Lance Mannion

Telling my inner Republican to shut up

Mined from the notebooks, Saturday afternoon, July 14, 2018. Posted Saturday morning, July 28.

A store full of temptations: For some people the temptation is to go in for a gallon of milk and come out with cigarettes and beer. For others the temptation is to go in for a gallon of milk and come out with a candy bar or cookies. For someone we all know in the latter category, the temptation is also to go in for a gallon of milk and make unearned and hypocritical moral judgments while he’s at it. One of our local convenience stores. Saturday, July 14, 2018.

Two weeks ago, Saturday before last, Mrs M had a crowd of visitors. Her mother, brother, sister-in-law, and aunt and uncle all came by the hospital to spend the afternoon and evening with her. I was supposed to take advantage of their providing her company for the day by staying home and working to get the house in shape for her coming home on the following Thursday.

I stayed home.

I didn’t work on getting the house in shape.

I slept.

I slept in. Until 9. That’s very late for me and was even when life on the Mannionville ranch was more normal. And I took three naps.

I did manage to run a few necessary errands though. One was to the convenience store to pick up milk. There I saw something that caused my inner Republican to rise from his couch in front of the TV and start to rail.

I like having an inner Republican.

I like telling him to shut up and go find a hobby.

Just ahead of me as I entered the store was a tall, broad-shouldered woman with pale blond hair who looked about fifty. A hard fifty. A hard and worn-out and worn-down fifty. Her expression was sullen but seemed to be without real, intense, or specific anger behind it. She was simply not in a good mood and probably had no reason to be. She looked like she didn’t feel good, physically or emotionally or both. Between the first two fingers of her right hand, she held an unlit, half-smoked cigarette that she’d probably stubbed out on her way in and intended to re-light as soon as she’d made her way out.

She wore shorts and a T shirt neither of which looked new or particularly clean, neither of which fit her. The way they didn’t fit her was a way that demanded an anymore. They had grown too small for her or, to put it bluntly, she had grown too big for them. She was big boned, not fat but heavy, carrying more weight than she was built for, and that extra weight wasn’t firm and plump and healthy. It was the bloat of a heavy drinker. Her face had the bruised from within look that alcoholics get too. The vagueness in her eyes and the too careful way she carried herself clinched it for me.

While I grabbed my gallon of milk and took it to stand in line at the register to pay, she drifted in slow circles about the store as if she couldn’t decide if she’d stop first at the cooler where the beer was or in the snack aisle on her way to the counter where she’d buy her cigarettes.

That’s when my inner Republican began to pipe up.

“It’s the middle of the day! What’s wrong with you? You deliberately trying to make a public disgrace of yourself? Can’t you manage even a minimal effort? You like being unhappy? You want to make yourself sick?”

My inner and outer liberal and my inner Catholic and my inner minimally compassionate and would-be decent person ganged up to shout him down.

“What’s the matter with you? Can’t you see she’s got problems? Doesn’t it ever occur to you people are unhappy and in pain through no real fault of their own? Weren’t you raised by the same mother as the rest of us? Weren’t you taught by the same nuns? Didn’t you listen to what they said about kindness?”

My inner Republican looked grumpy but chastened and slunk back to his man-cave to find a ball game on television, muttering that we’d better not ask him to care when her bad living finally caught up with her or expect him to pay her medical bills with his tax dollars.

It’s an especially Republican attitude to look for reasons not to care about strangers’ problems and find them in those strangers being somehow undeserving of the effort. It’s an especially Republican attitude but not a peculiar one. It’s a human one. A defensive reflex against being overwhelmed by all the calls upon our compassion and kindness. Life is a constant parade of people in trouble and in pain. We can’t help everyone who needs our help. Often it’s hard enough to help ourselves. So we do triage. And one of the criteria we use to judge whom to help is to separate those who are worth our trouble from those who aren’t.

I did it myself, reflexively withheld my sympathy from the woman in the convenience store---reflexively dismissed her as undeserving of it the second I recognized her as a drinker. I didn’t consider right away that there was more who she was and that that more might be that she was a good person.

For all I know, she’s a cop or a nurse or a teacher or firefighter or social worker or lawyer who does a lot of pro bono work. She might work for a local charity or non-profit and be the person in the office who really keeps the place running. She might be the person in any sort of office or store or business who keeps the place running. She might be the mainstay of her family or a really good neighbor or a leader of her community. She might do a lot of volunteer work. She might be one of those people who one way or another takes care of everybody around her except herself.

