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Health care

She knew…

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Yes. She knew. 

What she didn’t understand was that my father also knew. And he wasn’t going to put up with it.

***

My father rescued me from the most horrific cruelty my mother could possibly have committed. Ever.

What she tried to do was maneuver things so that I had to repeat what she had to do as a girl my age: minister to her mother as her mother was dying of a self-inflicted cancer.

Her mother was a fast little thing, back in the 1920s and 30s. Apparently, she would fu*k just about anyone and anything that  came along, and then some. My mother once told me about coming home from school one afternoon, using her key to unlock the front door, walking into the living room, and finding her mother and a boyfriend on the floor in front of the fireplace, in flagrante delicto. 

Not surprisingly, the woman fell prey to a number of venereal diseases. In the ’20s and ’30s, treatment for these was pretty fierce stuff. Couldn’t have been good for your long-term health.

Probably not for your short-term health, either. 😮

In due course, my dear grandmother fell prey to a reproductive cancer: one that killed her.

My mother, then a young teenaged girl, had to tend to her as she lay on her deathbed.

Result: she was determined that her own daughter would NOT do that. And the upshot of that was simply that my father chased me out of her room whenever I dared to approach her as she lay dying, years later, of the family disease: cancer.

In retrospect, I do understand what he was doing…and why.

But I also think he overdid it a bit. Probably he should have let me spend time by her bedside, even if I wasn’t toting bedpans and changing diapers.

Life. It distorts everything, eh?

NOW what???

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Is there, seriously, NEVER a dull moment?

Why th’hell not???

Six p.m., Friday evening, October 23. Now I find a weird, itchy rash all over my chest.

WTF???  Chicken pox???

Believe I had chicken pox as a kid. Can you get it again as an old bat?

Hmmmm….  Saith the Mayo Clinic:

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/chickenpox/symptoms-causes/syc-20351282

Doesn’t look strikingly like that.

Temperature: a little over 100 degrees. That’s high for me: I’m a cold potato. Normal for me is 97. Mayo clinic regards 97 to 99 degrees as “normal.”

Feeling ever so slightly on the awful side. Believe I’ll shut off the lights and try to get some sleep!

Whole Afternoon Blown Away!

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Sheee-ut!!!!!  The lovely (no irony!) woman my son hired to babysit me all day, every day, schlepped me out to the Mayo Clinic to chat with the docs about the endlessly nagging peripheral neuropathy. Planned to touch on a few other sources of pain and stress, none of them exactly heavy-duty.

WHAT a waste of time!

We sat there and we sat there and we sat there and we sat there until we finally were ushered into an exam room.

And…whaddaya guess? We sat there and we sat there and we sat there and…  Finally I just announced that I was leaving. And away we went. No one even seemed to notice that we were fleeing the premises.

Before we left the building, I had to search for my clothes, which some accommodating soul had picked up and carried off.

Why d’you suppose the Mayo would do that? Evidently they know their doctors keep the patients waiting until the last rooster crows after sundown. If they have your clothes, you can’t get home.

Well, I was about ready to walk home in my underwear, so PO’d was I. One of their underlings apparently realized that, and she brought my clothes into the waiting room. And then…

OUTTA THERE!

Yeah. I do realize the Mayo has rafts on rafts on rafts of patients. And Sure, I do know they can’t ever be certain of when any one of those patients is gonna soak up hours and hours, more than any doctor could catch up on. But honestly….

Wouldn’t you think that when they see they’re running an hour late, they could announce that to the waiting hordes and offer to reschedule those who would prefer not to spend half a day twiddling their thumbs?

How hard WOULD that be, really?

The peculiarly annoying thing about our (mis)Adventures at the Mayo is that none of the other major local hospitals — Good Samaritan, St. Joseph’s, John C. Lincoln, on and on– seem to be very good. They all receive rafts of negative reviews!  Apparently, the Mayo is the best of a bad lot.

