Tag: hospital

Egg-related Catastrophes, Fucking JEFF, and Reverse Unicorns

All of it is here

In an alternate universe I’m a philosophical radio personality punctuating the adventures of people I eat near, walk past, get snubbed by, and get talked about by.

The highlights of this week:

Hearing my mom lucidly recount the horrible powdered egg poop she had a day or two ago that needs to be entered in the annals of the most repulsive (and regrettable) digestive system egg-related catastrophes of all time.

My sweet kitten-heart Tonka nursing on the hem of my pants for comfort after being neutered and purring like he’s competing for a noise championship.

The thought that the whole world would improve if half of all human men were neutered before they reach puberty.

The realization that: a) such comments could encourage the MRA to slaughter me, and b) since the whole bible construct is patently misogynistic, and therefore hell itself is also an elaborate myth of the patriarchy, I will now be marked indelibly for a first class ticket to hell.

Fucking JEFF.*

Haunting the nurse station at both Kaiser hospital and the nursing facility like a wrathful spirit penning their offenses on the great wall of nursing crimes.

Four kittens purring.

The experience of being so bone tired I could lay myself down on a railroad track and get the best sleep of my life knowing trains be a-coming.

That’s a lie, I never sleep well no matter how bone tired I am and you people who experience good sleep are like reverse unicorns to me.

The sign outside the Catholic church that read “Jesus is the living bread that came down from heaven, eat of him and live forever” ZOMBIE JESUS. CANNIBALISM. CAN VEGETARIANS BE CATHOLIC?!

Tomatoes!

Max asking how come high school is so “easy”.

(Angelina wipes brow with her sweaty hand of industry and advocation and says “I don’t know, son”)

The good, the bad, and the perforations.**

 

*Nurse with an obsession about not over-medicating patients  through which he manages to under-medicate patients with a relentless refusal to offer the full prescription of medication allowed to his patients who can’t argue with him anyway because they’re so fucking delirious with PAIN and are too busy hallucinating loud parties in the driveway. Fucking JEFF!

**Cryptic message from the brain with no discernible meaning but it seems as good a note to end this post on than any.

Here, Have a Box of Kittens

box of kittens

I haven’t been on social media so much. I’m tired of reporting on my mom’s condition. Not because it isn’t important to me or that it might be boring to others, but because it forces me to see just how tenuous and fickle a body can be in recovery. It’s a big process requiring care from so many angles. I’ve been fighting so hard to make sure my mom’s needs are being met and it’s dreary and has me going in circles. My sister has stepped in to make phone calls which is a relief because now I’m not the only one talking to all these dildo-donkeys.

Yeah, I’m super mistrustful of the team of people who are supposed to be caring for her. Today her team will make a bedside stop and I will be there. I hope today is a better day for my mom than yesterday. She was super delirious yesterday, slurring her words, and admits to continuing hallucinations. Yet she passed a cognitive test to determine how capable she is of following directions. You should have heard her garbled report of how well it went.

This is where boxes of kittens come in handy. I definitely need a box of kittens. I’ll share them with you! These kittens are getting fixed today and will go up for adoption this weekend. 3 out of 4 of them. I’ll have Tusker a little longer because she needs to put on weight before she can be fixed and she needs a little more time for taming. We’ve had a great start to the day with our bonding session. She just purred for me for the first time and exposed her belly and also climbed into my lap. She didn’t stay in my lap but she did climb into it twice.

I don’t think I slept at all last night but two good things came of my pseudo-sleep: no nightmares and a kind of soft-focus for my brain in which it didn’t have to be thinking or worrying or plaguing me with upcoming tasks and lists of my responsibilities. I didn’t sleep because I slept in my mom’s apartment so her dog and cat would have some over-night company. The dog hangs out with us nearly all day so it’s not like she feels abandoned, but the cat never comes in our part of the house (because our dog will chase her) and boy oh boy did she need some love and attention. She sat on me, circled me, pawed at me for more attention. She was so starved for attention. Normally I stay in my mom’s apartment the whole time she’s at the hospital but after she got toted away by the EMT’s her room was a disaster and I couldn’t bear to be in there. So it was a cozy animal night, making my mom’s animals feel more normalcy and love, but no sleep. Just drifting in that half-sleep half-waking place.

