Almost Done

Justin and I cannot believe that he only has two more treatments left! Time has flown by! We have been here over 5 weeks already. Now that it is time to go home, we are finding it hard to do all the things we wanted to do. Tomorrow is our last full day here. He will have his last radiation Thursday morning at nine, and unless the doctor tells us differently, we will go home shortly after that. We will be responsible to wash our sheets and towels and do a deep cleaning of our room, but that shouldn't take us long. We keep it mostly clean all the time.

This whole experience has been very eye-opening for me. I have learned so much about myself, my son, and those around me going through physical hardships. I will be posting more about that in the future. I think I really need some time to process it and make some sense in my own head before I write it down.

Here is a little funny along the way. There are 28 rooms here, and we all must share all of the work in the kitchens. The four kitchens are in the four corners of a big room, with tables and chairs in between. My side has three women that do too much of the work; Tammy, Freddie and me. We do not mind in the least if we do dishes for someone who is sick. There are some elderly men that are here with no caregiver, and there are a few people who are really frail. So we do their work happily. The kitchens are wide and beautiful and have all the latest equipment, including industrial dishwasher/sanitizers. They are easy to run and we all (should) take turns. Usually there are several of us at once, so we chat and have a great time.

There is one caregiver who is a healthy female. We have noticed that she has never once done her own dishes. She leaves them on the counter for someone else to do. That is not only against the rules, but it is just plain rude. And she has been plain rude for 5 weeks. We are tired of it.

This morning Freddie and I noticed that she made scrambled eggs. She left her eggy pan, her (and her husband's) dishes, cups, silverware and wrappers on the counter for someone else to clean up. This really bothered me and Freddie. We griped that the two of us and Tammy always have to do her work for her. So I got a little piece of paper and wrote, "Please leave these for me so I can clean them myself." We both laughed that we really didn't want a confrontation, and maybe this little hint would nudge her to do her fair share. Then we left the kitchen, all clean except this one dirty pile with my note on it. We hoped she would pass by the pile later in the day and fix her problem.

In less than 5 minutes, Tammy enters the kitchen, sees the dirty pile, reads the note and promptly feels sorry for the unknown person who didn't have time to do their dishes....and she washes them all up and cleans up the mess, then throws the note away.

When we found out, Freddie smacked her in the arm! We laughed and laughed about our lesson gone wrong. So our friend got away with it again. As I write this, I know that there are again dirty dishes in the sink. She and her husband are the only ones in the kitchen (clean, except for her dirty pile). Oh, well. Looks like this will not be solved by me. But it did give us a reason to laugh like little school girls.