Tucky Green, 7/7/1927 - 8/27/2008

Norma Truxell “Tucky” Green

July 7, 1927 – August 27, 2008

Tucky Green, a long time resident of Deerfield Episcopal Retirement Community, passed away on Wednesday, August 27 after a brief illness. Born in Pennsylvania on July 7, 1927, Tucky graduated from Brown University in 1948. She was married for 53 years to the late Frank Green. Beloved for her wit, charm and intelligence, Tucky was a consummate housekeeper, gourmet chef, avid gardener and talented artist who was very active in both the library and the art room at Deerfield. She will be sorely missed by her many friends and her sister Anne, sons Francis William and Nathanael, daughter Felicity and grandchildren Audrey and Miles. There will be a memorial service on Sunday, August 31 at 2:00 pm at St. Giles Chapel at Deerfield, followed by a reception at 13 St. Alban's Court, Asheville.

And I do sorely miss her. I miss her so much and I can't even believe this is happening.

Mom

more clouds from the hospital
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

My mother passed away last night at 7 pm.

My brother and I left the hospital at 5, telling Mom we'd be back the next morning. At 6 the nurse called me to say that Mom was failing badly and we needed to get over there. When we got there the nurse said that we could do another operation with another tube, or they could make her comfortable and let her go. No more operations, we said, no more tubes, no more of this hospital shit.

So we stood by our mother, my older brother and me, and held her hands and I talked to her as she went away. I said, You are on a journey. I said, you are on a road and there is grass under your feet and trees along the side and the sun is shining and a guide is ready to meet you at the gate. There are all the good dogs, I said, waiting for you. There's Dad, I said, and my brother said, there's everyone. You are loved, I said, I love you, we love you, you have been the best mother in the whole world and everything I ever learned I learned from you. And my mother left. Her face changed and her soul went away and the numbers on the monitor fell to 0 and the lines became flat.

And now I don't know anything. I don't know what I will ever do again.

More Doctors

Well, I spoke for a long time this morning with the lung doctor, who I now like very much and therefore we will now call him Dr. Thawed Right Out Actually Kind of Cute Glasses. As the stomach surgeon told me last night, he's now sort of the guy in charge, partly because he's the ICU guy and partly because, of course, Mom's stomach is now the least of her worries. Besides, that one part of her is working. Or it would be working if her throat was working, which it is not.

Here's the deal: in 1988 my mother had throat cancer and went to Duke, where they operated on her throat and told her that she had a 9% chance of survival over the next year. They did a couple of radiation treatments that my mother did not enjoy much, so she said the hell with it and left. She didn't go back to a doctor of any kind for 17 years. Meanwhile, the surgery and the radiation destroyed her saliva glands and left it impossible for her to eat solid food, so for 20 years my mother, the gourmet chef, has lived on Ensure, very thin oatmeal and occasional cream soups. And coffee, always coffee. Now, it would appear that that radiation scar tissue has come back to haunt her.

However, Good Glasses Lung doctor says that it is too early to say hospice and that my mother can have something called a PEG, which is a feeding tube that doesn't go through her nose but directly from her side into her stomach and does not require general anesthesia to be installed. If there's one place everyone is on the same page, it's that Mom cannot ever undergo general anesthesia again. He says if she's been living on a liquid diet anyway, well, this isn't that big of a switch. That sounded good but of course, there's more. There's more like we need a cardiologist in and I should talk to the speech therapist and maybe we need a throat doctor in as well.

Enter, though, hope in the form of one of the ICU nurses who told us that what we actually need here is the Palliative Care people. We had never heard of these people but she said that what they could do for us was sort of gather all this information from all these different doctors and all into some kind of coherent whole and we could then all sit down together and figure out what, exactly, we're all looking at here. B & I nearly wept with relief to hear that these people exist and we said, YES, PLEASE, call them in, call them now. So hopefully we will be able to meet with them this afternoon or tomorrow.

My other brother N is flying in again tomorrow morning. In the meantime Mom is still weak, still in pain, still out of it and now, as the newest wonder wrinkle, she can't talk. I was at the ICU all morning; I'll be back all afternoon. Thanks, y'all for the comments and the prayers and the good wishes. It really helps me to write all this out, not just for the emotional catharsis but as a way to sort of organize what I'm hearing from which doctor or nurse and when, so I'm going to keep this all pretty updated. People keep asking what I need and honestly, aside from the usual (a winning Lotto ticket, someone to smack my son in the ass and make him care about school) I can't think of anything. But I'm very grateful y'all are here.

Doctor

I'm tired and sad and I came home from the hospital without ever getting to talk to a doctor. I'm so tired and it's so raining and damp and sad (yeah, rain, great, I can't complain but jesus, embarrassment of riches anyone?) that I just came home and curled up into bed and gave up. But then naturally just now the doctor actually called me. Now I know what's going on, sort of, and it isn't making me happy.

My mother's swallowing reflex is broken and so is her coughing reflex and so, apparently, is most of what goes on inside her throat. It turns out that in your throat and hers and mine is a valve - I am kind of picturing it like a small trap door - that directs stuff going down the throat as to whether it should end up in the stomach or the lungs. When the valve is working properly, air goes to the lungs and everything else goes to the stomach. In my mother's case, everything is going to the lungs. This is bad. This is not good. This is not what is supposed to happen. This is what kills rock stars when they pass out and choke on vomit and, if you are an 81 year old with MRSA pneumonia, this is what might well kill you. This is also pretty clearly a fucking design flaw and why we don't have two tubes each with a specific purpose which is kind of what I always thought we had since, you know, people talk about things going down the wrong tube when they laugh and choke on a beer or coke goes out their nose or something, I don't know. And actually, maybe we do have two, further down, and that's what the valve goes to. I don't know. I don't know shit. I didn't go to med school; I sat around and learned what the fucking red hat in all those paintings of St. Jerome means and why there's always a bug in Baroque still lives. I'm useless.

The doctor who called is the stomach doctor because we don't have another kind of doctor because if you go into the hospital for one thing you only get to have that one doctor that you went in with as your main doctor; you can't switch midstream. The lung doctors come and go and one of them is Dr. 1955 Frozen Cyborg Bad Glasses who doesn't like me much since I keep dragging him out of his doctor cave to talk to me about my mother. Tomorrow I'm going to do that again and he can lump it until he finds me another doctor, a doctor who can actually do something. The stomach doctor, who is nice, says that the next step would be to put in a feeding tube for my mother. Some kind of tube that would nourish her. He said he didn't know why her throat wasn't working anymore. He said it could be many things. He said that maybe surgery would help but that frankly my mother couldn't survive surgery again. We need another doctor here, a throat doctor, a lung doctor, a valve doctor, a doctor who can fix my mother.

