Wildfires

 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 knew I had to call you back and talk to you before I did anything stupid,” he said.  I told him I was glad he did, and we kept talking until a gay nurse he has had before showed up.  Not many people can get him to let them put in an IV, but this nurse did and when the pain meds started to flow, he started to drift so I gathered Marley in my arms, tucked the top sheet around and tried to sleep myself.

 

Sleep has been a problem because my right shoulder started hurting for no apparent reason and it’s worse when I lie down, so I can’t sleep on that side the way I usually do.  If I roll onto it during the night, it wakes me up.  Tuesday I took my painful shoulder to Dr P.  As he maneuvered it various ways, trying to locate the problem, I noticed that his energy felt off somehow.  We know each so well that all I had to do was give him a look.  “I’m not in a good mood,” he said.  I sat quietly, waiting for the rest.  “All you have to do is look at the news in the morning….” He trailed off, but we both knew what he meant.  I nodded, and he pulled himself back into the moment.  “This is a classic exam for shoulder impingement,” he said.  “You should come see Dr Katz in this office for a steroid injection, and I’ll send you some exercises to do.”  He knows my insurance won’t cover shoulder PT when I am already doing neck PT.

 

Thursday morning I was groggily filling cat bowls, after another night interrupted by pain, when I picked up the phone and heard someone simultaneously yelling and crying.  The voice was somehow familiar, but I couldn’t place it at first.  I listened for a minute and then it came to me.  It was S., the client who would not take their winter coat off the other day.  “Take a breath,” I said to them, “and try to stop shouting so I can understand you.”  They only got slightly calmer, but it was enough for me to figure out that they were in the psych ward, having been brought in by the police, and they were freaking out because they didn’t want to be there and they did not want to take the pills they were being offered.  “If you want to get out of there, you have to calm down,” I told him.  “They are not going to let you out until they see that you are doing better.  In order to get out, you need to cooperate with them, otherwise you will be there longer.”  “Should I take the pills, Kate?” “Yes, go ahead and take them.”  I heard S. ask the nurse for them, then a gulp.  “Thank you, Kate,” said the nurse in the background.  “Just do what they tell you,” I told S. and then went back to my morning.

Friday morning at 7am,  H., who had been texting me all night- a unilateral series of complaints about the neighbors who were keeping her up- started texting me again.  “Why bother taking my meds anymore since I can’t sleep and can’t breathe clean air? Why keep going? I’m so tired. I DON’T CARE ANYMORE.  I’m never going outside again, not even for rent.  Housing can kick us out.  Let them take E.” “How does never going outside help with any of this?” I asked, confused. “Because I don’t care anymore about anything,” replied H., her agitation making it clear that she cared a lot.

 

I headed out into the smokey air, with the sky an odd shade of light orange and a haze obscuring the iconic Manhattan skyline.   Early for Dr Katz, I got a cinnamon cruller at the donut pub, the only place I can ever find them.  Dr Katz was a small, energetic man who immediately started talking about my left shoulder.  While I was impressed that he had looked at my records, I had to stop him to explain I was there for the right shoulder.  More arm maneuvers and some strength testing later, he agreed that this could be impingement or the beginning of a frozen shoulder.  “Since you have Lupus, this could be autoimmune inflammation,” he told me.  Pressing his fingers painfully into the shoulder, he located the right spot and plunged the needle full of anesthetic and steroids into the joint.  I have had steroid injections in my ankle, knee, hip, thumb and spine so I expected the burn of the medication going in.  “Get an x-ray,” he said, “since you have a lot of arthritis in the other shoulder, you could have it in this one, too.”  

 

At the office, the temperature on the wall read 85 and my arm ached.  S. called back, no longer screaming, but despondent.  “I should just stop taking my meds and die of AIDS,” they said.  “That’s a long and really painful way to die,” I said.  “Maybe you could make some changes so you can have more of a life you want.”  “I got into crystal because they were using it at these places I was at”, they said.  “I know, the HASA SROs are full of crystal,” I said.  “It was staff,” they said.  “Staff were giving me crystal and having sex with me.”  I had to make an effort not to let my anger show because I didn’t want them to get agitated again.

 

The hot office was making me sleepy, but I was trying to make my way through a stack of paperwork when the phone rang again.  It was an old activist friend, who has also been a New Alt supporter.  She has been dealing with mental and physical health issues, and yesterday she told me she had been evicted but was planning to sneak back into her place.  She had tried staying with a “friend” but woke up to someone in bed with her saying that she couldn’t stay “for free.”  Today she told me that she had successfully snuck back in but then someone knocked on the door and she panicked and jumped out the second floor window.  I was thinking about what to say about that when she said, “I’m thinking of going to NYU as a voluntary admission.”  “They can make it hard to get admitted, but I am sure if you tell them you jumped out a window that will do it,” I told her.  “I’m not suicidal,” she said, “but if I run out of options, I would rather leave with dignity.”  Later she texted me from the psych ER to say she was waiting to go upstairs.

 

This evening was the Good Trouble March, about the attacks on black voting rights and against ICE.  Normally I would not miss it, but after putting out fires all week I didn’t have the energy left to march.