1.

Here I am, checking in, yes, I am still here, but I got lazy; I needed a break from life, at least from writing about it but the thoughts and words are sucking me back in. There is no running away.

It’s been about two weeks since I last posted about this mother-daughter journey I have been on. When last I wrote it was confusing: who was the mother and who was the daughter? I think I finally hit on the answer. Both my mother and I have been one another’s parent and child since I can remember. The roles were as fishy as my mother’s birth sign: Pisces: The two fish swimming in circles, fighting confusion, drowning in emotion. As a small child there were times I felt smarter than my parents. Maybe I have been confused about the roles all my life. I am the forever Scorpio, Scorpio rising. The Double Scorp who broods at the bottom of the sea, ponders over and over, always deep, deep in thought. Occasionally I come up for air and swim with the playful but confused thrashing-tailed fish but for the most part I am crawling around in the dark, too sensitive, too analytical. Too.

You probably don’t know this but I invented Twitter when I was twelve. Trust me this goes back a long time. My mother was bereft; she had just lost her younger sister who was a twin, the adored sister, the good sister, the better of the twins, my mother’s favorite of the other three. She might not have even been forty when she made it out of surgery at a nearby hospital. She had a heart condition and needed a pacemaker and lived to have it installed. In those days, pacemakers were probably as big as semis.  I felt she could never live that way, with a machine sending electrical impulses through her chest. I knew that this wasn’t going to be good. It wasn’t.  She died before she could leave the hospital. My mother was insane with grief and yet she managed to go to work and went through the motions of the shopping and cleaning and cooking and child rearing. I absorbed her misery which was pervasive in the house and managed to suffer silently through seventh grade. I was motherless and was my mother. She lay in bed night after night seeking solace, a Jewish woman reading Mary Baker Eddy, Christian Science. She was desperate to find inner peace and to make it through the next day.

In 1960, I looked to Twitter. I stuffed sheets of paper into my mother’s old Remington typewriter, the one she used for her second job when she typed briefs for the lawyer on the corner in the evenings. It had skeleton fingers and black lettered nails that responded to my poking and prodding. I wrote to the Universe, which most people don’t know was and is the precursor to Twitter, and pounded on letters and watched them smack the paper and leave words in their wake: Why do people have to die?

I would cut my questions into strips open the window and let the wind take them, from the fifth floor. They fluttered into the internet, the ether: the air.

I don’t know what I expected. A phone call, a shout from below, a homing pigeon. I never got answers to my questions, at least not then. No one responded to @kidonfifthfloor. No one “followed” me. There were no hash tags in front of my sentences. Somewhere, floating on a Stuyvesant Town breeze or laying on the grass, maybe blown into the East River or tumbling down the streets of the Lower East Side were the scraps of my questions, formed from my thoughts, the thoughts of a kid who just entered junior high school and who couldn’t find her answers in the brown paper-covered text books.

 

 

2.

I have written seventy posts related to my mother from the beginning of her decline in Florida. This was not something I planned. It just evolved. I never spent much time with my mother during our adult-hoods. I married young and left the house. We never shopped together, we never went to lunch. She swam in the Pisces circles of change being childlike one minute and the next being a headstrong adult. We inhabited different water signs, lived on different planes, had different tastes, spoke different languages.

Her life has taken over my life.

Over the last couple of weeks I can hardly recall all that I did … I will try.

• Saturday, September 28, 2013: The Oktoberfest at the Voelker-Orth House. Lovely place, a Victorian mansion. I met a woman on the board of directors with whom I worked in the early 1970’s. She recognized me. I won a Fitz and Floyd glass elephant in the raffle which I am hoping will bring me good luck. Why was something with such a fancy name made in China? Memo to self: ask Universe and float question on scrap of paper out of window.

My mother seemed to have gotten a flu, and developed a terrible cough which sounded like the one she had just left in Florida when she had pneumonia and was on Hospice care. After our evening out I delivered her requested Lysol spray and an oral thermometer, with a box of tea for good measure. The aide appeared at the door at 8:30 pm, surprised by my knock, in her nightshirt, with the pitch black behind her. She blinked at the light of the hallway and accepted the bag.

• Sunday, September 29, 2013: I was standing, just standing, and had an visual event. It was a first: a huge flash of gold in my right eye, gold which went black, a curtain of shimmer descended and one eye could see and one could not. From the bottom of my field of no-vision came a red, ragged curtain that slowly lifted, until I could see again. I called my doctor who assured me it was a migraine. I was told to go back to the neurologist I had seen in February and after that we would decide if I should be shipped up to Boston for a medical evaluation.

Within hours I was in Manhattan to see a production of one of my cousin’s early plays. All the while I was still freaked about going blind. Here’s a question for the Universe: #whythehellisthishappeningtome?

