My fourth visit to the Swedish Hospital Pain Center. I'm sorry to say that the ever increasing doses of nortriptyllineplus the salve, compounded in Poulsbo for $148.00 a tube, have not yet done a thing except to empty my pocket book. Nor did the rehab, the acupuncture, the botox, the surgical removal of the fifteen inch wire, the medical hypnosis, the series of spinal injectivions, the chiropractive procedures or the "forgiveness" entries, in case my pain was a case of repressed rage directed towards the urologist who surgically implanted the box and the wires or at myself, who allowed the entire botched-up to take place. At any rate, I spent an entire month, writing letters of forgiveness to just about everyone I knew, to now avail. Anyway, here I am, on the ferry from Bainbridge to Seattle, sitting on an absolutly flaming bottom, since yesterday I ended up sitting in my car for four and a half hours coming from Alan's place to mine due to an accident on the Agate Pass Bridge.
During my working hours, which are ever growing, I have taken to sitting on various stuffed animals which lie beneath a thin blanket beneath my bum. Throughout the many hours of each working day I only pray I am subtle as I arrange and rearrange the arms and legs of the arnimals in order to provide a continual sense of relief for myself. My longterm patients know exactly what I am up to and so they go on, engaged inside their week, their histories, their relationships, never batting an eye. Sometimes I explain, but mostly, I don't. I do worry, sometimes, that my newer patients must think I am playing with myself under my thin blanket but I am too tired, too bored with any explanations swirling around the subject of chronic pain, "You see, in 2005, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah............."
Blah. Blah.
So now I am one of the director of the Swedish Pain Center's patients because....well, it's some kind of cliche' or law.....I just keep being bumped up because nobody else knows quite what to do with me. Sitting in the waiting room I often feel "less than" or some kind of fraud as I look around and see patients in wheelchairs and the like. The lady I spoke with last time, for instance, the woman with only one usable hand who managed to rustle about inside her blankets until she brought forth a pack of cigarettes and then managed to roll up and out a lighter, wheel herself to the outside patio and light up. If I were her, I told myself, I'd do that. I'd smoke, I'd smoke, I'd smoke, so I went out and talked with her for the longest time.
But I am still here on the boat, we must be a bit more than half way across and I notice that we are all on the morose Woody Allen boat. Somewhere out there is the gala Fellini-esque boat, filled with beautiful ladies with big breasts and big smiles, everybody having a good, no, a great time, and here are we, looking down, watching our inner images crawl across our inner screens, one two, one two, like grim soldiers who must get up too early.....Oh, what have we done to have been give entre' onto THIS sodden boat? Are we all in some kind of pain?
So what do I hope for? I hope for this: I hope that Dr. Gordon Irving, five years younger than me, author of books on pain, will smile at me and wave his hand as if to say "No matter, no matter" when I report to him that I am "no better" - - and then he will pronounce, in a soft but firm voice, in a voice tinged with emotion, yes, just a tinge, "I have found it! The exact place, the exact site of your pain. And oh GOD, how you have suffered! Do you mind if I publish a paper on your case? I mean, once you are better, which you WILL BE, by the way, and VERY, VERY, SOON? Perhaps I could write TWO papers! One, on the anatomical systemology of your chronic pain and another on your absolutly spectacular heroism." And then perhaps he might kneel down beside me, take both my hands in his and say with tears in his eyes, "Dr. Morgan, I have SO much to learn from you. Indeed, we ALL do. So much so that we would like you to begin a series of lectures......"
The ferry is nearly ready to dock. Apparently there is no grandious place my brain is not completely willing to go, and gladly. Apparently I want both a cure AND applause. Yes, I am the child, wanting the parent to say, "We can take care of you AND BY THE WAY, how BRAVE you have been!"
