"$hospice_nurse." There was a long pause, and I waited through it. "She's coming this afternoon at 4."
"Good. Sorry I wasn't in here to answer the phone." I kicked myself for saying it, but I couldn't help it. She shrugged, and then she laid into me for not recording in the register all the checks she had signed for her bills. I had written the checks, she had signed them, and I had put them in envelopes to mail. That I hadn't finished recording them in her register really was my fault, but she treated me as if I were trying to steal from her, or hide what I'd done. My excuse is that I was in the hospice care center, wondering if she was losing her mind. I didn't tell her that, though -- I just wrote down the amounts of the checks and handed her the rest of her bills. I didn't offer to help. She wouldn't have accepted it.
When the vomiting started again, on Monday, she said it was because of the antibiotic she was on to prevent her stent from getting infected. Crackers seemed to help. The nurses came and drained the stent, and I was happy to hear that one of the nurses knew Thomas, the homeless schizophrenic man in Wilmington who walked me to my car on the evenings when I worked late.
"My mother worked for years at the Oaks," said the nurse, referring to the psychiatric inpatient division of the local hospital. "And when I first moved to Wilmington, she drove me around downtown. 'I want to point out Thomas to you,' she said. 'If you ever need anything, you just call for him.'"
I wonder if Thomas is still down there, and if he's still able to take care of himself and the people who need him.
Mama's regular nurse took her blood pressure before the draining, and it was 80/60. After a half a liter the nurse said, "Oh, Lord, it's 80 over nothin'. I think we'll stop there." Throughout, my mom still sat up and talked. She was lucid, and her color wasn't bad. Her blood pressure came back up a bit, to about 80/58, but when I tried to take it with the automagical digital blood pressure machine, it blinked "E" repeatedly. "Too low, I guess," my mom said. By that point, after the nurses had left, she had sunk back into herself, the skin visibly hugging her skull, and her eyes losing the "other people are around" glint. She looked like she is dying. She only looks that way when there is no one to impress.
Her vomiting has gotten worse, though, and its clear it's not because of the antibiotics. By Wednesday, she was willingly taking the ABHR drug (that's Ativan, Benadryl, Haldol, and Reglan), even though the medication makes her incredibly sleepy. The vomit is dark green with brown flecks, a color that feels wrong on a primal level. It takes much of my rational brain to dump the bucket into the toilet, rinse carefully with water from the tub, and bring the bucket back. Sometimes, I bite back my gorge, and the smell of citrus-green soda and stomach bile will forever be the smell of my mother dying. I will never be able to drink Diet Mountain Dew again. I have gotten back into the habit of emptying her bucket, though, and into the habit of watching the pain in her eyes that meant she was fighting to keep her medications down.
My habit in writing these diaries has been to make cryptic notes to myself in TextEdit, then figure out how to turn those notes into something I'll want to read later. I've found, though, that I can't write when my mom is awake. It feels profoundly wrong to write about something she is experiencing, at least while she's watching. I read her stuff I write from time to time -- but nothing recent. I read her my husi diary about drunken plumbing. I've read short stories, but I can't show her what I'm feeling now.
I started writing this entry this morning, sitting in the living room, while my mother was sleeping off her ABHR in her bedroom. Then, of course, the phone rang, and I got to hang up on a telemarketer. When I came back to hang up the phone, she said, "What are you working on?"
"What?" I felt the quick stab of guilt.
"I thought you were really working on something," she said.
"No, just playing on the computer in the den, trying to let you sleep," I said. I can't let her see what I feel.
Because what I'm feeling now is anger and grief, in equal measure. Ana and I have been getting notes from friends saying how wonderful it is that my mother's is doing a bit better -- how great that she's not throwing up! That she's not quite dead yet! I read their notes and I don't feel their relief. I just feel angry and sad. The recent "turn for the better that my mom has experienced hasn't saved her life -- it's merely extended it. It hasn't taken away her pain -- it's only made it last longer and drawn out its intensity. Somehow, as humans in the West, we seem to have internalized the idea that death is the great enemy and that anything other than death is preferable. I look at the crease between my mom's eyes and the deep grimace as she sleeps and I know better.
I fear that I will always wonder if I did the right thing, taking her to the hospital when she was vomiting blood every hour. I saw the pain in her eyes and I just wanted to take it away. I wanted the quick fix, and for Christ's sake, I wanted my mom to be okay. I fear I made a mistake that will cause her more pain and more fear.