She might be suffering from depression and self-medicating instead of getting professional help and care. She might, like Mrs M, be suffering from hydrocephalus without knowing it and it’s causing her to be unfocused, foggy in her thinking, inattentive, careless of her own needs, impulsive, compulsive, forgetful, exhausted, too tired to think, too tired to resist urges and temptations large and small, too tired to seek help, too tired to be even aware of what is happening to her.

She might just be someone who has worked hard all her life and struggled with the usual human struggles and done her best to lead a decent if not a wholly happy and successful life and it’s worn her out at last.

She might have led a blameless life and it’s just that her troubles and travails---and genetic bad luck---are finally catching up with her, or she might have brought it all on herself. Who am I to judge?

Who am I to judge and withhold my sympathy especially considering how dependent I’ve been the last six months on the sympathy, compassion, generosity, and help of strangers and how much more I’m going to have to depend on them over the course of the next God knows how many months?

We’re all fragile, physically, emotionally, mentally, and morally. We’re all made of the same weak flesh. We’re all subject to temptations and we all give in one or another every day. It’s not trivial to say that while that woman was going to leave the store with cigarettes and beer, it was all I could do to make myself leave with just a gallon of milk. There have been way too many times I’ve gone into a store for just a gallon of milk and come out with a bag of cookies or a box of  donuts or a candy bar or two along with the milk and a load of diabetic guilt.

Rick Scott, the convicted criminal who is inexplicably the two-term governor of Florida and is now running as the Republican candidate for the United States Senate against incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson has been an opponent of the Affordable Care Act his whole tenure as governor and has done his best to deny as many its benefits as he can to the people of Florida. It’s a given that if he’s elected to the Senate, he’ll do his best to help deny all of its benefits to all the people of the United States. One of the benefits he finds especially obnoxious is one of the ACA’s most popular provisions, guaranteed coverage for pre-existing conditions at affordable rates. He says he doesn’t like it because it doesn’t reward people for taking care of themselves. This is another way of saying it doesn’t penalize people who don’t take care of themselves, as if people whose cancer had gone into remission but has now returned and metacized or whose congenitally diseased heart finally starts to fail and requires replacement probably brought it on themselves by being careless of their health and don’t deserve to have their treatment paid for at taxpayer expense.

But it’s also a way of saying that someone who is depending on the help of strangers in the form of taxpayers to pay for his diabetes medicine and the regular checkups and eye exams that a smart and sensible diabetic should have if he wants to avoid amputations, blindness, vascular and kidney disease, and other shocks to his system has a responsibility not to cost taxpayers any more than he has to and take care of himself as best he can, and that includes, besides taking his meds, getting those checkups and exams, exercising and not walking out of the convenience store with cookies and donuts, and, boy, does my inner Republican give me an earful about that.

The diabetes specialist at my doctor’s has assured me that’s ok for me to give myself a little treat now and then, but I suspect there’s a pretty big difference between my definition of little and my sense of now and then are different from hers. And even if I’m taking care of myself according to the guidelines, given the vagaries of individual physiologies, it may be that I’m doing myself as much harm with my now-and-then little treats as the woman in the convenience store is doing to herself with her beer and cigarettes, and so I’m just as irresponsible about taking care of myself and just as “undeserving” of help from taxpayers.

And of course there are many ways apart from neglecting my health that I’ve been irresponsible, that I’ve failed to take care, that I’ve proven to be undeserving of the sympathy and compassion of strangers. It may be that in comparison to her I’m the more fit target for my inner Republican’s contempt, which is to say, my inner Republican needs to look in the mirror.

As the Ghost of Christmas Present says to Scrooge, rebuking him for his casually cruel remark about decreasing the surplus population:

“Man...if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!

Fill'r up!

Posted Wednesday evening, July 25, 2018.

The Filling Station Burger Works, West Haverstraw, New York. Tuesday, just after the lunch rush, July 17, 2018.

