Musings For A Thursday
It has been a difficult week. I’m wrestling with a painfully dull script I must write — I must, I accepted the advance — for an industrial film that shoots in early May in L.A. My ailing mother’s health continues to disintegrate, mostly because she simply does not care; worst of all, she has been skipping and cancelling much-needed doctor appointments because, being a lifelong victim of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), the 65-year-old invalid, who sleeps 20 hours out of the day and feeds her overstuffed chihuahua in her bed, has convinced herself that she knows better than the physicians, and that every single doctor has misdiagnosed her. She does not, she is convinced, suffer from diabetes, hypertension, bi-polar disorder, cirrhosis of the liver, or hepatic encephalopathy (swelling of the brain as a by-product of the fatty metamorphosis of the liver into tissue paper). If the doctors would just take her off the damn meds, she unreasonably reasons, she would simply spring back to normal.
My own health.
Not so good.
This being Thursday, it’s time for my weekly dose of the potentially-deadly methotrexate (MTX) – a form of oral chemotherapy — a last resort drug I’ve been on since December last to curb my flaring severe psoriasis. Endured my monthly doctor’s visit yesterday and the nurse drew gallons of blood to make up for their oversight in forgetting to draw my blood last month. See, with MTX the overseers of your therapy are supposed to draw blood every month to ensure that the drug is not playing dirty tricks with your liver.
In the meantime, the doctor delivers another blow: I have been diagnosed with COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease). My hastily-done research indicates that COPD is a catch-all phrase for You done fucked up your lungs with all that smoking. The funny thing is I was not in the least bit surprised. Only an idiot (or someone with NPD) can suck on cigarettes for 30 years and not expect repercussions. So, I’m compelled to give up smoking and continue my exercise regimen of walking between two and four miles every day. There’s no reversing COPD but ceasing smoking and daily exercising will slow it’s insidious progress.
So, back to the industrial film pit I go today, with apologies for no new fiction here this morning. Other matters abound (but there is a new Trace Remix tale waiting in the hopper).
April 17, 2008 at 12:49 pm
My late mother-in-law, the spittin’ image of the character Maxine, insisted that her wheezing was NOT emphysema because she didn’t smoke.
“What are you talking about? You’re a heavy smoker. You’re smoking right now!”
“No, I’m not smoking, I’m just puffing. I never inhale.” And she said that with a straight face.
I thought about trying to reason with her, to point out that she lived in a trailer and inhaled all that smokey air, but decided against it. She lived to be 80, I think.
She’s buried in a corner of the cemetery. In the other end of the cemetery is her first husband, my late father-in-law. On his left side his 2nd wife is buried, and on his right is his mistress.
…
April 17, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Rodger - That sounds like a pretty harsh situation. I miss my daily dose of fiction, but hope things turn around for you soon!
Kitty - Wow, that could have been a story about my grandmother - she smoked until about two months before she died in her mid-80s, except she insisted on being buried next to the husband that had abandoned her 50 some odd years before, much to the annoyance of his “widowed” mistress.
April 17, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Julie, I’ll be posting some fic tonight, just wanted the readers to have something in my absence this afternoon.
That’s a great story, Kitty: buried next to his second wife and his mistress.
April 17, 2008 at 3:49 pm
The Jehovah’s Witnesses had befriended him in his latter years. Not that he was religious, because he wasn’t. Bill Cosby remarked to his children that their grandparents weren’t really his parents but old people trying to get into heaven. That was my father-in-law, Harry.
The JWs took him in when he could no longer live on his own. They had no idea that Florence had been Harry’s mistress for decades while he was still married to, and living with, his wife Dot. In fact the JWs thought Harry, who was 90-something and looked like he fell off a charm bracelet, was the salt of the earth. It was only after Harry was safely in the ground, with Florence on his one side and Dot on his other, that my husband told the JWs that Florence was more than just a “family friend.” They took it well, probably because Harry had remembered them well in his will.
…
April 17, 2008 at 6:27 pm
Interesting, Kitty. The local Jehovahs Witnesses have befriended my mom as well. Not that she is religious, because she isn’t. But more because she tithes and is willing to sit and listen to their testimonials and conversion speeches because at this stage of her life, with every bridge she has burned with furious glee, they are the only people left on earth who will sit and converse with her.
April 17, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Gah! That happened to my dad’s mom after my grandfather died! And after she came to live with us, we had to let them come in and hang out in our living room for hours! Drove my dad (who was very anti-organized religion at the time) crazy.
(Actually, it’s pretty sad that the JVs are the only ones doing that… to be honest.)
April 17, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Sorry… I seem to have a bad case of the “me, too!”’s today.
April 17, 2008 at 10:03 pm
The Mormons do it, too, Julie. I should know: my mom is playing both ends of the field, the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the proselytizers from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
April 19, 2008 at 9:07 am
I wish your health were better. I have noticed a lot of problems in the world since Lynn emerged from chemo. So has Lynn. Things weren’t registering with us, I suppose because we were so focused on what was going on between us. Now that we are on some kind of “other side” we find that that other side has fires everywhere.
But what do you do? You like drinking and cigarettes. Lynn likes being busy to the point of stressing. I like taking it easy and quick asthmatic fixes. We are what we like, diagnoses be damned.
It is interesting to me that writer as Deleuze said is one of the only vocations in which the responsibility is merely to diagnose, and there is little responsibility and never any expectation to cure. In fact, we rather expect the opposite: if a writer says it, we’re mostly obliged to sigh and say, well, she tried her best. The sentiment pours into the rest of our being. Everywhere, we keep diagnosing, and leave the cures to someone else: readers, voters, physicians, corporations. It’s already all I can do to keep vigilant enough to identify symptoms; but I’ll be damned if I know what to do with them either.
April 19, 2008 at 10:59 am
You are eloquently correct, Joseph. Writers identify causes and symptoms and then sit back and wait for the world to do something about it, which makes us piss poor patients. We’re doctors, damnit.
Or as George C. Scott said in Paddy Chayeksy’s “The Hospital”: The whole damn world is strangulating before our eyes.
April 20, 2008 at 12:53 am
Ouch. Watching someone self-destruct and not being able to do anything… bloody frustrating.
Is the MTX at least helping?
April 20, 2008 at 11:26 am
Naomi, the MTX is helping. I still have psoriatic flare-ups, though not as harsh as before. But it’s such a dangerous drug and once you get on it, studies recommend that you should stay on the drug in perpetuity lest your psoriasis returns worse than before.
April 20, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Oh crud!
Reminds me of the old days of purging and bleeding… sometimes the cures are just plain vicious
April 20, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Ye. In many regards we’re still in the Dark Ages where medicine is concerned. That’s why medicine is considered an art and is something that is practiced.