The Tyranny of Health

OK—if I’m alive today and writing this, it’s all because of a legend, though a legend who has escaped the fate of most of us: Having our first mention in a Google search be “Helen Whitman is on Facebook!”

Or was her first name Helen? Because I had it in my mind that her name was “Ernestine,” but that Whitman appears to have been a flutist whom I knew in the music school, not the Mrs. Whitman I knew as a head nurse at UW Hospital and Clinics.

It’s fitting, really, that I don’t know—did I ever?—her first name, since she was very much not on informal bases with anybody, much less her nurses. She was Mrs. Whitman, and everybody else was Miss or Mr. or Doctor whomever, and she applied the rule as rigidly as she applied her white nursing cap.

She ran her ward in a way that made Mrs. Thatcher look like a slacker, and no, it’s not true that she applied starch to her uniform. Rather, any uniform that Mrs. Whitman chose to wear was expected to comply with her own high standards: No creases or wrinkles ever appeared. Nor was it the case that her name was ever spoken: Rather, it was whispered.

She appeared one spring day with serious scratches on her legs: Obviously I couldn’t ask her what had happened, but a senior nurse whispered the news to me. Mrs. Whitman had “awoken” her rose bed for the season, and was I surprised? Of course not: I was gardening myself at the time, and passionately involved with heritage roses: Wonderful shrubs with tremendous French names—Madame Alfred Carriere or Souvenir de Malmaison. True, they tended to bloom only once, and they could be unruly. But Mrs. Whitman? No, she strode into the world of modern roses, much as she strode onto the unit each morning, with an appetite for errant medical students, one or two of which she would consume for breakfast (she munched steadily through the day on anyone at hand….) So of course she would have tackled the reigning hypochondriacs of the garden, with all their wilts and rots and mildews and mites. Had she been an animal lover, she would have had Siamese cats, and had them lining up in order of seniority for roll call each morning and night.

Nor was it true that no patient ever dared die on Mrs. Whitman’s unit. What can be said is that they all—terrified into obedience—waited until after Mrs. Whitman had relinquished her ward to the PM or night shifts.

Detour—my mother had three children. After the eldest child was born, in 1945, my mother spent a month in the hospital, on strict bed rest, with a long, wonderful backrub at the end on the day, and plenty of rejuvenating rest, since look—the lady had just had a baby, for God’s sakes! Anybody could see that she’d been through a hell of an ordeal!

There was a problem, of course, since after a month of lying in bed? Well, those ladies were weak, and then being sent home to care for a newborn. So for the second child—born in 1950—the month got chopped down to two weeks. And for me, born in 1956?

“Dr. Thornton strode into the room and said, ‘get up, Mrs. Newhouse, and walk!’ just hours after you were born. And I never did get a decent back rub….”

I tell you this because I had a second—and last—cataract surgery on Tuesday, and now, three days later, what has my doctor told me?

“You can do anything but bungee jumping!”

Yeah?

The surgery was not without a wrinkle or two, since it appears that the operation can be rough on the cornea. And what that meant was that the eye was swollen, painful, and mightily inflamed.

“Soak your eye in prednisone,” said the doctor, so I did. And what else did I do?

“I’ll be OK to give class on Thursday morning,” I told my newest student, who looked skeptical. Right so then I cancelled on Wednesday afternoon, and then cancelled Friday’s class as well. Why? Because it wasn’t the pain or the inflammation that was the problem: I was utterly exhausted.

I went to bed and felt guilty: I should be up and doing something about the weed trees growing in the back balcony. But wait—did I really want to be out there sweating, with my hands in the dirt, and wiping my brow? Look, I wasn’t supposed even to be reading!

I twitched, I jittered—I fell asleep and woke to guilt / shame staring me relentlessly in the face. And then I had the revelation….

Mrs. Whitman!

“You’re not to leave this bed under any circumstances,” she said, “and I’m sending Miss Porter in to attend to those hospital corners.” She sniffed, and then paused at the door. “I’ll be right outside, at the nursing station.”

Bliss!

