Observations

  I woke up at 5:30am because Gretchen has decided it’s time to eat.   The rest of my cats used to be good at waiting for my alarm, but Gretchen is a bad role model and once she starts demanding food, the others join in.   It was pouring outside, raining cats and more cats, as we say in my feline-centric household.  When I went into the other bedroom to fill Gretchen’s dish, the leak I noticed recently was a steady drip. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do about it, there’s no way I can come up with money for a roofer. If I could get up there, I could put a tarp over it at least but I can’t.   Mary, the elderly Irish butch next door, used to walk from her roof onto mine but by now she must be 80, seems deaf and another neighbor just told me that she could not have been the person who buzz cut my front yard and left bits of greenery all over the walkway because she has pneumonia.   I decided not to think about the roof right now.  Before I could ...

  The thing about depression is that usually it’s portable - something heavy, like an extra book in my bag that I lug around with me.     But sometimes it morphs, liquefies and soaks me, and then sets into a thick, impenetrable coat of cement.     The natural inclination of cement is immobility, which is fine if you can stand in a sculpture garden growing mossy over centuries, but I still have all the responsibilities of the busy, bustling world.   The cats, who spend their days making detailed observations and then calculating the correlations between human behavior and the food in their bowls, know something is wrong when the ringing alarm gets no response.  They deploy a level one response - Marley staring intensely at me from her perch on my chest.  Then they escalate, Connor joining her on my chest, not just doubling the stare power but also adding bulk that skinny Marley can’t achieve on her own. Finally, as a last step to stave of...

  I woke up the day after my infusion to find the room spinning.     Even once the spinning stopped, I still felt like I was a child in the back seat of my grandmother’s car on the winding mountain roads of West Virginia where we would go visit her family.     I used to sit there with my eyes squeezed shut complete missing the beautiful views while using all my will power to keep from puking.     I would keep my mind on the prospect of seeing my great aunt Francey, the one most like me, with her heavy freckles and love of pickles and the sheer stubbornness that kept her living in her house way up in the Cumberland mountains despite her advancing age.     She grew her own food and stored it, canning and drying and stowing her potatoes in the cool cellar, to last her through the months when the ice on the steep road down would trap her up there.   Dizziness and nausea are common the day after IVIG, but it was an unfortunate day for it to h...

I woke up and reached for my glasses.     No glasses. Every now and then the cats relocate them during the night.     I have tried telling them “fetch glasses” since I know they know where they are but I was met with wide-eyed stares.     Looking for my glasses without my glasses is a problem since I have to feel around while trying not to step on them.     Usually when this happens, it takes about half an hour to find them, but on Thursday the search went on and on.     It got to be the time to leave for physical therapy so I called to cancel.     The receptionist informed me that they were going to charge a fee since it was less than 24 hrs notice.     I wondered how they thought I was supposed to know that my glasses would get lost 24 hrs before it happened.   Two hours later, I finally found them in a crevice between the furniture.  By then the cats had gotten tired of watching me search and fallen ...

  Sunday morning the air was clear, the smoke and particles having been washed away by saturday’s torrential rain.  I was getting ready for Jaysen and Jeffrey’s memorial, pulling my hair into a ponytail with some difficulty because of my problematic shoulder, when the Very Sick client called, upset because he felt that the latest new doctor was trying to rush him out of the hospital before he’s ready.  I listened to his complaints, and then he got more serious.  “It’s like a whisper telling me ‘something ain’t right, J.’ it’s almost robotic. I know because I feel it. Something’s about to be wrong.”  It’s this instinct that is responsible for his remarkable survival, prompting him to head to the hospital in the nick of time over and over.  Finishing that thought, he switched back to his less serious side. “Thank you for listening to my bullshit,” he said in the exact tone of someone saying “thank you for listening to my TED talk.” ...

  7/17/26   Sunday night, I was in bed, drowsy, but not yet asleep when the Very Sick client called from the ER.  “ I’m really afraid of what I’m about to do,” he said.  A sentence like that will wake you up fast.  “Maybe that’s a sign you shouldn’t do it,” I told him.   “Nothing is going right for me,” he said.  “You just go to sleep and you dream about something chaotic and then you wake up and you don’t even know you almost died.  I did it four times,” he said referring to the times he has flatlined in the hospital and been resuscitated.  “I know,” I said, “they keep calling me.”  He was having a hard time when I spoke to him earlier, panicking because the ER was so packed they didn’t have an isolation room to put him in and he was in a hallway with his wiped out immune system surrounded by other patients who might have germs.  Now the panic had given way to despair.  “I...