Right now, it’s 4:40 in the afternoon and I’m waiting (waiting…waiting…waiting) for the woman my son has hired to ride herd on me to GO HOME, DAMMIT!

No sign that she’s about to do that.

I don’t have enough in the refrigerator to feed dinner to myself, much less to me and her.

Wait: take that back:  A perfectly gorgeous slab of sirloin steak is in there.

And selfish little me: I would just as soon not have to share it with her. Dammit!

But if she doesn’t make a move to leave within the next half-hour or 45 minutes — it’s 4:20 p.m. right now — I’ll have no choice but to offer her dinner and then, without a doubt, host her in the spare bedroom.

Yes, it would be good to have her (or someone) stay here tonight. I did spavin a hip earlier today, and yeah: tromping around the house just now hurts like the dickens.

Just dropped an ibuprofen. We’ll see if that helps. If not…well, then I’ll have to find my own quack.

My long-time physician, the Beloved Young Dr. Kildare, first moved his practice to the far west side (a horrible drive from here) and now, within the past few weeks, has moved it into Sun City.

NOTHING could be  worse sign for a doctor. 

My mother died hideously under the ministrations of a Sun City quack. The doctors out there, the hospital out there…eeew! 

Yeah: those would be the ones who assume, ipso facto, that if you’re a woman you must be a hypochondriac.

And that, right there, is the Number One reason that you could not pay me to move to Sun City! Add to it…

*Endemic hate as a cultural theme…
* Loathing of young people…
* Constant, ungodly racket from that dam Air Force Base…
* Barrenness as a design element…
* Cheap, flimsy construction…
* Air-conditioning bills hovering in the stratosphere, because the houses were never built to be occupied during the summer…

What a horrible place!

My Mother Was Murdered

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The question returns to haunt: How could they have killed her like that? 

Next question: How could she have allowed them to kill her? She knew…she knew!

Well. The answer rolls into one: my mother was murdered by the God-damned tobacco industry, whose acolytes got her addicted to nicotine.

Craving, craving, ever craving…she puffed her way to the grave. By the time she died, she was going through two or three packs a day. She couldn’t have stopped, even if she had wanted to — which she did not. Puffety puffety puffety…chugging right into the grave.

A thousand curses on everyone who works in the tobacco industry. More than a thousand curses on any legislator who ever agreed to keep tobacco peddling legal.

They murdered my mother. Every goddamn one of those killers, from the tobacco company employees to the bastards in the legislatures that have kept tobacco legal, every single one of them is a murderer.

They’re all complicit in the murders of the SEVEN MILLION PEOPLE A YEAR. And one of those victims was my mother.

A horrible way to die, the cancer brought on by tobacco smoking. My mother suffered monstrously. So did my father, as he struggled to care for her during her hideous final months and weeks.

He chased me off from her bedroom, as she lay dying: didn’t want me to watch that show. Neither, I expect, did she.

But finally the show did end. She died: in vast pain until the last couple of weeks, when she was mostly unconscious.

It’s hard to understand why her death and the thousands of deaths like hers are not regarded as murder. Actually, the world-wide the toll is far larger than that: eight million murders a year. 

Why, my friends, do we tolerate this constant, ongoing mass murder?

Yeah, I know: money.

But money doesn’t make it right. Money doesn’t make it not murder. It just makes the murder even more immoral than it would be if someone weren’t getting rich from it. 

Did She Do It On Purpose?

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She killed my mother: no question of that. But…did she do it out of stupidity? Or out of malice?

I grew up in Saudi Arabia, where my father worked for ten years as a harbor pilot for ARAMCO, steering tankers and freighters in and out of the port at Ras Tanura. The country was as Third-World as a country could get, a marvelous incubator of toxic disease.

One of those diseases was amoebic dysentery, a gawdawful and potentially fatal infestation with the local germs that lurked in all the food…especially in fruits and vegetables. Anything that we ate had either to be fully cooked (as in cooked to mush!) or soaked in Clorox to disinfect it.

