Postcard from Pillville: A Rant

Chocolate. My current medication.

My mom's regimen of a dozen prescriptions was a bit more complicated. After she moved in with me in August of 2009, it took me at least a month to get acquainted with her routine. She filled her own pillboxes in those early days of living together, but confusion would ensue when the pharmacy re-filled a prescription with a different brand of drug than the one she was used to. When I cleaned her room, I often found pills on the floor or in her bed. More and more frequently she asked me questions that made me worry she didn't quite know what she was doing. Eventually, I became the dispenser of meds, filling three weeks worth of pillboxes at time from a giant plastic box of bottles divided into sections labelled A.M., P.M., and 2X PER DAY. 

Now that she's in a nursing home, I'm relieved of all that. But I've been left with a gallon zip-lock bag of meds. My mom moved out in October and I still have the bag of drugs. No class-one narcotics, mind you, just heart meds and blood pressure pills. Pills to help the sinuses, the digestion, drops for the eyes and the ears, and god only knows what else. Burping, farting, itching, swallowing--name your problem and there's a drug for it. I know drugs are not to be disposed of casually by flushing or in a landfill, but the pharmacy (Vons) that filled the prescriptions won't take them back. The DEA hotline had me on hold today for eleven minutes. The Internet has steered me wrong--Walgreens does not take back meds and they don't know who does. I called 211. Nope. They have nothing in their database. 

But I'm a late-night Google-er and I found a note I'd tucked into the bag that I'd forgotten about. It was the name of a pharmacy in the neighboring town. I called them, and they say they will take back the meds. I hope it turns out to be true.

Caregiving is hard enough. When it's over you want it to be over. Not that it is if you are still handling the mail and the banking, etc. I think all pharmacies should take back what they fill. And yes, I know I could have gone to the Sheriff's office. I did that after Dan died and dropped off the morphine and the Oxythis and the Oxythat into a secure bin, but I didn't especially want to retrace those steps. And by the way, I still have a tub of needles from Dan. The Sheriff's office does not take those, and they're not supposed to go in a landfill either, and I tried taking them to a toxic waste site. That was a no-go. I could, however, send away for a special mailer that costs 20-some dollars, and yes, I have the 20 bucks, but really, this is the shit that just wears you down. 

Thanks for listening. 

Any artists out their who make things out of pills? I have a bag full.

Shouting in the Dark

I love the moment at dawn when the birds begin to sing. 

My mother is shouting in her sleep as I write this. Sometimes she talks. I tip-toe to the door of her room and listen if she's speaking clearly enough to be understood. I keep waiting for some profound revelation from the beyond because she's usually speaking to dead people. Like maybe she has a message for me from my dad. Or maybe there'll be some long-held family secret revealed. Usually she's lost though. She and her twin sister are in the woods and trying to find their way back home.

My mom slept most of the day. Mitigating pain and keeping the sufferer coherent and awake is a challenge, apparently. When she was still asleep at 12:30 I called the hospice nurse, and she came over and checked on her. All her vital signs were great--probably better than mine at that point. She got up and ate toast and yogurt and coffee and juice. Then she went back to bed. I slept on the couch and we both woke up around 6 p.m. I turned last night's chicken into chicken salad. We had toast and an avocado with it and called it good. By the end of the meal, I had to keep my eyes on her because  she was dozing while lifting her glass to her lips. This is not a new thing. She does it regularly and the result is frequently a spilled drink and sometimes a broken glass. It pisses her off. I've never seen anything quite like it. She's here in the present and then she slips into some other reality, mumbling, talking, then she's gone and there's coffee or a martini in her lap.

The nurse made new recommendations for the meds, so we'll see if my mom Rip Van Winkels her way through tomorrow or what. The pain is pretty much gone though. When I ask her how she feels or how her pain is, she says, "Smoooth." She used our fabulous lavender microwave hot packs only once today. Before hospice the hot packs were constantly employed. The microwave blew a fuse on Sunday, and if we hadn't already had the okay to increase the pain meds, it would have been a gruesome day.

I actually sent out some writing today. Lately I've been feeling like my focus has just gone to hell, and that there's just so much rejection, and I can't apply for any fellowships, and I can't really participate in the literary scene, and I wish I were at AWP, but I'm not, and you know, whinewhinewhine. So I had some wine, and I thought, rather dejectedly, I'd see how my book was doing. It's okay. The ups and downs of book sales are completely perplexing. At least at this level. If you're on Oprah, yeah, I'm sure your sales go up. The things I'm doing to promote my book are less visible. A little like shouting in the dark.

Begin Anywhere

Begin like this:

It wasn't a dream. The footprint in the hallway was real. The rubber glove in the driveway was real.

Or begin with my mother screaming at 1:00 a.m.
Or after we tuck her into bed, home from the hospital at 6:00 a.m. Or begin when the ER doctor tells me he's sending her home because nothing is wrong and I mutter something I am too chagrined to see in print here.

Or begin yesterday when I walked on the beach (thanks to the man who loves me and his caregiving of my mother) and forget everything else because it's over, and we're back in our never-a-routine-for-long routine. Or begin with the dead fish on the sand, the birds plucking out the parts they like best--or the dead sea lion.

Or begin with laughter. "Like kittens on opiates," the man who loves me says the day before yesterday as he and my mother and I straggle into the car. Wheelchair in. Wheelchair out. Repeat. Repeat.

Begin with the word hospice. Then,  no--unsay it because the doctor and my mom and I all agreed to start with in-home nursing care.

Begin right now. Because everything seems like a beginning to me.

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.

What the Hell?

Dream:

I was still in his bed while he stood in his miniscule kitchen making coffee. "The cops have been watching me," he said. I wanted to ask if he wasn't too much of a small-time dealer for that, but I didn't know if it would insult him. "It's not just the pot," he said, as if mind reading was just one more thing he could manage to pull off without even trying.
"What then?" I said.
"Welfare fraud, bad checks, dozens of traffic tickets. And the Feds want me for tax evasion."  He pulled the sheet away from me and gave me the look that told me he thought I was beautiful, then waited for me to sit up and handed me my coffee. 
"Well, you ought to get the hell out of town," I said, plotting my own escape. Damned if I'd go down with his sinking ship. He was full of bullshit about being the captain of his life, not bowing down to the man---well, I was just a deck-swabber, cleaning up little catastrophes here and there, enjoying his pot and his bed. I had no qualms about jumping overboard.

It was later that night when I realized I had nowhere to go. I asked my friend Diane if I could sleep on her couch. One night, she said. The next day I went to look at apartments in a building that had a unit I had seen some months ago and liked. But when I pulled up in front the face of the building was sheared off like a dollhouse.  The apartments looked like empty boxes flimsily stacked on top of one another. It seemed indecent somehow, this wholesale peeking inside. No draperies or rugs or furniture. What the hell is happening here, I wanted to know. 

Later, driving around in my car, the cops called my cellphone. I barely know the man, I said when they asked me about him. Friend of a friend. I was couch surfing. Nothing more. I knew it would be trouble for me later, but I called his cell phone to warn him. "Get the hell out of town," I said. 

"Come with me," he said.

I was already driving up the coast. Betrayal, betrayal, my tires sang as they whirred against  the pavement.