Just like a Slattery

On Saturday, my mother couldn’t leave the hospital in a car because she had a widow maker.

Upon her request, I called a few people, including their pastor and Sunday school teacher (who prayed over the phone with me as I drove), who both said they’d put her on the prayer list at church. I also called my Aunt Betty, who said the same.

I went and picked up Bill, and the nurses at the VA said they’d be praying for wisdom and guidance for the doctors.

I had many, many messages from people here that they were keeping her in their prayers or were thinking good thoughts, whatever it is they do in such times.

Sunday morning, the new cardiologist came in, having studied the films and her records and was pretty sure that rather than open heart surgery, the problem could be fixed with a procedure called Endo Acab, which is essentially band-aid surgery for opening blockages in the heart.

People were still calling and writing, telling me that they were in prayer or meditation, meanwhile, and her blood pressure remained low and stable, and she kept telling me that she wasn’t nervous or afraid, she just knew that it was going to be fine.

There was an episode in which she panicked because Bill had taken a nap and she couldn’t wake him, and when she did, he had chest pains, but the nurses came and had him transferred to the ER. I ran up there and he was sitting up on the gurney, waiting to go back upstairs, perfectly stable, his blood pressure 107/63. The doctors all looked for a reason to admit him, but no cigar, so back he went.

Monday morning, the cardiac team assembled and they all studied the notes and during rounds came in and told us the blockage wasn’t, in fact, as bad as had been presumed, but was only about 60% (anything below 70% is generally not tinkered with), and could easily be stented if it beomes necessary. And anyway, they didn”t think that was causing the pressure in her chest, so they wanted to do a PET scan.

She went that afternoon and had her scan and it came back negative. I got a text with the results and the information that she didn’t need a procedure at all.

The calls and messages were still coming in – people were still praying or waving chicken bones around, whatever it took.

She does have to see an endocrinologist and go off her meds for diabetes and go on insulin (which will simplify things so much), and she’s grossly anemic, and she will have to follow up with a cardiologist regularly for the rest of her life, but it’s a good outcome, it’s the best outcome.

She also has to see a gastroenterologist because they think the pain was caused by reflux. And she needs to see some other -ologists too.

Friday afternoon, a cardiac cath showed she could have a heart attack at any second. Today, four days later, she and Bill got in the car with their friends and went out to dinner before heading back to Dublin.

So. Do you believe in miracles?

Things changed quickly Saturday morning when I got to the hospital and spoke with the other doctor, who was much more forthcoming with information.

With the knowledge that what my mother has is a widow maker, I was able to quickly make decisions about our logistics and get things moving.

I called my friend Kara who is an NP at Emory Cardiology and she got the ball rolling for me to have Mama transferred up there immediately by ambulance.

While paperwork was being pushed through I went to Dublin to pick up some things and bring my stepfather up. It’s truly amazing how much better the two of them function when they’re together.

We met with the cardiologist this morning and there’s a pretty good chance she’ll be able to have an Endo ACAB rather than open heart surgery, which we’d naturally prefer.

I left the hospital and came home, planning not to go back until tomorrow morning, when we’ll talk to the surgeons and decide for sure and schedule it.

Only my mother called this evening to tell me that she hadn’t been able to wake Bill, and when she was able to, his chest hurt and he’d been taken to the ER. So back I went and explained the situation and asked if he had to be admitted if it would be possible to admit him there and not at the VA.

They assured me that they’d admit him there, and after a few hours determined he didn’t need to be admitted anyway.

I have now tucked them in and am back home, and will be going back in the morning for more fun and games.

I am so fortunate to have such good friends who have surrounded me with words of support and practical assistance. I know that I could handle it on my own, but I’m grateful that I don’t have to.

Mama’s cath took nearly two hours and they still didn’t fix it.

It has been a long day, friends.

There’s calcification that’s preventing the placement of the stents, so our options are to fix it and to kind of fix it, which is to say open heart surgery or roto-root the vein involved and then place the stents.

We’re going full-tilt-boogie and having it all done.

In Atlanta.

The doctor here wants her to stay over the weekend, but she wants out to go spring Bill, and I’m not inclined to keep her here if they’re just observing her. I asked about the possibility of giving her blood thinners to go and he said no, just aspirin. She can give herself aspirin and she wants to go home.

Naturally we won’t leave if she’s in danger, but staying here is stressing both her and my stepfather out more than is necessary.

The doctor was kind of a bastard about the whole going home thing, putting his hands up in the defensive position, telling us he’s not in the business of telling people what they can and can’t do, but he’s going to heavily document the whole thing, which I completely understand, and then he had the temerity to call my mother sweetheart.

