Ornoth

I haven’t made a lot of noise about my mother’s death in January, and I don’t intend that to change. Everyone has their own method of dealing with loss, and I feel that making a big emotional scene is about the least respectful thing I could do in most cases.

I’m also not going to devote any more space in my blog to the hardships of five months away from home, enduring a very much unwanted Maine winter. There’s no need to discuss my role as caregiver during the ups and downs of her hospitalization, my tasks arranging the funeral, dealing with probate, selling her car and furniture, closing her apartment, and wrapping up her finances. I’ll even skip over seeing members of my family and a few long-lost high school friends I caught up with.

I’ll only briefly mention the powerful sense of relief once I had all those things behind me, and how very, very, very good it has been to finally be back home.

It sounds like I’ve ruled out just about everything I could possibly write, thus obviating any need for this post. But no, there is one thing I do want to share, and that’s a handful of laughs. One of that trip’s bigger realizations was how deeply important humor is to me, and its usefulness as a way to cope with even the most stressful times.

Amidst all the difficulties of the past four months, there were a handful of precious smiles worth remembering. Here’s a few.

One morning my brother and I were at her nursing home with my mother when she required emergency transport to the hospital. When the EMTs showed up, I briefed them on her condition, what medication she was on and when she had last taken each, the measures the nursing home had taken in response to her situation, and so forth. I was apparently so organized and on top of the medical lingo that—as I later found out—they actually thought I was the resident doctor!

During her emergency room trips, my brother and I sometimes hung out in the ER’s little kitchen area. Being me, I snooped through their cupboards and was surprised to find a gallon jug of molasses. Wondering what the heck they’d need so much molasses for, I consulted Google and immediately regretted it. Whatever you do, *DO* *NOT* google “emergency room molasses”!

At one point she was in the cardiac unit and a nurse and I were helping her walk. She fainted in our arms, and since the nurse was unable to reach a call button, she slapped a button pinned on her uniform. “CODE YELLOW, CCU ROOM 1! CODE YELLOW, CCU ROOM 1!” blared over the intercom and more than a dozen doctors and nurses ran into the room. Apparently “code yellow” is their shorthand for “patient out of control”, normally used for unruly or violent situations; kind of silly for an unconscious 90 year-old!

She was in and out of the hospital several times, occupying a dozen different rooms. However, after a two week stay in Room 118, her next readmission was coincidentally right back in to the same familiar room.

At one point, a prisoner from some local jail was in for treatment, with a policeman posted outside his room. His family brought a cat in with them for a visit, which is pretty surprising to begin with, in a hospital. But apparently the cat got loose in the middle of the night, resulting in a penitentiary-style lockdown of the ward and all the patient rooms until they recaptured it!

Whenever a newborn was delivered in obstetrics, they played a lullaby tune over the intercom. My mother enjoyed hearing it, although it felt very odd to hear it playing during two of my mother’s worse sessions.

The hospital allows visiting family to raid the small kitchens in the ward, so my brother and I started enjoying free ice creams during our occasional opportunities to step out of her room. I joked that I was doing my part to increase US healthcare costs.

One of the few things my mother would reliably eat was milkshakes, made with two cups of ice cream. So when the floor ran out of ice cream, my brother and I blamed her (even if we’d eaten more than our fair share)!

The doctors also ordered that the staff keep tabs on my mother’s blood sugar levels. We joked that it was because so much of their ice cream had disappeared…

It confused the hell out of me that I couldn’t buy a sugared cola drink anywhere in the entire facility: not on the floors, not in the ER, not in the cafeteria or coffee shop, nor in any of their vending machines. Apparently sugar is strictly verboten! But I couldn’t square that with all the free ice cream stocked on the floors for patients and family!

Ordering lunch one day from “Room Service” (when I worked there as a high school student, it was called “Dietary”), my mother wanted tomato soup. Asked if she wanted a bowl or a cup of soup, mom asked for a bowlful of tomato soup, but in a cup…

Auto-on, motion-detecting faucets… Great for keeping one’s hands sanitary, but a complete disaster when they’re placed in the only open section of countertop in the room. On multiple times someone would move mom’s dinner tray to the counter next to the sink, only to have the faucet helpfully spray the tray, the person, and entire room with water.

