a very bad night last night. She has been complaining about her back, so she was lying flat, but after we went to bed she was breathing heavily and raspily, and was coughing something fierce and moaning and crying. I had given her the dose of liquid morphine the nurse indicated was appropriate at this stage and half an Ativan, but it wasn't helping. We finally turned the lights on and called the advice nurse, who said she could be administered additional doses of the morphine until she stopped coughing and quieted down. So I gave her a second dose. We also propped her up on pillows—unfortunately with much pain involved—and set up the cool-air vaporizer I had bought for Bandit; the book the hospice gave us said keeping the air in the room moist would help.

The second dose did it and she mostly slept, but was restless from 4 a.m. on. Needless to say James nor I got much sleep. I was up with him—good thing, too; he needed a collar button resewn—and have been up in her room most of the day. She can barely interact, and it's further disheartening because Mom can't even use the straw any more to drink, and she's slid down on the pillows again, so I can't use the glass to give her water. (I can't move her; she cries out when I do, or try to lift her head so she can drink. I'd be afraid of her choking on ice.) Then I remembered the syringe I bought to give Bandit his medicine way back when; a second, unused one was still in the medicine cabinet. I can suck water out of the glass with it and put it into her mouth; she can take this little dose okay.

To keep myself sane I keep dubbing things: I can check their running time, set the stopwatch setting on my alarm clock, start whatever, and then go back upstairs. It keeps a routine going that helps. So far today I have copied two New Lassie episodes, the television movie The Big Time about the early days of television, the two part Swiss Family Robinson (Martin Milner version with a young Helen Hunt as one of the kids) about Jean Lafitte (Frank Langella...sigh...), John Belushi's tour-de-force in "Last Voyage of the Starship Enterprise," the inferior-but-cute "The Love Boat: the Next Generation" with Patrick Stewart, The Peter, Paul and Mary Holiday Concert, and the Lassie Christmas episode "The Little Christmas Tree" (which came off Discovery Kids and looks like hell, but is still, after all, a copy).

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 4:22:00 PM

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