He said my mother told him tonight she wants to go to hospice. He said that was an alternative. I don't think that's a fucking alternative, jesus christ, she just went into the hospital for fucking routine surgery, her throat worked fine two weeks ago, what the hell is this hospice shit?

Why can't this be simple? Why can't this be solved? Why does life suck so hard for so long and why isn't it more like fiction? If this was Lost or Gilligan's Island or something the doctor would just stab an empty ball point pen cartridge or a piece of bamboo into her throat and pull all that pneumonia glop out of there and she'd be fine by the end of the episode and goddamnit I don't see why that can't happen here.

Fuck

I may have spoken too soon. We have a whole NEW and IMPROVED problem. Now they say that her throat is too small because of the radiation treatment in the eighties and she isn't strong enough to cough out the goop from the MRSA pneumonia and so the nurse is saying perhaps a tracheotomy type thing and a feeding tube and my mother is saying that will happen literally over her dead body and my brother is saying that there must be some doctor out there somewhere who knows what's going on and has access to other patients who had weird throat cancer radiation in the 80s and are now in their 80s and have MRSA pneumonia and I'm thinking, yeah, sure, all three of them. Jesus fucking sweet christ on a pogostick. I'm going to the hospital and there had better be a goddamn parking spot.

Miracles

So this morning when I got over to the hospital, Mom was sitting up without an oxygen mask. She was talking. She was coherent and she was cranky about the fact that her ancient and prized large tooth comb has gone missing somewhere between the 7th floor and the ICU. I spoke to the Frozen Cyber Robot Doctor from 1955 again and he said that she hadn't had a heart attack yesterday after all. They don't know what happened yesterday. They don't know why she became unconscious and unresponsive and her lungs filled up with fluid and they also don't know why she then got better instead of kicking off this mortal coil as everyone expected her to do yesterday. They don't seem, actually, to know much of anything but frankly, I don't care. She's better again. And, as I told her when I left the hospital, she had better keep on getting better unless she wants to see me in a bed down the hall, because I can't take any more of this.

Just the Facts

This morning at 7:15 or so when I was out walking the dogs, the hospital called. My mother had gone seriously downhill overnight and they had just moved her back to ICU. "I'll be there," I said, "As soon as I can."
And I was, meeting my brother in the hospital lobby and browbeating the perky volunteer at the front desk into sudden terrible pity - I don't think she'd ever had to call ICU before - and standing talking with a doctor who looked to have been transported directly from 1955. Perhaps they unfroze him just to keep my mother comfortable.

Anyway. I wrote a long thing while I was waiting about all this and maybe I'll copy it all out in a minute or tomorrow or sometime. But that essay is more about feelings and stuff. This is the facts. The facts are that they think Mom had a small heart attack this morning but that at any rate her chest X-ray is much, much worse; she is struggling to breathe. The facts are that she is walking, right now, a very thin edge, although she woke up this afternoon and told us all about the Indians.

She was in a dance, she said, buried up to her neck in sand with a lot of other people in a circle. Being buried was okay, she said, there were cones of oxygen and of air around them. The Indians were dancing and playing music: Indian music, she said, but nice. One by one, the other people who were buried were moving on. They were dying, she said, but it was okay: they were all happy to go. Suddenly one Indian told her that she had to go back. "I don't want to go back," she said, "I like it here." "Sorry," he said, "You have to go back." And then, in her words, she was WHOMPED into the ICU.
"Whomped?" said my cousin P, who was there with us.
"Whomped." said my mother.
"You know," I said, ever helpful, "like, whomped."

So she came back. She's back now. But she's back in the ICU with an oxygen mask and her heart rate is fast, fast and her hands are cold and her lungs are full of fluid. They asked us again this morning about the DNR and whether we would consent, please, to a ventilator and we said, No. No, she doesn't want that and neither do we. Then we'll try to keep her comfortable, they said, and we said, you do that.

I felt this afternoon when I left the hospital to go check on the QOB and take young M home (I pulled young M out of school and he was there at the ICU most of the day, along with my daughter A and my cousin P who showed up since the grapevine yesterday got all the news and my brother B) like I'd been taking acid for days. Bad acid, laced with strychnine, bad acid done with bad people in a bad place. And I still feel like that.

One Step Forward. . .

Mom isn't doing as well today as she was yesterday and, after I went to see her last night, I have to say she wasn't doing as well yesterday as she was the day before. I can't stand this. It's like I'm on a constant fucking roller coaster here: Mom's better! Mom's worse! The house is on! The house is off! We have a plan for the QOB! No, we don't! Young M is in school! The principal called! I mean, I need something to just, you know, stay the same for 24 hours. Breathing room. Peace. I'm so overwhelmed, too, that I'm pretty much paralyzed, which is par for the course, since freezing like a deer in the headlights seems to be my default reaction to stress. Except that where a deer would just freeze, I instead resurrect old beep beep games that I was addicted to years ago and play them for hours, which is, of course, supremely useless except that it does give me something legitimate to beat myself up about, which I suppose is helpful. Yeah.

Today, my mom had an actual good nurse. I hate to say this but unfortunately, that seems to be a rarity these days on the 7th floor at St. Josephs and I'm starting to get slowly and deeply angry about it. I don't want to cause any ripples that might come out and bite her on the ass while she's there but I fully intend to raise one hell of a stink when she's back home. The nurse today told me that the doctors have been ordering a lot of things that simply aren't being done by the nurses. Like, she's supposed to be walked around the halls four times a day and that was supposed to start Wednesday. Today is Saturday and, except for the short and aborted walk on Thursday night (that's another thing, that walking at night thing. My mother is like some kind of opposite vampire: she wakes up at 4:00 am and goes to bed at 7:00 pm. 8:00 at night for her is like 3:00 in the morning for me. You can't be walking Mom around at night.) there hasn't been any attempt by any nurse to walk her around. She's supposed to be getting nebulizer treatments - whatever they are - three times a day and that's not happening either. She's supposed to be getting baths - she's not. They're not, actually, doing shit as far as I can see and while I sympathize that they're probably understaffed and overworked, I don't really care. That's my mother. I can go to work and slack off all I want: I work at a museum, not a hospital. Nobody is going to die if I don't get around to photographing a rock. The rock will be there tomorrow. My mother might not. That's why I don't work at a fucking hospital and one would assume that that's why nurses do and that's why they make a whole lot more money than I do. So they need to work harder. Besides, there are a lot of empty rooms up there. I don't think they're all that busy.