Although we came to know most of the hospital staff by name, one day a new nurse came in. Seeing two guests, she asked, “Husband and son, I presume?” Yeah, no. My brother might be aging, but he was still 22 years younger than my mother. I might better understand “Son and grandson”, since there’s nearly a full generation between he and I…

Her treatment included regular doses of morphine, which naturally zonked her out. Even at her worst, just before a new dose she would relate a list of things like medications that the nurse should know about and take care of before she “lost time” due to the effects of the morphine. My mother was always both very organized and very much a take-charge person.

She had been a lifelong nurse, so there were some things in life that were normal for us but which seem strange in retrospect. For example, most kitchens have a pair of tongs for grabbing hot items like baked potato or corn on the cob. We didn’t have that… Mom had several old pairs of stainless steel surgical forceps that she used for cooking!

And finally, the thing I think is ludicrous but which no one else seems to appreciate. Mom would naturally use empty cans or plastic containers to store stuff in. In cleaning out her freezer, I came across a couple plastic tubs that originally held a spread product called “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!”, which my mother used for storing… (wait for it…) butter! Doh!

These were the kinds of things that kept us on our toes and provided brief moments of much-needed levity during an incredibly stressful time. Looking back, some of them remind me that my mother was a normal person. Normal people have all kinds of quirks and idiosyncrasies, which you discover during the rare times when you have to pore over their belongings in detail.

There’s an idea that pervades society that men act like wimps when they get sick. Naturally, this has been advanced and perpetuated by the female lobby, but I think many men generally accept it, as well.

Usually, ideas that are so universal have at least some basis in fact. After all, if only a handful of women thought men were crybabies, that myth wouldn’t engender the universal credence that it does today.

So there’s probably some truth behind the statement that men react more strongly to, say, the common cold than women do.

The question then becomes: why?

Most women would answer by re-stating the presumably obvious fact: because they’re wimps! But is that really the most likely explanation? Is it really plausible that it all boils down to one personality flaw that is shared among all men on the planet, but not a single woman?

Consider an alternative hypothesis. Is it possible that men actually experience cold symptoms differently than women? After all, there are precedents for gender-specific diseases and variations in diseases. Unfortunately, I don’t think anyone has done a study of differences in how the genders experience common illnesses.

Frustratingly, when I mentioned this idea to one of my female friends, the answer was categorical: “No, men are just wimps”. Even in the absence of any data, she refused to admit that it was a possibility that men and women experience colds differently.

That kind of categorical dismissal reminds me of other gender-based physiological issues that were scoffed at for centuries: pre-menstrual syndrome and menopause. After having spent decades trying to get men to recognize and accept the reality of PMS and menopause rather than dismissing them, one would think that women might be more open to the idea that men, too, might have physiological symptoms that differ from their own.

Never mind the fact that calling men wimps also perpetuates the whole “men must be macho and never vulnerable” stereotype that women usually rail against.

But no, women seem perfectly willing to treat men’s symptoms as fiction, just as nineteenth century men did with women’s ailments that today are accepted as medical realities.

Of course, I’m not asserting that men actually *do* experience illnesses more intensely than women. I’m merely saying that since that is such a universal observation, perhaps there’s some physiological basis for the idea that men experience more suffering from colds than women.

My position is that we just don’t know, because no one has done the research. And if you’re not even willing to admit the possibility, then I think you should carefully examine why you feel so strongly about it, in the absence of any objective data to back it up.

So I say to today’s women the same thing I would have said to men who derogated women for PMS and menopause: before you cause harm by mocking your significant other’s symptoms, keep an open mind and consider offering them some compassion and understanding, rather than using their malady as an opportunity to take your “loved” one down a peg.

Because no one has proven that men’s apparent suffering is a purely mental fabrication.