• Tuesday, October 1, 2013: was supposed to take mother to a lawyer to redo all of her Florida paperwork. I had to cancel as she was ill. I was able to get an appointment with the neurologist, for 11:45 am, I was seen after 4:00 pm. Then I had to wait another hour to have a carotid artery evaluation. Dr. H. dictated a memo to my Dr. L. “Patient says, seems, getting worse, ocular, migraine, episodes…” He prescribes Calan SR 180. I put the Rx in my bag. It was after 6:00 pm and I was beyond tired and I didn’t wait to speak to the doctor about the results. I left the latest cycle of irate patients in the waiting room. I had had it. I went down the road and had a great Japanese meal.

 

 

• I decided I needed to know more about the medication before I would take it. I’d wait.  I booked myself a therapeutic massage, something I should have continued having months ago but was too distracted by my mother. I walked out of it feeling so much better than when I went in. That evening I had company coming from out of town and we had plans to have dinner out. Soon after she arrived I had an ocular migraine and if that wasn’t enough, BAM, came the second round one within the hour. #Howdisconcertingcanitbe? This couldn’t be happening, I had a massage, I was relaxed, or so I thought.

The ocular migraine soon gave way to a “regular” dull headache and there I sat with my bottle of Alleve and the best pastrami in New York. THAT can make you feel better. Dinner with cousins and good comfort food.

 

 

 

•  On Thursday, October 3, 2013 I got needled. Acupuncture is amazing. It is a centuries old form of medicine that works, I can’t explain how deeply relaxed I can get from a bunch of needles, but the energy channels open and the “chi” starts flowing.

 

• I’ll be going on a regular basis, I hope.

• I discovered that my internist, Dr. L., had prescribed CALAN in March but I decided not to take it when I heard it was a calcium channel blocker (#whataboutosteoporosis? #what-metakeheartmeds?). Here I am with a filled prescription from March and another in hand, the same drug in a timed release version from the neurologist. I conferred with my internist, who appears even more impressive now having prescribed almost the same version of the same drug; he recommended that I try his Rx and see how it goes. It should “balance the electrical impulses.” On  Friday, October 4, 2013, I ceremoniously took a pink pill along with my handful of vitamins and supplements and  am holding my breath. I want this to work. I am so sick of these crazy episodes, I need this pill to work.

• And it did! No ocular migraine occurred on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. My heart rate slowed, my blood pressure dropped. Stress had re-set my normalcy to ongoing panic, anxiety, fear. I was drowning in responsibility, still am, but hoping I can now be where I belong, out of the land of heart palpitations.

• But then, this morning, at 3:15 am; I opened an eye, looked at the clock and the light triggered an episode. Middle of the night and I have an aura shimmering in my open eyes, closed eyes, in-the-dark-eyes. And if that wasn’t bad enough, I had another one hours later in the evening at 7:00 pm. I had gotten riled up while talking to my mother on the phone. She was still sick, couldn’t/wouldn’t go to the lawyer tomorrow as planned. Maybe the second episode was an outgrowth of an earlier phone call today with the aide who was the alleged “snorer,” who left to go to Jamaica for a family problem, who my mother told me would not be allowed to come back. She’d get furious talking about the snoring keeping her up and the possibility that the woman wouldn’t hear her in case of an emergency. The aide’s story was the opposite: she never snored, she is a light sleeper. But the big upset was that my mother wanted her substitute to stay, and her substitute was the snorer’s BEST friend. I was told under no uncertain terms that if her friend were to take the job there would be a massive upset, a big problem, she would never forget that betrayal by her friend, her “sister.” Here I was again in the middle of a bunch of women and trying to find some peace for myself by placating my mother. I have to find a new relief aide.

• last Friday I went to my mother’s to drop off the aide’s check, pay bills, continue unpacking and hauling, delivering purchases. I canceled the cable TV (no one could figure out how to use the two remotes, it never seemed to work properly. And since my mother declared she doesn’t watch it anyway, I am saving the fifty+ bucks a month: I had the TV  hooked up to the building’s master antenna. The picture and sound are horrid but better than nothing.)  I have hauled enough cans of Ensure, bottles of peroxide, cans of Lysol, loaves of bread, bags of clothes … I have balanced enough check books, had words with Florida banks that did not honor a visit from my mother before her move: I had to spend hours getting papers notarized and even that wasn’t good enough. (All this joy in the middle of my own feud with Verizon and ongoing billing mistakes.) I have made enough appointments and canceled enough appointments. I have smoothed enough feathers. And in between it all, on medication or not, I am having these crazy visual disturbances. I think I had better take a few steps back.
  

I am cutting a slip of paper and opening the window: #it’stimeforme 

This series is linked: see “continued here.” Also, below the line there will be links for the previous post and the next.

The series starts here

continued here