I had to call the insurance company after all that to check that we won’t run afoul of the insurance company if she leaves tomorrow, and they informed me that the division for her section of insurance closes earlier than the others and will reopen on Monday morning.

I plan for her to be at the new cardiologist’s office on Monday morning, I need to know now. Hilariously, I burst into great, gasping, sobbing tears and announced that if it were my own heart, it wouldn’t be so urgent, but it was my mother for crying out loud, and it’s the holiest day in all of christendom – Jesus Christ, our lord and saviour, died on the cross and was laid in his tomb on this very day, and couldn’t somebody please just help me help my mama before it was too late?

Once I stopped crying long enough, the lady on the phone asked me to please hold and she would find someone to help me.

I’m probably going to hell for that, but it was worth it.

I didn’t eat all day, and now I’m piled up in this hotel again. I ordered the most ridiculously unhealthy salad in the world. Fortunately my points week starts all over again on Monday.

That’s all the news that fits. I should go to sleep now. I don’t see my days getting any shorter soon.

I’m good at waiting. I’m so good at it that I tell people I’m freakishly patient.

This week I have had to put my money where my mouth is.

My mother and my stepfather have been in two different hospitals in one town where neither me nor my brother were.

He went to the hospital on Sunday, and Monday morning she had chest pains, so she went to the ER, where they kept her “overnight for observations.”

It’s now Friday and yesterday they brought her by ambulance to Macon for two stents in her heart.

I packed a bag in a hurry and called Jennifer to come get m’dawg and got down here as fast as I could. I expected that when I got here, she would actually be getting her stents, but that’s not how it’s all going down.

I also expected that she’d be released today and I’d be taking her back to Dublin and springing Bill, because he is Done With The Hospital.

Instead they admitted her to the CICU and scheduled her for this afternoon for another cath, where they may or may not put in the stents.

It was nice staying in the posh and tony Marriott last night, but I want to go home. I want her in a hospital where I know people, where they are known for being cardiac whiz kids.

Which is not to say that they’re not perfectly nice here, because they are, and they are taking very good care of her, aside from I just had to ask a nurse to change gloves. He said he’d just put them on, and I asked how many minutes he’d put them on before wiping his nose.

We spent hours in the room this morning, waiting, her asking the same questions over and over again, me answering them. She’s told me fifteen times (I counted) that she’s not nervous, but maybe she should be.

I’m not nervous either and maybe I should be, but it’s just not time to worry.

On a more fascinating note, there’s a woman here in the cardiac waiting room who’s dipping.

I’m so hungry, I might have to eat my emergency orange.

Kevin, my long lost friend, is dying, for real this time.

Kevin has been defying death his whole life it seems.

Kevin has had HIV for decades now and all the while has been drinking like a fish and smoking like a chimney.

He wasn’t going to die of AIDS, you see, he was going to live with HIV.

We’re not Facebook friends and we’re not in touch, so I know this more or less indirectly, having seen some alarming posts on the wall of mutual friends, and then having done a little digging on my own.

I will say for Kevin that he has always lived full-tilt-boogie, balls-to-the-wall.

He is a charmer and the most maddening sumbitch I have ever known.

He is generous to a fault and a world-class prevaricator.

He loves with his whole heart and can hate that way, too, if someone hurts one of his.

He has delusions of being able to work the hoo-doo, or claims that he can, in any case.

Recently, it seems, he contracted an infection in his heart, and that was cleared up and then his liver failed.

He’s always been a dilettante of the highest degree.

Now he is in hospice and doesn’t know his elbow from his asshole, due to the copious amounts of morphine he’s now allowed to have.

Kevin was always happiest when he was drunk out of his gourd, calling me at three or four in the morning to come collect him and whatever tank of a car he had from some gay bar and take him to a waffle joint for some grease and grits.

I once had an uptight roommate who, upon being awakened by the two of coming back home, screeched at him, “I HOPE YOU’RE HAPPY NOW!” He mildly replied, “Yes, darling, I’m ecfuckingstatic.”

That was Kevin, never a raised voice, never a hair out of place, even in the worst of circumstances, never rude to anyone, not even the officer who had his car towed that evening.

I have never known a man who could smoke so many cigarettes and drink so much coffee in such a short span of time, nor one who could sleep so peacefully at night.

I do not know a person more loved than Kevin.

We have not been in touch in years, for reasons too ugly to detail.

I hope that the rest of his journey is peaceful and that he is stoned and dreaming of drag queen fairies.

When he dies, I shall send flowers and throw jewels in his coffin. He’d love that.

At the end of 2010, I decided that in 2011 I was going to give a compliment every chance I got.

I have been humbled by the reactions a very simple compliment draws from even the dourest person.

It has changed me for the better.

