Let’s Play “Beg That Question”

You forgot to remind me to put my teeth in before I went to the barbershop.

Your sister-in-law in Florida calls moments after you sit down with a lemongrass and ginger tea martini. She says your mother-in-law has fallen down trying to make it to the bathroom ahead of her diarrhea – unsuccessfully as it turns out. Mother lives two rooms away from your martini.

The hospital social worker calls at 21:30 to say they want to discharge your mother-in-law tonight after 2 hours because, though she had fallen and been taken to the emergency room dozens of times before for durations averaging 36 hours, this time she has diarrhea.

She put her dirty diapers in the cupboard next to her clean bath towels to cut down on odor.

Your spouse and his mother engage in a confusing dialogue about a plant on her dresser that has been rat-gnawed and/or rat-infested, after which he reports back, and then you ask if he placed said pot outside, and then he replies that he was going to but blah blah blah, and then there is much consternation at your precipitous action to take the fucking pot and put it outside the fucking door.

Before you tossed the rat pot, did you determine whether the rat was in it?

Is this all part of your diabolical plan to murder your wealthy relatives in cruel and lingering ways and to live in luxury thereafter on your ill-gotten gains?

At what point did you realize you were living with hoarders-in-waiting, and all that stands between you and a public spectacle in which the term clinically insane appears in lurid headlines describing your psychotic break and subsequent killing spree are the following: your medical marijuana card; your excellent cooking; your adorable kitty; and the happy place in your mildly morbid imagination?

Before I go on a magical quest to clean her commode and commode chair, I want you to see that this is actually chocolate ice cream in this large plastic tub I intend to use to put in the wash water to clean said appliances.

She objects to being told she has to spend an indeterminate number of days in a skilled nursing facility because her roommates are too ill to clean up her shit, by which I mean her shit.

Why I Won't Own a Gun

In other news,  I spent my 64^th birthday in a place with room service.  Had breakfast in bed the next day. Then lunch. Then, I paid my $50 co-pay and was discharged.

I had gone to the emergency room the evening of my birthday with atrial fibrillation. They kept me overnight, so someone in unfortunately patterned scrubs could wake me up three times in the night to be sure I was getting a good rest. Although I would have preferred to return home and sleep, I was discharged in time to attend the weekly sushi lunch/torturous conversational feedback loop with TCG and our demented roommate.

I returned home from the hospital with a case of intestinal flue that kept me running between the bathroom and bedroom for the next 24 hours, and wishing my Mommy was there to hold my forehead to check my temperature. So, I got a thorough intestinal cleanse as a free birthday bonus.

Of course the same bug then felled TCG, only he suffers much more dramatic symptoms, and prefers to have a sympathetic audience for his distress. When I am sleep deprived, my shoulder and neck muscles spasm and clench. It feels like a pit bull is gripping me by the back of my neck. I spent my first night back from the hospital sleeping on the couch - which was preferable to being awakened by TCG’s frequent noisy trips to the toilet. Thank Allah for vicodin.

The second day of TCG’s “24-hour” illness, this happened.

TCG:  (Dialing DOB’s cell phone for the third time because he’s too contagious/lazy to go and see how she is doing.  Wrt/phone, she usually can’t react quickly enough to answer on the first try, but mostly manages to figure it out by the second) Figure it out and answer your damn phone.

UCC:  You might still be contagious, want me to go check?

TCG:  (Dialing the home phone intercom) Hello? Hello? This is your son. Are you ok? Why don’t you answer your cell phone?

Pause, while we all assume DOB is trying to process a reply but succeeding only in babbling some repetitive phrase that might as well be: You have reached a non-functioning brain. Please re-think what you’re doing, after first disregarding any lingering assumptions you may harbor that the person you are calling can exercise any cognitive task more challenging than blinking while drooling.

TCG:  I have to see DOB.

Pause, while the earth spins silently on its axis, and me and the cats hold our collective breath for the next shoe to drop. Finally TCG huffs and puffs his way back to our side of the house.

TCG:  (Waving his hands to indicate he can’t speak yet, but being sure to get my full and undivided attention while we all wait.) She found where the rat is that’s been reportedly visiting her in the night… That plant J sent for some unexplained occasion? That’s sitting on her dresser? You know, in the basket. That plant…

… There’s a nice neat hole chewed in the back side and a nice burrow tunneled into the dirt and roots of the plant…

WISIMH:  And she got you up from your sickbed to show you this? Is she insane or just thoughtless? The incoherent warp of her babbling begins to sound like a wind chime in a zen garden. You're still at the semi-cogent state that remains intermittently coherent. I receive a blinding insight: O wait. She’s insane AND thoughtless. You're almost as bad. (Two insights, actually.)

TCG: … That’s where the rat has been…

UCC:  So you put the plant outside, right?

TCG:  I was going to, but I was laying (sic) on the floor because I was out of air.