Well, I mused about her, since I had been reading a book by Robert Whittaker: Here’s what one writer had to say:

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (Crown 2010), by the journalist Robert Whitaker, is one of the most disturbing, consequential works of investigative journalism I’ve read in a long time. Perhaps ever. Whitaker has persuaded me that American psychiatry, in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry, may be perpetrating the biggest case of iatrogenesis—harmful medical treatment–in history.

Well, my brother had recommended it to me, and my brother—unlike me—does not suffer depression. Shouldn’t it be “suffer from?” No, I meant that my brother, along with so many others, thinks that if I just got myself together, took a good long walk, and thought positive thoughts, all would be well. Am I being fair to my brother? No, of course not. But until you’ve been seriously depressed, it’s hard to imagine the peculiar hell of the noonday demon.

Well, I had read enough of the book to overcome my initial irritation. Then I had had my surgery. Then I pondered the fact that, with all our wonderful treatments for depression, the incidence of the disease is soaring, not dropping. So what gives?

It’s the tyranny of good health, I concluded. Because at no time in history have we been more healthy, and isn’t it time to speculate that sickness has a place in our evolutionary history? Even the most dreaded disease—cancer—is no excuse to take to your bed for extended periods of time: You have your chemotherapy one day, are sick as a kitten the next day, and are back peering at your computer screen at the office the next day. Repeat week after week until remission.

Consider the cancer of the 19^th century: Tuberculosis. Anybody reading Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain will know the story. Here’s Wikipedia’s telling sentence:

In the opening chapter, Hans is symbolically transported away from the familiar life and mundane obligations he has known, in what he later learns to call "the flatlands", to the rarefied mountain air and introspective little world of the sanatorium.       

Well, a serious blogger would look into it, would see if anybody has proposed the theory: Robbed of the illnesses that would take us to our beds, isolate us, force us to look inward, put us in darkness, we have created depression, and are suffering vast amounts of it. Man spent most of his existence working outside during the day, and sleeping during the night. Now we are chained to our devices, and outside, for most of us, is the walk from office to car. So I should look into all this, except…

…Mrs. Whitman is ordering me back to bed!

Monday Morning Bastards Redux

“I’m listening to this Zen radio station,” said Elizabeth, who was presided over a completely empty gift shop, unless a yakking parrot and a close -to-microscopic dog were enough to compete against the human dredges of three cruise ships that normally fill the shop. “It’s nice to reduce the stress, sometimes….”

So I contemplated it: I had taken a three or four-mile walk by the sea, listened to forty-five minutes of rapturous music by Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber (see below), did I have any right to question how seriously stressed Elizabeth might be? After all, we could both still walk, which was something, since Sunshine is still limping around—though also still working. Oh, and how long has this been going on? Well, it was two-weeks old when I wrote about it on October 16, 2014: We’re going on four or five months now, and Sunshine has received no treatment for his knee, but no matter! He now has another extended family of caring, although bureaucratic friends!

“Hey, they told me quietly at the doctor’s office to go to the procurer people,” Sunshine told me, and I knew what he meant. The Oficina de la Procuradora del Paciente is the Ombudsman for the patient—and so for the doctor’s office to be quietly urging him to turn them in is a fairly radical move.

“First they say it’s one paper and that the insurance company needs to provide it. Then the insurance company says the doctor’s office lost the paper, and for reasons of auditing they cannot provide a duplicate copy. So I’m going back and forth, and now they’re getting pissed at me because instead of going to their office, when the pain gets bad, I’m going to the emergency room. And that’s causing them real money….”

OK—that may not be actually what’s going on, but does it matter? Of course not, because whatever the legal or moral issues involved, from a financial point of view, it’s a disaster. Who knows? If the situation continues, Sunshine’s knee may worsen to the point of needing surgery—and how expensive is that? And how is Sunshine going to pay the bills if he’s in bed, recovering from knee surgery? He’s already working on his feet when he shouldn’t be.

So he’s asked me—can I help him? And I told him—stupidly—that I couldn’t, since I had to be writing this. Right—so my writing is more important than his knee? Hmmmm.

