Roasted Doorbells

Words can’t even begin to describe the misery she went through in the past several years of her life.  Her immense medical record was just about as long as the list of doctors who were mortified at the prospect of having to navigate the murky medical waters of a woman who, by all rights, should have been dead five times over.  Between her assisted living facility, the various wards of the hospital, and rehab facilities spanning across several counties, she was a threat to sap the combined medical resources of the greater Charlotte area.  77 is not an old age, but aside from her thinning, yet stubbornly black hair, her body might as well have been 97.

I don’t know, at this point, what finally did her in, but I can venture a guess that it’s something to do with the all-too-uncommon perils of someone with her comorbidities: her stage 2 kidney failure prevented her from taking the full dose of diuretics necessary to get the inevitable fluid buildup away from her heart and lungs, while her stage 3/borderline stage 4 heart failure had a hard time keeping up with the volume overload.  People in her condition walk a thinner and thinner tightrope until they (or their loved ones) are forced into choosing death by kidney failure or death by heart failure.

It was getting to a point where we would have been forced into making a difficult decision on her behalf.  While she never suffered from any sort of neurological conditions (other than lifelong anxiety and depression), she was so tired—especially in the final months—that she could barely lift up her head, and her generally high creatinine levels (a byproduct of kidney failure) led to many a moment when the vivid imagination of her dreams got to her in her few remaining waking hours.  She would have been in no condition to weigh the awful choice which was coming her way; a nursing home would have been the next step, and that process would have been an unimaginable emotional anguish for everyone involved.

Her passing, while undeniably sad, is a weight lifted.  Her condition would have killed a lesser person, and her life is a testament to a strength of willpower so strong that the rest of us would do well for ourselves in life if we had the tiniest fraction of hers.

You often hear about deaths like this being sad, but not too sad, because they’re “expected.”  As cliché as that might be, I can attest to its accuracy, having seen her on her deathbed on multiple occasions within the past several years.  It was hard on those occasions because we grieved her passing and got through the emotions associated with such a loss, only for her to pull out and get through another two years.

Even towards the end, she had good days, good weeks, and even good months.  She found as much joy as possible in the little pleasures and comforts still available to her—watching the livestream of my graduation, hosting her bridge club for the final time—up through May.  When it became clear that her body wouldn’t get back to the quality of life she once enjoyed, it shut down for good; that fight to get to the next goal, the next thing-she-was-looking-forward-to, just wasn’t there this time.

I get not talking to people you once talked to a lot, especially online—heck, I’m the poster child of that.  I’m terrible at keeping up with people if I don’t see them around!  Every time I try to consciously change that, it seems like the rest of the universe conspires to give me an endless amount of stuff that’s due within the next few days.

But this ... really hurts.

(This is going to be a long post but I wanted to type it out to get it off my chest.)

So there’s this girl.  She was on the periphery of my social group last year; I TAed a class she was in, but other than that, I didn’t have many interactions with her.  Then I had to switch sections of German for the spring semester and we became fast friends.  She’d often call me to pick her up on the way to class (for, even though she didn’t live far away from where class was, it was extremely cold at 7:50 in the morning for several months at the beginning of the semester).  We’d go to concerts on occasion (all classical, given our music-school-student statuses) and we’d study German together as well.  All was totally platonic; I’m astonishingly oblivious to flirtation, but even I knew that no signals were being sent.  Heck, I’d have to keep her from opening up Bumble (which I learned was a dating app) on her phone during our study sessions, just so actual studying could happen, because she’s the kind of person who fantasizes about romance to a stereotypical extent.  She called me “the honorary uncle” to her future children.

Would I have asked her out, given alternate circumstances?  Let’s just say that if I’d had the merest inkling that she were interested, I’d have run that risk.  We’re very similar people in a lot of ways, we hold ourselves to the same standards and values, we’re always an encouraging presence in the others’ lives, and she’s inordinately cute.  But I knew that I valued her friendship, and I appreciated her presence in my life in that capacity ... so why risk anything?  After a rejection or breakup, “staying friends” is a mere platitude about 98.6% of the time.