It's scary and frustrating and until the nurse today, it felt like nobody was giving me a straight answer. When Mom went in there ten days ago, she was fine except for the twisted intestine. That was serious, yes, but it got fixed. But Mom now can't breathe, is on oxygen 24/7 and can barely walk 100 feet down the hall.

Apparently the pulmonary doctor said "Have you had a chest X-ray?"
Yes. Yes, doctor, look at the fucking chart! She's had five or so.
"What are we doing about the pneumonia?" the doctor said to her.
Pneumonia!?!?! Nobody told us she had pneumonia but now apparently they're saying that MRSA in the lungs is pneumonia and that's why she's so weak.
"How long," asked the good nurse, "has she been having this much trouble breathing?"
I nearly started to scream. "SINCE LAST THURSDAY." I said. "HER LUNGS WERE FINE WHEN WE BROUGHT HER IN HERE!"
I mean, what the fuck, exactly, is the point of the hospital? She's getting sicker, not better.

This is so frustrating. I've talked to the gastrointestinal doctor but I haven't spoken to the pulmonary doctor because I can't get hold of him. Fortunately, my brother talked to some of Mom's neighbors and they freaked out and called the nurse up at Deerfield, the retirement community where they all live and now, hopefully, the Deerfield nurse is calling the hospital and may get some concrete info for us. Or light a fire under the hospital nurses with her mystic nurse powers. It's always hard, I know, when there's nothing really to be done except wait and see, and I'm afraid that's where we are right now. I'll be back over at the hospital this afternoon to show Mom my new haircut anyway. She likes it when I get my hair done, although of course I constantly dash her hopes that someday, somehow, I will appear dressed nicely in belted khakis and a button down blouse, penny loafers on my feet, proper soccer mom bob on my naturally colored head. Actually, in her weakened state, if I did that the shock would probably kill her, so it's best that I don't go that far. Still. The haircut was a success and that will please her and, I must say, pleases me no end.

Well

Driven by boredom, cramps and general loathing for the universe, I have joined Twitter. This will make stalking me far more efficient in that I'll be a happy tweeting partner in my own stalkerisation. Sort of like the way a few years ago I was offering free ladders to anyone who would be interested in looking in my bedroom window, except, you know, textual and I bet it will be just as popular, which is to say, not at all. Whatever. Here I am, anyway. I know your heart is just going pitter pat in anticipation of my next witty, pithy outpouring. Or not.

I've been thinking that driving around the St. Joseph's Hospital visitor parking lot every morning for twenty minutes or more in the hopeless quest for an empty space is so much fun that I should probably keep on doing it even after my mother gets out. Just to keep that aforementioned loathing all fresh, bright and beautiful and also to see heartwarming sights like I saw this morning: a young woman in a hospital gown, dragging her IV pole along behind her, hunkered down in a far corner of the garage desperately puffing on a cigarette. I feel for her and also now I've kind of figured out why there was that guy in a hospital gown with his own IV pole going down in the elevator the other day. I thought at the time that he was just making a break for it, which makes total sense. The hospital is a scary place and I am absolutely convinced that there is an entire tribe of people who just live there. The other day I saw this one guy, who I swear lives there, since he's always there and never speaks, just wanders around, dressed in full scrubs. If he's performing surgery we're in real trouble; I am sure that he just lives at the hospital and doesn't work there. Cue the Twilight Zone theme here. Or possibly call me paranoid, but remember, just because they're all out to get me doesn't mean - yeah, exactly.

I have found a place to park, though, that's even better than my old highly illegal spot and I don't even think it's illegal: it's just about a mile or so away from my mother's room, which leads me to believe that the hospital is doing this on purpose to make me exercise. They apparently tried to get my mother to exercise last night. She went about 10 feet and refused to move any further. The nurse tried to pull her along with the ubiquitous IV pole.
"I'm going back to bed." said my mother.
"Oh no, you're not," said the nurse.
"Oh yes, I am," said Mom, and proceeded to do just that. The nurse called in her supervisor. "What's the problem here?" asked the supervisor.
"She won't walk any further!" said the nurse, pointing at Mom.
"How far did you go?" asked the supervisor.
"While she was calling you," said Mom, "I went down to the lobby, out to Biltmore Avenue, hailed a cab, went home, had a cup of coffee and I'm back now. What more do you want?"
"What happened then?" I asked, intrigued despite the fact that I was mentally preparing a small speech entitled Mom, You Need to Walk Around to Get Better for Chrissakes.
"She was too busy having hysterics," said my mother with pleasure, "to get mad at me."

And Things Just Go On

mist and geese
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Well, young M is safely registered in school, where he has already fallen foul of the new cell phone laws. Oh joy. I haven't even seen the dress code yet. They probably want him to wear pants that fit.

My mother is totally getting better, even though yesterday it turned out that the MRSA is in her lungs, which scared the hell out of me. However, the massive antibiotics seem to be working: she's still getting better and is in fact healthy enough to be reading The Other Boleyn Girl, which she finds utterly terrible and yet cannot put down. She may even be out of the hospital by Sunday. Meanwhile, I'm flat refusing to obey the isolation rules because I feel, in my considered, professional opinion, that they are totally fucking stupid. I just stand far away from her - what, did the hospital think we were one of those touchy feely hugging families? God forbid! - and wash my hands a lot when I move things around her room as I am instructed to do. Everything must be neat and organized at all times. They should let my mother loose in that hospital. She'd clean away all this MRSA stuff, stat.

