Minnesota: Land of 10,000 Tears

This post comes to you from my condo in St. Paul, Mn.--a condo I bought back in 2008 pre-economic downturn against the advice of my trusty financial advisor. He was right.

But post-divorce, I was making all kinds of crazy plans. I would have taken out a jumbo loan and financed the Taj Mahal at an interest rate high enough to reach the moon if I'd thought it was the solution to how shitty I felt back then. Daughter M was not doing the best in those days either, and I think living here was some sort of balm--as much balm as a physical thing can be for a hurt that's not at all physical. She lived here for three years, and now the other daughter, C, is living here with her husband. With my mom in a nursing home in northeast Iowa, the Twin Cities are now a good gateway to visiting her.

The frozen rural place/a.k.a. Iowa--taken on the road trip with C and her husband to see my mom

Photo of my mom and me taken yesterday. 

It was -28 degrees today in St. Paul. I went out for a walk. The sidewalks were dry and clean. With my eyes watering from the cold and my frozen tears sticking my eyelashes together, I thought about  my complicated history with Minnesota. I came here for college in 1970 just weeks after signing the final paperwork relinquishing my son for adoption. The next year I had major surgery on my spine and a month later my father died suddenly of a heart attack. The following year there was another back surgery. Thirty years later I came here again and again post divorce. I've walked in every type of weather. I've walked in deep into the woods and on country roads in the pitch black winter night while the sky was ripped apart by shooting stars. I've walked ankle deep in the mud on a lakeshore, along the Mississippi River in driving rain, in downtown St. Paul bathed in Christmas lights. I've walked drunk. I've walked sober. I've walked wailing out loud, talking to myself, while plotting mayhem, and while plotting my own destruction. Today I just walked, glad to be out under the sky.

Today, walking in St. Paul

Walking is what I do. Sad, happy, mad, glad, tired, wired, here, there. 

And while I've shed plenty of tears in California, somehow I always feel happier there.

Last month walking on the beach in Cambria, CA

And tomorrow, I'll be back in Margaritaville (a.k.a. Ventura County)

Though I have to disclose that this photo was actually taken in a Mexican Restaurant in Dubuque, IA

Another road trip photo--just because.

Report from Pillville: the ER, the pharmacist, the nightmares, and the nose

I used to travel.

Let me begin by suggesting that you read  THIS. I had two dogs and two cats then. All of them getting older with a myriad of problems. By some stroke of incredible luck my lovely niece and her fiancé were willing to pet sit while I was out of town for weeks. I think I may have gone to Greece.

I may be completely under the control of an overactive ego, but I'm pretty sure I am now irreplaceable. My human "patients" can not be sated by meds tucked into jerky treats.

The man who loves me had a typical rocky night last evening. Up and down with opiate nightmares and pain. Last night was night six post-hospital. He's in command enough now that I pretty much roll over and sleep through most of his getting in and out of bed. Guiltily. But I have no musical talent. I cannot paint or draw or design costumes. Sudoku is a mystery. I am, however, the world champion of sleeping. So I do what I am good at.

The plan this morning was that I would go off to the blood lab with my mom for a routine blood draw and leave him alone for an hour. Which turned into four hours because after she threw up in the wastebasket at the blood lab and complained of a splitting headache, I drove her to the hospital. The man did fine while my mom was rehydrated, given anti-nausea meds and some morphine. I did less well while there in the ER cubicle, fantasizing about nursing homes in Iowa while I simultaneously trembling at the thought that she might be dying. My own heart was racing, and I wondered about the physical toll on me  of all these ER visits. For my mother, a CT scan of the  head. X-ray of chest. Swab of nose to test for flu. EKG. And a paper cup of water for me. It turned out my mother was fine. Maybe a stomach virus, they said.

And when we got home, I found her morning meds still in her pillbox. She interpreted her orders to fast for her blood test as no water--and so did not take her pills. Which would explain her to the moon blood pressure this morning. Closer oversight on my part is now required.