It is later. My blood pressure is 116 over 67. My weight is one pound above what it was three weeks ago. There is a knock on the door and a big smiling doctor bounds in and introduces himself. He is a Foot and Ankle Pain man. He asks if he might talk with me for awhile. I say yes indeed, although my feet and ankles feel very well. He says he is glad to hear that. He sits down and reads my chart, asking me this and that. Then, right on the dot, Dr. Irving comes in, says Hello to Dr. Foot and Ankle, and asks me how the cream worked, plus the nortriptyline. I say the cream needed more "numbing" ingredients and the nortriptyline seemed to have no effects at all. "Oh, that's a shame," he said, "Well, I would still like you to continue going up on it, increase it to 50 mg for a week, and, if no side effects and no benefits, go on up to 75 mgs for a week, and if no benefits, begin to decrease and ultimately we will get you off it. It's damned expensive, I know. "
He wants to talk to me now about the medicine Lyrica and at the mention of Lyrica I start to cry because I have been on Lyrica and went manic and then suffered some suicide ideation and I told him this and both he and Dr. Foot and Ankle smypathized and shook their heads and said No, no, of course, and Dr. Irving said, Well, there's only about a thirty per cent chance of it working, anyway.
"Can't you put more numbing stuff in the salve?" I ask. "I grew up on a farm and sometimes we had to numb up the cows. Can't you treat me like a cow?" He looked at me for several seconds and then said, quite thoughtfully, "Hmm I can't treat you like a COW, but there IS a cream that is given to horses and sometimes to people, called DMSO. You get it from livery stable shops or on line. I think that might be a Very Good Idea. Yes. I'm going to prescribe some of that and I want to see you back here in two weeks." Dr. Foot and Ankle has gone from looking quite distressed to looking happy once again, now that he knows there is a chance that I might be able to take the horse ointment and that the horse ointment might help.
I say to Dr. Irving, "I'm sorry. I think I must be one of your worst patients."
"Why ever would you say that?" he asked. He is from South African and everything he says comes out sounding British.
"Because nobody can figure out what to do with me?"
"But that is the very nature and challenge of chronic pain," he said. "That's precisely why I love it. It is a horrible, horrible thing. If we could just cut it out, we would. But we can't. It is extremely difficult to treat. And, in fact, you are a most excellent patient. You have a sense of humor, which is wonderful. And you can sing! I've heard you! The thing is, you simply can't give up. I won't give up, and neither can you. I've written up a prescription for the compound with a more numbing ratio and I want you to find some DMSO. You can use the two together. Let's give it a go, hmmmm? See you in two weeks."
Well, that's it. Life never goes the way one wants it to, or at least it rarely does. But, as Teilhard de Chardin said, "It doesn't matter if the water is cold or warm, you're going to have to wade through it anyway."
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Cousins Redux
Spending a yearly weekend with my cousins feels like being dropped into a tale told by Lewis Carroll where everything - or at least some things - are on the wrong places and the wrong sides of the wrong places - and common sense has not yet arrived, although there does exist a sort of common sensibility which twirls and swirls around all of us who are connected to each other by way of sharing a family name of Greaves and living our childhood during the forties and fifties on a Silverdale farm where we were free to run wild in the summers from morning til night and now, now being ever since we cousins began meeting in 1996, we are free once again, to meet through the fleet form called memory which has both pleasured and scoured our futures. Our memorys, laden with lacunea.
This past Sunday, Linda, Carolyn and I began our jouney from Poulsbo to Whidby Island at noon and arrived at our destination around three-ish. Marily and Janet began their journey from Seattle at one o'clock and arrived at their destination which was the house where we were all to meet, at approximately ten o'clock that evening. Certain stressors accompanied them. Janet is nearly legally blind and Marilyn, who was driving, had recently undergone neck surgery and could not hold her head in an upwards position for very long. Those facts, plus the fact that the GPA they were relying upon was a mechanical idiot, found them taking the Edmonds/Kingston ferry not just once each, but twice each, whle the ferry they really meant to catch was the Mukilteo ferry, which they finally took, once.