Why do I do this, I often wonder? Does a blogger make any difference? Is anyone out there? Are the shadowy figures who control the international global economy and governments quivering as they read my incendiary words? Or is it just me, a voice among millions of others—speaking whatever truth mine is to power? At any rate, here is just one sentence from the New York Times, enough to make me feel that my own Monday morning has just gotten soaked by a heavy rain of stress:

In several states, including New York, Wisconsin, Minnesota and New Hampshire, legislatures have banned the withdrawal of oral nutrition or hydration at all, no matter what a directive or a proxy says.

OK—for anyone who doesn’t know the story: My mother, at age 89, was barely able to walk, see, or do the things she had loved all her life. So, though she may or may not have had the beginning of Alzheimer’s, she stopped eating and drinking, with the full support of her doctor and her family. She died peacefully at home after eleven relatively comfortable days.

She had made her decision, and so perhaps even today she could have done what she did: Announce to her doctor that she was “done,” ready to go, happy to leave the party as it was dying down. More, that had always been her wish, which was why she had written (with my assistance, since I was an RN) a complex health care directive stating under what circumstances she wished fluids and food to be withheld, until she met her end. So is it the case that today she could make the decision to stop eating and drinking, but can no longer direct someone else to make that decision for her? What if my mother had been hit by a truck while going to the doctor to arrange to stop eating and drinking, and what if that collision had resulted in her being in a vegetative state? Would she have been out of luck? Oh, and if the blood pressure is insufficiently soaring, you might contemplate this sentence, from the same Times article:

“We should not encourage people to think their life has no meaning or value because they’re in a fragile, vulnerable and terrible situation,” said John Brehany, a former executive director of the Catholic Medical Association. He predicted that Catholic-affiliated hospitals and nursing homes wouldn’t honor such directives.

Yeah? Well, if I were in a “fragile, vulnerable and terrible situation,”—and why do I think end-stage Alzheimer’s might be a very good example of the above—I’d want to do something. And no, I wouldn’t appreciate the Catholic Church deciding on what I was going to do.

Look—it’s abuse in Guantanamo; it’s abuse in Madison, Wisconsin. Anybody who is force-feeding a person who has refused nutrition or directed that a health proxy refuse nutrition on his behalf is committing torture. And nothing—not national security, not the church’s teaching on the sanctity of human life—can justify torture.

Think it can’t get worse? Oh, but it does, because the same New York Times, a week later, reports the interesting news. I bring you a screen shot of the headline:

OK—at this point the Biber Effect had been seriously diluted, but could I not read the article? Of course not, so now I read that Dino Palermo, in his eighties and visiting every day his PhD-educated wife in the Mary Manning Walsh Nursing Home—a Catholic facility in Manhattan—had arrived one day to find a six page legal document on his wife’s bed. Why? The facility claimed that Palermo owed money, and they were asking the state to assign guardianship to collect. In short, the nursing home would take over Mrs. Palermo’s finances, and determine whom to pay.

It didn’t happen, but it also didn’t make Mr. Palermo’s life—presumably not the easiest, since now he had to take on a legal case AND take care of his wife—any happier. Here’s the New York Times again:

Mr. Palermo, 82, was devastated by the petition, brought in the name of Sister Sean William, the Carmelite nun who is the executive director of Mary Manning Walsh. “It’s like a hell,” he said last fall, speaking in the cadences of the southern Italian village where he grew up in poverty in a family of eight. “Never in my life I was sued for anything. I just want to take care of my wife.”

Is it just me, or is the world more than ordinarily deranged nowadays, when a Carmelite nun, for God’s sake, is suing an 80-year old for control of his wife’s money?

Well, The New York Times has more resources than this blog, so they could do what I cannot, but they were good enough to tell me about it. Because it seems that the statistics are hard to come by about guardianship—hmm, wonder why that should be—but the Times got Hunter University to look into the matter. And here’s what they found:

In a random, anonymized sample of 700 guardianship cases filed in Manhattan over a decade, Hunter College researchers found more than 12 percent were brought by nursing homes.