Well, I do, for one. And you can go by me, because I go by Emily Post and Miss Manners and Leticia Baldridge and Ann Landers and generations of women who knew SAS.

There was a rollicking conversation last night over at Lynn’s blog about baby showers for second babies born within a few years of first babies, and then about showers for second weddings.

We (Lynn and I) don’t believe in it.

I’m going to tell you why (of course I am).

A shower invitation, bridal or baby, is an invoice for a gift

. It’s to help the bride or new mother get started on a brand new phase of her life.

There is no other invitation in the social repertoire that is an invoice for a gift aside from the shower invitation.

Now. All weddings and births are joyous occasions, so of course it is lovely to celebrate them. By all means, buy gifts, throw a tea party! Have cocktails! Just don’t have a shower.

Everybody needs some good churchin’ from time to time, whether they need the God aspect of it or not. It’s good to be able to sit still for an hour and face forward and be quiet and let somebody else be in charge of the talking.

I, personally, am in need of some good churchin’, and more to the point, am in need of a good church.

I am a member of a church that’s good, but it’s no good for me.

I sure was good for it, though, because I’m full of energy for their outreach programs, and I want to serve the least of these our brethren, and I want to be surrounded by like-minded people.

I’m a lonesome animal in a church – that church, anyway – because I’m single and straight and middle-aged and female and I don’t have any children.

I am The Only One Like Me in the whole church.

They don’t have a Sunday school class for me, even.

It’s not like I’m going to church looking for husband, and truth be told, I wouldn’t want to meet one there, because I don’t want to give the false impression that I’m going to go every Sunday.

I quit going to the church I’m a member of, and it was both an easy and a hard choice.

I haven’t felt included since the old pastor and his family left.

I talked to the two co-pastors about how I don’t feel that there’s a place there for me and they…just agreed.

I chose that particular church because for one thing, I have historic ties to it, in the form of my late Aunt Virginia, and for another, it has an excellent outreach program, and that means something to me.

But every Sunday, I sat there alone. I did not feel the sense of community I think you’re supposed to feel in a church. I did not feel that those other people were my people, let alone my friends.

Every few days or so, there would be an email, a prayer request for this person or that person in some sort of need. It’s a pretty well-known fact that I can fend for myself, but not once, not one, single, solitary time has anyone asked me, “How are you doing, Susan?”

So today, just like that, I cut my last tie when I unsubscribed myself from the church listserv.

My heart is heavy, but it was as simple as falling off the pew.

McDonald’s offers free breakfasts to kids taking the FCATS (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test) and the AIMS (Arizona’s Instrument to Measure Standards test), among others.

The breakfast consists of an Egg McMuffin and small milk or orange or apple juice.

And people are bitching that they’d rather see them offer the yogurt parfait or the oatmeal (at 31 grams of sugar, which actually makes it dessert, rather than breakfast?)

And you know, sure, it’s easy to say kids needs a healthier breakfast than fast food. They do. We all do.

But here’s the thing: too many kids leave home in the morning with no breakfast.

Many of those same kids will return home to no supper, too.

If McDonald’s is willing to step up and say, “Listen. We’ll make breakfast for these kids, and we’ll deliver it to them,” then I don’t care who you are, if you’re not willing to do better for them, then you’ve got no business griping.

Yes, it would be nice to furnish those kids who wouldn’t ordinarily have breakfast with organic, locally-sourced produce and grass-fed beef, served by virgins. But since that’s not happening, maybe we should just all be quiet until we learn to smile and say thank you to those who actually show up.

So who are they, the heroes? Those will tell you what needs to be done, or those who just do it?

I need to know, because tax day is right around the corner, and I need to know further how this affects me, on account of I haven’t done my taxes yet.

I need to just sit down and grind them out. I have an early-morning breakfast day with three of my favorite girls in the morning, and I should rush right home and take m’dawg to get her nails clipped and then just do it.

And on Monday morning, when I know what the damage is, I need to call the payroll company and have them start taking more out of my paycheck so the whole thing will stop being my annual nightmare.

I have a tax bill so big from the year-before-last that I’m going to have to take some money from a retirement fund to just pay it off. Normally I wouldn’t do that, but the economy is such that the interest and penalties are more than I’m making on the fund and I’m going to be working decades longer to make it all up.

In non-governmental news, I have been reading my friend Amanda’s blog (which I would link to, but I don’t know if she’s okay with that), and I always forget how much she is just one of my ten favorite people, for so many reasons both big and small. She looks so tiny and delicate, but I have never seen her not roll up her sleeves and just do what needs to be done. If you had to pick someone to go on a top-secret mission, she’d be the best person, because she’d just hike up her skirt and get it done.

I am truly, truly blessed to be surrounded by great friends like her.