By the time they arrived at the very nice house cousin Linda had found for us, neither Janet for Marily could manage to say one word. They just stood there, holding on to the backs of pieces of furnitures, with their knuckles bone white, staring downward and snapping at us if we so much as opened our mouths to ask any style of questions such as how....or what happened.......
"We just catch whatever ferry that happens to be in any dock, wherever that dock may be, and that's it," said Marilyn, who finally managed to sit herself down. Sadly or not sadly, Marilyn's words sent the rest of us into huge gales of laughter. How could they not?
Marilyn is on oxygen and had preplanned to have several bottles of oxygen sent to the house so that she would be well taken care of, but thre was a big difference between the oxygen bottles she was used to and the type of bottles which had been delivered to the house. Marilyn did have, or seemed to have, two of her own bottles left, but we weren't sure whether they were both full or not. One might have been empty. But which one? L:inda began to tinker a bit with one of the steel levers on top of one of the bottles and suddenly the bottle toppled over to its side, came to life and began to spray a fursious loud and angry spewing of oxgen which sounded like something was going go explode. I raced to the door, Linda ran behind the couch, Carolyn ended up in the corner, Jan went to the other couch and Marilyn just sat there and stared the exploding bottle in the face as if to say,You little bastard. Linda finally came forth and pushed the lever back down. So then we knew which bottle was which and we stopped careening about and began to giggle a bit, partly out of relief because it really did seem like maybe the whole place might just explode and partly because we knew we must have looked so funny, all of us running for cover. But our laughter didn't solve the problem of what were we going to do about getting the oxygen out of the strange new bottles into Marilyn's bottles? We needed, we felt, a pair of pliars. But all we had was a wine opener.
It was either Carolyn or Janet who decided we must pile into Linda's car and go to the police station, which is what we did. Certainly a police station is the place where ladies of a certain age go if they have a problem. We sent Janet and Carolyn in and, after ten minutes out they came, staying nobody had pliars but they had called an ambulance and we were to wait for the EMTS who would come and help us solve our problem. Finally, the ambulance arrived, an EMT man jumped out, with a key made just for oxygen bottles and then they drove us several miles out into the country side in order to get us to a hardware store where we could purchase a small crescent wrench. At this point four police men magically surrounded us, all smiling and assuring us that if we needed anything more, really, anything at all, all we need do would be to dial 911.
On the way back from the hardware store Janet, who has suffered from child-onset diabetes all her life, took her blood-sufer and muttered, "Damn, it's 300." Marilyn heard her say something and yelled, "What, Janet? What did you say?" "Nothing! I didn't say anything!" called back Janet. "YES YOU DID! I heard you SAY something!" yelled Marilyn. "NO I DID NOT!" screeched Janet. "YOU. DID TOO!" hollered Marilyn. "Now What in the HELL is the MATTER?" "I SAID I CHECKED my BLOOD SUGAR and it's THREE HUNDRED!" yelled Jan. "Oh my God, we've got to stop for lunch!" Marilyn responded. We've been going through this since 1996 and we usually have something, some orange juice or nuts or something, but on this day we had nothing. Linda spotted a cafe, managed a U-turn and stopped her carwhere we started to barrel out but Janet said, "It's some kind of noodle place and I. Don't. Want. Noodles. It's okay because I just gave myself an extra dose of insulan." So we all piled back into the car, returned to town, found a nice cafe, ordered fish and chips, french fries, wine, then stopped at another place for coffee and ice cream. Such is the way of the ill whom have been ill all their lives.
Once back in town I knew what I wanted to do; I wanted to find the oldest, most formal jewelry store in Langley and look for a gold bracelet to wear next to my silver watch. I have been longing for a few months now for such a bracelet, but no luck. I found my store, went in alone and tried on several gold bracelets. Too-fancy bracelets, too plain bracelets, and then the jeweler brought out a singularly beautiful bracelet from the Victorian era, shaped rather like two snakes, and it fit me, I liked it, and I bought it. Such is my way. I rarely ask questions, other than: the price, please. and, if I can afford it, I buy it and that is that. When I caught up with my cousins, however, there was hell to pay.