In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re under attack here—we people who want to make our own decisions, live our own lives, and do so without the government either mandating what we can do or spying on us to make sure we’re not doing something else. Is it any coincidence that the first day of our new congress, they got right down to dictating what a woman can or cannot do to her body? Here, for a change, is Huffington Post:

Emboldened by a new Senate majority, Republicans in Congress introduced five abortion restrictions in the first three days of the new legislative session that would severely limit women's access to the procedure.

It’s nothing short of breath-taking—even worse than a fifty-year history of three-pack-a-day smoking—the callousness of the Catholic Church. Though it has to be admired: Who else could so deftly rig the system? Dino’s wife has no power to stop being a vegetable, no power to direct anyone to withhold fluids. And then the same “church” that made that decision for her is now trying to get hold of her purse strings.

First they make the morality.

Then they make the money off it.

    

Montalvo Reinstated

Who knows what drew him? For he had been away for several weeks now, since his mother had moved to Florida, his motorcycle was broken, and…well, in his words, “I’ve just been dealing with some deep shit, man….”

Remember that?

So Lady weighed in—Montalvo had flown back into our lives because it was the Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastian, which, according to El Nuevo Día, was a generally ordered affair this year, since there were only some 600,000 people in a seven-by-seven street village: Old San Juan. And last year? Well, it was 600,000 minus one, since somebody got shot.

At any rate, into this mayhem Montalvo was proposing to insert himself, since he had inherited his mother’s business, and was therefore donning the official uniform of the enterprise: Here’s the photo.   

“Lick my tight-ies,” I told him, and not for the first time, since I had seen it before, and said the same thing. So, dredged from the harbor of elementary school knowledge, I told him about long and short vowels, and the effects of single versus double consonants.

“It’s the difference between ‘moping’ and ‘mopping,’” I told them, Lady being present. The problem? Neither one knew what moping was, so it was a quick detour, until ‘hoping’ and ‘hopping’ came into view.

So there he was, in the Poet’s Passage, but also—significantly—in front of the television, which had finally agreed to get up on the wall, and—we hope—stay put. ‘It figures,’ I thought. ‘Of course we would put up the television, and the very next thing—“one clear call for me,” as the poet sang—Montalvo would appear.’

“Man, you guys gotta treat me like a grown-up! I be a business-owner now—not just some kid from the hood!"

The business, apparently, involves popsicles formed in the shape of—look, do I have to tell you?—nor is that all. Apparently, the tities—ah, computer, for once we agree!—contain alcohol, and so his mother and now Montalvo have adopted the business practice of walking the beach with the dogs and a cooler, and selling refreshment and a buzz to the recumbent tourists. Now, Montalvo was proposing to bring his tities to the fiesta, to notch the general inebriety of it all one-step further.

“Man, I wish I hadn’t cut my hair, all so I could get some lame-ass job. I ain’t never gonna work for the man again!”

He directed a look at Lady, who had been “the man” on repeated occasions.

“Lick my tight-ies,” she responded.

“Hey listen, Dad,” he told me, “my mom said I should find a place in the old city to crash at night, cause getting in and out is gonna be murder.”

Well, sane advice, since we were dealing with an hourglass situation: How to get 600,000 people out of the old city and into the mainland. There is, after all, only one road in and one road out.

“So I’m looking for a place to stay this week…”

Remember “nudge nudge / wink wink?”

“I have no guilt,” said Lady, walking up the steps to my apartment, in order to be in-serviced on the cats. “He is NOT staying in the Poet’s Passage.”

“He’s not staying here,” I told her, “Raf and I don’t let anybody stay here except Taí if one of us isn’t here….”

So I gave her the dope on the cats, which is pretty simple—so simple that it occurs to me, why do we make it so hard? Because we are not only cook—well, OK, food service provider—we’re also the lunchroom monitor, since none of the cats want to eat from their bowl—a concept about which they acknowledge nothing—but instead run to the other cats’ bowls. So while I am doing Sudoku of an evening, I am also hearing Raf scream, “Loquito! Gordito!” All this accompanied by various thuds and thwacks—almost all of which fail to connect.