While my mom slept most of the day, the man and I sat on the couch calling his doctors and the insurance folks. How to get his check-up x-ray here in the county where he is recuperating instead of in L.A. county. What do the instructions "take 3 times a day" really mean. What is the difference between hydrocodone, oxycodone, and oxycontin? Is there any difference at all between Percocet and Norco? His eureka moment that the reason he isn't sleeping is his nose. And that he needs antihistamines.

I was thrilled to manipulate a trip to the pharmacy into a dusk walk (only a tad guiltily) under billowing clouds  to discuss the nose with pharmacist, who, after considering the myriad of meds, cautioned against antihistamines.

Somehow we all managed to eat dinner together. And now I sit here on the couch with the one remaining resident of the old Pleasure Palace and Pet Hospice. Piper, the ancient cat, just sneezed. But she's okay. Nearing 100 in human years, she's heartier, I believe, than the human residents of this house. My mother is in her room murmuring, the man upstairs searching for a way to comfortably breathe while his body adjusts to the absence of a section of his left lung. I am neither murmuring, nor missing a body part. My body is not racked with pain. And I know that I am kidding myself when I say that I am irreplaceable. I could go nuts and hop a plane to Greece tomorrow, and love and care from others would fill the void. Love and its path of least resistance. I bow down to the love. I bow down to the path.

How to Heal

First this happened.

And yesterday, after nine days in the hospital, this. Welcome home committee included Piper, the ancient cat.

Tonight there was even a little music.

The daughter of the man who loves me is staying here, too--and that has been the silver lining--getting to know her a bit. Today she slept and rested most of the day. The relief crash. I'm feeling it, too. The sweet slowdown. The knowing (as much as we can know) that this will all be okay.

We are all burrowed in. Heads full of song. Bellies full of meatloaf. Present full of wellness.

Word of the Day

A pneumothorax (pl. pneumothoraces) is an abnormal collection of air or gas in the pleural space that separates the lung from the chest wall and which may interfere with normal breathing.

Not a particularly happy word. The happy part is that the pneumothorax,  in the lung of the man who loves me, is small. It should heal itself, the doctor says. Meanwhile, he's pretty much confined to his hospital bed. I have confined myself to my bed in solidarity.

And doesn't the Glendale train station look stunning at night?

Hospital: Day 3 or How I learned to love the L.A. freeways--and thank you

The infamous 405, (as seen from the Getty Museum) looking like a river of molten lava

I moved to Los Angeles from the midwest in 1975. I didn't have a car, so I took the bus to work, and my boyfriend drove me anyplace else I wanted to go. The freeway on-ramp in our neighborhood was also an off-ramp (I'm not going to explain this--if you don't get it, be glad.) When I finally started driving in L.A., I would cry--no matter if I was merging in or getting off. Thirty-some years later, I still loathed driving the freeways.

It was a big relief for a million reasons when I moved out of L.A. to my little paradise up the coast. These past few days with the man who loves me in a suburban L.A. hospital, the freeway speeds me to him. Five lanes going exactly where I want to go.

This marvel of modern urban engineering also delivered my friend Toni to my house this morning where she is hanging out with my mother, who after her tug of war with the neurologist yesterday, has fervently promised to be good, while admitting that she should not be left alone for hours and hours. (More about that in the next report from Pillville.) This evening the freeways will speed me to the nearby house of a couple more friends where I will enjoy their good company and the antics of their handsome cats before I'm given a bed for the night.

Then tomorrow, back to the hospital for day 4. The man who loves me is doing well--as well as anyone can do after such a traumatic surgery. The cancer is out. The road ahead of him will not be a fast and furious freeway. But on that slow and narrow lane that leads back to wellness, all I ask is that it be smooth.

Thank you all so much for your good wishes.

Birds of Fortune

Sixty-some miles apart, you talk to a surgeon while I walk on a beach plucking even the tiniest fragments of beach glass from the sand. Omens and portents, I'm thinking when I see the birds in the distance. Pure white doves--as if some magician has given them the day off for a trip to the beach. They take flight. I count nine and finger the bright pieces of glass in my pocket as if they are rosary beads.

How I Killed My Father or Why Some Family Stories Deserve to Die

My father died when I was 19. I'd only been out of the hospital and back at college a couple of weeks when a late-night knock on my dorm room door delivered the news. That same January while I spent a month in a Minneapolis hospital, my niece found out she had cancer and was given 6 months to live. "Don't cry," my mother told me when she showed me the letter.