The thing is that we were just ... there for each other.  When she had a rough night with some scary experiences, I was the first to learn about it, and I stayed by her side to calm her down, had her call her roommates and campus police, and accompanied her to Wal-Mart late at night so she could get some pepper spray.  When a ton of crap went down in re: my grandmother, and I needed someone who would sympathize, she was there for me.  When the A/C went out in her apartment, I lent her the biggest fan I could find.  When I got sick towards the end of April, she checked in on me and made sure I was getting lots of rest.  In appreciation of her presence in my life, I wrote a piece for her and she became the first confirmed performer on my upcoming senior recital.

We kept in touch a bit over the summer, but not extensively.  I spent a month in Maine, and she spent twice as long interning at a drama camp that sounded like a truly wretched and miserable experience once we caught up about it.  Understandably, she all but dropped off the face of the earth for a while, but we still would occasionally talk.

The fall semester began pretty much right when I get back from BrickFair, and though I don’t have a class with her this year, we still would run into each other.  Not long after the school year started, she came down with mononucleosis.  At the beginning of September, I took to sending her some funny picture each day.  She really appreciated them and told me on several occasions that she was happy to have her mornings brightened in such a fashion.

Thus began the longest continuous streak of days in which we’d text or otherwise electronically communicate.  Throughout September, we’d pretty consistently chat about pretty much everything, including some extremely late nights when she got Deep™ about her emotionally unstable middle and high school years.  It wasn’t a one-way street; she would start conversations as often as I would, and we’d always ask about the other’s day.  (Plenty of times, she’d send me funny pictures, like a picture of Donald Trump as a block of Spam.)  Good news or bad, we’d always tell one another.  On one occasion, we went to a concert and then ended up walking around her neighborhood until half-past midnight.  When she broke up with a guy that she’d gone out with a few times over the summer—a relationship that she described as “not good for her”—I found out before she even updated her relationship status on Facebook, right after her best (female) friend.  (As you might imagine, I had mixed feelings; I didn’t like the fact that she was sad, but I couldn’t dislike the cause of it.)

Overall, it was just nice.  I enjoyed her company and she seemed to reciprocate.

In any event, she was talking one day about red velvet cake and how much her soul desired some, so I hatched an ingenious plan to bake some red velvet cupcakes for her.  As the frosting required refrigeration, I had to let her know of my plan beforehand.  She said—before I’d even made the things—that she appreciated me being there for her, and caring about how she was doing each day, and that it all meant a lot to her.

As I type this, it occurs to me that it all sounds very romantic, but it really wasn’t.  (Well, maybe the tiniest bit—but I’m also the type who would do this kind of stuff for any of my friends, and goodness knows I don’t have crushes on all of them.)

I took the cupcakes to her before a big performance, and so—while she didn’t eat any then and there—we hung out in the very short period of time before she had to perform.  I went to the concert, naturally, and then afterwards, she, I, and another friend of mine went to get some late dinner.  I took her back to her house and we ended up, once again, in one of those profound conversations about the nature of humanity and the universe and its implications in our respectively weird lives.  While full of our usual wit and banter, we both ended up talking about things we don’t usually tell other people.  It was vulnerable but comfortable, and that’s a rare experience.

It only ended because an alarm went off on campus at 1:30 AM, blaring out the sound of an air raid siren before a voice came over the speakers, talking about a “dangerous individual.”  I texted her after I got back home to see if she was alright, and she said that she was.  “We have to find times to hang out that aren’t super late at night,” I told her.  “Agreed!!” she replied.

And everything changed since then.

Her friends have said that she’s still around and okay.  She’s still active on social media (though a little less than before).  Yet since that late night, she hasn’t just been unresponsive to my daily memes, she’s not even looked at them.  The only interaction we had was when, in the middle of this past week, I said that I hadn’t heard from her in a while and wondered if she was still doing okay (given a spate of crimes that have occurred near campus).  It took her most of the day to respond, and even when she did, it was more laconic than usual, with none of the usual trappings of her electronic communiques.

Now fall break is upon us, and with it, continuing tension about whether or not I’ve lost a friend.  (Granted, the stress is increased since it involves a friend I also happen to have a moderate crush on, but still!)  I’ve replayed the events in my head and can’t make heads or tails of it.  She’s still going to perform my piece on my senior recital (and, last I heard, she was still very excited about it, because she would sometimes text me out of the blue and talk about how gorgeous it was).  According to those who see her every day, she’s doing a lot better and—while not 100%—is more or less as functional as a student without mono.

