Well, it’s not her glaucoma or her macular degeneration. There’s no infection, so the blood test say. Maybe it’s the new medication or maybe she had a little stroke the other night when we somehow managed to get her to the emergency room. But now she’s like a zombie. Sleeps most of the time, eats a little, goes to the bathroom (still by herself, thank god), and goes back to sleep. Doesn’t say much except to cry a little that she can’t remember. I’ll call her geriatric specialist tomorrow and confer about the medication.
In many ways, it’s easier on me because while she sleeps, I can do other things, like blog and alter some of my clothes that are now getting baggy, since I dropped about six pounds (on purpose). But I hate to see her like that. Like a walking dead.
We have to find out what it is.

I’ve mentioned before that Jim Culleny of No Utopia emails out a poem a day, sometimes his own, sometimes another’s. Sometimes I post them here, and here’s one I just had to.

It’s 5 a.m., and the sky is getting light in the east as we drive back from the emergency room with my mother finally asleep in my arms in the back seat. We got to the hospital around eleven. Delerious and (as far as we could tell) dehydrated, she moaned and cried and cursed at us during the entire drive out. She fought us as we positioned her in the wheel chair and then she managed to kick one of the nurses who was trying to take some blood and put in the hydrating IV.
We felt so helpless. Obvioulsy she was in a lot of pain. When her pain gets bad, that triggers episodes of dementia, and she becomes unable to articulate anythng about where and how badly she hurts. Her hands come at me, clawlike. “I want to kill you,” she cries. “Give me a gun.” Anger and frustration fueled by pain. Nothing will calm her but a sedative added to her IV.
Some of what she is going through is the result of trying some new meds, one of which made her so nauseous that she wouldn’t eat or drink and that’s why we took her to the emergency room. The other makes her sleep for hours, after which she (sort of) wakes up, eats a little something, and then goes back to sleep. Meds are trial and error. Not every med works the same on everyone. And she’s so tiny that even the lower doses are too strong for her. We have to work with her geriatric doctor to adjust the meds. My sibling is impatient with the lack of medical certainty. So much of medical science is hit or miss. And if you miss, you try again. But meanwhile, she suffers. “I’m afraid. I’m afraid,” she mutters. “Please help me,” she mumbles.
The emergency room has one bed empty. “You should have called an ambulance,” the admitting nurse says to me. I didn’t tell her that I wanted to, but my sibling wanted to drive us. That was one battle I didn’t have the energy to fight. It would have only upset my mother more.
I’ve said ths before, but I don’t know how ill elderly people advocate for themselves. For example, there’s a protocol they’re supposed to follow in the emergency room before they can give any treatment: take blood pressure and temperature, draw blood and analyze, get urine sample, do EKG, do an X-ray or CAT scan if indicated….. But there was my mother, completely distraught and delusional, feeling pain with every move she made. She fought against letting them take her blood pressure because she knows how much it hurts her thin arms every time. She ripped off the EKG wires as soon as the nurse put them on. So, we had to be her advocates and insist that they hydrate and and sedate her and worry about the other stuff later. We all had to hold her down to get the IV in her arm and let them draw blood and then put in the hydration. That was when she kicked the nurse and said shewas going to kill us all.
It was a long night for us because my mother slept during the IV drip. Other patients came and went. A young man, maybe about 16 years old, sullen and belligerent, handcuffed, blood-spattered, walks in with two cops. I look into his eyes. Anger. Fear. Defiance. Sadness. Sadness.
Later:
I’ve had exactly four hours sleep. She’s up. She’s only talking in Polish. My sibling doesn’t understand any of it. I was bilingual as a child and can still remember enough to communicate in basics. I’m surprised to realize that I’m slipping into actually thinking in Polish rather than mentally translating from English before I speak. But I’ve forgotten too much. Mostly I say, in Polish, “I don’t understand. Talk in English.”
She has pain on the right side of her face, including her eye. It could be residual shingles pain or maybe her glaucoma has escalated. We put ice on her forehead. We give her meds (not the one that made her nauseaous, though). I call her opthamologist, and he will meet us tomorrow (Saturday) morning at his office even though his office won’t really be open. Now there’s a dedicated doctor.
She has tea and homemade bread. She thinks we are people she knew when she livedi in Poland, asking us where we were born and where we went to school. She carries on a monologue in Polish. She laughs.
At least today she can laugh.
I am so tired I want to cry.
Finally, she sleeps again and so do I.

