The thrill you feel when you turn 16, 18, or even 21 are the last times in your life when aging seems remotely attractive. As you watch years slide gracefully (or run pell-mell) by, you realize that aging sucks, actually, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Being an adult is actually one of the universe’s cruel jokes, and you've been had.
This realization becomes ever more intense as you watch your parents age. “There”, you realize, “go I”. It’s not the same as when you first noticed that you had your father’s eyes, or your mother’s laugh. Not even when you realized your child had the same tendency to exaggerate that grandpa does, or started blaming things on skipped generation genetics. No, now you find yourself sidling up to your parents and asking personal questions, like “Mom, when did you start going through The Change?” and “Do you dye your hair?” Health histories are like Gospel. “So, did Uncle George have the Cancer or a heart attack? I just can’t recall. Please tell me no one had either Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s.” Fortunately, as folks age, the one they remember clearly is health history: theirs, all friend’s and relative’s, the neighbor’s, the checker at the market’s, pretty much anyone they talk with for more than five minutes. They can not only recite it, they can argue about the details: “No, no, I am telling you, Gertrude had the Rheumatiz before she got the Lumbago! It was Lila who had the brain tumor that almost killed her!” “Silly, you have it all wrong! Lila had the pneumonia! Marge had the brain tumor and it DID kill her!” “Oh, that’s right. Lila’s pneumonia went septic and she got soft in the head.” “ Right, but it was Buck they had to stop feeding on account of the dementia.” “That’s right. That Hospice is a right scary place.”
At first, these conversations are just one more reason for your eyes to glaze over and make you wish you watching football. Then you begin to realize that they are a window into the future; not only your parent’s, but your own. And that some of the decisions they are discussing will someday fall on your narrow shoulders.
My husband’s mother, Boone’s Farm, was raised to be a polite 50’s June Cleaver style Hostess and Model Wife. She Found Herself in the 60’s, without even knowing she had been lost, as so many people did. Unlike the masses, however, she decided she liked the decade so much, she might as well stay. She remains there to this day. After divorcing Reposado’s father, she married Box Wine, her EST instructor, and a former smoke jumper; and together they joined the Peace Corps, spending a couple of years in Sierra Leone. Upon their return to the States, they went back to nature, and built a log cabin in the boonies where they could celebrate their art, fabulously created from found objects. They worked at meaningless jobs in the state prison system to pay the bills until retirement.
Boone’s Farm has massive joint degeneration, and a strong determination to still do yoga.
She just had her first hip replaced. You have to understand, that when you have never left the 60’s, the Man is never to be trusted. The Man includes most of modern medicine. Box Wine, for instance, declined the dopamine agonists that most Parkinson’s patients begin to take immediately upon diagnosis. He had heard about this wonderful grapefruit therapy! Acupuncture was said to work wonders. If you drink corn silk tea at the light of the full moon, while meditating with aqua crystals…. Well, you get the idea.
Boone’s Farm does take her blood pressure pills, though she has gone through every iteration of them imaginable, because, “they just don’t agree with her.” Still, she hears what she wants to hear when she talks to the doctor. If he says “it is possible to have both hips done within a reasonable time frame,” she hears “you can have the second hip done in two weeks.” I went to all her pre op appointments with her. Both Box Wine and I were concerned that if anything didn’t go well, she would have a difficult time, since they live, well, out there, and his Parkinson’s means that she would be on her own. She usually helps him with movements. Her insurance company refused to even discuss the idea of home health until “she could be evaluated post op.” She “just had a good feeling about this surgery and knew that it was going to be okay”, so we were silly for wanting to make any plans. Long conversations ensued about things like rolling up rugs. Yes, you do need to get a walker, and no, you can’t sleep on the couch; you have to get an actual bed that’s lower than your tall one if you can’t get into it. You need to be able to roll over and sit up. This is why you have to take the entire dose of the Coumadin post op! It’s great that you want to do all the post op exercises, please be sure to tell everyone in the hospital, even the Janitor that you will need home visits for PT, because we all know Box Wine can’t drive that far that many days a week… Finally we made it through the list.
The big day arrived. I couldn’t be there; I had to work. Driving the 90 minutes south to the hospital of her choice just wasn’t possible. So I waited for her call. I didn’t get it for two days. “Oh, well, I called your SIL, you know, and told her everything was okay.” This is a passive aggressive shortcut for saying,” I really hurt, and I didn’t want to talk with you about it.” By the time I spoke with her, she was feeling better, had hit her low point, and bounced, and was ready to go home from the hospital.
She told me about blessing the room with her Brussels Sprouts wand, and the floor where they learned how to walk again. “Everyone was just running up and down with their walkers in their pajamas! It was such fun!” (I’m sure it will be a theme party soon.) She described the skirt she took that she had found at Nifty Thrifty and how much better it was than the sweats she had been instructed to take. She raved about all the wonderful people who were going to help her. “It takes a village, you know!”
In the end, she did not have to go to a SNF. Someone from in-hospital PT taught her how to get onto her tall bed, so we did not have to face the dreaded living room bed situation. She did need the Home Health Nurse. A LOT, as someone came nearly every day for dressing changes and BP monitoring. She got the Home Health PT. She used the walker for almost a week. She is still using a cane, and has not yet gone back to yoga, thank goodness, though she knows the doctor told her she could.
Now she is soooo excited about getting her next hip done… and maybe her knee! Me too, Boone’s Farm, me, too.
Dry Gin Martini, MD. Anyone for a corpse reviver?
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