In a distorted irony, of the friends I have (whom I see on a regular basis), she is the only one I’d feel comfortable talking about this situation to—and obviously, I can’t.

We can all agree that relationships suck, but this isn’t even a matter of that.  This is someone going cold-turkey on even talking to you after being comfortable enough baring their soul to you.  That cuts deeper.

Does she like me but is afraid that I don’t like her?  Has my reticence come back to bite me?  I don’t have any hope that this is the case, but it would be the best outcome as far as I’m concerned.

Did she start to see me as being overbearing?  I don’t see how, but if so, she should feel comfortable enough by now to tell me.  In case it’s this, I’ve given her space, even though my day feels a little less complete without her causing my phone to buzz at intervals.

Does she suspect that I may have feelings for her (well-hidden though they may be), and has done her best to distance herself so she doesn’t have to reject me?  If so, I wish she wouldn’t assume romantic intend behind guys who do nice things for her ... but if so, that says something about society, not her.

I keep going back to this whole situation in my head over and over and over, and it’s kept me from writing the papers I need to write and write the music I need to write and apply for the grad schools for which I need to apply.  We will run into each other; it’s just sort of a given on our tiny, tiny campus (not to mention that she’s still obliged to be on my recital).  I just needed to blast all this information out into the void and whoops, turns out Tumblr has become that place.  Whoop-de-freakin’-do.

In other news, my grandmother is at least doing okay.  Her house didn’t flood during Florence and it’s now on the market.  The thing is, if it doesn’t get sold soon, we’re all going to be in a world of financial hurt.

I’ve seen up close and personal a mind that is eating itself with severe anxiety and depression.  It’s not easy to watch.  She has good and bad mental health days.  One day she can be as carefree as is possible under her circumstances—a shade of her former self—and the next, she can be spiteful, hateful, and genuinely hard to be around, while engaging in a set of bizarre mind games inherited from her mother, who suffered from PTSD and became a toxic and emotionally manipulative person herself.

The antidepressants seem to have kept her mood a little more stable—as there would be times, before, that she would cry more or less constantly and over the most inconsequential of imaginable things—but her anxiety leads her down paths of denial and paranoia.  She is obsessed with the idea of returning home, and we’ve managed to figure out why: her house is not just a symbol of her triumph over less-than-pleasant late family members, but it’s also filled with items and trinkets that someone living alone with severe anxiety could use to mentally center themselves.  She insists on not using leg-wrapping devices that, even by her own admission, would help her get off excess fluid from the edema that has plagued her for over twenty years and has only been exacerbated through what she’s more recently endured … because, in her mind, if she uses them, “people will laugh at her.”  She’s the youngest person in the facility and amongst the slowest and least stable in terms of mobility, and is at this point almost completely bald … and yet she fixated on a practical (and common) solution to her edema (which she also despises having to take medicine for, even though, without such diuretics, she’d have been dead a decade ago).  Someone has to accompany her at all doctor’s appointments—and she has a myriad—not because of her feebleness and her unsteadiness and her lack of strength, but because of her inability to focus.  She zones out and gets facts wrong about what she’s told, only to turn around and insist that she’s right about that very thing.

Her paranoia extends to almost everything.  Case in point: she was very, very concerned for a long time that, should her wound from her shoulder operations not heal, they’d amputate it.  This is despite every member of her team of physicians and nurses telling her, in so many words, that this was an unfounded fear.  Everyone she knew to whom she also voiced this concern were unafraid to tell her that this was a ridiculous notion.  They can’t just take off someone’s entire shoulder, and they wouldn’t try unless she had gangrene … but, of course, there was someone in the family who met their end through that gory route, and so her mental state led her to believe that this, too, was to be her fate.  Anyone who tried to bring reality to the table was screamed at through tears.

