Ibid, Etc.

I wake up every morning now to the same day.  I'm exhausted.  There will be no relief.  I carry on, dutiful and muddled.  Each day I wonder about the next.  Today, my mother is scheduled for her 3rd kyphoplasty, but I don't know what time.  No one could tell me.  The interventional radiologists do not work weekends.  Imagine that.  One part of the hospital just shuts down on the weekends.  Why?  It makes no sense.  But my mother has been cared for every day since she went to the hospital on Thursday by the same nurse, Yvette.  She has been wonderful to my mother.  She treats her as a daughter might, holding her hand, massaging her, bathing her.  She keeps my mother out of pain administering meds, requesting more from the doctors.  Yesterday afternoon, I had to leave the room.  Two assistants were trying to take my mother to the bathroom and she was crying out in pain.  I fell apart.  I walked into the hallway and out the doors into a little lobby by the elevators.  Yvette came out with a box and tissues and sat with me for a moment.  She told me she sees old people come in every day and no one comes to see them.  I had been there for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  But the more she told me what a good person I was, the harder it was not to weep.  

My mother will not have any care like this again.  She suffers when the night nurse comes on, she said.  I'm sure he is fine, but after being cared for by Yvette. . . . 

My mother is very confused about things now.  I don't know if it is the morphine or just an acceleration of old age dementia.  I hope the surgery today will relieve her pain, but I am doubtful.  She has a back full of arthritis, the foramen narrowing so the nerves have little space in which to live.  After the surgery, she will go to a rehab facility.  These are often not so good.  I've been researching them online as best I can and have come up with some ideas, but it is all a matter of whether she can get in at the time she is released.  These are short-term facilities.  They will evaluate her after two or three weeks.  My mother will never be able to live independently again, so hard decisions lie ahead.  My system is breaking down with the stress of things.  I'm trying to learn about Medicare and insurances.  It seems she has only 100 days before all financial support shuts off.  I am told I must really research all of this.  I have never been a "money man."  I have no interest in finances and institutions.  I am looking at all this the way a very dyslexic kid looks at "War and Peace."  

I can't.  

I need help.  Help is expensive.  Everything is.  

Today, I must begin using my power of attorney.  I need to run to eight banks all in different parts of town.  I need to know when CDs are due to be renewed.  My mother said something about my needing to withdraw money from some of them or there will be big penalties.  I have no idea about this.  I'm hoping the banks do.  

I look in the mirror at night and don't recognize myself.  It is a different person looking back now, haggard, joyless, glazed.  I take no pleasure in anything, and I must be careful.  I've been drinking too heavily at night.  I shut it off last night and made tea.  But I'm not eating well.  I feel ill, weak.  I sit.  The house pops and creaks and hums and moans.  Now we live under the fateful eye of potential hurricanes.  The next two months will be dicey.  Misery spreads across the land, but I can't take interest in fighting fascism at this point.  What can I do?  People have voted to end democracy.  This was the majority choice.  Miserable people like watching the freedoms of others disappear.  "Maybe," they think, "their lives will be as mean and miserable as my own.  I think that would bring me pleasure." 

That's my takeaway.  It is akin to sexual pleasure, I think.  How many Nazi schmucks enjoyed the beating of the Jews?  I think some primitive, evil joy was had.  

But I have my own miseries to contend with now.  I'm sure one day I will come back to an altered world.  I'll wonder what happened while I was away.  How could it?  

The world grows warmer, storms wilder.  Crops fail and animals disappear.  But people are so easily distracted by the circus.  Science it too difficult.  The new football season is about to begin.  Did you hear about the new album that just "dropped"?  Oh, man. . . it explains soooo much about the artist.  We all want to dig deeper.  We all want to know more.