Well. My father worked with a guy who wasn’t too bright, and said guy had a wife who was even less bright.

And she just didn’t get the message about sanitizing ALL the food.

One evening they had us over to their house for dinner. I was in the kitchen watching and playing around — at the time I was about ten or twelve years old. There, I observed that our hostess didn’t bother to sanitize the cabbage she used to make our salad. She even handed me — a little kid! — pieces of this unclean produce, which I scarfed right down.

Fortunately for me, I had pretty strong resistance by that time, after spending nigh unto ten years in the bowels of Hell. But…my mother did not.

She ate that salad, and shortly thereafter came down with a roaring case of amoebic dysentery.

She damn near died of it. Years later, I learned that there was a moment when her doctors thought she very probably would die.

But she didn’t. After weeks in the hospital and then in bed at home, she eventually recovered.

Sort of.

She never really fully recovered. But she went on with her life.

A truncated life.

The upshot of the unholy infection and its ungodly treatment was that some time later she did develop an abdominal cancer.

And yes: that killed her.

Understand: The wives who were brought to Arabia with the men working for the Company were required to sit through a lengthy course in how to prepare food safely, and how otherwise to protect their families from the diseases to which simply living out there would subject us.

That idiot woman knew not to serve up unsanitized produce! Yea, verily: She knew to soak those greens in Clorox and rinse them well before making a salad of them. 

Interestingly, neither her husband nor her young son would eat the stuff. “Don’t like cabbage,” we were told.

I believe she deliberately tried to make us sick.

She could not have not known that the produce had to be mightily sanitized before it could be served to people who were to eat it.

Given that fact, it’s my belief that she purposely served us unsanitized cabbage in the hope that it would sicken us.

And it worked. It sickened my mother enough to do her in, ultimately.

Did she do it on purpose?

Could be. But…on the other hand, there’s an outside chance that she truly didn’t know what she was doing. My father regarded her husband as one of the stupidest men he’d ever met. So…who knows? Maybe they were a matched set. Maybe she really was so stupid that she didn’t bother to sanitize the produce before serving it up to her guests.

Maybe.

Doesn’t matter: Stupid or cunning, the upshot was the same. She killed my mother.

Swampy-Dampy Day!

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Ruby just dragged her human back into the house, after a circumnavigation of the ‘Hood. Gosh!  What an icky morning!

Be glad — be very glad — that you don’t have to work outside in Arizona’s heat and humidity. It is just sticky out there right now.

Ohh well. Ruby and I successfully traipsed around the neighborhood, with little ill effect. Wunderground says we’re enjoying 56% humidity…egad! Does that REALLY mean more than half the air out there is water?

😀  Hope not. But sorta suspect that’s the case. We have 81 degrees with rain showers predicted for this morning.

What, dear Gawd, is on the calendar for today? (Gets up and traipses back to the office…)

Nothing! Hallelujah, brothers and sisters!

Hmmm…it’s Sunday. Thank goodness I no longer have to get up, throw on some decent clothes, and fly down to the church to sing half the morning.

No kidding: I do miss the choir. A lot. But on a day like this, I’m mighty glad not to have to go out into the traffic and the weather.

….ohhh goodie! Just to make the morning, my son sends an email reminding me that we’re traipsing out to the Mayo Clinic (again!!!!!!) tomorrow morning. 

Boyoboy, could I do without those junkets! No doubt he feels even more strongly about that: the Mayo is a good 40-minute drive from here, meaning a trip out there and an hour wasted talking to doctor about essentially nothing consumes half his working day. And since he’s contrived to get my driver’s license negated, he ends up having to drive me out there.

To me, it feels like such a waste of time. (Imagine how it feels for him!!) Their doctors never have anything to say that makes the slightest bit of difference for my condition….whatever that condition may be. They seem to have no clue. Basically, they’re charging me for getting old.

Makes Christian Science look better and better….