The roller coaster house is currently on a down slope. Things ain't looking so good. Nobody normal who buys a house has to go through this kind of thing and I have a lot of rotten thoughts I will keep to myself for the time being. I keep telling myself that all these relationships are not supposed to be adversarial, but holy shit, they sure feel that way. I know this is complicated, cobbling together semi regular loans and grants and no interest loans, and I know that I am attempting to be that terrible affront to society, a choosy beggar, but I'm starting to feel like these people really don't want me to buy a house. Tell me why, exactly, again that they can dictate to me the condition of my house? As long as it isn't going to, you know, fall in and kill anyone? In the meantime, I've spent enough money and time now that if this one doesn't come through then it will all be too late for me to ever get another. The money's already gone and I can't go through this roller coaster again.

On a lighter note, Pebble got up on the roof. She climbs up the screen door when it is open, and, while she used to just swing back and forth, suspended and trying to play with the dangling chain, now she's big enough to hop to the roof. I was scared until I remembered that Pebble will pretty much do anything at all for canned cat food and when I went and got some and opened it, crooning Nom Nom! at her, she came skittering back. So I, wobbling a bit on my tiptoes on a kitchen stool on the deck, grabbed her and told her about the terrible roof dwelling kitten eaters, which fazed her not a bit.

To keep her occupied, I put batteries in the battery operated rolling rat I bought tonight at Wal Mart (oh yeah, and I went to Wal Mart tonight. As usual after a trip to Wal Mart, I now hate all of humanity with an undying passion and hope to wipe the entire world out. By the way.) Yes, the real rats are gone and I had to go buy a plastic one that rolls hither and yon. It's hilarious. I'm going to resurrect my old camera and take movies. Unfortunately, it kind of scares Pebble but the dogs are beyond delighted to chase it and bark madly. Now if only Pebble could get interested in the plastic squeaky rack of ribs I got for the dogs so they wouldn't be jealous (I am clinically insane, yes) there would be balance in the universe. Until I wipe it out, at least.

OKAY, UNIVERSE, I AM OFFICIALLY OVERWHELMED

THE HIGH SCHOOL WILL NOT LET MY SON GO BACK TO SCHOOL BECAUSE THEY SAY THAT THEY DO NOT HAVE HIS CURRENT ADDRESS AND SOME MAIL THEY SENT OVER THE SUMMER WAS RETURNED. THIS IS FASCINATING SINCE WE'VE LIVED THERE FOR OVER A YEAR AND GOTTEN MAIL FROM THEM. I CALLED THE SCHOOL AND THEY TOLD ME NASTILY THAT THEY HAD TO HAVE PROOF OF WHERE WE LIVED AND NO, A DRIVER'S LICENSE WAS NOT PROOF. SO I PRINTED OUT AN ELECTRIC BILL (I GET THEM ONLINE) AND TRIED TO FAX IT TO THEM. I TRIED BOTH OF THEIR FAX NUMBERS FROM TWO DIFFERENT FAX MACHINES AND NEITHER OF THEM WENT THROUGH BUT WHEN I CALLED THEM BACK THEY SAID "WE'VE BEEN GETTING FAXES ALL DAY" AND ACTED LIKE I WAS TRYING TO HIDE SOMETHING. I AM BEYOND FURIOUS. THE LADY IN THE OFFICE SAID THAT SHE GUESSED THE PRINCIPALS HAD HIS REAL ADDRESS BUT NOT GUIDANCE. I SAID THAT I WAS UNDER THE IMPRESSION THEY WERE ALL IN THE SAME SCHOOL. SHE DID NOT THINK THIS WAS FUNNY OR HELPFUL. IN THE MEANTIME MY SON IS WALKING HOME FROM THE SCHOOL BECAUSE I AM AT THE OFFICE WHERE I ACTUALLY THOUGHT THAT I COULD WORK ALL DAY TODAY FOR THE FIRST TIME IN A WEEK.

ON TOP OF THAT MY MOTHER WHO IS STILL IN THE HOSPITAL (BUT OUT OF ICU) HAS DEVELOPED MRSA. DO NOT GOOGLE THAT, IT WILL FREAK YOU OUT. I WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT HERE AS AN ASIDE THAT THE PROBLEM WITH LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE IS WHEN YOU DO YOU SEE YOURSELF SAYING THINGS LIKE, "DON'T GOOGLE MRSA" AND THEY MAKE NO SENSE WHATSOEVER, AS THAT SENTENCE WOULD NOT HAVE MADE SENSE IN 1998. ARGH. THE HOSPITAL SAYS THAT IT IS NO BIG DEAL. BUT THEY ALSO HAVE HER IN ISOLATION, WHICH MEANS THAT WHEN I GO SEE HER, I HAVE TO STOP OUTSIDE HER ROOM AND PUT ON A GOWN AND GLOVES AND A MASK. THEN, GET THIS, THEY WANT ME TO TAKE THOSE THINGS OFF INSIDE HER ROOM AND THROW THEM AWAY BEFORE I LEAVE. WHAT, DO THEY THINK THE GERMS ARE KIND OF SLOW ON THE UPTAKE AND WON'T NOTICE THAT I'VE TAKEN THE MASK OFF IN THE EXACT SAME PLACE WHERE I WAS ALREADY STANDING TO TALK TO HER? AND IT'S DEHUMANIZING AND SAD AND SHE'S SUPPOSED TO BE WALKING AROUND TO GET HERSELF BETTER BUT NOW SHE CAN'T BECAUSE THEY WON'T LET HER OUT OF HER ROOM AND ALSO I DON'T LIKE THE NURSES UP ON THE 7TH FLOOR; THEY'RE NOT ANYWHERE NEAR AS COMPETENT AND FRIENDLY AND GENERALLY NICE AS THE NURSES IN ICU OR AS THE NURSES WHO USED TO BE UP ON THE 7TH FLOOR TWO YEARS AGO WHEN SHE WAS SICK. HOWEVER MY MOTHER IS DEFINITELY FEELING BETTER BECAUSE SHE GAVE ME A LONG LIST OF STUFF TO DO AND A SMALL RAFT OF SHIT FOR NOT BEING MORE ON TOP OF THINGS. I AM GETTING SOME SOLACE FROM THIS BY GLEEFULLY IMAGINING ALL THE SHARP AND COGENT AND PURELY, QUIETLY EVIL THINGS SHE IS NO DOUBT GOING TO BE SAYING TO HER DOCTORS. HA.