Last Tuesday, the Mannion guys had a training session at the rehab hospital with Mrs M’s physical therapist so they could learn to help her get around safely when she was discharged. Before their session we stopped for lunch at The Filling Station before their training session at the rehab hospital. The Filling Station---TFS as its roof sign and menus say---is a burger joint inside an old re-converted gas station. Unfortunately it was pouring  and the bay doors were closed against the rain so we couldn’t sit outside and I couldn’t get a picture that gives the full service station effect. The owners are canny suggestivists anyway. The place isn’t crazy with gas station kitsch. A few vintage signs, metal tool cabinets with open drawers offering condiments, straws, napkins, and flatware. The long tables have a back of the bay workbench sturdiness. But the emphasis is on the food and not the ambience or nostalgia. And the food’s very good. I had the Texaco burger. Pepper Jack cheese, hot peppers, barbeque sauce. Excellent. If we ever go there again, though, I’m trying the Indian Chief. Sauteed mushrooms with a truffle aioli. The Overhaul sounds good too. Smoked bacon, blue cheese sauce, and lettuce and tomato. Ken Mannion, a man of simple tastes, ordered the Fill’r Up but did not fill it up with toppings. Just American cheese for him. Oliver had a grilled chicken sandwich called, I think with admirable restraint, the Fowl Play. If it was my place, the chicken sandwiches on offer would probably be the Fowled Engine, the Fowled Carburetor, and the Fowled Exhaust, and I’d be out of business in a week.

Hospital Journal. July 16. Day 74: Picture with Mommy

Mined from the notebooks, Monday afternoon, July 16, 2018. Posted  Tuesday morning, July 17.

 

Altar and sanctuary of Mary Help of Christians Chapel, Marian Shrine and Don Bosco Retreat Center, Stony Point, New York. Photo by Lance Mannion’s inner altar boy. July 16, 2018.

Very near to the hospital is the Marian Shrine and Don Bosco Retreat Center. I pass it every day on my way to see Mrs M and every night on my way home. I’d been meaning to stop in. Mainly out of curiosity but I have to admit I’d been feeling pulled by my inner altar boy’s vestigial faith. This afternoon, I gave into both and turned off to take a quick look around. It was too hot to walk around Our Lady’s Park, a sculpture garden at the center of the grounds where the devout are encouraged to say the rosary, stopping for each decade before statues depicting the mysteries and watched over by a titanic statue of Mary, forty-eight feet tall. I didn’t make it to the shrine itself either. But I did go into the Mary Help of Christians Chapel, first steeling my soul against the temptation to pray.

The noon mass had ended and there were very few people still inside. One of them was an elderly Asian nun in a blue habit and white running shoes making the Stations of the Cross. Another was a friendly little old lady who, I think, going by her accent and her dress and matching turban I’m guessing was from Haiti who shyly approached me to ask me to take her picture “with Mommy.” Of course I knew who she meant, and was glad to oblige. Then, after I’d handed her back her iPhone and she’d approved my photography,  I asked her if I could take her picture again, this time with my phone. I told her it was for my wife who was in the hospital but would have liked to meet her. It’s true. Mrs M isn’t feeling all that devout these days but she’s as friendly as ever. So here’s Mrs M’s new friend she’ll probably never meet but, having seen the photo, feels as if she has…

Hospital Journal. July 16. Day 74: Failing to observe

Posted Monday morning, July 16, 2018.

My Facebook “memories to look back on” today included this post from last summer that I thought was cute and funny at the time. It’s not so cute and funny to me anymore…

July 16, 2017.

Mrs M has been feeling poorly again. Thinking to cheer her up and earn some extra good husband points, I bought her some flowers when I was at the grocery store this morning. I put them in a vase and set them at her usual place at the kitchen table before calling to her to come have the bagel I also picked up and a cup of the coffee I'd made. She staggered to the table, ate her bagel, drank her coffee, then staggered back to bed, without saying a word about the flowers.

I thought that was a little odd since she's always been a big fan of flowers. So I went in to check on her.

"Thank you for the bagel," she said weakly from under the covers.

"And?" I said with my most winning good husband smile.

"And for making the coffee," she murmured.

"And?"

"And for getting the groceries."

"AND?"

"And what?" She still had enough strength to start getting annoyed.

"Once again, Watson, you see but you do not observe. Did you not notice what was right in front of you on the table?"

This sparked her curiosity. She mustered her strength, threw off the covers, and staggered back out to the kitchen.

"Oh! They're pretty! Thank you!"

Can good husband points still be redeemed if you had to award them to yourself?

Notice that again in “Mrs M has been feeling poorly again.”?

