Doctor, Doctor

We are somewhere near the West End.  We are nowhere.  We are traveling towards something undefined.  We are running away from all we have ever known.  We had watched the crashing planes, the buildings blow.  We shiver.  Is that what brought us to this twisted place?

It had started.  Twelve years ago, I think.  More than ten and less than fifteen.  I've been told more than once that I have no sense of time or distance.  I know that isn't so.  When I am away from clocks I can guess the time to within ten minutes of your watch.  Especially if we are in the woods.  I don't know if I always could do that.  But I can do that now.  Now is the arbitrary division between "before my m.v.a./brain damage/t.b.i." and after.  Distance is something I can feel.  It is not my blindness if my mate is puffing after only three-quarters of a mile.

Face-blind.  I am face-blind.  I roll those words around on my tongue feeling their textures like pockmarks or a scar.  I tell people I am face-blind so they do not startle when I don't recognize them in the supermarket or the restaurant or if they get a new hat.  They startle anyway.  Silly people.  A few people don't know what those two words mean-- face-blind-- and a few who do know have reacted with something akin to surprise.  You?  Yes.  Like everything else, I hide it too well.  Passing is in my bones.  And it ought not to be.  Society is not compassionate to those it judges as "Other."  We all wear masks.  I wear mine with pride.

But this is not about me.  This is about you.  Us.  Another trip to the neurology clinic.  You are abnormally quiet in the car, breaking the silence to point out the clean snow along the side of the road.  I point out the frost choking the trees.  The ducks in the river are a blur to you.  You miss the red-tail hawk completely.  But I see him.  And also the blackbirds fanning in a mating dance over there in the swamp which tells me spring is coming early this year.

The hospital rises above mid-town, a mute testament to those who have served our country and to those who continue to be slaughtered in the name of an unforgiveable peace.  I let you off in the front.  You are having difficulty extracting yourself from the cloth seat and rotting floorboards.  You push.  You get your hips centered over your feet.  You stagger to the entrance.

I drive to the parking lot.  It is more crowded than I've ever seen it.  I am very tired.  I circle the lot three, four times.  The singular parking space is a leftover, violated from all sides by large shiny cars.  No room for the rust-bucket.  The mechanic told me last week that the car will get me through the winter-- maybe-- but it will be completely rusted from the bottom by spring.  I wanted to ask him if he could just weld another car's bottom onto my car's mid-section.  I don't ask.  I am back in the parking lot and I want to cry.  It is too early for tears.

Back to the front of the hospital, I spot a boy.  Boy because the fuzz under his mouth is barely hair.  Boy because I've gotten older.  "Hey, come here!" I yell.  He does.  "My dad is in there alone and he has dementia.  Take the car."  He asks if I will be back soon.  "Sorry, I can't.  He has appointments."  The boy uses a cheap blue ball-point pen to scribble something onto the ivory ticket stub with the red numbers.  Deftly, he separates it into two portions-- no, three-- places one under my windshield wiper, and gives one to me.  Later I will find the third wrapped around my keyring.

I go inside to find my dad standing under a heater with another vet.  Dad is talking in spite of his headache.  The vet is listening.  Dad is like that.  He always has been.  Making connections with random strangers is easy for him, even in the midst of his brain failure.  Dad says goodbye to his new companion and we stagger to the elevators.  Someone else holds one for us and safely installed in a sea of faces smiling through pain, we go up. 

After checking in, we wait an hour in the waiting room.  A smiling woman collects my dad to take his vitals [They are excellent, she says to me in triumph] and then we wait a bit more.  The couple next to us demonstrates their restlessness by striding up and down the hallway every ten minutes or so.  Dad admits to his.  I don't.  I am concentrating on not gagging because someone left the woman's room door open.  Noxious, hideously pink fumes escape from it.  I give up.  I go in to wash my hands and then carefully adjust the door so it is open at a fifteen degree angle and not forty five.  It makes a difference to me.  I am no longer fighting waves of vomitus from the stink.

The doctor comes.  We follow her down a very very very long hall.  Dad, who also used to be able to walk as far as I can, struggles with the distance.  He lifts his shoes up carefully so he doesn't trip on the linoleum floor which is built up with dull old wax.  We are installed in a little white room, just like all of the other little white rooms here.  Let the interrogation begin.

Dad declares that he fell out of bed a few days ago.  I haven't heard this story before.  Now his headache is along the top of his head.  A few minutes later it is the left side.  I suspect this traveling headache to be an ataque de nerviosas but the neurodoc doesn't.  She orders one or two bedrails, some ointment, and a head scan.  Today for the head scan.  "We must rule out internal bleeding," she explains.  I know that.  Around eight years ago, I also was sent for a head scan 'today' in order to rule out the same thing.  "After lunch," I say.  She quietly writes the order to double his dementia medicine.  His short-term memory loss is really starting to show.  Dad is with it today.  "Yes," he tells her, "I do repeat myself sometimes."  "No," he clarifies, "it is not the colors of the rugs that give me trouble.  It's the textures.  Sometimes they trip me up."  Scratch Alzheimer's off the list again.  I breathe in quiet relief.  I hadn't realized that I was holding my breath.

