It's hard for me to return to talking about the past when so much is happening in the present! I'm still here at my same address, though (i.e., I haven't moved yet). That's for the most part because I'm still waiting for the bank to decide whether they'll accept my offer (it's for a "short sale," which - for those not versed in U.S. real estate lingo - is a sale of a property with a for less than the going market rate. The bank holding the mortgage has to decide whether it will accept the offer from a potential buyer. In my case, I offered the amount the seller - representatives handling the estate of the now deceased owner - presented as being "pre-authorized" by the bank holding the mortgage. However, I eventually learned that this sale amount wasn't "pre-authorized" in the usual formal sense of the word. Rather, it was the amount that the bank had counter-offered to a potential buyer not long before I came on the scene, so the estate handlers sort of assumed that this amount was "pre-authorized".
Anyway, I've been continuing to work on getting the condo set up, and in any case, I'm going to buy a condo at this complex, whether it's this unit or not. But other than that, my health has provided more fodder for news and excitement than I like. This isn't a case where "no news is good news" can be used. That is, the fact that I haven't written here does not mean that I have nothing of interest to write. Au contraire! No, since the last time I wrote to you I've been in e.r. twice (after consulting with my doctors' and health insurance's after-hours services. And, I've been admitted likewise twice into the hospital. However, they still haven't determined with great certainty what is causing my symptoms. O, yeah, and I also have been walking with a walker since my last week-long hospital stay. And the walker is a whole story in itself!
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The story of the walker goes like this: on my 5th day in the hospital last time a nurse told me she thought my trouble walking was because I wasn't up and walking around enough. Huh? Armed with that stupidity in mind, I vowed to get up and walk around after having my shower (which I had to take sitting on the floor of the bath tub because their rules disallowed either taking a bath (there was not plug for the drain) or sitting on a chair in the shower and I wasn't stable enough to risk standing to take a shower.
This was mid evening. So true to my word, after the shower I made myself presentable (by hospital standards, which means mostly wearing a bath robe in order to be properly covered up and not displaying ones backside, wear the hospital gown ties up. I should mention that the entire time in the hospital when a physical therapist came s/he'd bring a walker and go with me walking up and down the hall a bit, but then take the walker away when the session ended. So I was left to my own devices when it came to walking in the absence of a physical therapist. So walking after my shower meant trying to walk without the aid of a walker. So I got by by holding on the rail along the hall. I reached a corner in the hallway - like a T-intersection where you have to decide whether to go right or left because straight ahead is not an option - I looked both ways and who should I meet but my rheumatologist! He was doing something at a computer in the hallway maybe 20 feet or so away from me. I had missed an appointment with him because of being in the hospital and had asked for a consult with him. He didn't recognize me at first, which isn't that surprising since he'd never seen me in my bathroom and with my head wrapped up in a towel turban-style. After I told him my name he cam over and I told him why I was walking around - what the nurse had said, and he agreed that my trouble walking was not because of muscular weakness due to lack of use (of the muscle(s)). He also offered to write a prescription for a walker for me.
The next morning I asked the nurse about the walker, and she acknowledged having seen the script for the walker in my chart but told me that I wouldn't be given the walker until discharge from the hospital. So based on this information I didn't ask about it again until I was being discharged.
Upon learning I was being discharged I had to arrange for follow up appointments for the following week, figure out how I was getting home (I'd come via ambulance), and otherwise go through the usual discharge routine. However, this was being done by nurses at the same time they were taking care of their other patients too. So somewhere in there I inquired about the promised walker... only to learn that there evidently wasn't a script for it. I insisted that there was a script and the nurse checked and double checked, and it wasn't in my records. So then the nurse said that the doctor would have to physically come in to sign the script. I told them that my rheumatologist had already written the script, and I was told that he wasn't my doctor while in the hospital (?!). I eventually understood that the script had either been either intentionally taken out of my records or accidentally misplaced. I said I wouldn't leave without the walker so I had to say another night. The next morning I was told the script was signed and I'd get the walker Monday at home. Satisfied with that (oh foolish me!), I agreed to be discharged.