Fatigue, listlessness, lack of focus, inattention, indifference, intellectual and emotional detachment---those are symptoms of hydrocephalus, symptoms that were about to start getting worse for Mrs M. I don’t feel guilty---at least not greatly guilty--- for not knowing what was happening to her. And it wasn’t the case that I saw but failed to observe. I observed. I just didn’t know what I was observing. I thought it was depression. Which I took seriously. I’d been pushing her to see the doctor for that. I’d heard of hydrocephalus, but I didn’t have a clue that that’s what was afflicting Mrs M. I didn’t know what it looked like so I wasn’t looking for it. But it’s the again that bothers me and makes me feel guilty.

I should have observed more. I should have been pushing harder sooner.

Nine months! Nine months it took to get it diagnosed! Nine months to the day, in fact. Monday, April 16, 2018 is when she had her CT scan. Four months ago today. That’s the memory I have to look back on today, Facebook.

Hospital Journal. Day 72: Unite the League and pass the wings

Posted Saturday night, July 14, 2018.

Mrs M didn't need my company today. She had visitors all day. Her aunt and uncle stopped by in the morning and her mother and brother and sister in law came in the afternoon and stayed until closing time. So I thought I'd take advantage and stay home, relax a bit, and start getting the house in shape for her homecoming Thursday. Of course I didn't relax and the house is still a disaster.

I spent the day feeling guilty and fighting the urge to get in the car and rush down there. Oliver and Ken threatened to hide the keys.

But so the day wouldn’t be a total loss, they forced me to sit down for pizza and wings and a Mannion Guys Movie Night.

We watched “Justice League”...

The pizza was good.

Hospital Journal. Day 70: The 7Eleven has become my clean, well-lighted place

 Mined from the notebooks Thursday night, July 12. Posted Saturday night, July 14.

“Come on. Stop talking nonsense and lock up."

"I am of those who like to stay late at the cafe," the older waiter said. "With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night."

"I want to go home and into bed."

"We are of two different kinds," the older waiter said. He was now dressed to go home. "It is not only a question of youth and confidence although those things are very beautiful. Each night I am reluctant to close up because there may be someone who needs the cafe."

"Hombre, there are bodegas open all night long."

"You do not understand. This is a clean and pleasant cafe. It is well lighted. The light is very good and also, now, there are shadows of the leaves."

"Good night," said the younger waiter.

"Good night," the other said…

---from “A Clean, Well-lighted Place” by Ernest Hemingway.

Don't feel like making the drive home tonight. Think I'll just sit here in the parking lot of the 7Eleven drinking coffee all night. Don't let the name fool you. They don't close at 11. They're open all night. They should call themselves the 24Seven.

What ever happened to truth in advertising?

Not that I'm complaining.

Hospital Journal. Day 53: Jazz at the Rehab

Mined from the notebooks and adapted from the Facebook feed, Sunday afternoon, June 24. Posted Saturday morning, July 14.

This is the Palisades JCC Jazz Ensemble, out of the Jewish Community Center of Palisades, New Jersey. That’s Steve on flute, Paul on bass, and Barbara on piano. I didn’t get their last names when Mrs M and I went up to talk with them after the show. Muffed it there. Barbara was the front man. For this gig. Other gigs, they have other front men, playing other instruments. They have other members too. Some playing these instruments while Steve, Paul, and Barbara play none, because they’re not playing that gig. Apparently the JCC Jazz Ensemble exists mainly in inchoate form, an invisible field of potential music that takes human and instrumental shape around the bodies and axes, horns, fiddles,  sticks, ivories, and skins, the shape and sound varying according to who’s available to play a particular gig. Pretty much the way all bands of all genres exist and have existed throughout time. This afternoon it’s just these three. But that’s enough for the crowd, a mixture of patients and their families. The Jazz Ensemble knows its audience though and plays mostly pop standards with Barbara as vocalist. Mrs M and I “danced” to all the tunes by holding hands and swinging our arms together with our elbows on the armrest of her wheelchair. It’s the first concert we’ve been to since we left Syracuse. The first jazz band we’ve seen live since we lived in Fort Wayne and took a vacation to New Orleans.

