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I was pulled into the world of MySpace because my nieces and nephews were incapable of just sending an email or picking up the phone to call. I then went over to Facebook because that was the new new thing, and suddenly I found my own friends as well as my family alive and well there. But increasingly with my busy schedule, the emails would filter in from Facebook and annoy me – whether it was someone else wanting to be my friend or simply someone musing about air molecules and I would have to log on and respond and I often felt like this was a big whopping waste of my time – until…

A friend from 30+ years ago found me on Facebook one week ago and it was actually a friend I wanted to hear from, so I was happy to log on and respond. First, let me say I am a very lucky person with loved ones that are unparalleled, friendships that are genuine, and a partner who is more supportive of me than anyone has ever been in my life, and yet, yesterday when I was in the hospital lobby speaking to my aunts and uncle who had driven in to see my mom who was still in restraints and hallucinating and one of them said, “I know this must be hard for you, Rachel, especially because you are dealing with it alone” – I thought ain’t that the truth.

Nobody knows what it is like to be the child of alcoholic, unless you are one. Nobody can understand the polarity of emotions that take you from anger to pity to fear to sadness in nanoseconds. So although I don’t feel alone per se, I do feel that most people and even T can little understand how I feel right now.

Out of the blue, my old friend writes that she is living in her parents’ old house as both of them are dead now. Through a snippet here and there, she learns about my mother and begins telling me the years of watching her own parent die of alcoholism – “he didn’t want to be sick, but he couldn’t give up the drink.”

LOVE will never cure or heal them …I could not love him on his terms of being a alcoholic and unfortunately all the LOVE you have for her will not rid her of her demons.

And so this morning, when I am trying to figure out what is the next step, she writes

I, too, chose to look at life w/ gusto & laughter & more importantly with eyes wide open…But my heart still aches every now then for what could have been but never was.

I know that she came back into my life because I do feel alone in caring for my mother and dealing with my anger and sadness, not because I’m not supported by my loved ones, but because this is a 50 year heart ache, not an isolated incident. My friend knew it too.

So Facebook might have started off for kids and it still does annoy me because you have to log on to engage, but it has become a telegraph for old friends too, ones who come back in your life when you least expect them yet need them the most.

Women who want children much more than their partners are also more likely to get a divorce.

That’s just out from a study in Australia on how likely it is for you to stay married to your partner.

Good to know.

Yesterday, when  mom was asking me to put out her imaginary cigarette, I told the nurse – oh, and she also smokes.

Mom looked over at her and said “Triple whammy.”

Kicking Cymbalta, alcohol and cigarettes ain’t easy.

I was trying to soothe my mother’s anxiety by prodding her into telling the nurses about her wardrobe and about how she had won beauty contests when she was younger. A week ago a friend had written and said that she remembered my mother fondly. And I try to focus on those aspects of my mother, the ones where people know the big hearted woman, who was as fragile as a flower. Later, that same friend wrote and said that she had lost her own father to alcoholism and that in the final days, “it was rough because he didn’t want to be sick, but he didn’t want to quit drinking either.”

There was an interesting article in the NYT this Sunday by Michael Winerup talking about The Father I Thought I Knew as he tried to reconcile the tyrant with the loving dad. He writes about a young woman who worked with his father on the news desk:

Kathy Melymuka wrote that she was a 30-year-old rookie copy editor back in 1980, the only woman working full time on a desk of prickly old newspapermen. And it was my father who had looked out for her and taught her pretty much everything she’d ever needed to know about editing. “He was wonderful,” she wrote. “They really, really cared about good language and Harold was the best of them.”

“He made more of an impression on me than almost anyone I ever met,” she continued. “I would say he was one of the great favorites at the paper — loved and respected. He was so talented, so funny and so kind.

I was sitting in the hall waiting for the bed linens to be changed when I was standing by two people who were catching up. One was an elderly gentlemen who began talking about his days in Cuba with the other guy’s father. I joined their conversation reminiscing about Havana and post Castro and whatnot. The elderly gentlemen said in some ways Cuba has progressed further than us in medicine and education, and yet they have a dictator. I said it’s hard to know what to give up – democracy or progressive institutions.

I told them about my mom being seven and a half months pregnant with me when the 14 year old gum chewing boys with AK47s arrived to arrest Batista’s guard. The younger guy, not knowing my mother’s situation, began talking about his father, the elderly gentlemen’s old friend, who was in rehab after going through detox.

When a friend of mine was dying of AIDS, he was surrounded by his friends who sat hospice with him and helped care for him in his final weeks. His family was almost restricted from being there as they were of no help. One of the many things he said during moments of lucidity and not was that he was a detective, a gumshoe, who would always got his man.

At 3AM this morning, my mother’s stable condition turned to serious as the DTs hit with a vengeance – by the time I got there she was telling me that Uncle Huey was outside in old blue and wanted her to go for a ride. As she rode the wave of lucidity, she told me at one point that I was just like Nurse Ratchet and at another point that she was blessed to have me.