Upon arrival at home my neighbor lent me her walker on the assumption that it would be only 2 days, until Monday. I waited... and waited... finally by Tuesday mid-day with no word about the phantom walker I was to receive, I called my doctor's office, the rheumatologist and also my primary care doctor, and I also mentioned it to the neurosurgeon, whom I saw on Monday. So at that point both the rheumatologist and neurosurgeon were working on the walker, but my primary care seemed to be AWOL (absent without leave, a military crime worthy of court martial). Finally, by Thursday I got a call from a company arranging to bring me a walker. The next day someone else came by with a walker, which I did not accept. It turns out that that second walker was from the rheumatologist, so I guess I got the walker the neurosurgeon prescribed. Anyway, I'm still walking with a walker, although the physical therapist is helping me and sometimes I'm able to use just a cane.
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And this brings me to another point... when I was discharged from the hospital I was sent home with a script for physical therapy at home and a home health aid. A nurse comes by from time to time too.
And what are my symptoms? It quite possibly might be easier to answer that are NOT my symptoms, but I'll try my best to answer what ARE my symptoms: weakness and poor control in the legs, tingling and sometimes pain in my feet, cold feet, poor balance, acting up of my autoimmune allergic reaction (specifically redness in the upper chest and facial swelling), tingling in the face accompanied by fatigue, pain in the mid back and also in the gut, g.i. system slow down/malfunction, loss of feeling in my feet (not good for driving a stick shift/automatic transmission car). So now I have increased medications, have dizziness excercises tacked on to my usual heath routine, have to keep my legs elevated to minimize foot pain, tingling and lack of sensation, have to pay more attention to my g.i. system, etc., etc.
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At the same time I'm working on getting set up in the new condo and hoping against hope that my general contractor is honest, because I just can't deal with problems on that front on top of everything else. But now I'm living in a personal canyon of boxes in my dinky little apartment. Part of the boxes are from packing up, but a good chunk of them are things I've ordered for the new apartment when I find things I've liked at good prices. I'm having to be my own interior decorator, because even if I could afford an interior decorator, noone will work for you until you own the place. But knowing my health I feel like I have to do as much as I can while I'm reasonably able, because I never know when my health will "head south" as they say (i.e., worsen). And, as a bit of insurance against contractor problems, I'm buying most of the things that they have to install. But things are starting to slow down regarding condo set up, at least as far as what can be done before I actually own the unit.
I must say, however, that my health and the condo prep has been a good diversion from thinking about mom and family. There's no getting around the idea that she's happier where she is now (from a Christian standpoint), but it's hard to deal with all the suffering she'd gone through prior to her death. Lately I've thought about it a bit as things otherwise slow down for me some.
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Here's the real trigger to my writing today, though. I got a call from a cousin, who's a Christian and has spent some time with mom and my brother in recent years, after dad's death 5 years ago in particular. She called yesterday to ask my forgiveness for her not believing me about my concerns about how my brother there was treating mom. It turns out that since mom's death she's seen the angry side of him that she hadn't seen before, and now one of this cousin's brothers (who isn't a Christian) doesn't want anything to do with my brother because of his anger.
In these kinds of things it's not really appropriate to gloat about being right, because it would be better if I hadn't have been right, and mom's the one that suffered. I've told you here how I've been stymied at ways to help mom, but that mom and dad had things set up so that my influence in family matters was negligible, but my brothers played a major role also in making sure things were set up that way. Still, I'm sorry that mom had to suffer in this way - from my brother. But I hope that you will also see that people eventually come to recognize that I'm right in many of my interpretations of events and people. While it would probably be foolish to claim to be right all the time, I hope you can see that at the very least my perspectives on things probably should not be dismissed lightly. My family had build up an informal mechanism for keeping family issues secret and this mechanism could even fool people close to them, but I saw it for something otherwise (than what they wanted people to believe) and stuck to my beliefs with the conviction that I had enough to go on that I was convinced I was right. One other thing you can learn about me from this is that I don't change convictions easily and also I'm not afraid of going against the flow in my thinking.
