My Scorpio-self has been living under the sea for a few weeks now. I was using a free solitaire app on my iPhone and when things are free one pays the price: I was baited, hook, line and sinker to download a “free” app for a game. Of course the bait had nothing to do with what I ended up with, and after each round I vowed never to play it again, in fact I deleted it from my phone, only to reinstall it the next day. And, not only is it on my phone, but I installed it on my ipad and formed the SueSue team for Goldie and LilGefilte. I formed a union with my fish selves to cheer myself on and to send myself  “lives” so that I wouldn’t have to wait X-amount of minutes for my “life to recharge,” enabling me to play.

Goldie is now on level 87 and LilGefilte is on level 83. I don’t want to tell you how many hours it took to achieve this. but in a pandemic you does what you does, including succumbing to making a few in-app purchases to help you finish-off a level. I believe there is an algorithm that makes each puzzle level so hard and frustrating that a miserable adult would open a wallet in the privacy of an angst-filled moment and throw a few bucks to the company in order to put a level to rest — and then get crazed by the next one. I have spent a few $2.99s to buy my Fishy Bank’s 50 jewels which are sneakily used to extend moves to puzzle-solve at the cost of 9 jewels. Oh, they get you. But I am proud to say that I have learned something valuable here in the fake fish tank cyber world: Patience.

I have played levels maybe 100 times, or more, to find that eventually, eventually things do work out, and the random seashells, squids, pearls and starfish might just line-up on the 101st try, that I might  have enough moves to beat the level and win, only to go on to a more frustrating puzzle on the next one. There are international teams playing this game reaching hundreds of thousands of points and levels and I am sure they are throwing money at this company hand over fin: Because, NO ONE is strong enough to be patient and play a level over and over again, with “lives” needing to be charged for long periods of time. Note, if you want to BUY more lives and the tools you need to survive under the sea, you can, but I am cyber-swimming without an oxygen tank and determined to to do it on my own, except when I am not; I get too tempted by the fishy bank whose contents I have earned, filled with 50 purple jewels, and the only way I can get to use them to extend the number of allotted moves is to BUY THEM. Look, it’s a pandemic, I need entertainment.

I haven’t been out to take photos in ages. That is usually my sanity mainstay along with the subsequent editing and artistic creating I can achieve. In this phase of my beleaguered life I am finding words coming at me, I need to write, and cartoon fish swimming toward me. And Governor Andrew Cuomo. And hours on the Target website to find everything I wanted to hoard has been sold out.

Now, back to the real world of “what the hell am I going to make for dinner tonight?” and “how long will my fridge full of food last?” and “will I make it through this insanity?”

My mother isn’t doing well.

I am strangely, comfortably numb. But I am getting waves of anxiety in my gut. My head is running away from me as is the serenity of my under-water cyber water.

I am worried.

The same aide, a new lady, has been attending to my mother for a few days. When I called yesterday, my mother said she was “feeling better.” She wasn’t coughing but for a moment complained that she was “hot.” She was “getting tired,” and had to go to bed in the afternoon. In fact she was in bed most of the day. Her speech was slurred. She said she tasted a pill, the prescribed antibiotic, and that she had “an allergic reaction: shaking, dizziness and some other choice words I can’t recall.” My mother chalks everything up to “allergies,” which have plagued her her entire life. But I fear this is not allergy. Or it was and has descended south, deeper into her lungs.

This morning, when I called, Nazareen answered the phone and said everything was OK but my mother didn’t appear to be included in that statement: She was still in bed. Not sitting in her recliner by the window, watching TV as best as her macular degenerated eyes could see. It was the second day my mother couldn’t hear me when I called. She seemed to have forgotten how to hold the phone. She wasn’t eating, “there is nothing to eat.” She wasn’t drinking. She was unable to get up and go to the bathroom as she would usually do at 5:00 am, this time due to vertigo.

When I called and finally spoke to my mother, something in me was silently alarmed, visions of what was coming bombarded me. I called her doctor’s office, down in her building and spoke to the sweet receptionist. I knew the doctor was going to see my mother at about 11:00 am. I told her she hadn’t been eating or drinking and was dizzy. When I expressed my fears, that something dreaded had arrived, she said, “let’s take this one thing at a time.”

And so, I just got off the phone with the doctor who visited her, who said she was sitting up in bed, who told him she will not take the antibiotic as it made her sick with an allergic reaction, who had no idea where the cough medicine that he prescribed the other day was. While we were on the phone, her managed long term care called to alert the doctor to her bad cough; it is likely that the aide called her supervisor and the word got out. Better the word than the virus—or that virus. The doctor informed this one or that one while I was on hold, that my mother had no symptoms other than a productive cough. They informed him that it was their duty to call for an ambulance but that she had the right to refuse it.

We are back where we began, in limbo. Then I expressed my fears: if she can’t get out of bed due to vertigo, how will she go to the bathroom safely at night—how will she go to the bathroom safely at all? And if she is not using the bathroom, will an aide help her, attend to those personal needs?  Do I ask for hospice care? (It would be the second time; the last time she was on hospice was when she was ninety-five, seven years ago in Florida, fighting pneumonia) Do I ask for an aide for twenty-four hour care? Do I call the agency? The Managed Long Term Care? Do I call my mother to see how she is doing?

The doctor felt that this would not be the illness that would take her down. He has an elderly mother, too, and knew exactly where I was coming from. “There are some old people who can survive anything. My mother, along with Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, will survive a nuclear war and end up in a world of cockroaches.” Now, there’s a good way to look at it.

In the meantime. I don’t feel like making any more calls. I don’t feel like thinking. I don’t feel like making decisions. I am sick of anxiety. I am going to join Goldie and LilGefilte on Team SueSue, and let my mind swim among the gold and blue shells, the red starfish and the white pearls. I am going to concentrate on upping my levels, decorating my cyber aquaria, getting groovy to the steel drum island background music. I might even buy fifty more purple jewels from my fishy bank for $2.99.

There’s only one thing I can’t do and that is buy more lives—for my mother.

Click to hear …
Comfortably Numb
Pink Floyd

This series starts here:
Part 1: And The Band Played On … a mother’s life, a daughter’s journey

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