So then we drift back to the café, since a seventy-inch television has a powerful gravitational pull, and that’s when Lady says it.

“It’s been a dream of mine for years, to have a really good television…”

“Kick-ass,” puts into Montalvo, less for clarification than admiration.

“…so that we can do Button Poetry.”

Here’s why you have friends, since I have no idea what Button Poetry is. And if you don’t either, here’s a quote from their website:

Button Poetry was founded in 2011 by Sam Cook and Sierra DeMulder, who were shortly joined by Rachele Cermak, and Heidi Lear. They launched the first Button website and blog.

In March, Button hosted its first recording party to produce Button Poetry: Volume One, featuring Sierra DeMulder, Sam Cook, Dylan Garity, Hieu Nguyen, Kait Rokowski, and Shane Hawley, along with many other Twin Cities poets.

Starting in May, Sam and Button teamed up with Poetry Observed to film and produce a series of high-quality poetry videos.

OK—that’s the description, but the reality?

Good news, Dear Readers! You can put aside ISIS and the Republicans and Boko Haram. Check out the video—by a guy from, ahem, Madison Wisconsin—below. This video which has been viewed 8, 831, 505 times on YouTube.

8,831, 505 times—there’s hope for us all!

          

A Tribute to Puerto Rico

What I should do, the responsible thing to do, is to give you the official Iguana opinion on the terrorist attack of the French newspaper, Charlie Hedbo. And in fact, I wrote something last week, along the lines that however much there are peace-loving Muslims, there is just a little bit of complicity in the Muslim world toward its terrorist elements. Remember those girls kidnapped by the Boko Haram? Well, they’re still wherever they are—presumably enjoying the benefits and blisses of marriage—and the Boko Haram went on another rampage, this time destroying an entire village and killing two thousand people. So 12 people die in Paris, and 2000 die in a now destroyed town in Nigeria. Right—now we know our priorities. But my point was this:

The government has made no official comment on the alleged massacres. President Goodluck Jonathan skimmed security issues when he relaunched his re-election bid in front of thousands of cheering supporters in the economic capital, Lagos, on Thursday.

OK—so why should I care about 2000 people killed and who knows how many displaced if the president of the damned country doesn’t? In Paris, the president of the nation was right out there, but Goodluck? Well, no Luck.

Well, it troubles me—you legion of readers out there who are left in the dark, not knowing whether you should be Vous êtes Charlie Hedbo ou non. I admit it: I’ve let you down.

Closer to home, though more distant in time, did you know that the third building of the World Trade Center is the focus of an extensive conspiracy theory, and that there are 2200 engineers and architects—so says one guy—who think that the reason for the collapse was a controlled demolition? The building—building number 7—wasn’t hit by high-jacked planes, but when the second tower collapsed, it hit building 7, starting office fires. The BBC, as you can see in the video below, says the demolition theory is a crock of you-know-what, but is that enough to dissuade a true conspiracist? Of course not, so in the spirit of fairness for which this blog is massively famed, here’s one the comments:

911 was planned by our own government and corporations, to make lots of money from starting two unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dickhead Cheney's former company Halliburtion made 39 billion dollars from the Iraq War, which Cheney got his cut. Building 7 fell straight down in 6.5 seconds, nearly freefall speed from office fires. There were 47 steel vertical beams running the height of Building 7, and all 47 of them had to fail simultaneously to make the building come down the way it did. Equally, the WTC towers exploded down to the ground. How do 110 solid concrete floors blast out completely, in the form of dust already in mid--air from mere "collapse"? Watch videos and see the hundreds of tiny explosions going off in the smoke clouds after the buildings started falling. On 9/11/01 the laws of physics took a vacation!  

Right—so now I have to worry: Should I tell all you out there that you can’t trust the American government? That there are men and (a very few) women so jaded that they would send thousands of people to their deaths, all for a few nice wars? Well, it’s a sticky moral dilemma: If you’re lucky enough to believe in the essential decency of mankind, should I, a mere blogger, rape your innocence?

