Time Passages
Just trying to express in an e-mail to a friend the weird things that happen to time with age and other circumstances:
The bizarre thing is that time goes by really fast, but there’s a lot of it. Or it goes further away faster. Or something.
So it seems amazing that we’ve lived here for 4 years already, but our arrival here also seems unfathomable eons ago. It seems like less than 4 years in its speed, but more in its length. A moment flits by and shoots away into the far distance.
So what’s 6 more years till I’m 70? A lifetime in an eyeblink.
As a bonus, here’s the Al Stewart song.
And for real nostalgiaficionados, the original (I think):
Rock and a Hard Place [UPDATED AGAIN]
J is sleeping, unconscious, semiconscious, most of the time. Sometimes he can’t be roused at all. Sometimes he will respond to a call but only with a grunt. And sometimes he will wake up briefly, greet friends, make an expressive face, show pleasure in jazz being played, drink a little ice water and cough strongly as some of it goes “down the wrong pipe,” eat one or two spoonfuls of something soft, and then, exhausted by the effort of any or all of the above, sink back into sleep with unswallowed food still in his mouth.
What is making him so somnolent? Pain? Pain medication? Or just the impact of the viral illness and its aftermath on his already so compromised brain?
I suspect the third, because the somnolence had its beginnings before he had either significant pain or medication for it. But in my impossible decisions about what to do for him — made impossible by his extreme difficulty in communicating and perhaps even perceiving what he feels and needs — I am right now pinned between a close friend who suspects that pain medication is the problem, and thinks I should try stopping it to see, and the hospice people, who suspect that pain is the problem, and who probably think I’m not giving him enough oral morphine. The hospice doctor explained to me that unless you “stay ahead of” the pain of postherpetic neuralgia, unless you treat it “aggressively,” it can settle in and become a permnent habit of the nerves. Meanwhile, our friend fears hospice is too willing to nudge him towards death in the guise of the “comfort care” that would be completely appropriate for an unambiguously terminal cancer patient.
I see his point. Hospice was wonderfully supportive of J’s relative well-being before shingles, and fought to keep him certified for the past year, on the grounds that he was helpless and his illness was progressive and ultimately (if not immediately) terminal. I know people whose spouses had the same illness and were on hospice for as long as three years. But now that he has taken a downward turn, the hospice people assume that he has begun to move toward death. (They may be right, but never underestimate J.) The Thursday before last, when I asked the on-call nurse to come over because he was passing out so alarmingly, she told me, “When they stop swallowing, it means the body is starting to shut down. [ominously] You may see other changes.” A week ago tonight, when he was unconscious, unable to cough or swallow, gargling and pausing in his breathing, and his feet were cool, the same nurse spoke on the phone of the “death rattle” and “death secretions,” and told me to call her if he “passed” during the night. I was alone with him; I put on his favorite jazz, left a low light on, and fell asleep holding his hand.
In the morning on Monday he still sounded as if he was underwater, but his color was rosy, his feet were warm, and his breathing was regular. That day, the social worker brought me a list of funeral homes, while a different nurse ordered us an oral suction machine (the night nurse had said it was pointless) and scopolamine patches to dry up secretions. They weren’t needed. By Tuesday morning he was swallowing, coughing, and dry, drinking a lot and eating a little, but also hallucinating, waving his arms and talking to people on the ceiling. The day hospice nurse labeled this “terminal restlessness” and wrote into her computer system, “Goal: safe and comfortable dying.” Since then, he has cycled among somnolence, fidgety hallucinations, and a groggy lucidity accompanied by severe pain. (When in that phase I asked him, “Does it hurt?” his answer was, “You’ll never know.”)
I’ve been trying to ignore both extremes and to follow J’s lead, pushing him neither towards life nor death, giving him pain medicine when he’s able to let on that he’s in pain, and not when he indicates he’s not. (Times when I can’t get any kind of verbal or nonverbal answer to the question “Does it hurt?”, hospice would probably recommend medicating him, but I don’t.) How surprising to discover that at such a time what’s most challenging is having to juggle the needs of other people than the one who’s ill: the young friend for whom J is the hero who always fights and prevails; the cousin who wants to rush to visit out of guilt that she didn’t when he was healthy; the friends and relatives who have strong and contradictory opinions about what to do for him; the old friends who need to unburden their own feelings and memories about J; the protocols of hospice and the mixture of professional and personal in the motives of its personnel. All this is a rightful part of the job; it’s just the hardest part, because it’s “social work,” literally, at a time when you don’t feel very social. But it is vital, because it keeps you half in the world of the fully living, maintaining the connections that are also sustaining you.