The first time I heard the story--that my father's worry over my and my niece's health was the catalyst for his heart attack might have been as we stood in the cold February drizzle watching as his coffin was lowered into the grave. Or it might have been in the restaurant where the post-funeral meal was served. "It was just too much for him,"someone said. I'm not even sure who said it first, but after the words were uttered, they entered the ether of family lore--a sort of poisonous cloud that hovers over us swirling with a myriad of un-truths and half-truths that can be uttered by anyone at anytime.

You don't know the half of it, my younger self would think when anyone re-accused me of my father's death. You think the worry over my surgery killed him? Ha! What no one but my parents knew was that I'd had a secret pregnancy the summer after my high school graduation. My secret was found out with barely enough time to hustle me into the Iowa countryside where I hid out with a foster family before giving the baby up for adoption. That ought to be worth a coffin nail or two. I trudged around with the mantle of guilt for a decades silently bowed by its weight while simultaneously shouting "Bullshit!" inside my bursting head. Like many family stories, this one was grossly oversimplified. There was never any mention of my father's troubled business dealings, his high blood pressure, the fact that he was 73 and still responsible for a young family.

This past Sunday evening--our dining table graced with the presence of the man who loves me, M, and her girlfriend--my mother hauled out the story for another go around while I waited for the punch line. "It was just too much for him," she said.

"Yup, Mom," I said. "Sorry. I killed him." Given the state of my mom's hearing aids, and her imperviousness to irony these days, I'm not sure that, in her estimation, I acquitted myself. But now I'm on a mission to listen more closely to the stories I tell. Family life is never simple. The stories we tell about our big events and about one another ought to reflect the complexities in which the conspiracy of genetics and fate have bound us to one another.

Do you have a family myth, dear reader, that deserves the death sentence?

photo: pamelawills.com

Report from Pillville: the Pacemaker

"I need a pacebreaker," the man who loves me exclaimed some time ago. We were, no doubt, discussing our mortality or some related profoundly romantic topic.

My mother, on the other hand, has a pacemaker. Now that she lives with me, it's partially my responsibility to maintain her pacemaker, so off we went today to the cardiologist's office for a test with the guy from Medtronic. After offering my mom a seat and introducing himself, he proceeded to attach a box-like monitor to her chest. A few moments of studying a computer screen ensued, and then he proclaimed that the pacemaker was working just fine. And that it was only "pacing" at 1%. Which kinda makes me wonder why she needs a pacemaker. In any event, the thing is good for at least another four years. My mom will be 92 if she's still on the planet four years from now. Her pacemaker will be out of juice, and she will require surgery to implant a new one. I really don't have the energy or the desire to think very far ahead these days, but if I did, I might lose a little sleep over this one. Isn't there some way to just plug her into a charger?

It's young people who design these things, no doubt. Surgery? Sure! Then let's go out and party.

In any event, getting a pacemaker implanted is probably less tiring than getting a flu shot--or so it seemed today at the local CVS. Here's a clipboard. Stand here and fill out all these forms. Stand here some more, while I punch a jillion keys on my computer and wonder why something is not working.
I asked if there was somewhere my mom might sit down. Yes, of course,  there was an area with chairs--halfway across the store. And yes, bring the forms back to the counter. And yes, walk back over to where the chairs are to get the shot. The woman walks with a cane (and a lovely new English chestnut cane it is) for fuck sake. Slowly. And I doubt that she's the only senior to come in for a flu shot. Move the chairs, people. Make it easy. Is your mother in our system, the white coat finally asked me after several more minutes of tapping away at her keyboard after my mom had hiked over to the chairs. Does she get her prescriptions filled here? No, I said, but she buys her gin here.

And yes, that was why we chose CVS for a flu shot. 20% off on your next purchase!!! Well, that didn't go smoothly either, but in the end, thanks to a couple of diligent employees working the check stand, the saga ended happily. And we got an second 20% off coupon for the next gin run.

I arrived home feeling like I'd consider having a pacebreaker installed, but the smell of gin always cheers me up.