I talked to iGrrrl the other night, and it felt really good to talk to someone about my other life, the one in Boston, the one where I have a job and a dog and a cat and a house. The one where I don't ever have to make life-and-death decisions. I miss that life. iGrrrl asked, half-jokingly, "How's your Ativan consumption?"
"I haven't had one since last week," I said. "But my beer consumption is not insignificant."
Last night, ana and I went to the West End Tavern in Burgaw, NC. It, like the Spur of the Moment in Larkspur, CO, and The Blue Post in Wilmington, NC, is a comfortable locals' bar with surprisingly good beer. Well, at the Blue Post, I mostly drink PBR, but that's because it's where (and what) I drank when I was poor. Still, locals' bars are good places to have conversations with random drunk strangers, and they're good places to forget for a few minutes, the pain that's waiting.
Ana ordered a Sierra Nevada ESB (which was not bad, though not Fuller's), and I asked the bartender to surprise me. I told her I liked IPAs, and I like hops, so she served me a Victory HopDevil, which was really very good. I'll look for it again.
I perused the classifieds of the local weekly arts paper, and ana and I realized that we could sell our house in MAia and be able to afford to houses around here, at least of the apparent median prices. With much more land, too. And people around here wonder why so many people are moving to NCia.
We left the pub early, and we were home by 9. Even though my brother and his wife were here to make sure my mom was okay, I still felt that I needed to get home. Plus, I couldn't justify getting wasted, not now. Buzzed, okay, but not really drunk.
Tonight ana and I went out to dinner at the local Mexican place. To prove that I'm not trying to watch her every move, I left mama alone briefly, between the time ana and I left, and the time brother J and his wife got here (with food from their church--bleargh). I brought my mom some ice and another soda and kissed the top of her head and told her I love her and asked her if she needed anything else. "No," she said. "I'm just going to sit right here." I asked her if she wanted anything to eat. "No," she said, her hand resting on her swollen belly. "My stomach just aches." I tried to ask her about the type of pain -- is it her stomach? her abdomen? pressure? "It just aches," she repeated.
I rubbed her back and kissed the top of her head again. "I guess Rusti can just wait until you get back to get her balogna," my mom said sadly. I took a deep breath and said -- as cheerily as I could -- that oh, I'll get it now! Before we go! No problem! Come on, Rusti! It's balogna time! Even if it's an hour and a half before you usually eat!
This is the sort of communication I'd forgotten about. This is the sort of thing my mom did when I was a kid and when I was a college student. She wouldn't just ask me for something -- she would make me feel bad for not anticipating what she needed. I've tried very hard to learn to be more direct, to not make people feel bad when I ask them to do something for me. I hope I don't make people feel bad, anyway. I wish she wouldn't play these games now. I wish that now, of all times, she could just say, "I'd like it if you fed Rusti before you leave -- I don't want her to have to wait." But, instead, I drove down highway 117 complaining to ana, who sat beside me, making sympathetic noises.
This is what I need ana for, right now. Even though ana shrugs, palms up, and wonders what exactly he's doing, I know. Ana is my witness. Ana is who I share this burden of vigil with. Ana takes out the trash and plays ball with the dog and empties the dishwasher and wipes up the mud I track in. But mostly, ana just holds me and listens and shares the ache. Thank God for ana, because now I don't feel alone.
Shortly after we arrived at the restaurant, many teenagers from the horrible private school I went to for a few years arrived. I find it interesting that on their web page, this school has several African-American students, since the school was one of the many "segregationist" schools that sprang up in the South in the 1970s to give wealthy (relatively speaking) families a way to keep their white daughters and sons pure. It was a horrid school, and I got a spotty education for those few years I was there, in addition to getting abused daily by those with more means than me. I wanted to make snide comments to the roomful of Harrells Christian Academy students and families. I still feel like I have something to prove, I guess.
I stopped writing briefly to get a beer for me and some ice for my mom. While I was getting ice, I heard her retching, and I came back to see the dark green sputum landing in the bucket. I rubbed her back, and took the bucket from her when she was done. It smelled foully, even after I rinsed it, so I returned it -- just in time for her to spit violently into it. I left it sitting in her lap while I got a new liner, and waited until she was finished to throw the old one away. I noticed she had vomited on her blanket. "Let me get you a clean blanket," I said, softly.
"No, no it's fine," she said. "It'll be okay."
I ignored her and brought her a clean blanket and took away the soiled one, leaving it on top of the washing machine. "Thank you, baby," she breathed. She's now eating spoon-fulls of crushed ice, swiveling back and forth in her chair, staring blankly at the television, her dog -- and I -- watching her intently.
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