UCC:  Jaisus in heaven. (Going to DOB’s room, confirming which is the rat’s basket, opening her door and putting it outside)

DOB:  You put the plant outside?

UCC:  Yes. Is that ok with you? (Not waiting for an answer,  closing the door on the smell of fresh urine and returning to the kitchen, bringing the full garbage bag that has been sitting by her door waiting for a magic spell to take it outside)

TCG:  I was going to take the plant out. I couldn’t breathe. Why did you take the trash out?

WISIMH:  Because the likelihood of you doing so is about as remote as Miskatonic University in Arkham MA is from this hellhole full of loonies.

UCC:  Are you shitting me? Because garbage attracts rodents. Rodents in the house are not ok. Then, there's the smell.

WISIMH:  Ya gotta draw the line somewhere with these hoarders. They think nothing of leaving crap on any horizontal surface that holds still longer than it takes TCG to start pissing. I am slowly losing the battle to remove accumulative hot-spots like the coffee table adjacent to TCG’s lazy-man recliner with the broken spring that sheds lumps of yellow crumbling foam to mingle with the potato chip dust and cookie crumbs marking the perimeter of TCG’s territory. The infected coffee table is likely to spread its clutter elsewhere if I leave it, but I’m just so fucking tired of living in a cluttered house that smells of only urine on a good day.

TCG:  I was going to do it as soon as I caught my breath.

UCC: The absence of initiative in this household is daunting.

WISIMH: The absence of initiative in this household is inversely proportional to the irregularity of my heartbeat. It’s more daunting than flaked coconut stuck between back teeth. “Lisa, you’re tearing me apart!”

We all managed to get to the eye doctor the day before I got sick, and I got a new prescription. Problem was that I chose to leave my good frames to get the new lenses, so I’m trying to wear a pair of backup specs from at least one major prescription away. The result is that I suffer from major eye-strain and am unable to escape into a book or three by reading to distract myself from things than my real life. My nearsighted life is less like a soft focus slow mo over new age music, than a blurry jumpy confusion of light and shadow. Or then again, maybe those two brownies for breakfast are talking.

Yesterday, I made some killer soup in the crock-pot with a smoked pork shank and some cannellini beans. Today I went to my primary care doc for the hospital follow-up, who referred me to cardiology after an irregular ekg showed I have a long qt interval. Today, DOB has come down with the same shit we had, so I’m bringing her juice and bullion. I have refused to perform any shit-cleaning duties in DOB’s room, claiming my heart condition and general unwillingness to perform any task the futility of which is comparable to rolling a stone up a hill and watching it roll down, over and over.  So, unless there really is a magic fairy looking over us, the shit smell is sure to spread across the DMZ of the back hallway and into the room where I sit and type.  Go. Save yourself.

Postmaturation

There’s premature, and immature, but I’ve discovered a new kind of mature. Actually it’s a new kind of lack of maturity. I’m calling it postmature.

Postmaturie is a behavioral pattern adopted by elderly sufferers of intermittent dementia and chronic forgetfulness, often accompanied by belligerence and paranoia. Onset and duration of symptoms are exacerbated by alcoholic consumption in public.

Diagnosis: Aberrant behaviors observed include: making faces, repeating “no!” and behaving generally like a nap-deprived, ill-mannered serial tantrum-throwing brat. Advanced cases include additional symptoms of incontinence, staggering and falling down, crossing arms across the chest, lowering the chin, and other body language of unreasoning defiance.

Undisciplined young children, the self-absorbed, the mentally challenged,  those with a very weak sense of situational awareness, weaker powers of reason, few inhibitions, appalling manners, and those with few redeeming or endearing characteristics are all at risk of Postmaturity.

Caregiver Qualifications: Must be a survivor, not a victim. Self-medication is a survival skill. Being deaf is a blessing. Hiring preference to those with other sources of intelligent conversation. Qualified applicants will demonstrate a well-evolved inner life, excellent imagination, creative craft hobbies, and/or one or more adorable cats. Postmature Persons’ Caregiver status qualifies for prescribed Medical marijuana by prescription in California.

Making And/Or Keeping Promises

So, DOB fell again. Not once all of 2010. Well, once, but we were able to pick her up because we discovered her pretty soon after she fell.

Sunday’s event began sometime in the wee hours of the morning, when, as near as I can reconstruct from the only eyewitness whose mentis isn’t very compos lately, she went outside to hang a wet towel to dry because I would be in to pick up her dirty laundry. Wait, what? She wanted to dry a towel before I picked it up to wash?

So, I enter, unsuspecting, around ten am to pick up her laundry…

DOB:  Blah blah (the minute I open the door. Never mind that she knows I can’t hear when she whispers)

UCC:  Yikes! You fell!

DOB: (from the middle of the room where she is sprawled in what can most generously be described as an unladylike pose) I pulled a boner.