I didn’t wake up with so much back pain, so that’s cool.

That’s all I have to say for now. I’m burnt to a socket.

Here We Go Again

barren of chamomile

This is how I feel right now: all hard scrabble, dried leaves, and a dirty flattened Q-tip.

Tomorrow my mom goes to Kaiser to get put back together from all the trauma of last summer. There are many reasons why this surgery should not be stressing me out the way it is:

  • It’s not an emergency surgery this time.
  • She’s not getting surgery with a broken back this time.
  • We know about her reaction to the anesthesia and pain killers and that they may need to try alternatives if she starts accusing nurses of setting the hospital on fire.
  • Kaiser does everything internally so there won’t be that head-exploding problem of trying to orchestrate all the different contractors that take care of different things.

I think there are more reasons but I’m having trouble focusing on them at the moment. Resectioning intestines is a pretty high risk surgery even when it’s planned due to risk of infection. They may go in there and find too much scar tissue from last time and not be able to resection her. She knows that’s a possibility. I know it’s a possibility. Because of who I am and the clinical anxiety that’s so hard to wrestle down, I can’t stop thinking about her going through all this only to find they have to close her up and she’ll have to face a lifetime of using a colostomy bag.

Obviously I can’t quite quell the fear that she’s going to die. I made her write a will this week. We talked about what kinds of decisions she wants us to make if things go wrong. Today while cleaning the bathroom I made a mental note to ask her to remind me if she wants to be cremated or something else.

I am the grim reaper.

Apparently.

I have to admit to a certain level of PTSD. This time last year she was in the hospital fighting for her life for a month. I don’t feel over it yet. The whole thing was awful. Not the way death itself is awful but all the not knowing and the paranoid hallucinations, the second emergency surgery, the abscess that formed, becoming obsessed with her white blood cell count, trying to get information from nurses and doctors. It was one long traumatizing nightmare.

Life is constantly reinforcing my anxieties, proving that YES, people can die at any moment and YES, everything can go wrong and YES, you can end up living in a small town in which you don’t belong where –

Oh, hang on, different nightmare. Different PTSD.

I collect PTSD like they’re Pokemon cards.

Life is constantly proving me right. That’s one of the worst things about having clinical anxiety. It just builds and builds because everything you’re afraid of really happens in the world. It doesn’t matter if there’s only a 1% chance it will happen to you.

That person who got killed by a serial killer – do they really give a shit that there was only a .000000001% chance that was going to happen to them? People with anxiety don’t give a chewy monkey’s ass about percentages or statistics. It’s enough that these things that happen to almost no one happen to SOME ONE.

Here’s the best case scenario:

  • She goes in tomorrow morning and they go in and find she doesn’t have too much scar tissue.
  • They resection her and she doesn’t react to the meds.
  • She doesn’t get an infection and she’s discharged in a week.
  • She comes home, we help her recover comfortably.
  • She gets completely back to living a normal life and we all get glass slippers. Or wooden ones that won’t shatter and cut an artery and make us bleed out on the ball room floor.

Cause that could totally happen.

That’s what I need to focus on now. I need to picture that. I need to send energy to that.

I’ll probably be watching Fringe on an endless loop. I’ll be sleeping in mom’s apartment (a unit in the same house as ours) to keep Rosie from getting scared or lonely. I expect to drink a lot of beer for the next few days.

But the minute my mom is on the mend and clear of delicate risk of infection or complications – I’m going temporarily sober again. Another 3 month stint. I have to do it. I can’t start it right now. I need the beer and the constant Fringe episodes. Then I need to get back on track with taking care of myself.

I may be edgier than usual for the next week or two. Please be willing to forgive me if I snap at you or get weird or horribly maudlin.

If you want to read about last summer’s hospitalization:

The Thing About Life

The Remains of The Day

The Longest Night Before The Next Longest Night

Coming Home: Goodbye Room 108 and 107