The JCC Jazz Ensemble was formed many years ago, Barbara told us, when a rich businessman who was on the board of the community center funded a music program that would offer lessons and classes at the center. He had one condition. He was a trumpet player and he missed having other cats to swing with. A portion of the money he donated would go towards forming a band. Remembering when he was a broke musician struggling to earn money for college, he believed nobody should work for free. The trumpet player-philanthropist is long gone but the JCC Jazz Ensemble still swings.

During the show, Barbara introduced songs with stories and history lessons. Her idol and role model was Marian McPartland and like McPartland on her radio show on NPR she told her stories and delivered her lessons conversationally, gently, genteelly, in an understated way, with little embellishment, as if confident that we’re all grownup jazz fans together and we find interesting things interesting for themselves and not for their drama and scandal and we want to learn not be titillated. She introduced “All Of Me” by informing us that the composer, Gerald Marks, wrote it as a ballad but very few of the famous artists who made it part of their own songbooks sang or played it that way. Frank, Ella, you name them, made it swing. Then Barbara added, as if only to footnote her main point, that about thirty years ago she was playing for the lunch crowd in a cafe in an office building in New York City, receiving about the attention you’d expect from a lunch crowd in a cafe in an office building in New York City, which means she wasn’t thinking anyone but herself was really listening. She was making her way through “All Of Me” when she was interrupted by a hard tap on her shoulder. She turned around and found a fierce looking old man glaring at her.

“You’re playing it too fast,” the old man said.

He should know.

It was Gerald Marks.

Barbara, Paul, and Steve then proceeded to play the song as Frank and Ella swang with it. How else would we in the audience have been able to sing along?

I should close this post with a clip of Frank or Ella or Billie or whoever doing in “All of Me”. But…

One of Barbara’s other idols is Peggy Lee, and the band opened their act with one of the many songs Lee wrote the lyrics for and then made hits.

“I Love Being Here With You.”

This one’s for Mrs M…

Hospital Journal. Day 58: Mrs M sums up Robert McNamara's place in hell

Mined from the notebooks, Saturday night, June 30, 2018. Posted Sunday morning, July 8.

Soldiers running to board helicopters near Chi Chu in Vietnam, 1966. Photo courtesy of the National Archives via Wikimedia.

Watching television can be good for you.

Maybe.

If you're recovering from brain surgery like Mrs M and have her memory and attention problems.

Depends on what you watch.

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's documentary on the War in Vietnam, which I just discovered is now on Netflix and which Mrs M and I started watching tonight, appears, in my rankly amateur and wholly ignorant medical opinion, to offer Mrs M welcome therapeutic effects, not just on her memory and attention; it might help strengthen her vision and lift her spirits, as well.

Might seem odd that spending nearly an hour and a half---with about fifteen and a half more hours to come. Mrs M says she wants to watch the whole thing. Spread out over the next couple of weeks, though. Mrs M was not a fan of binge-watching even before she got sick---reliving that godawful time would be a cheering experience. But it's eighty minutes not spent thinking about her current situation, eighty minutes thinking about American history, which Mrs M has always enjoyed thinking about, and eighty minutes thinking about her own history, which has developed gaps and disconnections, confusions and vagaries that she’s working to fix.

Where were you in '62? asked the tagline for "American Graffitti". In her crib in Houston, Texas, is Mrs M's answer. Mrs M was born near the end of 1961. She grew from a baby to a young teen during the years U.S. involvement in the war went from sending advisors to leaving people stranded on the rooftop of the American embassy in Saigon. Being just a little kid for most of that period, the war wasn't quite real to her and consequently she remembers those years most vividly as the time of her own generally happy childhood.

(I was off enjoying my own happy childhood, but since I'm a few years older, the war started to become real to me at its height and I started having nightmares when I was twelve about what I was increasingly terrified my not too distant future was going to hold.)

It was a grim time for America, Mrs M is not at all vague or confused about that---”It’s very sad,” she said, when I noticed the tears in her eyes and asked about them---but watching “The Vietnam War” and has stirred up concurrent memories of her moving to Pennsylvania from Texas when she was in preschool, sledding in Valley Forge, joining the Brownies, breaking her ankle falling off her bike, practicing being a spy like Harriet, the heroine of her favorite book, taking family vacations at the Jersey shore, becoming a cheerleader in seventh grade, making the volleyball team in ninth, becoming an editor of her high school paper, and meeting the kids and classmates who would become her friends for life and who became my friends too and are now helping me take care of her.