ALL MY COUSINS: "How much did you PAY for that bracelet? Because if you paid $500 and you were told it is real gold, it isn't, and you were duped. And if you paid $3,000 and you were told it is real gold, you were duped again, because there isn't a stamp on it."
ME: "I'm not TELLING you how much I paid. Leave me alone. It's real gold. Stay out of it."
ALL MY COUSINS: "Now, Kay. You KNOW you don't ask the right questions. You KNOW you just merrily go your OWN WAY and don't TAKE THE TIME to do things SERIOUSLY and you may have paid a GREAT DEAL OF MONEY for something that is JUST A SHAM and so you REALLY NEED to tell us WHERE THE STORE IS so that WE CAN GO THERE and FIND OUT.........."
KAY: "NO NO NO NO NO NO NO.
ALL MY COUSINS:"Yes. It's no good telling us no because you know we will find it and you know this is for your best interests, so let's go. Come on. We're going right now. It won't be so bad. Come ON. We'll be nice. We're just taking CARE of you."
So down the street we went, me in front, walking backwards and yelling things at them, like, "Come on, come on, put some muscle into it, if you're so desperate to humiliate me, you could walk a little faster couldn't you? Come on, now let's go, let's go............."
And so we all entered the jewelry store and it is a most sophisticated and formal jewelry store which immediately took some of the hot wind out of their hot little sails ("oooooooh, I like this" and "ooooooooooh", this is a nice piece of work") and I called out, "Madame Jeweler, I have brought a small group of people who would like to have a word with you" and up the stairs she came with one of those round glass things in her eye and one of my cousins asked how many carots Kay's new bracelet has" and Madame Jeweler said, "Eighteen" and my cousins exclaimed, "Oh! That's very good!- - But why isn't it stamped?" And Madame Jeweler explained that in Victorian Times they did not stamp gold jewelry, but there is a test that is done in order to discern what is gold and what is not and that this test has been done on this bracelet, in fact, it is normally done on all gold jewelry, whether it has been stamped or not, and Kay can take her bracelet to any worthy jeweler and find out for herself that it is, indeed gold, through and through, and eighteen carot gold, at that.
So my cousins were impressed and pleased and had no more complaints, which is exactly the way that all good stories about gold and investments should go. And now for the rest of this blog please go on to the following blog which is titled "Cousins Redux".......................................
This past Sunday, Linda, Carolyn and I began our jouney from Poulsbo to Whidby Island at noon and arrived at our destination around three-ish. Marily and Janet began their journey from Seattle at one o'clock and arrived at their destination which was the house where we were all to meet, at approximately ten o'clock that evening. Certain stressors accompanied them. Janet is nearly legally blind and Marilyn, who was driving, had recently undergone neck surgery and could not hold her head in an upwards position for very long. Those facts, plus the fact that the GPA they were relying upon was a mechanical idiot, found them taking the Edmonds/Kingston ferry not just once each, but twice each, whle the ferry they really meant to catch was the Mukilteo ferry, which they finally took, once.
By the time they arrived at the very nice house cousin Linda had found for us, neither Janet for Marily could manage to say one word. They just stood there, holding on to the backs of pieces of furnitures, with their knuckles bone white, staring downward and snapping at us if we so much as opened our mouths to ask any style of questions such as how....or what happened.......
"We just catch whatever ferry that happens to be in any dock, wherever that dock may be, and that's it," said Marilyn, who finally managed to sit herself down. Sadly or not sadly, Marilyn's words sent the rest of us into huge gales of laughter. How could they not?