The issue is that, between physical safety, financial stability, and being home, she can only have two of the three.  She has fallen seven times since last September and her desire to prove her independence has left her more vulnerable, and often in positions where she needs more help and yet stubbornly refuses to ask for it.  This is a cycle that, if left unbroken, increases her chances of needing to go to a nursing home.  Her insurance is good and she’s got enough money to last her a decade in assisted living, but to get that kind of 24-hour care at home, she’d burn through everything she’s got in less than two years (and that would include a sale of her house).  To be financially stable and at home would mean just getting a few hours of home health per day, and they would come at the times of day that she’s most likely to be awake and able to do things on her own.  No matter how you slice it, getting all three is impossible.

Meanwhile, her house is exhibiting structural issues not unlike that of its owner.  The huge wall that extends the length of the house—a good 70 to 80 feet—has cracked in two down the middle.  What this means, according to structural engineers, is that the wall has failed.  If left untreated, it would collapse completely, dirt would pour into the basement, and the entire front of the house would fall in.  If that happens, the house would be condemned and she’d get no money out of it, ever.  Fortunately, that’s not happened yet, and a company that specializes in these things will reinforce the wall—but the cost of this is paid in terms of months she can stay in assisted living.  There’s only so much money she has available.  Within a few more years, other problems will almost certainly emerge.  The pipes in the kitchen burst and flooded a few years ago, and the pipes further back surely would be the next to go, as they were installed at the same time.  With the foundation less stable, are any other supporting walls about to go?  Heaven forbid if bats get back into the attic, as they did when I was a kid.

We have had a lot of difficult conversations, but none have included her.  They can’t.  She has exhibited a tenuous grasp of reality only rivaled by the tenuous grasp of her hands.  It would be unimaginably irresponsible to let someone in her condition have a final say, because the decision she wants to make—to go home, no holds barred—would result in her bankruptcy, her being shipped off to a low-quality facility on government subsidies, and wasting away in misery as her brain eats itself in a cycle of anxiety and paranoia, from which there would then be no escape.  It would be unthinkably abusive to allow this to come to pass.  She is best served to get as strong as she possibly can at the safest possible place—which is where she is now, at the best facility in the county—and, as the wound closes up and she finally comes off the antibiotics she’s had, to reassess where she’s at.  She has to become strong, and steady, and mentally clear, and be able to do everything with her non-dominant hand exclusively.  Her muscles have atrophied and her litany of other, non-shoulder-, non-brain chemistry-related medical issues continue to plague her.  The best we can hope for is presenting independence as a goal to strive for, with the idea that her overall betterment will result from her desire to achieve it, even if its achievement is now beyond hope.

I thought it was the roughest thing to witness someone you love go so quickly downhill physically, but it’s almost worse to see someone suffering from so much anguish inside their heads.  I’ve had to remind my dad that, sometimes, there is no such thing as “winning,” and that no one can be singlehandedly responsible for managing the life of another.  The stress of managing this has only been compounded by a daily and gnawing fear he holds of how, on a scale from normal to conspiracy theorist, she’ll be from day to day.  Dealing with all of this has resulted in his own health problems: in addition to elevated blood sugar levels (which he’s committed to bringing down before the follow-up appointment he’s got, so he isn’t diagnosed as a diabetic), he suffers from cluster headaches, trigeminal nerve pain, and a kind of headache called chronic paroxysmal hemicrania … all of which are likely related, and all aggravated by factors such as stress and eye strain.  Speaking of eye strain, he’s having an operation of his own tomorrow to … more or less straighten his bumpy eyeball out.  That should fix at least some of it, and allow him to back off of the mega-strength glasses prescription he’s been on for several years.

Oh, and I’m busy cramming for the GRE, which is basically the grad school version of the SAT and is just a flat-out miserable experience because a) I’ve not done any of this geometry crap in about five years, b) they don’t give you even so much as a hint of the solution to problems in their official practice material, c) a not-insignificant chunk of these problems contain very straightforward solutions that they forgot to cover in the official review, and last but not least d) it’s really, really not fun to come across a situation where they flat-out provide the wrong formula.

I lose track of all the stuff that’s happened to her in the past few months alone, but we’ve put ~5000 miles in on the drive between our house and the hospital complexes she’s been in since early September.  Her health is like the stock market, but in reverse; she takes one step forwards and two back.  Every time her hopes and our hopes are up—that is, during her steps forward—they are relentlessly beaten back by an endless stream of weird and off-the-wall complications.  She is, by any doctor’s estimation, a medical anomaly.