WISIMN: No shit. Now, you’ll repeat incoherent snatches of a story of how you came to be where you so gracefully are.

DOB: I don’t know what happened….

WISIMH: Bless your little heart, you never do. Do you, dear?

DOB: … I opened the door to hang a towel on the rack outside…  where towels go to dry?... must have fallen. Don’t know what happened, except that I fell outside when I went to hang up a towel. Or something. Anyway…

UCC:   Stay right there, I’ll get him.

DOB:  Ok, I pulled a boner when I blah blah (trailing off as I leave the room to summon her son)

UCC:  Take a hit of abuterol. She’s down.

TCG gradually, with much huffing and puffing and what?-ing, trails me as I return to where I left off in DOB’s conversation, fortunately not missing any important plot twists or story recounting.

Scroll ahead an hour later, as we give up after trying to explain, then demonstrate, then listen and repeat trying to get the old lady on her knees so we can flip her butt up into a chair. She can’t fucking figure out how to do that, amid babbling about the towel and the open door and the boner she’s pulled. Ibid. Ibid. When we actually did get her in the right position at one point, and then we tried to lift one under each arm, she goes all passive resistance and dead weight as soon as we ask her to heave ho.

TCG has called his friends at 911, explaining calmly that we need “lift assist” and this is not a medical emergency. Then, I walk down to the street to meet them and walk them up to her room, explaining that she seems fine and TCG has COPD.

Of course, despite having discussed this at some length before their arrival and decided when they made the inevitable offer to take her to the ER to be sure she didn’t have a fucking stroke we would graciously decline, she of course, said yup take me in to the hospital.

WISIMH: Why did I not see this coming? These people have the follow-through of a broken toaster and slightly less initiative and cognitive powers.

After sitting in a corridor of the ER watching them bring in stretcher after stretcher of old homeless men/women who probably only needed a meal and a warm bed and a nap, and realizing they were VERY busy, I came to a stopping place in my book and finished my thermos of coffee and ate my apple, the later only after moving several chairs down the row from DOB’s wheeled chair, far enough to diminish the smell of ripe urine enough to swallow bites of apple. Then:

UCC:  We don’t have to stay here, you know. Mother may be hungry, and may need to change her diaper, and may feel just fine now, and besides the day’s half over and I didn’t get the first load of laundry in and several more ibids and ibids while we gravely considered our options and checklists.

Rolling out DOB in the wheelchair while TCG tags along in his walker so I have to open doors, I leave them on the curb and walk a few blocks to where I parked after dropping TCG at the ER door. We get home.

DOB:  I don’t know what happened, ibid, ibid and fucking ibid.

TCG:  Huff and puff and glad we didn’t stay.

WISIMN:  Yeah, now I can get back to the laundry, after I make lunch for DOB, make sure she takes her pills, take my own pills, and perform the standard checklist of one-on-one attention TCG requires after stressful event like this. Note: the checklist doesn’t include a reminder about how we agreed the next time she goes to the hospital, we’re not bringing her back into our house. Oh, wait. I remember now. You will conveniently ignore that with the same degree of expertise you ignore anyfuckingthing else I ask you to actually fuckingDO.

House of the Holy

House of The Holy

TCG has a form of ADD with an added element of senior forgetfulness that makes it hard to conduct a conversation. He interrupts very very frequently. Add to that a tendency for him to even interrupt himself, and toss in an almost total lack of ability to listen to anything else for more than about 30 seconds. 

I have to not only tell him to do anything that requires him to bestir himself from his chair,  I have to provide detailed direction. 

Now, when you add to that his needy clinging and dependence on me to provide all his socialization, cooking, cleaning, and laundry for him and the 92 year old crazy mother who, on a good day smells only like piss and who increasingly smells like shit, it's a plate full of crazy. 

 So, here is what I'm thinking...

Saint Blaise was a martyr who had his  flesh torn by wool carding combs and then he was martyred by being beaten and beheaded. He is the patron saint of wool combers. 

By this logic, I will eventually be the patron saint of incontinent dementia-sufferers, and hypochondriac drama queens. 

What will survive of us is love

Wisimh: I feel better than I have in years. While my home life is dreary sad and depressing I am not depressed as I had increasingly become these past 3 - 4 years. I feel stronger and able to survive my duties as caregiver. I suppose, as with the final stage of death and dying, I accept my life. How fucking mature of me.

If not cause for actual celebration, I'm no longer on homicide watch (like suicide watch, only different). Threat level green. Whew.

The title quote is Philip Larkin.

I Feel Like A New Man

UCC had an angiogram and two stents were inserted in a cardiac artery.

UCC: I feel like I have been born again. No chest pain and walking on the treadmill is much easier. I'm not fatigued, depressed or in pain. I have NO indigestion and feel like I can breathe much easier and deeper. No arm pain.

TCG: Maybe you'll enjoy sex more.

WISIMH: Douche.