Tag Archives: life

Aging Parents

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Sorry, everyone: my dad fell and broke the top vertebra in his neck. My sister and I spent some time at my parents’ house, figuring some things out. Or trying to.

The reason my dad is not paralyzed is arthritis. The vertebra snapped in two places, making a single piece surrounding his spinal cord and two side pieces–all held in place by the severe calcification of his bones due to advancing age.

My dad does not see this as lucky. He sees it as a minor inconvenience. My mom spends a lot of time trying to convince him he cannot mow the lawn. You should have seen the home health nurse’s face when he asked her the same question.

We like feisty old people on television. A certain amount of orneriness keeps the elders alive, makes life worth living for them, etc. But when someone who has spent his whole life being the decision maker is confronted with the fact that some decisions have been taken out of his hands because he is broken, he may not listen.

And family dynamics will rise to the surface, and that charming Golden Girls fighting spirit will turn into a family fight. Of course elders don’t want to leave their home. And if the home is safe, working hard to make sure they don’t is your best bet.

When the home is not safe, stubbornness becomes danger. It is a difficult transition for adult children to make; a geriatric physician friend says “it’s difficult raising parents.”

At some point the irony kicks. You find yourself saying “I have done the best I can for you and yet you continue to fight what is best for yourself by labeling it ‘you just don’t understand’.” And then you bust out laughing because you remember this conversation in reverse somewhere around your junior year of high school.

Humor might save your sanity, but it won’t save the situation. If a family has spent a lifetime building up a specific form of communication best labeled as ‘avoidance,’ that dynamic will continue into the final years. And perhaps make them the wee bit miserable.

So now you know.

The Funny Side of Malfunctioning

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So if I’m going to take you on a journey with me into my brave new health world, let’s start with how I entered it. Which is, if I do say so myself, a very funny story.

I went to Mexico with the Wayfaring Writers. One of the attendees was a retired MD whose granddaughter had given her the flu just before she left, so she was getting antibiotics from a local clinic.

In Mexico, if you want antibiotics, you go to the pharmacy, see the doctor attached to it in an office next door, pay something around $5, and get a diagnosis. Watching my friend do this, I kept thinking how nice it would be to take a little souvenir home: cheap Cefalaxin. I’m one of the lucky ones allergic to penicillin. Getting cheap C to take back sounded good, but there was one problem.

I was healthy as a horse.

My MD friend smiled at me. “You’d have to lie. The easiest lie is to say you have a UTI. Those symptoms are easy to describe.”

“Are you enabling me?” I laughed.

She shrugged, and smiled again, and said nothing.

So two days later, having wrestled my moral concerns into submission, I went to a pharmacy, and saw a doctor. I paid him $3 and began describing the symptoms I did not have.

He kept staring at me. He knows I’m lying! Hot guilt suffused my face.

He asked, did I have a fever? Did I have a backache? Was I short of breath?

These are not UTI symptoms.

When I answered in the negative for all these, he said, through the Spanglish sign language combined with his phone’s Google Translator, that he was going to take my blood pressure. He used an electronic arm cuff, read the meter, and his eyebrows shot into his hairline.

He got out a sphagnometer (the manual cuff that requires a stethoscope) and took it again. Then he wrote something on a pad, and said, “You’re getting an EKG.”

Uhhhh, okay……

Twenty minutes and $15 later, I was naked on a bed while  a very handsome man ran his hands over my breasts. I swear to you, in that moment, the ONLY thing I could think was, I really should have been more specific about my fantasies for this trip.

I told the doc on our trip about my adventure, and she said likely the doctor who sent me for the EKG was reacting to something I was doing without knowing it: panting, perhaps, short of breath; or flushed because of the exertion of the heat and the heart not liking each other in a country full of salt and alcohol. Both of which were flowing through my veins at that point quite freely.

Two hours later, I was back in the kind doctor’s office with an envelope, which he took, studied, pursed his lips. Then he reached for his phone.

You have upper left blocked.

Dude, I need a noun. But Google was not yet up to providing “ascending aortic aneurysm.” That would come two months later, when I was hooked back into the American system struggling to get appointments.

I think fondly of Mexico these days, and that souvenir envelope containing the EKG that may well have saved my life (and a box of Cefalaxin). As anyone with an aneurysm can tell you, the most important thing about having one is knowing that you do.

So I’m on an interesting journey and will tell you more later, but all hail that kind doctor who looked, really looked, at me, and saw through me straight to my heart in the best possible way.