My sister called to scream at me in the phone because I had allowed them to restrain her – but after she had yanked out her IV and been found all over the room trying to escape – restraints seemed like the most humane thing that could be done with her during this critical period.

After a few hours, while I was trying to soothe her and get her to take deep breaths, my mother looked at me in the eye and said, “You just wait.”

My mother was prescribed Cymbalta for her peripheral neuropathy and depression two months ago. You have to love a drug that says on the front page of its website, we don’t know how the drug works. But what about a doctor who prescribes a medicine that clearly states you should not drink alcohol with it – prescribed to a woman who is an alcoholic. He says she told him she quit drinking.

Side effects: When discontinuing treatment with Cymbalta, the manufacturer recommends a gradual reduction in the dose, rather than abrupt cessation, whenever possible.

Today, I called her doctor and spoke to his nurse and said I wanted him to file a report with Ely Lilly about the adverse effects of this drug and also to rethink his care for my mother. This is a doctor who teaches at a medical university here and has a reputation – but what? for two months he is deaf to the effects of Cymbalta in one of his patients and then tells her to abruptly stop using it! He should have been in the emergency room for 10 hours – then maybe he would see what his decisions lead to.

She has had two blood tests with liver levels moving higher in the last two months; she was prescribed Cymbalta for neuropathy and depression but the scientific community doesn’t believe it works for neuropathy or for depression.

Wiki says this about Cymbalta (the other  name for Cymbalta is Duloxetine):

Duloxetine failed the US approval for stress urinary incontinence amidst the concerns about liver toxicity and suicidal events; however, it was approved for this indication in Europe and Canada. Duloxetine alleviates pain associated with diabetic neuropathy and fibromyalgia; however, its efficacy relative to the established treatments, such as anticonvulsantsand tricyclic antidepressants, has not been established.

A large number of side effects occurring during duloxetine treatment and lack of clear advantage over existing medications prompted critical reviews concluding that duloxetine “should not be used” for stress urinary incontinence^[2] and “currently has no place in the treatment of depression or diabetic neuropathy” as well.^[3][4]

Monday morning and I slept like the dead last night and woke into some groggy clarity that I had been through a hump – in the midst of what should be a summer lull there have been too many deaths, too many festivities, too many problems with my mom – so I sort of woke this morning and took a deep breath.

Loca and I were on our typical walk through the park when we ran into the mayor of the hood and so we followed along under the shady tree and at one point, Loca started her vertical walk – up and down and up and down she went as if she had jet fuel pumping adrenaline into her. I just watched her go and the mayor said, “Wow, we should all dance like Loca.”

I told him that after everything this weekend, my take away was to enjoy every precious moment that life offers you and yes, to dance, at every opportunity. That is why Loca and I are symbiotic – we both have the impulse to jump up and down and move our body – and we don’t know where this life force comes from and we don’t have any control, so when you see us – dancing in the street – know that we are enjoying every precious moment of La Vida Loca.

There is ample room to learn how to be discerning in life and if there were a list of desires I would like my child to learn, one would be knowing how to discern what is best for them and others. But unfortunately, a lot of times it takes choosing poorly to get to choosing wisely. And a lot of times when we sit in judgment of others it is also out of ignorance or lack of empathy or sometimes as in my case, fear.

So when I was speaking to the medical professionals about my mother, I didn’t speak in judgment of the fact that she drinks, I asked questions about how the drugs prescribed to her might be affected by alcohol. And then we were able to have a conversation where the nurses and doctors weren’t judging my mother but rather thinking about how how to help her.

Today’s meditation from the Tao te Ching comes from Page 5:

The Tao doesn’t take sides;
it gives birth to both good and evil.
The Master doesn’t take sides;
she welcomes both saints and sinners.

The Tao is like a bellows:
it is empty yet infinitely capable.
The more you use it, the more it produces;
the more you talk of it, the less you understand.

Hold on to the center.

I have been a dedicated Oil of Olay user and have defended using a drug store skin cream by offering my own skin as a testimonial, but enough is enough. I went to the drugstore to get some more Regenerist night cream and there were so many different line extensions and brand names under Olay that the confusion turned to revulsion of the product. I tried to write them on their website but because I didn’t have the UPC code in front of me to enter, the comment section wouldn’t submit my comments. So I fall back on my little blog here to vent.

Oil of Olay has jumped the shark.

1) Currently, Olay’s most popular anti aging products are Olay Pro-X (their high end brand), Olay Regenerist (their mid range brand), and Olay Definity (their low end brand). I have been using Regenerist, which now has at least a dozen line extensions.

2) There is no way of looking at the brands and figuring out what is what. On the shelf at Walgreens sits not only Regenerist and Definity but a zillion versions of each.

3) Skin care should not have to be so difficult.

T uses Barbor products, but they have too much perfume for my sensitive skin. So, I sent away for a free offer from Dermitage, a company out of San Francisco that rated highly in an online survey. Will let you know how it goes.