Marilyn is on oxygen and had preplanned to have several bottles of oxygen sent to the house so that she would be well taken care of, but thre was a big difference between the oxygen bottles she was used to and the type of bottles which had been delivered to the house. Marilyn did have, or seemed to have, two of her own bottles left, but we weren't sure whether they were both full or not. One might have been empty. But which one? L:inda began to tinker a bit with one of the steel levers on top of one of the bottles and suddenly the bottle toppled over to its side, came to life and began to spray a fursious loud and angry spewing of oxgen which sounded like something was going go explode. I raced to the door, Linda ran behind the couch, Carolyn ended up in the corner, Jan went to the other couch and Marilyn just sat there and stared the exploding bottle in the face as if to say,You little bastard. Linda finally came forth and pushed the lever back down. So then we knew which bottle was which and we stopped careening about and began to giggle a bit, partly out of relief because it really did seem like maybe the whole place might just explode and partly because we knew we must have looked so funny, all of us running for cover. But our laughter didn't solve the problem of what were we going to do about getting the oxygen out of the strange new bottles into Marilyn's bottles? We needed, we felt, a pair of pliars. But all we had was a wine opener.
It was either Carolyn or Janet who decided we must pile into Linda's car and go to the police station, which is what we did. Certainly a police station is the place where ladies of a certain age go if they have a problem. We sent Janet and Carolyn in and, after ten minutes out they came, staying nobody had pliars but they had called an ambulance and we were to wait for the EMTS who would come and help us solve our problem. Finally, the ambulance arrived, an EMT man jumped out, with a key made just for oxygen bottles and then they drove us several miles out into the country side in order to get us to a hardware store where we could purchase a small crescent wrench. At this point four police men magically surrounded us, all smiling and assuring us that if we needed anything more, really, anything at all, all we need do would be to dial 911.
On the way back from the hardware store Janet, who has suffered from child-onset diabetes all her life, took her blood-sufer and muttered, "Damn, it's 300." Marilyn heard her say something and yelled, "What, Janet? What did you say?" "Nothing! I didn't say anything!" called back Janet. "YES YOU DID! I heard you SAY something!" yelled Marilyn. "NO I DID NOT!" screeched Janet. "YOU. DID TOO!" hollered Marilyn. "Now What in the HELL is the MATTER?" "I SAID I CHECKED my BLOOD SUGAR and it's THREE HUNDRED!" yelled Jan. "Oh my God, we've got to stop for lunch!" Marilyn responded. We've been going through this since 1996 and we usually have something, some orange juice or nuts or something, but on this day we had nothing. Linda spotted a cafe, managed a U-turn and stopped her carwhere we started to barrel out but Janet said, "It's some kind of noodle place and I. Don't. Want. Noodles. It's okay because I just gave myself an extra dose of insulan." So we all piled back into the car, returned to town, found a nice cafe, ordered fish and chips, french fries, wine, then stopped at another place for coffee and ice cream. Such is the way of the ill whom have been ill all their lives.
Once back in town I knew what I wanted to do; I wanted to find the oldest, most formal jewelry store in Langley and look for a gold bracelet to wear next to my silver watch. I have been longing for a few months now for such a bracelet, but no luck. I found my store, went in alone and tried on several gold bracelets. Too-fancy bracelets, too plain bracelets, and then the jeweler brought out a singularly beautiful bracelet from the Victorian era, shaped rather like two snakes, and it fit me, I liked it, and I bought it. Such is my way. I rarely ask questions, other than: the price, please. and, if I can afford it, I buy it and that is that. When I caught up with my cousins, however, there was hell to pay.
ALL MY COUSINS: "How much did you PAY for that bracelet? Because if you paid $500 and you were told it is real gold, it isn't, and you were duped. And if you paid $3,000 and you were told it is real gold, you were duped again, because there isn't a stamp on it."
ME: "I'm not TELLING you how much I paid. Leave me alone. It's real gold. Stay out of it."
