I don't want to write, but I don't know how not to. The routine of the last year has been disrupted and so I hold on to that which remains to steady myself. I'm walking around in circles right now not knowing, really, what to do. I think forward. I think back. Everything looks old. Everything looks new.
Brief update. . . I guess. I sat with my mother in an E.R. holding room for four and a half hours. They took blood and urine, but she never saw a doctor. Fed up, I got the nurse to see what was going on. The doctor who had never seen her had issued discharge orders.
Spontaneous eruption.
To put it mildly, I called bullshit on that.
In a few minutes, a perky blonde in weekend jeans and sweater who I'd seen running the hallways with a stethoscope draped around her neck just like the t.v. doctors popped into the room with a sly smile. She liked being doctor. She blithely explained to me that my mother's bloodwork and urine analysis was o.k. She had no reason, she said, to keep my mother in the hospital.
"So. . . you've ruled everything out. You know she has not had a stroke, that none of her vertebrae have collapsed, that the injection of Prolia she had this week has not caused a catastrophic reaction."
"Your mother says she doesn't have back pain," said the doc, "and there is no blood test to determine if she has had a reaction to Prolia."
My mother lay in the bed helpless. I pointed.
"So it is your determination that she is capable of taking care of herself and you can just put her out on the street."
"I don't have any reason to keep her. I need a reason."
I gave her a whole bunch of reasons. Her shit eating grin drooped and became frozen. I was pretty sure, though not positive, that I could demand that she be examined by another doctor, that there was some federal law that I could object to her being discharged. It was a vague memory from all the visits from case workers in other hospital stays. I wasn't certain, of course.
"O.K.," said the perky blonde with the hanging stethoscope, "I'll admit her."
And with that, she was gone.
Five hours on, now. My mother knew we had been talking, but she couldn't make out the words. She listens and makes up what she thinks people have said now. She looked at me with painful eyes.
"I can't go home," she said fearfully. "I hurt so badly."
"They are going to admit you," I said. "They are going to take you upstairs. I am going to go so that they have no choice. They can't just wheel you out to the curb, but I don't trust this doctor. I'll be back in a few hours once you are in a room, O.K.?"
"Oh, honey. . . I know. You go do what you have to do. . . . "
My head was spinning. I headed back to my house. Another shit story, but in short, the gas company had torn up part of my lawn to run a gas line across the street to the house under construction. They said they would put the yard back together, but two weeks later, they hadn't, so I called. The day before, a guy in a truck threw down some pieces of brown St. Augustine grass that looked like shit. "Make sure to water it twice a day," he said. "I was lucky to find any sod at all. This should come back. Just keep watering it."
"It's going to freeze for three days," I said.
"Yea."
I had come home to water the dead sod.
When I got back to the house, I had a phone message. It was from the hospital, a Dr. So and So saying that they needed some information to admit my mother and to call back. He left a number. I called it. It was a general number with an automated "If this is an emergency . . . if you know your party's extension. . . for hours press. . . to hear these options again. . . . "
I pressed a number. Nope. I called back and pressed another. Finally, I got a human. Never heard of Doc So and So.
Fuck it, I said, if they want more info, they can call back .
I got another call from the hospital pharmacy. They were checking on my mother's many, many meds. We went through them all.
"So my mother has been admitted?"
"Yes."
She gave me the room number.
I was uncertain about a couple of the meds, though, and I had to drive back to my mother's to look at the labels on the bottle and call the pharmacist back.
At five, I went back to the hospital. This hospital is huge taking up a very large swath of town with multiple high rise buildings for different diseases. They have a famous Children's Hospital which is huge. My mother, however, was in the original hospital wing. It was old, nearly decrepit. When I got to her room, I had to squeeze in. It was a shotgun room, small, depressing. I had to move equipment to go get to the back wall to grab a folding chair. My mother barely opened her eyes, but she moved and moaned and said she hurt. Water kept leaking out of her, she said. They had to take her out of her pajamas. She babbled.
A nurse came in. I asked for an update. My mother had gotten X-Rays. Had she seen a doctor? The answer was unclear. She thought that maybe Hospice was going to come in in the morning. Nothing seemed settled.
I sat with my mother. She told me that she heard all the things I'd talked about with the doctor at noon through the speaker just now. Her eyes were opened but she looked confused. She closed her eyes again, not in sleep, but something else. I stayed with her for a couple hours, then told her I loved her and would be back in the morning.
Driving back to my house, the temperature was dropping, the wind blowing in giant gusts. The sky was cloudy, but suddenly in front of me the moon broke through. It was big and full and spooky.
"Siri, when is the next full moon?"
I have palm trees that I worried about. It will be well below freezing for three days, they say. I thought that these palms were Canary Island Palms, but it isn't true. I have taken photos of them to multiple nurseries and nobody knows. I've tried to find them online. When I bought the house, I was told they were freeze resistant, but now I worried. I'd gotten an idea while sitting in my mother's hospital room--I would wrap the ball trunks of the palms in sheets. That might just help.
In the cold and windy moonlight, I wrapped sheets around the base of each palm running tape 'round and 'round several times . I walked back into the house I haven't lived in for so long. I had no idea what to do. I poured a whiskey from a bottle that had been sitting in the "library" cabinet for how long now? I took it to the deck and sat as I used to in a remembered past. I watched the limbs of the tall trees dance. The whiskey tasted better like this just the way it used to, just me, the whiskey, the trees, the cold, the wind, and the moon. I thought about my mother. I thought about all the things I would have to take care of one way or another. It was a lot to think about.
As I pulled into the driveway at my mother's house, I felt a sudden rush of guilt at how I had felt for a long time now pulling into her driveway, the old depression and dread of walking back into a sad house of misery. Yea. . . so much guilt. The house was empty, of course, but more than that. And now, once again, I was wondering if my mother would ever see her things again. The old pain and sadness welled up into my throat and eyes. My mother's things. My mother's life.
I clenched my jaws tightly and squeezed my eyes and pushed it all back down. Not now.
I had hardly eaten all day, but I wasn't hungry. I made popcorn and opened a beer. I sat down wondering what to do. The tenant called and we talked for a bit. Then I turned on the t.v. I'd read a good review of the movie "Blue Moon." It was rentable on Netflix. Eight-thirty. I could watch it and go to bed.
Now I must face the day. When I woke, it was 24 degrees, 14 with the wind chill factor. Coffee. The news. I don't know what to do. The routine is broken. I needn't put my mother's meds together. I needn't see what she wants, needn't make her breakfast, needn't clean up whatever mess she made in the night. I stand in empty rooms not knowing what to do. But there is plenty to do, I know. I just don't feel like the man to do it.
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