AND ON TOP OF THOSE TWO THINGS THE HOUSE I'M TRYING TO BUY FAILED THE HUD INSPECTION FOR SOME PURELY RIDICULOUS SHIT (THEY COMPLAINED THAT SOME WINDOWS WOULDN'T OPEN. I WENT OVER THERE YESTERDAY AND BANGED ON THE SASH AND BROKE THE SEAL WHERE THEY WERE PAINTED SHUT AND VOILA, THEY WORKED FINE, I MEAN, SHEESH) AND NOW I HAVE TO FIX EVERYTHING AND GET IT ALL REINSPECTED BEFORE I CAN GET A LOAN WHICH MIGHT MEAN, WORST CASE SCENARIO, THAT I AM ABOUT TO PAINT AN ENTIRE GARAGE FOR SOMEBODY ELSE ENTIRELY. BECAUSE PAINT ON THE GARAGE IS SUCH A PRESSING SAFETY ISSUE.

AND THEN, AS THE ICING ON TOP OF ALL THAT MY YOUNGER BROTHER IS GOING BACK TO NYC TONIGHT WHICH MEANS THAT MY OLDER BROTHER, MY DAUGHTER AND I HAVE TO TRY TO TAG TEAM TAKE CARE OF THE QOB WHO HAS LIKE A BAZILLION THERAPY AND OTHER APPOINTMENTS TO GET TO AS WELL AS NEEDING STUFF LIKE FOOD COOKED FOR HER AND ALL THAT KIND OF THING. SHE DOESN'T UNDERSTAND HOW TO USE A PHONE YET SO WE DON'T FEEL COMFORTABLE LEAVING HER ALONE FOR VERY LONG. WE KEEP PARKING HER IN FRONT OF MOVIES WHICH MAKES US FEEL GUILTY ALTHOUGH SHE'S FINE WITH IT EXCEPT SOMETIMES WE MAKE A BAD CHOICE AND SHE THEN GETS SCARED. BLADE RUNNER WAS APPARENTLY A BAD CHOICE AND NOW SHE IS KIND OF AFRAID OF REPLICANTS.

I FEEL CONFIDENT THAT WE CAN KEEP THEM AT BAY, THOUGH. AS LONG AS WE STAY AWAY FROM THE HIGH SCHOOL, WHERE THEY ARE RUNNING THINGS. RIGHT NOW I COULD SO TOTALLY AXE ME SOME REPLICANTS.

Occasionally you have to shout and today would be the day for it. I would hereby like to give the universe notice that I am full up and cannot take any more shit at all for at least three months. For the next three months I demand some peace from you, universe. The car cannot break down. The animals cannot need to go to the vet. I cannot get sick. And all this stuff must be resolved. Okay? Okay.

Troubles Never Come Alone

I went over to the hospital this morning with my giant blue mylar dolphin balloon to give Mom and there wasn't a parking space to be had for love nor money. The visiting hours at the ICU in the AM are short: 9:30 to 10:00 only, and I was wasting precious time driving slow circles around the parking deck and cursing a lot, so I parked completely illegally. Then Mom was asleep anyway, but that's okay: when she wakes up she'll see a giant blue mylar dolphin floating around her ceiling and it will, hopefully, make her happy if it doesn't scare her comatose again. Also hopefully she won't touch the Hershey's Kiss shaped weight thingie, because it is wrapped in some kind of shiny blue stuff that rubs off apparently indelible blue ink all over your hands. I washed my hands the requisite four times with the alcohol stuff and it only made it worse, as did the soap and water treatment. Oh well. Sometimes your intentions are pure and yet the mission is not an entire success.

This could also be said of my house deal, which would appear to be falling through again, which makes me want to fucking cry. I don't understand why this has to be so hard and why it is so goddamn difficult for me to do even the simplest things that other people take for granted. I also don't understand why the federal government will not give me a housing loan unless the garage of the house in question is painted, because that does not, somehow, seem to me like a burning safety issue. I see their point about the heaters and the wiring in the basement but the handrails on four steps in the yard and the paint on the porch and garage seem totally ridiculous and I just want to tear my hair out and weep and shriek a lot. God damn it, I'm never going to own a house, am I? I had accepted this truth years ago and given up and then I thought I'd try again only to find that of course, my hubris is being slapped down by the gods again.

This world is a cold and unfriendly place where all kinds of stupid random stuff happens all the time and none of it is balanced or fair or means one tiny goddamn thing because it's just the random action of random particles, except for the part that's run by an evil gnome with an evil sense of humor who is cackling evilly to himself at the controls of his giant evil machine where he engineers the random stuff to be slightly less random and purely more evil. I wish I had never crossed his radar.

Secret Lives of Hospital Corridors

My mother is still in the ICU. Thanks, y'all, for the good wishes and keep them coming. The breathing tube is out. She's doing better. Her blood pressure, which keeps going from off the charts high to off the charts low in more or less 10 minute intervals, is a worry. My brothers and I are now used to the walk in and out of the ICU: the washing of the hands, the trade off of one sibling for the next (only 2 people allowed in ICU at any one time) and my mother, who to us looks so much better than she did two days ago that we just don't care, except for calling the nurse when her blood pressure line becomes impossible, which is to say, more or less constantly. She didn't yell at us when the ventilator tube came out, anyway, and that was all we were worried about.

Meanwhile, I have spent enough time in the hospital to tell you that there is an entire tribe of people living there. I swear. I will elaborate later, when I'm soberer. Yes, fuck off, soberer. I have been at the hospital pretty much every waking minute these past four days and tonight, I went over to my mom's house and made dinner (and cleaned it up, sheesh) for both my brothers and the QOB and we drank some white wine and talked about times long past. There isn't, really, much to say, even though I have a giant blue mylar balloon dolphin in my car. Damn.

Wow

Take this one from me: you never want to be sitting in an empty hospital room at night, waiting for your mother, after what you have been assured was a short, routine and uneventful operation and get a frantic phone call from the surgery recovery room. You don't want to be standing in a recovery room hearing a nice doctor tell you, worry all over his face and body, that your mother is tenuous. Tenuous, you think, is not a word that should refer to your mother, who has been many interesting, definite things in her life but never tenuous. You don't want to see three nurses and a doctor huddled around your mother while machines beep loudly and flash red. You don't want to sit in a surgery waiting room that's been specially opened up for you, trying and failing to read an article about Dolly Parton and hear that your mother now has a machine breathing for her, since she can't breathe on her own right now, and, from the kind and worried doctor, "I'm sorry, but I'd like to talk to you both about what we should do if her heart does stop."