Hi Liz! Hi John! Hi Mary Pat!

So watching “The Vietnam War” could be an exercise in not just recall but in making associations, within her personal memories and remembered history, and between the personal ones and historical ones, as well as an exercise in sequencing---she has to answer for herself what thing happened when and before which and after which?

In order to follow the narrative of an episode she has to keep in mind what not only what she watched just the minute before but the minute before that and the minute before that and the minute before that and, eventually, the minute seventy-nine minutes before. As we move on to the next episodes, she’ll have to remember each previous episode, as well as names, events, places, and dates that were introduced and re-referenced in what will have been several episodes past---which means not just remembering things sequentially but remembering them out of sequence without losing track of their sequence. Mrs M isn’t suffering from amnesia, exactly, but rooms in her mental attic that got jumbled up by her surgeries need straightening up and she needs to figure out what goes back into what file cabinets drawers and what gets put on which shelves, where to go looking for what, and how to lay things out on a work table so that she can see patterns and make associations

As for her vision: since we watched on the ipad propped up on her knees as she lay under her covers ready for bed, she could keep her field of vision narrowed and her eyes focused and not let them wander.

At any rate, that’s my theory. I might be getting ahead of myself. The first episode deals with the first one hundred and three years of the war, from 1858 to 1961, before Vietnam’s war for independence became its American War and our Vietnam War. So it’s all history to Mrs M. Almost all history. But she remembers the history. The episode begins at the end and works backwards through a montage to the beginning, and among its first images is a clip of Henry Kissinger lying about Peace With Honor.

“Thanks a lot, Henry,” Mrs M said.

After Kissinger, there appeared clips of Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, and Truman, interspersed with clips and pictures of other political and cultural figures of the time, American, Vietnamese, and French. Mrs M didn’t thank all of them, but she did thank LBJ---”Thanks a lot, Lyndon!”---and Charles De Gaulle---“Shar-ulls” is how she pronounced it. She did win the French Medal in high school, after all. But she was stymied by the character shown between  Johnson and Kennedy. Hs name wouldn’t come to her. I don’t think his face rang any bells. I had to tell her who he was

Robert McNamara.

“Oh, yeah,” she said with disgust, “Him.”

And that might sum up McNamara’s place in hell.

Hospital Journal. Day 58: A study of Mrs M's reading habits

Mined from the notebooks, Saturday evening, June 30, 2018. Posted Friday afternoon, July 6.

“Do you want to read about Kanye?” Photo of pages from the New York Times featuring an article about Kanye West Mrs M seemed to think it was imperative for me to read. The question is, did she read it herself?

Mrs M has been demonstrating heroic levels of patience, resilience, determination, and fortitude over the course of her rehab and recovery. If you know Mrs M, you know the resilience, determination, and fortitude are her being her. The patience might come as a surprise.

There’s a lot I won’t ever know about Mrs M’s personal experience of her ordeal unless she remembers it all when she’s fully recovered and wants to talk about it, which she may not. Mrs M isn’t one to dwell on the past. Solve a problem or come to terms with it and move on, that’s her thinking. But I’m pretty sure that one of the most frustrating things for her has been the slow recovery of her ability to read. For a while there she simply couldn’t, physically. Her vision needed to come back into focus. Her neurons and synapses needed to reconnect and start re-firing in the ways that made it possible for her to comprehend words as words, to even see letters as letters. And Mrs M loves to read. Anything and everything. On top of that, her professional pride is at stake. One of the qualities that made her such a good newspaper editor was her ability to read.

Read fast and read smart.

Faster and smarter than many another editor.

If she’s lost that ability she can’t go back to the work she loves and has loved since she was in high school.

So it’s a big step in her recovery that she’s reading again. Her vision’s back to normal, when she remembers to wear her glasses. Those neurons and synapses seem to be doing their proper jobs again. Books are still too much for her. That seems to be a problem of manual dexterity. She’s still having trouble holding things in both hands. Her left hand and arm are still very weak and she seems to be avoiding using them, which might be due to continuing neglect. Early on in her rehab she did try to “read” books. She’d open them flat on the bed and with her right hand flip slowly through the pages, sometimes all the way to the end, sometimes pausing to “study” a page, then flip back, methodically, as if searching for a particular passage or the place where she’d left off the last time she “read” this book. She’d then repeat the process again and again until I’d gently take the book to read and try to get her focused on something else.