Now we have a pudgy woodchuck eating my lettuce. I’m tired of fighting the inevitable. He or she can have it all.
Tansy is supposed to keep away bugs. I have planted some near my tomatoes. I wonder if it will keep bugs from noshing on my tomato leaves.
And deer don’t like foxglove. I thew a bunch of foxglove seeds in the ground a year ago. Now I’ve got foxglove all over the place. I wonder if they would keep the deer away if I transplanted them to surround my garden.
Meanwhile, the little (but heavy cement) statue of baby Pan that I’ve been hauling around through every move for the past decade seems to have found a perfect spot. He’s a little worse for wear, having had part of his foot chipped off, but I’ve grown accustomed to his wild appeal.

I have a few manufactured creatures hanging out among my flowers. I’m rather fond of my garden whimsies as well.

There eventually will be a climbing spinach growing up the stakes behind the gargoyle. The other photo is how I try to put to use the trash (like that pallet under the plants and the tire that I painted green) that my brother has lying around his property. That little arrangement is in the woods near entrance to the garage.
And, for the first time ever out here, I spotted a robin. I don’t know why they are rare here on these acres. Actually, fewer and fewer birds are showing up at our feeders, since we take them down at night because of the racoons, and then we don’t get them back outside early enough in the morning.
I have never been a morning person. When my last boss was asked what she might say negative about me, she said that my desk was always messy and I didn’t like to get up in the morning. Some things never change.

On NPR, Harry Shearer has a weekly, hour-long romp through the worlds of media, politics, sports and show business, leavened with an eclectic mix of mysterious music, according to the website where you can listen to podcasts of his program. Listening to Harry romp was what got me through my sloshy drive from Massachusetts — when I wasn’t being entertained by the country music station, of course.
Near the end of Shearer’s June 3 program, he got a phone call from someone he apparently had spoken to before. She identified herself “Yvonne de la Femina,” a cabaret performer, and she recapped her gender journeys from male, to female and back and forth as such three times. (I was surprised that Shearer didn’t make some kind of comment about her being “three times a lady!”)
De la Femina claimed to be working these days doing a one-woman show on a cruise ship sponsored by Lunesta, the sleep-aid. (Was she for real or was this a put on??)
Shearer’s straightforward responses to the chatty transexual made the whole notion of her life and times sound almost plausible. After all, isn’t truth often stranger than fiction?
Then she told of her one date with Phil Spector. That’s worth listening to the podcast for.
Being a Google junkie, when I got home — and after my mother was asleep for the night (such as her night sleeping is, these days) — I did a search for “Yvonne de la Femina.” There was one hit, which rated Shearer’s 1994 album, It Must Have Been Something I Said. This is what it said about Yvonne de la Femina:
Another bit set in Iraq circa 1991 is “The Last Kuwaiti Woman Held Hostage”, which features Shearer interviewing cabaret performer Yvonne de la Femina (played by TV producer Tom Leopold). She is being held because her captors consider her to be a man, despite the fact that she had a sex change operation to make her a woman. The level of humor is quite impressive when you consider that the whole thing, which lasts 14-and-a-half minutes, was improvised.
I suspect that the bit I heard on Sunday was improvised as well. And done so well that they almost had me believing it all.
You can get a list of where and when Shearer’s program airs here.
There’s something uniquely wild and wacky about Harry, and he should be more well known than his is.