After her last full-blown hospitalization, which included a course of IV and by-mouth antibiotics, she was cleared to go to a specialized hospital that dealt with unusual cases.  In her time there, her creatinine levels (which is tied to kidney function) skyrocketed, and that made her go utterly loopy.  This isn’t a fun loopy, either—this is a scary, mean, aggressive, and thoroughly mentally unstable loopy.  She’s been a hardcore Democrat all her life, but should her creatinine or calcium levels go up, or if she is given any opioid-based pain medication, she turns into a full-fledged Alex Jones-level conspiracy theorist against anyone.  She becomes hard to be around in these moments because she channels her mother, who was an extremely toxic and emotionally abusive woman.  Other than my dad and myself, she has no relatives other than her older sister, who lives over two hours west and is in no shape to be helping in any way, aside from being a voice of consolation over the phone.

Anyway, her first shoulder surgery went awry six weeks in, and the specific bacteria that deeply infected her shoulder ate the rotator cuff and surrounding tendons. It’s fast-acting; it’s an “acid-fast” bacteria, and tuberculosis is closely related.  Nevertheless, she blames the surgeon, of all people—especially because she was so drugged out that she doesn’t remember him coming in to visit before either surgeries, even though my parents were both there to corroborate that he did.  There’s no way the surgery could have done it to her; it was too far out and too fast acting to have been given to her weeks prior.  It was a freak thing that the surgeon hadn’t seen in nearly 1,500 replacements.

She was finally discharged from this specialized hospital yesterday, and though she sent my dad and myself on a wild-goose chase (a two hour round trip from the hospital to her house and back for things she ended up not using, because of aforementioned loopiness), we finally got her to the rehab facility that helped her recover from her second back surgery when the first went wrong several years ago.

As you might imagine, that woman has absolutely no business ever going under a knife again because this kind of stuff always happens.  She only elected to get her shoulder replaced because the joint had worn down to the point that it no longer even existed, putting her in excruciating pain.  She felt snakebit before this; I’ve not a clue how awful she feels her luck is now.

It took several hours for the nurses to check all of the boxes because they had to go through her medical history, which rivals War and Peace in its length and the Star Wars prequel dialogue in unbelievability.  What she’s already been through would have killed anyone with less of a fighting spirit, and though she can be irritable due to the unending nature of her medical maladies, she always makes fast friends with all of the nurses.

She had a standing follow-up appointment with the surgeon to check and see how things were healing, and there was no good news.  The antibiotics haven’t been working to kill the infection, but have just kept it at bay, which means that they’ll have to do a third surgery, and the second consecutive where they’re just in there to clean the infection out. Originally they held out hope that they’d put in a “reverse shoulder” where the ball and socket are flipped around, but now they’re to the point where they’re not even going to try.  She’s never going to have a right shoulder again.

She has all but lost her ability to heal; her humerus broke when they were cleaning out the infection during the second surgery, and it hasn’t healed a fraction.  Even slow healers would have shown significant improvement by this point; she’s got nothing.  She has barely any strength left to her; she cannot move under her own power and could barely lift half a small hamburger to her mouth.

On top of that, she’s been immunocompromised so severely with the cocktail of antibiotics they’ve prescribed, because the primary and secondary antibiotics used to treat her particular infection both give her severe allergic reactions.  Her list of allergies is nearly as long as her medical history.

The drugs that they give her in order to put her under anesthesia lower her already low blood pressure, put extra strain on her pacemaker-reliant heart, swell her already edema-swollen legs (which she’s had so long that she’s developed immunity to the main medications used to treat it), and aggravate her early-stage kidney disease further.  Complications from the last surgery gave her the recurring kidney issues because her body metabolizes things so slowly, and the lingering anesthesia medications give her loopy spells up to a month out.

The best case scenario is that she takes twice-a-day IV antibiotics for the rest of her life.  She will never drive again.  I don’t see how she ever lives by herself again. The only question now is will she survive this next surgery—and if she does, what will her life look like?  Will she ever regain what she lost as her muscles atrophied over the past two months?