And often she couldn’t tell me what she’d “read.” It was as if she remembered how to read, remembered she liked to read, but didn’t remember to read.

When she could tell me, it was often in the most general terms, describing what could have been almost any book on the subject suggested to her by the title or by my questions. Other times, she described what sounded like a real and specific book but not this particular book. What she was doing, I've since learned, was confabulating. That’s the substitution for real memories with other real memories but ones that aren’t appropriate to the moment---for instance, Mrs M remembering her best friend Mary Pat visiting her at Westchester Med at the beginning of the month but remembering the visit as if Mary Pat came to see her here today---or with an entirely false memory that sounds like storytelling and fantasy---for instance, Mrs M remembering Mary Pat taking her on a day trip to West Point in her bright red “speedster” to see President Obama in his office there.

There also might have been some semantic paraphasia at work caused by her problems with initiation. She knew what she’d read but she couldn’t physically force herself to describe it in the words she wanted so she substituted something that sounded close to it.

She gave up trying to read books as she recovered more of her old self-awareness and with it became able to do more things deliberately rather than by reflex or on impulse. She began to learn her limits, and reading books was beyond her limits just because they are, like I said, simply too heavy for her to hold.

But she has been reading, actually reading, magazines and newspapers for a while now---like I said, a major step in her recovery. When she first started "reading" them again she was mostly scanning pages and taking in the pictures and a few words here and there. Sometimes she “read” holding the page upside down. Reading, truly seeing the words as words and comprehending the sentences and paragraphs and then whole articles as wholes is something she apparently had to retrain herself to do. But that doesn’t always mean she remembers having read them.

And why would she? She doesn't need to. When you think about it, there's very little imperative reason to remember anything you read in print or online. That’s not a swipe at the current state of political journalism and commentary. It’s just a fact of the transient and often merely diverting nature of all journalism. Most of it is just written to fill space between ads and keep you entertained enough to move on to the next article filling the space around more ads. Consequently, not only is there little imperative reason to remember one article or story or column or post after you finish it and move onto the next, there’s often very little imperative reason to remember a newspaper or magazine article or a blog post while you are reading it. So Mrs M doesn't, usually.

She actually takes a lot of it in and files it away. She just forgets that she did. Sometimes, it seems, when she tries to remember, she has trouble finding and pulling open the right mental cabinet drawer. It's then easier and less frustrating to re-read than go searching. The result is she often rereads things several times and calls my attention to them each time.

“The Millennial Socialists are coming,” she informed me this afternoon, reading the headline on Michelle Goldberg’s column in the New York Times.

“Are they coming like the cavalry or like the White Walkers?” I asked.

“Like the cavalry, I think,” she said, then went back to her reading. A minute later she said, “The Millennial Socialists are coming.”

“Are we supposed to be worried?” I asked this time.

“Yes,” she said with mock seriousness---Mrs M has not lost her sense of humor. “Very worried.”

“Well, fortunately we have a Millennial Socialist for a son. Maybe he can put in a good word for us.”

“Who’s that?”

“Oliver.”

“Oh. That’s right.”

“He can intercede for us.”

“This is true,” she said but this time she seemed serious. She nodded thoughtfully, then went back to her reading. Something riveted her attention and she wanted me to know about it.

“The Millennial Socialists are coming,” she said.

“Like the Redcoats?”

“Yes,” she said but with a smile. “Like the Redcoats.”

I tried to redirect her thoughts. “‘Listen, my children, and you shall hear…’”

“Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,” she said, finishing the line.

That seemed to work. She moved on to another section of the paper where she found an article she wanted to share with me.

"Do you want to read about Kanye?"

“Not really,” I said.

“Ok,” she went back to her reading. But a minute later…

“Do you want to read about Kanye?”

“No, thanks. You know how I feel about Kanye.”

“Yes, I do,” she said, but I wasn’t sure she did. So I said, “Same as President Obama.”

“How is that?”

“He called him a jackass.”

“Oh, that’s right. He did.” She went back to her reading once again, and, once again, after a minute she asked, “Do you want to read about Kanye?”

Now here’s the thing.

It dawned on me later that Mrs M might not have been asking me if I wanted to read about Kanye. She might have been asking me if I wanted her to tell me what she’d just read about Kanye.

