For the past couple months I have been very distracted and not keeping all of my websites updated because my grandmother has been in and out of the hospital for most of the year. My father died about 15 years ago, followed by my grandfather, leaving my brother and I the only close relatives she has in this area. Of course, my brother and grandmother are estranged, to put it mildly, so taking care of her pretty much falls to me (my grandmother’s brothers and sisters are very helpful, but they are dispersed around the state).
Anyway, my grandmother had a stent operation last summer, but began experiencing chest pains toward the end of last year and had to go in for another operation to repair a very diseased artery. She spent a couple weeks in a nursing home at that time, and then went back to her apartment. Then in April she was readmitted to the hospital after complaining of numbness in her leg — the diseased artery was once again on the verge of failure and doctors had to replace it with an artificial one.
She was in the hospital for several weeks after that and has been in a nursing home for physical therapy for the past six weeks. Frankly, for someone who was never very active and smoked much of her life, she’s in pretty good health for being 81. But she’s also reached the point where my wife and I are no longer comfortable having her live on her own in Battle Creek, which is about 20-30 minutes from Kalamazoo, where we live.
So we’ve talked her into living with us. Which created an immediate problem because we currently rent a house in which the bathroom is on the second story, and there’s no way grandma can do stairs anymore. So, we’re wrapping up buying a house that is a bit further from where we work, but a bit closer to my daughter’s school (currently we only live about 1 mile from the university we both work at).
We’ve had to do this in record speed, since my grandmother is going to be discharged from her nursing home any day, and we want her to spend as little time in her apartment as possible. So, we looked at several houses last Wednesday, made an offer on one on Friday, had that offer accepted today, and hope to have the requisite inspections, etc., finished this week so we can close on the damn thing in early June and be all moved in before the end of June.
Thankfully, Lisa has taken care of handling most of the details, as I absolutely abhor the sort of convoluted processes that are required to do something like buy a house. In fact, we keep having our realtor and mortgage rep tell us that we’re doing things backwards, but that’s because the normal way is just plain silly IMO and would take forever.