The Dang Furnace (Thurs, 3 Feb 2011)

When I called this afternoon, mom was stoking the fire in the wood stove. The first thing out of her mouth was, "That dang furnace is going to drive me crazy! It's heck to have a furnace that doesn't work well, so you have to have a wood fire TOO to keep it warm enough!"

So of course I jumped into the opportunity to suggest that when Bill takes her into town tomorrow for her appointment with Dr. Kubac, maybe they should stop by Orley's Stoves and take a look at propane stoves and see if she likes any of them. She immediately squashed that idea by saying, "Oh no, I know what you're trying to do, but I'm going to wait to see what happens with Kubac. I've got too much on my plate to worry about that right now. I want to see what happens with Kubac first." That was a kind of interesting response, because it implies that she doesn't want to go through the expense and hassle of getting a propane stove installed if Kubac tells her she doesn't have much time left. While I can understand not wanting to deal with a propane stove project if her health isn't stabilized, it has seemed like she has been doing pretty well over the past couple weeks. She has even said that she is definitely feeling better. But mom is an old-school nurse who believes that doctors know everything (except for Dr. Dow the Dunce), so maybe she wants Kubac to tell her how she is doing. Anyway, tabling the propane stove idea for the moment.

She said that she has no wood on the back porch, but since Bill is coming this evening, she figured she could wait. She did say that she has been using the wood that her friends stacked for her on the side deck outside her sliding glass door, and that she wants to use that up before summer, so she actually has plenty of easily accessible wood.

She said that this is "one of those slow but sure days." At 4pm she was just finishing her laundry. I asked how she was feeling, knowing that she has been feeling pretty good for days now, but she said that she is "awfully tired" because she has had three nights in a row where she didn't get much sleep because the diuretic keeps getting her up all night long to head to the bathroom. She kind of likes to sit in the bathroom and read in the middle of the night, because the furnace vent is nearby and if she closes the door it gets toasty warm in there. She said that Jana kept getting up to push the door open with her nose to see what was going on. She said, "Jana follows me around something terrible; she hasn't forgotten that one day her favorite guy (Ray) didn't come home, and I think she's afraid that the same thing will happen, that I won't come back."