ALL MY COUSINS: "Now, Kay. You KNOW you don't ask the right questions. You KNOW you just merrily go your OWN WAY and don't TAKE THE TIME to do things SERIOUSLY and you may have paid a GREAT DEAL OF MONEY for something that is JUST A SHAM and so you REALLY NEED to tell us WHERE THE STORE IS so that WE CAN GO THERE and FIND OUT.........."
KAY: "NO NO NO NO NO NO NO.
ALL MY COUSINS:"Yes. It's no good telling us no because you know we will find it and you know this is for your best interests, so let's go. Come on. We're going right now. It won't be so bad. Come ON. We'll be nice. We're just taking CARE of you."
So down the street we went, me in front, walking backwards and yelling things at them, like, "Come on, come on, put some muscle into it, if you're so desperate to humiliate me, you could walk a little faster couldn't you? Come on, now let's go, let's go............."
And so we all entered the jewelry store and it is a most sophisticated and formal jewelry store which immediately took some of the hot wind out of their hot little sails ("oooooooh, I like this" and "ooooooooooh", this is a nice piece of work") and I called out, "Madame Jeweler, I have brought a small group of people who would like to have a word with you" and up the stairs she came with one of those round glass things in her eye and one of my cousins asked how many carots Kay's new bracelet has" and Madame Jeweler said, "Eighteen" and my cousins exclaimed, "Oh! That's very good!- - But why isn't it stamped?" And Madame Jeweler explained that in Victorian Times they did not stamp gold jewelry, but there is a test that is done in order to discern what is gold and what is not and that this test has been done on this bracelet, in fact, it is normally done on all gold jewelry, whether it has been stamped or not, and Kay can take her bracelet to any worthy jeweler and find out for herself that it is, indeed gold, through and through, and eighteen carot gold, at that.
So my cousins were impressed and pleased and had no more complaints, which is exactly the way that all good stories about gold and investments should go. And now for the rest of this blog please go on to the following blog which is titled "Cousins Redux".......................................
COUSINS REDUX
At any rate, the Cousins were well satisfied and they agreed that it is a most singularly beautiful bracelet and when everything goes to hell I can sell my investment and eat for a month or so.
That night we went back to our lovely little home and ate hummus and chips and cheese and crackers and salami and olives and fruit and French bread and bottles of wine and we talked, as we do, about our grandparents and our uncles and our aunts and our ex-husbands and our grandchildren and suddenly Marilyn popped up and exlaimed, "Jesus, no wonder I'm not breathing! The goddamned thing's not even in my nose! It's on my chin!" And I looked at her and at the rest of my cousins and thought, these are the peoples of my life. They are essential. Funny, sometimes difficult, often zany, always courageous. To grow old means to lose what one has. I am not near ready to lose these women. I love them and I bless them. I hope the God I do not believe in will take mercy on me and love me anyway if He orShe is anywhere nearby and knows about my love and about any of my cousins and how much I hate it that I squander my love for them so freely and so loosely during so much of every single year until the time comes when we see each other again.
That night we went back to our lovely little home and ate hummus and chips and cheese and crackers and salami and olives and fruit and French bread and bottles of wine and we talked, as we do, about our grandparents and our uncles and our aunts and our ex-husbands and our grandchildren and suddenly Marilyn popped up and exlaimed, "Jesus, no wonder I'm not breathing! The goddamned thing's not even in my nose! It's on my chin!" And I looked at her and at the rest of my cousins and thought, these are the peoples of my life. They are essential. Funny, sometimes difficult, often zany, always courageous. To grow old means to lose what one has. I am not near ready to lose these women. I love them and I bless them. I hope the God I do not believe in will take mercy on me and love me anyway if He orShe is anywhere nearby and knows about my love and about any of my cousins and how much I hate it that I squander my love for them so freely and so loosely during so much of every single year until the time comes when we see each other again.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)