I sat in the ICU waiting room from 1:30 till 8:30 yesterday and am here to say there has got to be a better way. But the good news is that mom came through the surgery with two metal plates in the left side of her face and no scar that is visible. And maybe this fall had a silver lining as now she will remain in the hospital until many of her issues are…
In 1998, I had been back in San Francisco for two years after a thwarted move home to New Orleans in 1995. My panic attacks reached enormous proportions because I didn’t want to be there, I wanted to be in New Orleans, near my family, having children with my husband, and living and breathing the architecture, culture, music, food, flora and fauna of New Orleans not being lulled to sleep by the sterile, overpriced, transient…
When my friend’s daughter was dying she asked me “how am I going to get through this?” and I said, when you need them the most, a merry band of angels will descend to help you over this trough. Similarly, when another friend just lost her grown child, she asked someone, “how will I get through this?” and sure enough, a merry band of angels appeared to hold her up as her knees buckled. Yesterday,…
Mom entered the hospital because of I believe a carelessness in prescribing her Cymbalta and then further carelessness in abruptly stopping the drug. Granted she’s an alcoholic and smokes heavily and these are all bad, but the Cymbalta took a bad situation and pushed it into critical. If it wasn’t bad enough to stabilize her heart, go through four days of DTs, and then not be able to breathe or swallow, it was worse that…
There is a complete solar eclipse this coming Wednesday and there is lots of speculation about the forces it already has had on good and evil. I’m not here to say the eclipse has caused all this turmoil that we have been experiencing but at this point, I’m ready to get passed anything that smacks of gris gris.
We were supposed to get a huge storm passing through New Orleans this weekend, and instead we got the front without the rain, and with it, the most beautiful fall like weather you can imagine. The weather brought everyone out to the bayou to walk, run, and just frolic in the wonder of a breeze and low humidity. Meanwhile, under a canoe sits a duck with a bunch of eggs, and the herons which have…
I went to the hospital to see mom this evening, she’s heavily sedated with an amnesia like drug so a lot of what happens now is happening in abeyance, but I still think it is important to touch her and tell her I love her. My brother met me there and then followed me to her apartment to help water her plants and pick up her mail and newspapers. We sat down and got caught up…
My niece (aka Miracle Baby) wrote and said she found a CD in her car with a song on it that put her in mind of me because she had just read my blog and caught up on mom’s crisis. The song is a Dar Williams song – I know Dar because she sings that great song All Men Are Liars, but this is a much more touching song, called After All. After All Go…
I watched a movie last night but kept falling asleep but yet I got in bed and tossed and turned with the same thought running over and over, why does she get out of bed and fall flat on her face? Why isn’t she automatically catching herself, bracing herself? She fell with such force on her face that she shattered her cheek and forehead and nose. This is one of many falls she has taken…
In 2005, I came back to be with my family and found that my life erupted and my family dispersed and so I was left, a shadow of my former family self. My main reason for coming was my mother, whose health had been fragile since she took her first serious downturn back in 2001 – a big year for events if you recall. A black year for me personally – that’s when the bow…