Today was another mostly shitty day.
My grandfather was due to be taken to Hospice at around 1pm. Getting up around noon, I didn’t want to show up at the hospital just to turn around, pay $2 parking (let’s remember that I really have no income right now), and leave again. So I waited around at home for the call to action.
Finally, at 6:30pm, he was moved. I could have been at the hospital the whole time with my family. So that was irritating, and now I feel guilty for something I didn’t even cause.
At hospice, he was settled in and Holly and my uncle Kent and I went out to get Subway. We came back and finished our food. I went out to smoke and came back to find Holly sitting in the dining area alone. We went to my grandfather’s room and this is what we found:
The door was shut. After knocking lightly, I opened the door and beheld four Hospice staff and my dear uncle standing around in some vague state of chaos. Here’s what was going down:
They needed to change the dressing on his wounds (he’s got pressure sores – essentially bedsores, having been in bed for pretty much the last 2 1/2 years), and had just given him morphine so they could roll him over to change them without excessive pain. Remember that he’s got multiple cracked ribs from chest compressions, when the doctors in the ICU brought him back to life a few days ago.
So the bones in his chest are probably killing him when they do this. They’ve got to be. I heard him loudly moaning. “Oahh! Ooh! Aaahh! Oooah! Ohh!”
So what’s the problem, exactly?
My father and, mostly, my uncle want him to not have morphine. My uncle made no friends in that room tonight. He was aggressive. I do not blame him for that, since many health care workers have failed us terribly in the past. Still…
I’m not at all certain what alternative they want, exactly, because my uncle tonight did not want to elaborate with me on the other side of that coin. He only wanted to emphatically and adamantly defend his position that Grandpa NOT be given morphine.
At the end, after trying to voice my understanding of things, he simply walked off. I told him: “I’m not trying to fight with you or anything, I only want to understand all of this.” This he would not hear.
He said that Grandpa made more noise when they were moistening his nose. I remember: “Dad, dad!” It was not as loud. It was not a horrifying sound. Not like when he was being turned over. “Ohh! Aaaah! Ooooh! Aaa-ooh! Ohh!”
He would not hear anything that I had said. It was Know-It-All vs. Know-Nothing. Many times, my voice goes unheard, or, worse, talked over. I am not to be taken seriously in any opinion that I give. This fact has been presented to me in practice many, many times in the past, and in the present. I’m just this perpetual sixteen-year old kid.
I used to wonder why I felt so inconsequential, so ineffectual. I have been treated like this all my life. One thing leads to another, and soon enough everybody else does it, too.
(I am a densely angry thirty-five year old man. I understand more about people, and about the way the universe works, than anybody else I know, including the blow-hards who only claim to know. I understand the great “mysteries” of life. (There is no mystery, only cause and effect. There are only events, in varying orders, at various frequencies. People behave according to their chemicals, steered by their recorded experiences.) I can do any task presented before me, and have proven this many times over. I am tougher than many. The things that I have seen and experienced, other people only emptily brag about. I am far more powerful than I let on – I am only weak because I am not usually brave enough to try.)
So I left, too. I walked right out of that place, and I drove home. I wanted to smash something. Had Holly not been in the car with me, I would have driven fast and crazy and mad. When I got home, I changed into shorts and a tank top and ran as hard as I could. I found an abandoned shopping cart and threw it to the ground: “chank!” I punched a street sign: “smak!” I wanted to beat the holy living hell out of something – to break something, anything into tiny little pieces. I broke nothing, and maybe that means something, or not.
The more I think about it – and why not think about it? What I think doesn’t matter! – the more I think this: “So what if he’s stoned out of his poor, already-crippled mind for a couple of hours, every other day or so?”
Think about having your ribs broken. Then think about having someone forcibly roll you onto your side. Think about the raw, cracked bone rubbing up against bone, under your meat. Surely bone, muscle, and sinew must all scream with pain!
One good thing: possibly the only coherent sentence my grandfather spoke today was when he looked at me and said, “I love you.” That was maybe the sweetest moment of my entire life.