My grandmother is back in the ICU.  She’s a stubborn lady who, just in the past week, displayed her sheer mental-middle-finger, literal death-defying force of will in a way that I think stunned the cadre of nurses who more than half-expected her to never again awake from her near-catatonic slumber.  There’s no good part of this, but the worst part is that almost every one of the problems she has would be straightforward to fix if the medicines that would solve it didn’t exacerbate several other issues.  I don’t know how she’ll pull through, but I’ve thought that before—including last week—and yet we’re all still here.

She went from barely staying awake for more than five seconds to like, actually having lunch for the first time in about ten days.  That’s good news, but she’s also arrived at a point where an ICU visit is like ... a normal Monday.  That’s not good news.  Right now she’s in for a low platelet count, and it’s a mystery as to why her numbers in that realm plummeted so fast—exceeded only by the mystery of why it took so long to get a platelet transfusion to her in the first place.  It’s not the first time in the past week that one of her numbers has gone way out of whack for no good reason other than that her body has long been considered a mystery by medical science—an anomalous tendency my dad inherited and one that—given my still-absent twelve-year-old molars—I may very easily carry on.

It’s been particularly hard to manage because she lives over an hour south.  I can’t be down there except for every so often, given my college schedule, and my parents can only visit so much given their work commitments.  Managing her affairs—both medically and financially—from afar is extremely taxing, especially when it often comes down to one of us to straighten out the doctors and nurses and figure out what exactly is happening.  American health care, unfortunately, is one of those arenas where the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, to the point that we’re often the only ones who know the extent of her warlike medical history.  Additionally, she’s a hardcore Democrat in bonafide Trump-land, which means that it falls to us to run interference in the event she goes on a political rant in her sleep ... which happens more than you might expect.  (She’s louder in her sleep than when she’s awake and it’s been that way since I can remember.)

It’s just been … a week?  A friend of mine died and it’s really been awful on everyone.  He was younger than me and he passed in a freak accident.  I feel sort of hollow inside, so I can’t begin to imagine the heartbreak that his parents and grandparents and brother and fiancée are going through.  I knew him from three years of high school baseball and he was genuinely one of the nicest and most gracious people I’ve ever met.

The visitation took hours because there were at least two thousand people there to see the family, and the funeral was just about as packed.  All in all really a punch in the emotions; it’s been really really difficult to actually sort of do anything this week.

Also my grandmother had her fifth surgery in recent memory, as of late August, and though she’s finally home from rehab, her mental health has just been a disaster.  She’s had a rough go of things through her life and a lot of that’s been drug up to the surface because of the umpteen medications she’s on.  She wants to stay independent and can, if she puts her mind to it, but she’s soon going to get to the point where, if she loses the physical ability to do something, she’ll never get it back.  Getting her back on her mental footing is the only solution, for no good will come otherwise.  She doesn’t have the money for a retirement village, she can’t move in with us (too many stairs) and we can’t move in with her (she’s over an hour away).  How long the situation will be tenable, I know not.  She kept a lot of this from us when we were preparing for our Alaska trip because she didn’t want to keep us from going, but we were literally told that she was going to have this surgery on our way back, on the phone.

In an entirely different realm, there’s this really nice and cute girl that I know—I mean, not well, per se, but more than just casual acquaintances.  So on Wednesday she called me over to where she was sitting, insisted that I sit next to her specifically, told me at the first available opportunity that she was not romantically involved with the guy across the table, then proceeded to initiate an inordinate amount of casual arm-touching while we discussed our surprising number of commonalities.

I ask her out later on and all of the sudden, wham—brakes on—turns out she’s not looking for a relationship with anyone.  Totally fine, obviously, but it was a complete 180 because she flat-out isn’t like that to anyone else.  I feel gaslit because what she was doing definitely was flirting, obvious even to a relatively socially oblivious creature such as myself.  I would care very much to retain her friendship but ... yeah, wow.

There’s this other girl that I’ve liked since the end of last year, when I scored a film she directed, but I’ve not seen her much on campus this year and she may or may not be a Trump supporter, according to rumors that I find rather unfounded given who’s repeating them, but ... yeah, that’s also a thing.

tl;dr various emotional roller coasters, my least favorite kind of roller coasters, whoopee