No. You don't want this.

However. If all this is gone through and then you are in another waiting room that is unbearable because of a television set and it's late and getting later, it's better, oddly enough, to be standing in a bright tiled fluorescent hallway, talking to your brother about long vanished third cousins. It's even better when an incredibly nice nurse ushers you gently into a spaceship that is called ICU, where you have to wash your hands two times to get in and two times to get out of the locked doors and then the nice, the wonderful, the beloved nurse tells you that your mother is stabilized. Even though you finally cry, then, and lean over and say gently into your motionless mother's ear, "It's okay. I'm here. We're here. It's all going to be okay." it's even better afterwards to go home and smoke too many cigarettes and hug your children and cry a little more and sleep a couple of hours and go back to the hospital to find your mother actually awake.

Awake and confused - "What day is it?" she writes on a pad with a sharpie, her fingers swollen and hard to move around the tubes and wires. "Was there a bomb? Is this the operating room?" - and still with a machine breathing for her and many IVs and bags and tubes and Enterprise style monitors blinking jagged lines, but awake for the first time since the banal conversation finally faded into silence and the gentle anesthesiologist rolled her out of pre-op and you kissed her and told her it would be fine and you'd see her in a couple of hours and wondered, briefly, why all the conversations you'd had with her since this whole roller coaster began 48 hours before had been so meaningless. But, you think as you walk off with the plastic bag that says Patient Belongings, what else are you supposed to do? Say "Got any last words, Ma?" Better to keep it light.


Yeah. Well. It's been a long long 24 hours, or 36, or however long it's been. We think she's finally beginning to get better, although she's still in ICU. My younger brother, after a frantic epic dawn journey from NYC, is here. And I'm fucking exhausted and prone to break into seeping tears at any moment. Keep the good thoughts coming.

And So It Goes

sunset from the hospital parking deck
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Well, my mother is still in the hospital and, actually, she's going to have surgery this afternoon at 3. Which is to say, in two hours. I'll be over there soon enough; it's one of those weird situations where while I feel like I ought to be there in her room, I also feel like I shouldn't be there, since it's painful for her to talk and when I'm there she wants to talk. Last night and this morning when I was visiting her I tried to keep a monologue going but, surprisingly, even for me, this effort gets difficult after about 15 minutes. I mean, I mine the web for Mom-suitable anecdotes (thank you, Metafilter!) and I can rattle on about the garden for a remarkable length of time considering that it's really only 10 feet by 10 feet of mostly drought ridden weeds, but eventually even I fall silent and then my mother, queen of the social graces that she is, feels the need to fill the conversational gap. Then I feel guilty at the sound of her rasping voice. This through the nose to the stomach tube is really, really bad. I mean it's really bad and I can't even crack a joke about it.

Anyway. That's about it. As seems to be the case with hospitalizations in the family, it tends to take up your entire brain. I think I'm very grateful indeed that this kind of thing is so far from routine that it does throw me this out of whack - it makes me somehow totally exhausted on a bone deep level. I'm one of the lucky ones, I guess - being at the hospital is a shock to the system and not a routine.

Life Gets In The Way

birdhouse butterfly joe pye weed 2
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

So yesterday I composed a cute little blog entry apologizing (sort of) for not blogging much lately. It was charming, I tell you. Wry. Poignant, even. And I was all ready to post it when my brother called from my mother's house and told me to get on over there: Mom was sick.

Well. Mom is indeed sick - quite sick with all kinds of bad news intestinal issues including the kind of pain that would have had a normal person screaming and writhing on the floor. I knew it must be bad: she confessed to considering taking 1/2 an ibuprofen. My mother the druggie. So I informed her that she was going to the ER and after merely a token protest (this is another clue that she is really sick) we took her to the emergency room. Once there she commented that being 81 has its perks: emergency room staff see you quickly and are really nice. I think they might be nice to everyone but who knows? At any rate they got Mom back into the treatment area of the ER and then the whole long slow process of diagnosis and treatment began. X rays. CAT scans. Blood tests. And, meanwhile, morphine and anti nausea drugs.

My brother and I spelled each other at both staying with Mom and going back to her house to be with the QOB. This of course involved all those kind of technical logistics that are so much fun: one car? Two cars? Will A come pick me up? Why do I have to walk five blocks on the no mans land that is the hospital portion of Biltmore Avenue before I feel like I can light up my first cigarette in six hours? Meanwhile, back at Mom's, my brother kept putting on more movies for the QOB - he was thrilled when he found out she'd never seen Blade Runner since, naturally, he owns the director's cut. Unfortunately, Blade Runner was a bit much for her and when the kids and I got over there that evening after a fast meal at Apollo Flame (note: Apollo Flame, which went from good to inedible a few years ago, is back to good again.) she had all the lights on and all the doors locked. So I picked up some stuff for Mom, left the kids there to fight off any renegade replicants and hightailed it back to the hospital where I found Mom & my brother in yet another ER treatment area where they were busily pumping my poor mother's stomach out. I'd never seen that done before. They go through your nose. If I was ever even inclined to OD, this knowledge would now stop me from that one.

It turns out that she has a kink in her intestine, just like my cheap garden hose. They don't know why it's there, although they commented that most people would have been at the ER one helluva lot earlier, which didn't surprise us at all. The problem now is unkinking it. The hope is that by emptying out all the pressure, it will unkink itself, which apparently happens about 50% of the time. If she is not part of the lucky half, they will have to go in there and unkink it. Meanwhile, my poor mother is up there on the 7th floor of St. Joes with tubes coming out of her nose and arms, feeling gruesome and they won't even let her have any coffee. I tried to bribe the nurse to slip some caffeine into her IV at least (Mom is a serious, heavy duty, confirmed coffee addict of many years standing) but alas, she would not listen to reason.

My brother is staying up at my Mom's with the QOB, which is good, since while the QOB is mostly fine by herself, the stroke left her unable to figure out a phone (it's that pesky math and number recognition stuff.) I'm going back over to the hospital after work, as is A. And all in all, here we are and nobody seems to think that this is a really bad one this time. The doctors don't have that "This could be IT" gravity that they did two years ago. We feel confident enough to be mildly annoyed by the mediocrity of the hospital coffee, which we didn't even notice two years ago. She'll probably be home in a week, or so we hope and in the meantime all the logistics will be managed. I think.