So I was busy watching the video, when Lady came in, with the news that she had decided: The Poet’s Passage was closing for the Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastian, since after partying hard in the Calle San Sebastian, there tended to be a second festival on Calle Cruz, where the Poet’s Passage is located. And since the poets had fled, the café had become The Drunks Pissing Everywhere Passage. And it was a sort of reworking of the slave triangle: All of the adolescents from the suburbs—rich and poor—crammed into the city, spent all their money on beer on Calle San Sebastian, and pissed it away—don’t have to tell you that’s literally—in the Poet’s Passage. Wisely, Lady decided to break the chain, or the triangle, or whatever.

So then Nydia—Raf’s sister—comes into the café with the news: She’s fleeing the city, since somebody had decreed that the vuvuzelas would be banned his year at the festival. And what is a vuvuzela? Well, they were originally used to summon distant villages in Africa to attend tribal events. But now, they’ve been used in soccer games. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

The vuvuzela has been the subject of controversy when used by spectators at football matches. Its high sound pressure levels at close range can lead to permanent hearing loss for unprotected ears after exposure,^[6] with a sound level of 120 dB(A) (the threshold of pain) at 1 metre (3.3 ft) from the device opening.

OK—this festival is a stampede-waiting-to-happen, since at it’s worst, walking is unnecessary: You lift your feet and the crowd carries you along. So imagine the effect of having not one vuvuzela but five or ten, all within one meter of you? So the officials had decreed: No vuvuzelas! But the police?

“They all hate the mayor, so every time they saw somebody with that trumpet from hell, they gave them the thumbs up. So I’m going to the country, where I can meditate….”

And so we are both refuges, this weekend, and then we go on to talk about how hard life in San Juan is, for the residents. But somehow, the genius of the place takes over, since instead of grumbling like gringos, we’re now laughing about the idiotic things that flow so naturally here. Consider Yolandita—officially Yolandita Monge, but everyone knows her on a first-name basis—who buried her philandering husband, and then made a huge scene at the funeral, which everybody was watching and making jokes about. Jokes so offensive that Yolandita would sing no more, no more, in her native land, but would travel afar, where she could be given the respect which should be accorded her, as an artista. Hah! Take that!

But there was a problem, since she had buried her husband, and the press was camped out, to see if she would appear, dressed in her widow weeds, to throw herself wailing on his grave. (A likely possibility, since she had to be restrained from flinging herself into the casket….) So now Yolandita wants to exhume her late husband, and cremate him, so that she can carry him around with her, as she sings everywhere else but you-know-where.

Simple, right?

Well, not quite, since hubby’s best friend came forward and objected, saying he had forbidden cremation on that terrible day when he—Yolandita being prostrated with grief and sedatives—had had to go make the arrangements. And why had he forbiddn cremation?

Hubby had pleaded with him never to allow it, since hubby was terrified of cremation.

This makes perfect sense, though minds of a more wintry clime might ask—how can a dead man…

But we can be sure all of this is legit, since the best friend of hubby? He’s…

…a medical doctor!

So we’re laughing like fools, since who could not want to live in a place where absurdity sits at the head of the table? And then I told her about the fire at the Bacardi rum factory, where a tourist riding the little trolley films what is a completely normal day. So there they are, getting the story of the famous Mexican architect, who fashioned the pavilion in the form of the company’s emblem or mascot or what-ever-it-is: A bat! And did you know that there is a special rum produced for (inaudible) Bacardi, the fifth-generation descendant of the original settler from Cuba? Yes, it’s a normal, normal day, and a normal, normal scene that the tourist is filming, only excepting the…

…huge, billowing cloud of smoke from the fire raging at one of the buildings on the grounds!

Well, it was good to know that the driver of the trolley was practicing safety first—keeping his eyes on the road!—though as you can see, the video comes to a complete halt, presumably when the news that the Bacardi Museum was on the right was preempted by a bit more urgent, like, “OH FUCK!”

So we’re laughing at this, and then I told Nydia what her mother had told me: You’ll never leave Puerto Rico, you’ll just stay and keep laughing at it!

But she said it kindly.

Just to make sure, I told her: I pay tribute to Puerto Rico through laughter.