Smells like bacon…

Life has been a little… chaotic since starting hospice care for my mom. And by “a little chaotic,” I mean I now live in a sleep-deprivation experiment sponsored by Alexa, arthritis, and appliance failure.

Mom has developed a habit of waking me up throughout the night because she can’t work the remote, needs help getting to the bathroom, or wants to have deep late-night philosophical conversations with Alexa. Honestly, Alexa probably knows more about our family secrets at this point than I do.

And if I somehow sleep through the commotion? My cat Milo has appointed himself Head of Hospice Security. He will aggressively inform me that my mother is awake. Tuesday morning, I was up three separate times—twice for Mom and once because the dog apparently didn’t want to feel left out of the group activity. We had a long potty break at 4:30 am before I fixed a bowl of cereal for mom at 6:00 am. My productivity during the middle of the night is kind of impressive.

By 7:30 a.m., I finally crawled back into bed… only to be jolted awake an hour later by the lawn guy. Nothing says “get out of bed” quite like industrial-strength weed whacking outside your bedroom window.

Then things got spicy.

I walked into the living room and smelled something burning. Not “Oops, the toast is a little crispy” burning. More like “This might end with me explaining myself to the local news” burning.

I checked every room, the basement, the attic—nothing. Mom’s aide arrived and immediately smelled it too. At that point, my anxiety packed a suitcase in my brain, signed a lease, and moved in permanently. Meanwhile, no one else seemed particularly alarmed. They were treating it less like a possible electrical fire and more like a bizarre candle-scent guessing game.

My mom thought it smelled like bacon. Her aide insisted it smelled like some kind of roasted meat.

I, meanwhile, was one whiff away from a mental breakdown.

Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and called 911. The operator kept asking what the smell was like, so I blurted out, “Bacon.”

There was a pause.

“Ma’am… were you cooking bacon?”

My sleep-deprived, completely fried brain immediately answered, “No! I’m a vegetarian!”

That seemed to be the moment he realized logic had officially left the building alongside my emotional stability, because he calmly told me to evacuate the house.

Now, if you’ve never tried to urgently evacuate a hospice patient, let me explain: urgency is not always a shared goal. Mom needed to use the bathroom first. Then brush her hair. Priorities.

Eventually, her aide convinced her to head outside while I wrangled the dog and one cat. The other cat vanished like he had outstanding warrants.

The firefighters and EMTs walked from their station across the street and immediately started debating what the smell reminded them of. One said bacon. Another said rotisserie chicken. Apparently my near panic attack smelled delicious.

Turns out it was the refrigerator. The coils were burning.

So the fridge got unplugged, I scrambled to save groceries in coolers, hauled out a tiny backup fridge from storage, and learned that replacing a refrigerator apparently takes two business days and the patience of a saint.

Honestly, though? Maybe it was a blessing in disguise because it took me two full days to physically clean out that refrigerator anyway.

Meanwhile, my body is absolutely flaring. Between lifting, laundry, stairs, caregiving, errands, and surviving whatever fresh nonsense each day delivers, my joints are staging a full rebellion. And the hardest part? The guilt.

Because when your body physically can’t keep up with what your heart wants to do, the emotional exhaustion hits almost as hard as the pain.

Still… we made it through another day. Slightly sleep deprived. Mildly traumatized. Smelling faintly like a burnt bacon refrigerator. But through it all, we’re still here.