UPDATE: I tried to give our friend’s hypothesis a chance today by giving J as little pain medication as possible, to see what would happen. What happened was that he was no more present, but plainly more miserable. Whatever we do, he is withdrawing. We might actually have more moments of real contact with him if we keep him comfortable.
UPDATE 2: He sure likes Chris’s homemade applesauce, though.
Mom Rant Deux
Too bad for us — this stuff is too good to be Sh*t My Mom Says.
*************************************************
Mom asked me:
If J were sentient, I wonder how he would react to the drama of the Chilean miners: would it be unbearable for him to watch it? I can only be glad he is spared the anguish of waiting for the painstaking process to be finished; but I wish he could share the exhilaration of each rescued man–if he could stand it.
I answered:
I know how he would react because I saw his reaction to an earlier rescue and surrounding media fest. It was one of rather bitter irony — when he escaped, the whole world was most definitely neither watching nor helping. It was in loneliness and nearly complete obscurity and indifference whether he lived or died — but for a few crucial individuals who could have turned him in but, with remarkable consistency, hid and fed him instead. It’s so odd to compare that solitary, one-to-one humanity to our media-metastasized combination of curiosity, compassion, and spectacle.
She responded:
There’s been a lot of callous indifference to suffering in this world. Think of how we have turned away from the genocides that have wracked the planet, especially in Africa. I was thinking about J in the cave-in and how that whole terrible memory might have risen again as he thought about these guys and all that time down there. The media had turned away from this story, too, as long as it was just the families whose lives were shattered by the long wait at Camp Whatever-they-named-it, in the dry mountain chill. How he’d have empathized with that feeling of being entombed after the timbers gave way–and he was injured! None of the Chileans was hurt, I gather. You think about that lonely terrifying and incredibly courageous escape into the Unknown from what he must have felt was the certainty of death if he didn’t get out of that hospital. But I was thinking about the terror of the accident itself.
One cannot abide the mentality that wants to be entertained on TV by blood-curdling accidents, prurient and corrupt melodramas, and the anguish of the nameless innocent, whether in massacres, mine disasters, drownings, fires, earthquakes, or floods. The Hungarian toxic flood is almost Hiroshima on a smaller scale: poisoned water that burns the skin off you! Each day we have to have a new–and more grotesquely horrible–event to look at, or we fall asleep over our beer and potato chips out of sheer boredom. The proliferation of media outlets–and I add Facebook and its offspring, if there are any yet, and its progenitors, who, unfortunately go back farther than Barnum–that both create and then pander to this audience has eradicated genuine information and demeaned the pleasure of real communication between real people. So we are all shadows, living in “Second Life,” only we don’t know it—yet.
Love from one Queen of the Disaffected to another (?)–
Mom
[Jean S. Gottlieb]
Turbo-Encabulator Era Upon Us?
Given the failure of recent economic stimulus efforts, the time may finally be right for mass production of the revolutionary turbo-encabulator.
Come One, Come All!
Anyone who wants to witness the comical spectacle of “Ruth”Mary practicing medicine remotely, without a license, and send her your good wishes, hurry up and take a look at her comments on my last few posts before I delete them and send her to back to Spamville.
. . . Oh, never mind. ZZZAP
I will just leave my obituary for her here for the record:
You’re easy to figure out, because of the palpable vicious vibe you give off beneath appearances, and because of the incredible ignorance from which you assume and pontificate. Many things that *you’ve never heard of* can and do happen. You know absolutely nothing about us, or about the progression of Lewy body dementia and what kinds of things kill its sufferers, or about the impact shingles can have on a vulnerable older person, or for that matter about the positive vs. negative influences of pets. You are worm-eaten by envy and trying to figure out how to destroy people you believe have been more fortunate than you. Get a life. I will delete your comments, but only after leaving them on display here for all to see.
Snouts in the Trough
(Via Hit & Run)
Side Note: Ebenstein would be even more persuasive if he understood the difference between “effect” and “affect.”
Location, Location, Location
“There’s no place like home,” certainly applies to this Chicago neighborhood.
A nice place to be from, I think.
Ambiance 