We have lunch in the bowels of the hospital.  Dad used to enjoy their hotdogs, rice and beans, or a hamburger.  Now he only wants a biscuit and some rootbeer.  This  is the second time we've had lunch here that he says he isn't hungry.  Is that he is worried about spending [my] money?  Or ashamed of the deterioration of his fine motor skills?  My dad who taught me how to eat in a restaurant!  Or is it the mysterious headache and bumps which shift here and there, left to right, up and down?  Next time I will take him to the diner down the road.  The diner at least has a selection of pastries.  If nothing else, dad will enjoy those.

After lunch, we dutifully report to the radiology department.  I tell Dad several times where we are.  Ra-di-ol-o-gy, he repeats himself.  He remembers the receptionist.  I don't.  I've never seen her before in my life.  This is the world of the face-blind.  I don't mind.  I've learned how to pass.  Dad goes off willingly with the radiologist, one whose face he also remembers.  I sit and pass the time in the waiting room.

Dad comes back and reaches for his coat.  "One more stop," I tell him.  I hate having to do this because I know he still has his headache plus he is now tired from roaming the halls of the V.A.  We go up another floor and the signs point us in the direction of prostetics.  Bed rails are in prostetics, we had been informed by both the neurodoc and the receptionist there.  Actually, they aren't.  The prostetics lady carefully explains to me that neurology will send down a consult.  And then the bedrails will be delivered by someone who will set them up.  "So one day someone and the bedrails will show up?"  I ask.  "Yes."  Times like these, I wish my disability was visible.  But it is not.

I cart Dad off to the elevators one last time.  He has a mystery appointment.  Someone called the assisted living home the other day and insisted that Dad also has to go to ___________ .  The only thing I have is the room number.  It turns out to be a study.  Dad had signed up for the study eighteen months ago and then steadfastly refused to do anything else about it.  But the lady behind the desk was very warm and friendly.  Dad understood her explanations and signed willingly.  He went off into the next room with her to have a blood sample drawn-- protected by H.I.P.P.A. and all the other bastardized initials courtesy of our lovely, cough, politicians-- and came out smiling but unsteady on his feet.  I jawed random things about dementia at her officemate who was quite willing to listen while waiting for Dad and his newest companion.  My own brain damage [it is a traumatic brain injury but I've recently taken to calling it "brain damage" because I am tired of living a sanitized life] is threatening a typhoon of fatigue but I stand my ground.  A couple more hours and I will be home.  Then I can give in.  But now, I must be here.  Totally and completely.

The study lady is sunny and warm.  She tells Dad about her own kids and her dog.  She does not talk about a husband.  Neither one of us asks.  We both know about divorces and affairs and beatings hidden by whitewashed walls.  The socialization is good for dementia.  I remember several docs saying that.  So I let Dad socialize and I socialize too.  I don't have dementia as far as I know at the moment.  I don't really understand idle talk.  But here we are not chattering into the wind.  We are making fragile memories.  The docs will say we are strengthening bonds or stimulating our brains or whatever.  I am by nature a hermit preferring my own company and the occasional company of other hermits.  But I put up with the vast influxes of people on clinic days because I have to.  And becuase it is good for Dad.  Dad allows the study lady to help him with his coat.  She hugs him and she hugs me and she makes sure we get on the elevator.  It is a bank of elevators behind the usual set.  But I am able to follow the arrows to the lobby once we get off.  Face-blind yes, but good with distance and direction and time-sensing.

A different boy, a man really, pulls out number sixty-four off the hooks and strives off to retrieve the rust bucket.  He leaves it in the middle of the circle, engine running and both doors open.  But even here in mid-town there is no danger of any thief being desperate enough to steal my dying car.  Dad folds himself in.  I climb in and gulp down some diet soda.  "You want some?" I ask.  He doesn't.  Rarely does anyone say yes to soda left in my car.  I don't know why.

Dad does not want to go to any stores or have coffee on the way home.  He does not mention wanting to stop at a car place for a job application.  [I am relieved.  Just the other day he was insisting upon doing this].  He does not want me to get him something for his headache.  [He has refused my offer of this all day.  I will learn to carry some with me along with the ever-present box of tissues for his phlegm and runny nose].  I see another red-tail hawk on the way back, some Canada geese sprinting up from the river, more blackbirds dancing.  I don't know what Dad sees.  He admits to being tired but then says, "I didn't want to go today but I am glad now that we went."  I understand.  At the house, his home that he shares with other old folks and some dedicated staffers, he heaves himself out of the car and waits for my hug.  "I love you, Dad," I say and I give him the neurology clinic papers.  He sets off for the stairs and the front porch.  He opens one door, staggers into the vestibule, closes the door.  I set off for home then and the tears finally come in the silence.


sapphoq on life