It's hard, really, to deal with getting this confirmation that mom was abused by my brother (emotionally and verbally if not physically). The fact that I did as much as I could to try to help maybe alleviates any guilt feeling I might have, but it doesn't help the sorrow of this confirmation that she experienced this kind of treatment. You can see from other things I've written here that my relationship with mom has sometimes been rocky, but in all actuality, I think the ultimate cause of this goes back to the men in our family and the fact that mom was so dependent on them and they were so "persuasive" in affecting her views on things.
In the weeks or couple months before mom's death she had told me that she and dad didn't know about the things I'm writing here. But the thing is that they couldn't have known because I didn't trust dad enough to tell them. If dad had found out I was thinking or experiencing these things he would have very convincingly dismissed them and mom would have believed him and disbelieved me. It would have been very difficult for me to write some of these things things when dad was still alive.
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I still have a couple more things I need to get done before I return to this blog in full force.
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P.S. I got to thinking that there is one time when I messed up when I might have been able to maybe help mom. That was when I was living in New York and my brother and mom came out to visit me and my other brother and his boys (mom and brother in Pacific N.W. and other brother with his boys in New England; I was living in an apartment owned by my brother in New England, since I'd lost my second job for health reasons.
The scenario was that I hadn't had a holiday with the family in years so I went overboard on preparations. I should have spent more time with mom, but the thing is that after she left from that visit things would be exactly like they were before and it wasn't like she was going to start let me help her apart from my brothers' efforts. So these kinds of things felt to me manipulative ways to try to sort of suck me into the family "game playing" (in the socio-psychological sense of the term; other members of the family would undoubtedly deny there was any "game playing" going on). The last thing anyone in my family was ever going to do was let me have independent relations with mom. While dad was alive, he could maintain direct relations with me because he was astute at some of the familial issues and had clout enough to keep the upper hand. In any regard, no one in the family but me had any realistic potential of countering him. Dad, for example, was where the buck stopped as far as framing (of issues, individuals, events, etc.) went. I was the only one who questioned him with any conviction. I think I was able to do this because of things I'd experienced apart from the family, but also because of certain knowledge I'd gained and also because of my personality. My experiences independent from the family led to independence of judgement and change in some of my values and opinions. Under the purview of my family it would have been more difficult to come to these divergent perspectives, so the geographic and attitudinal distance combined with certain personality traits provided the opportunity to diverge from our family mindset. One of the personality traits that allowed me this opportunity was that of being independent in nature, which dad blamed for my problems in Vienna with the mission. I will remind you, however, that independent of thought is a well-known American value, which Alexis de Tocqueville in his famous book "Democracy in America" noted in the 19th century. Americans valued independence so much that they speer-headed the unfettered free trade movement in the 20th century. I mean the kind of free trade that is unencumbered with legal limitations and lets the market go where it will. Let's just say that I'm the embodiment of that value and Americans should recognize me as their true child that I am, independent spirit and all. (I hope you understand I'm speaking tongue in cheek here.) And dad, who was quite politicized, held to republican hands-off rule, where the rights individuals and businesses aren't encroached upon by big government. In other words, he valued independence... except, it would appear, in me. Or maybe it wasn't so much that I was the problem as it was that there were limitations to his valuing of independence and I fit into one of these exceptions to the right-of-freedom belief. Or possibly, he was just acknowledging how in reality things worked, but in any case, I felt that he agreed with the limitations of freedom thrust on me (by the mission in Vienna, etc.), so my independence in this particular situation was out of line, and those attempting to limit my independence were right in limiting me. In this case, however, one must try to disentangle what was independence acceptable and when wasn't it, or what kind of independence was acceptable and what kind wasn't.
Anyway, this is all to say that I might have helped mom during her visit to New England, when I was living there. But since I wasn't going to join in the family relations as they were, this help would just have been a short-lived event, until they returned back home and my brother there would once again be the one to come between me and any help mom might get. The only way my help could have been more enduring would have been if she would have stepped in so that I could on an ongoing basis have direct access to her to help her. That wasn't going to happen, because doing this was beyond what she could accept emotionally. Giving me that kind of access to her would be tacitly (if not actively) acknowledging that our family was something other than idyllic.
