Family Friday... on a Monday

Grandma's first selfie.

This is my grandmother. You are seeing this picture first because the rest of the pictures will be graphic in nature and I needed a buffer picture so my links were not immediately accompanied with a gross picture.

Anyway, my grandmother is 85 years old. She is borderline diabetic [this is a complicated statement], hard of hearing, has macular degeneration, peripheral nerve damage in her feet, and is a staunch Democrat. She is mobile, but needs a walker and has a lot of difficulty making it up the three stairs in her home.

She is adamant about living independently. She currently lives across the road from us in her ranch style home. It is all one level [save for the three steps it take to get to the attached garage] and even her washing machine is on the main floor.

I'm telling you all this as a background.

December 21st we [myself and my mother] get a call from the nice lady [and family friend] that helps grandma clean her house. She saw that grandma had an open wound on the back of her foot. When asked about it grandma said she first noticed a blister back there on Saturday [the 19th] and to not tell us about it because we'll just worry over nothing.

This is a normal statement from Grandma.

So naturally, she called us and told us about it and we went over right away to look at it. We found this. For size reference... grandma wears a 10WW shoe.

Grandma assured us that she was fine and didn't want us to worry about her.

We didn't listen to her and took her to the emergency room.

Once the slipper was removed we noticed something else.


The wound was just the top of a popped blister. A blister that measured 4.5 cm tall and 6 cm wide. That is a Post-It note sized blister... that we only were just told about!

Now I know that at least one person is out there going, "Why don't you do daily checks on her?"

We do... I do.

Grandma is a special case. She is kinda paranoid. Like "the government is trying to steal all my money" paranoid. She is considered "too rich" to qualify for an in-home care program and "too poor" to move to a care facility. So she has me as a care provider and our family friend as a maid. I take her to appointments, get her groceries, make meals, and pick up her prescriptions. If she needs something from me, she calls me up and I go right over. She has a Life Alert necklace [that she keeps on her walker because... reasons?] incase she can't get to her phone.

But mainly it is her decision to do anything. And she likes to prove this by not telling us about her ailments for a few days. Even when we are sitting in front of her.

So the ER doctor says that the blister is probably from either her cellulitis or her lymphedema.

In other words... no big deal?

They send us down to wound care for debridement... aka the removal of dead tissue so the wound can heal. It looks like this.

Just so you know, I'm apparently a ninja when I take pictures. The doctor didn't even know. But I knew I needed to be able to tell other family members what was going on.

So I became the Ninja Photographer!

Long story short, Grandma is healing well. Actually she only had to go to 2 debridement appointments. The doctor said she was healing nicely and that all she needed was someone to change her bandages.

That would be me.

Woo...