Because, of course, in other news, I'm still trying to buy a house with the help of the feds and the state and MHO and a bunch of other places, all of whom want more paperwork now, now, now; young M starts school next Wednesday and I haven't gotten around to meeting with all his teachers and guidance counselor and stuff yet; I launched the process of getting young M health insurance with the government and they need more papers now, now, now; I had to take Pebble to the vet this morning for her first kitten shots and the happy news that I'll be back there once a month for the next two months to the tune of around $100 each time and, while I was leaving the hospital, the Saturn dealership called to remind me that my car, which is, in car years, about the same age as my Mom, needs maintenance, inspection and registration renewal. This is good because, you know, I was afraid my life might get boring or something.

Preserving

tomato
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

There are seven jars of hot pepper jelly cooling on a kitchen towel (the only goddamn kitchen towel. What the hell happens to my dish towels? Do they migrate to other planets? Does my son use them for some weird ass nefarious purpose in the garage? Do the dogs eat them? I have no idea but it's annoying as fuck. I get tired of buying new dish towels; they're all ugly and I hate paying money for bad design.) in the kitchen. I feel all goddess like - not one of the fun goddesses like Aphrodite, granted, but goddessy all the same. Also, this is going to be the hottest hot pepper jelly I've ever made in many years of making hot pepper jelly, because this is the first year that I've had the nerve to completely ignore the part of the recipe that calls for 2 cups of bell peppers and 1/4 cup of hot peppers and instead just used pretty much all hot peppers. Take that, wimpy recipe writer! My hot pepper jelly is going to have cojones! Even as I write this the jars are making satisfying little BINK noises as the lids seal. I always worry that I'm going to kill us all when I start canning stuff - lacking a proper pressure canner, I just wing it with my big stock pot, tongs and hope. So far, no deaths have been attributed but it's still nervewracking since, as we know, I'm not one of those housewifely types whose kitchen oozes sterility. My kitchen more sort of just oozes. But this jelly and the jars were all boiled to within an inch of their lives, so all good, one hopes.

All the peppers I used are also all out of the garden, which is nice. Yeah, bring it on, peak oil! I can grow and preserve my own vegetables! Especially if there are still supermarkets where I can get canning jars, vast quantities of sugar, pectin (whatever it is - don't tell me, I have a sneaking suspicion and I think I'm happier not hearing it confirmed) and apple cider vinegar. And if I can live on hot pepper jelly, which sort of requires cream cheese and bagels as an accompaniment.

I'm inundated right now with hot peppers and basil (I am about to start giving basil away, so if you find yourself in need of basil, let me know. Seriously.) tomatoes and, naturally, zucchini. I also have one small but perfect cantaloupe which has gotten me all excited since the only other melon I've ever grown successfully was the Barbie Watermelon of 2004, a tiny, Barbie sized perfect watermelon which we ate with hilarity and gusto in about 30 seconds of tiny, tiny slices and which has lived on in the family annals as an exemplar of the fact that, as in all things, I am a seriously weird gardener. The cantaloupe is not Barbie sized but neither is it supermarket sized: it's more sort of softball sized. Whatever. I got it off the vine before the groundhogs did, so, hey, victory. It's these small triumphs that are the whole point of gardening.

Secret Lives of Cats

sunflower 5
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Suddenly, there are cats in my yard. There have probably always been cats in the neighborhood (I know there's one in the house in the back, because young M saw a groundhog chase it through the fence one time in what was no doubt a highly embarrassing moment for that cat, the kind where you really hope no one is watching, particularly no one with a video camera and a Youtube account.) and I guess there were others as well. Now they're all hanging around in the back yard, looking innocent and wronged when the dogs bark furiously at them. I assume that through their super secret cat powers, they have intuited that there is now a kitten living in my house and they want to meet her. Or eat her, which is my fear.

The kitten cannot be an inside only cat. Yeah, I know that being indoors only is better for cats and outside is a scary place full of real risks for kittehs, but unfortunately little Pebble has moved to a house that already contains two large dogs and if those dogs can't get themselves in and out of the house I'll go insane, so Pebble is just going to have to be an indoor/outdoor kitteh too. Nobody wants me to go insane, even me, even though if I was insane certain portions of my life might be much, much easier to bear. More insane, I mean. Than I already am. However, I'm not planning on getting to some peaceful form of madness by letting the dogs in and out all day, every day. I'd rather do it with high quality hallucinogens and besides, I'd have to quit my job.

Still, letting Pebble outside scares me. She is so little and the outside is so big. Yes, I know, I tossed my toddlers out into the world with less concern, but I'm older now. Besides, they were surprisingly hard to lose and I didn't have to worry about hawks swooping down and carrying them off. Pebble is completely different, very cute, kettle of fish. Do you know how CUTE she is? Yesterday she climbed a tree, partway, until I rescued her and she's started playing with the dogs like a puppy, which is so OMG TEH KYOOT that I think I will go into some kind of diabetic coma and die of sweetness. This is not like me but so far, the only rotten things she's done are attack my feet under the sheet in the bed and climb my legs. These things are painful but not really rotten in the same way I will consider it rotten the first time she pisses on my clean laundry because I got the wrong kind of food (I have had cats before, god help me.)

I have no conclusion, here. Pebble goes out, she comes in, I freak out, I close the door, the house gets hotter and the dogs look at me reproachfully, I open the door, Pebble goes out, I freak out and then the cycle is repeated. I suppose it's good to have a routine.

Diets

view from the public service building 1
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

The other day I hauled the scale out from where it had been hiding under the green cupboard thingie that I use to store all the bits and pieces of random fabric that I have somehow accumulated through my life and am saving for just that perfect moment when I, you know, need a random piece of fabric. Granted, the random piece of fabric I pull out will not ever, ever be the right size but them's the breaks in this crazy thing called life and anyway, that's how I managed to recover the couch cushions on one side since the specifically bought for the couch fabric wasn't, of course, big enough. However. The green thingie does not matter here; what matters is the scale.

I took it out and wiped the dust and dog fur off (Theo is currently shedding enough collie fur to create a whole new dog every two days) and replaced the battery and weighed myself for the first time in, um, a bit more than a year? A year and a half? A while, anyway, since it was indubitably the first time I ever weighed myself in this house and I've lived here for 15 months now. I was heartened to see that in the last 15 month I had lost four pounds. YEAH! FOUR POUNDS! Okay, that's not anywhere near enough.

