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.