Update: Glimmer

Dark moods may be good for creating dark stories, but dark times mean it's hard to find quiet hours in which to work on them.

There should be a full medical blog soon, because I just got a vital piece of information about my mother's physical rehabilitation stay this afternoon.  Namely, it ends on December 4th, and so I can pretend to enforce some degree of chapter structure on life while recounting recent events.  But for now, let's just say that she's been blaming me for all of it.  Mostly by phone, although I am allowed to visit in person twice per week -- under strict guidelines.  (Coronavirus, y'know.)  And when someone is calling twenty or more times per day to inform you that you're a monster, it becomes hard to concentrate on some of the little things.  Like creativity.

Caregivers and doctors have this much in common:  we can't turn off the phone.  And mine is a dumbphone.  Very dumb.  It makes phone calls.  It does not assign individual ringtones to callers, or I would have given her one for impending doom.  As it is, any time someone's called me for the last few days, I've jumped.

It's hard to be creative when you're jumping all the time.

So today, I turned off -- the ringer.  I looked at the screen and only answered the phone when the rehab center called to tell me about the discharge date, because any other medical notification would have also come from them.  I've been trying to call her since finishing the chapter, but -- she's not picking up any more than I did earlier, perhaps because they told her that the release date would be determined today and she initially heard that as 'I'm getting out today.'  I am presumably being blamed for this not having been true.

I went for temporary silence to postpone the pain.  I won a side order of guilt.  But I also got 8k words up.

It may not be a win, but I'd like to at least call it a no-score tie.