Last night was so surreal at some point I expected to hear Queen playing in the background.
The evening began at 6PM when Mom called to say “oh btw the doc’s office called and told me to quit taking the Cymbalta” (I had called to complain about her condition), no tapering off, just quit cold turkey even though every website I have been on for the past three days has said you cannot go off of Cymbalta cold turkey. She was extremely agitated and I tried to talk her off the ledge because I thought after some withdrawals she’d improve.
Then we walked over to Bastille Day celebration with T’s mom, who decided on second thought she’d wait us out at the park rather than venture the crowd that was gathered to listen to the Creole String Beans playing and taste the delicious fare along Ponce de Leon. First thing I learned is that a neighbor had recently passed and I was saddened by the news because it just seems like I’ve had too many death notices flashing in front of me recently from pop icon to son of a friend. Too much, too little, too late.
I called to check on my mom and she said her anxiety was still high and could I come over and bring her a Lorazepam. I told her I didn’t have any.
T’s mom decided to head home without us and so we entered more deeply into the crowd and sprinkled ourselves here and there catching up with neighbors and friends and then headed home around midnight, walking towards the moonlit bayou. We passed the Spanish Custom House where a towering avocado tree is ripe with fruit and I thought about the young man who bought the house in the recent auction. I had asked about him, has he moved in?, and a neighbor said, nope, just moved in a bed and entertains the ladies there on weekends. Wow, what a house to bring home a date to, I thought, as we passed by the large ornate metal doors that lead to the living room where the light from the other side of the house made the doors glow.
Right as I climbed into bed, my mom called and said she needed to go the emergency room, so I quickly redressed and drove to get her and when I arrived she was in a high state of agitation and looked as if she was having a heart attack. I wrestled with her to get to the truck and as I was tripping over her downstairs neighbors’ beer cans that lined the stairway, one of them, Leo, a new guy, drunk, stepped in front to help, but instead ended up blocking our progress and I yelled at him in Spanish to get out of my fucking way.
While I was heaving mom into the front seat of the trunk, Leo was crying out “Oh Patty, no te mueres, no te mueres.”
I drove like a bat out of hell to the Emergency Room at East Jefferson and arrived just in time for showtime. I grabbed a nurse and told her my mother was possibly having a heart attack and sure enough, an EKG revealed her heart rate had sped up gravely. While I stood there, a young boy was sitting in his mother’s lap at the next desk crying because they just told him he had blood in his urine and then a man came running in having shot himself in the hand.
As we made our way passed another man who had been in a barroom brawl and was now lying facedown on a gurney bloody and bruised all over his upper body, we passed a woman who had been at dinner who was in excruciating pain from diverticulitis, and then another elderly woman who had been reaching for her ailing husband’s meds and collapsed into the microwave possibly having her own stroke.
Mom was quickly admitted to the emergency room where they began giving her a drip for her heart rate to calm down, and meanwhile the woman next to me, breathing through a tracheotomy and sounding way too much like Darth Vader had a consultation in her “private” room of makeshift drawn curtains where we learned her cancer hadn’t returned but her blood levels were indeed elevated, and the gentlemen behind the other curtain was possibly having a heart attack. He was soon replaced with an elderly woman who faintly called “nurse nurse” every three minutes.
Beyond the noise of alarms going off and doors swinging open and gurneys rolling by, we began the long wait of ER procedure – where mom was not stabilizing and they were giving her EKGs, catscans, checking her vitals and she was sweating, shaking, and fidgeting like she was coming off a heroin high and I was running back and forth for small little styrofoam cups of water because she had a thirst that knew no bounds.
Six hours later, her heart began to stabilize but was still beating too fast, and they decided to admit her to the hospital. By 8AM, when I was sitting in a small chair holding both our purses, shivering from the cold, and falling asleep with my mouth open, I opened my eyes slightly as the curtain parted where the woman with cancer was lying and saw her daughter, my age, staring back at me blankly.
About that time my mother said out of the blue, “You are a blessing,” to me and I thought about the older woman next to us still calling “nurse nurse” in her semi-audible voice, alone amidst this sterile cacophony of unfamiliar sounds, her cries more pathetic than the moans of the man on the gurney.
Later, I heard the nurses as the shift change was occuring say, “Does it hurt here? Does it hurt when I do this?” in a mocking tone towards each other.
As I followed mom’s gurney out of ER into the hallway of patient rooms, the chorus in my head was beginning to sing and instead of:
“We all die alone.”
I heard the bells ringing and the fireworks going off and the chorus singing:
“Enjoy every minute of your life.”