Just Lauren

Yesterday Pippin and I went to Colorado Springs to visit my parents and my grandma.
My aunt, grandma, and cousin had all come to visit last weekend for my grandma’s birthday. While driving back to my parents’ house from lunch at Kaitlin’s last Sunday, they got into a car accident. My aunt and cousin are okay, but my grandma took the brunt of the impact (they were t-boned on the passenger side). She has broken ribs and fractures throughout her body. She was hospitalized for a couple of days and then transferred to a rehab center in Colorado Springs. She will now be staying there for 4 to 6 weeks while she goes through rehab and heals.

So I went down yesterday in order to visit her and to help out my parents. I took Pippin because I figured it would be nice for him to get out of our house for a bit.

I’m glad I got to see my grandma. She’s in a lot of pain but when she moved from the chair to the bed in the evening (she had been sitting in her chair all day), it was the best she had done the whole week. I will take that as a small sign that she is improving. Sadly, the accident has caused her to have a difficult time staying in reality. When I saw her at lunchtime, she thought she was back in her home in Texas. She thought my aunt and mom had held a garage sale earlier and were selling all her possessions. It was kind of a shock, very odd. I had known that her memory was going (it’s believed she has Alzheimer’s) but I had never seen her act like that in person. She was definitely not like this when I saw her before the crash. I hope that once she gets back home in a month or so, she’ll do better.

The brain is such a complicated thing. It’s sad to think that one day, years and years from now, there will probably be a cure for Alzheimer’s, and my grandma won’t be one of the people to benefit from it. But others will, and that’s good. And you know what, as long as my grandma is happy, it doesn’t matter if she thinks she’s 63 or if she can’t remember what she had for breakfast. Who cares about that stuff anyway?

(By the way, she remembered who I was yesterday. Take that world! 🙂 )