So I decided to weigh myself every single day for a week and I've been more or less doing that with the somewhat disheartening result that in any given 48 period I can apparently lose three pounds, gain two, lose one, gain four and so on. This morning I weigh three pounds more than I did a week ago and that must be stopped. It could all be stopped, I know, if I would stop drinking beer every single night. To that end, I've switched to Michelob Light, which is so appalling tasting that I can only bear to drink like two before I lose interest in ever drinking beer again and, actually, life in general. Still, you would think that all the time I spend eating horrible diet frozen entrees and walking the dogs and never eating sweets (those two tablespoonfuls of ice cream out of the freezer didn't count because no bowl was used) and so on would net me an actual weight loss instead of this holding steady at 30 pounds overweight thing. But apparently, no, I am destined to be not just old but old and fat, and now I'm anxiously awaiting the moment where I will find that freeing instead of depressing.

And In Other News

miss asheville and some of her fan club
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Options I Wish Pandora Would Offer.
1. I Really Loved This Song in 7th Grade and Hearing It Again is Nicely Nostalgic; However, You Can Stop It Now.
2. I Like This Song Okay But Not, You Know, A Whole Lot.
3. I Really Only Like This Song Ironically, I Swear, But You Could Play It More Often If You Felt Like It
4. There Is More Than One Pixies Song In the Universe
And some other stuff that seemed a lot funnier last night. I love Pandora but sometimes it's like they're turning into FM radio: they just play the same songs over and over. Still, it's better than WNCW "Most Annoying Music We Can Find! For You! Oh and Also, We're Taking Away the News Program You Like and The Morning Music You Wake Up To and Replacing It With Morning Edition Which You Could Hear On the Other Local NPR Station!" Public Radio.

The house is, at the moment, on again. Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. I'm still chanting Nam Yoho Renge Kyo more or less incessantly; we'll see; do not congratulate me, though, in case it falls apart again. I will not believe in this thing until I have the keys in my sweaty hands.

And, last but not least, that up there at the top is a picture of the one, the only, Miss Asheville! Yeah, I didn't know we had a Miss Asheville either, but it turns out we do and she was wandering towards Pack Place through the New French Bar Courtyard where I was ensconced on Friday night having a couple of after work cold ones in the company of my brother, the QOB and my friend J. Miss Asheville had a few adoring fans along with her and she was wearing, as you can see, her sash and her tiara. Her hair was perfect. Heh. And she was wearing those horrible thick old lady pantyhose that look really fake and are so gruesomely uncomfortable, poor thing. I felt kind of weird asking to take her picture but, you know, hey: as J pointed out, she's our Miss Asheville. She represents us! Long live Miss Asheville! Let us wish her success on her quest to become Miss Buncombe County or whatever else comes next! You go, Miss Asheville! Now, you would think, to be properly Miss Asheville, that she would have dreads and be, actually, a he but alas, apparently the shadowy cabal behind all that is Miss Asheville are not yet enlightened enough to think outside the box. Go figure.

Mini Vacation

at the lake 1
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Yesterday, I cleaned out the car and made tofu salad and some extremely hot sort of pico de gallo type salsa stuff from the garden and then loaded A, young M and the QOB into my aged Saturn wagon and we all set off for Conestee Falls, where H's parents have a summer home. They went to Florida, leaving H & Z the full run of their house, and, since H & Z are totally cool, naturally they threw a party and invited me. Yes, you might think we are all a little old to be doing the party while the 'rents are away thing but, hey, you would be wrong.

I saw this as an awesome chance to finally take the QOB to a lake, since she's been going on about wanting to go swimming since she got to Asheville and I hadn't, until now, figured out a way to make that dream come true, since we're sort of short on easily accessible lakes around here. But Conestee Falls, which is one of those gated communities near Brevard, has a ton of lakes and all of them are excellent. It's a long drive but we got there and found Z & H & J & K & S & C kicking back on the porch (J & D showed up later.) So we milled around a bit and then went on down to a lake - a fabulous clear lake full of water that is just exactly the right temperature.

Taking the QOB swimming was a little nerve wracking. No, wait, it was a lot nerve wracking. First we got her down the road to the water and then we got her into the water and then, as she slowly waded in, I suddenly thought what I should have thought ages before, which is to say, "Oh shit! What if she doesn't remember how to swim?" Well. She did, more or less, and I stayed nervously right by her and thank the GODS that A, who has a lifesaving certificate and also knows how to hold up people who are having trouble walking, was with us.

The QOB did wonderfully in the water right up to the point where she announced that her legs didn't seem to be working and, oh well, she guessed she couldn't stand up ever again. We got her up, though, and onto a cooler which S had thankfully dragged down to the lake and she went through a whole lot of peculiar gymnastics to get her bathing suit off and her clothes on while young M and A, relieved of great aunt duty, swam across the lake and it was good. Then we all went back to H's parent's fantastically wonderful house, which has everything you could ever want, including a Wii Fit and a ping-pong table and a pool table and a kick ass high porch looking out over a zillion miles of green trees. I dubbed it Awesomia. Yes. Yes, I did and I'm not ashamed.

Then, because I am a bad, bad parent, I wheedled A into driving young M and the QOB back to Asheville while I stayed the night in Awesomia having a completely marvelous time playing ping-pong and pool and Wii Fit (I am not fit but I need one of those machines, I really do) and all in all I think it was maybe the most fun I've had in about 15 years. You know when you're young and you're playing ping pong in somebody's basement and you're all, this is boring, I wish I was old enough to go to a bar? Yeah. Now I'm old enough to be playing ping pong in somebody's basement and all I can say is, "OH MY GOD this is so much better than a bar." Actually J said that but the sentiment is certainly true. We had an fantastic, wonderful, totally great time.

Today when J & K were driving me home we were all bemoaning the fact that we didn't study the right stuff in college which would enable us to get lake houses where we could go and swim whenever we felt like taking a break from hard rounds of ping-pong, beer drinking, listening to Z & C play music and, oh yes, H's award winning cuisine. Not only was the food amazing, we got to throw watermelon rinds and corn husks off the porch and into the woods. It was the most perfect summery day and a night and a half a day I may have had since I was a kid. Fuck eating the rich; I think I just want to join them.