Or…

She might have been being a wiseguy. Again. I told you she hasn’t lost her sense of humor.

“Do you want to read about Kanye?” she asked a few minutes later as we packed up her wheelchair for a trip downstairs to the cafeteria.

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I have to push the wheelchair.”

“This is true.”

We started out, Mrs M perusing the paper as we made our way down the hall.

“Do you want to read about Kanye?” she asked again when we reached the elevators.

“Maybe when we get to the cafeteria.”

“Ok.”

Into the elevator and down we went, and when we were set up at a table by the window in the cafeteria…

“Do you want to read about Kanye?” she asked. I couldn’t resist a suspicious glare. She met my eyes.

She was grinning.

Impishly.

____________________________________________________________________________________

Do you want to read about Kanye? Then follow the link to Into the Wild With Kanye West at the New York Times.

Also, the Millennial Socialists really are coming!

Hospital Journal. Day 41: Not like any other President

Mined from the notebooks, Tuesday, June 12, 2018. Posted Friday morning, June 29.

You say that like it’s a good thing…

As far as I’m concerned, every President since has just been holding Washington’s coat: “Scene at the Signing of the Constitution. Howard Chandler Christy. 1940. U.S. House of Representatives via Wikipedia.

Overheard another patient here and her daughter talking politics a little while ago. The patient is a woman well into what looks like a vigorous and cheerful old age, although she can’t be that vigorous at the moment since she’s here but it looks like she’s on her way back to vigorous. I’m not sure how cheerful she really is but she sounded it. Her daughter did not sound cheerful. She’s indeterminately middle aged, probably in her fifties, and clearly used to telling her mother how the world really works, which is not how it ought to. The mother seems used to being told and not minding. She doesn’t necessarily feel the need to agree or argue. She just listens and nods and makes a comment or asks a question now and then to show she’s paying attention and not taking her daughter for granted. In the daughter’s strident opinion, the world in general isn’t working as it ought to, but one thing---one person---is.

Him.

At least one aspect of him seems to meet with her approval.

“He’s not like any other president.”

I’ve heard this any number of times. On the news. In conversation. Eavesdropping. And I don’t understand it. He’s not like any other politician. He’s not like any other president.  I say it all the time, myself, but I hardly mean it as a compliment. Other people do or at least a positive thing. Even people who don’t like him say it with a note, sometimes grudging, of admiration. There’s an implied “One good thing you can say about him....”

“One good thing you can say about him, he’s not like any other president.”

Any other President?

And that’s a good thing?

Why would you like that? Want that? A President who isn’t like Washington or Lincoln or the popular conception of Jefferson? I can understand why if you’re a Republican you wouldn’t want another FDR, but wouldn’t you want a Republican version of him? Isn’t that what Reagan was touted to be? Wouldn’t you then want a President who is like Ronald Reagan? Or at least one like Dwight D. Eisenhower?

As far as I’m concerned, every president promises to be like every other when they take the oath of office, and one of the ways they’re promising to be like each other is trying to be like Washington. As far as I’m concerned, every President is just holding Washington’s coat.

Why would you think it’s a good thing to have a President who isn’t thoughtful, restrained, disciplined, cool, level-headed, clear-minded, deliberate, responsible?

Maybe it’s one of those colloquial elisions where you expect the people you’re talking to to know what you’re leaving out. Any other ordinary President. Of course you want another Washington or Lincoln to come along, but that’s wildly unrealistic. But wouldn’t you want a President who at least tries to be like them?

I guess that’s naive of me. None do. None has. None of the ones in my lifetime---if you look at it from a certain point of view, and that point of view is that of someone around my age, like the daughter. They’ve all been scoundrels and screw-ups and...typical politicians. There’s the elision. “Not like any other president I’ve known.” If you’re my age--her age, our age, a late arriving Boomer---here are the Presidents you remember:

Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Herbert Walker Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama.

Taken together it’s not an inspiring group. Barack Obama should be seen as a moral hero and political and policy genius in comparison to the rest of them. A first-class mind and first-class temperament. Trouble is, it’s hard for non-partisans---Most of whom are white folks, white folks, including many white “progressives”, which has implications---to see him standing apart from the others. History will have to take care of that. For now, a lot of  people are going to see him as one of them. Better in some ways, worse than others because of faults of his own and faults he shares with the other but possesses himself in somewhat greater degree. He’s seen as more aloof, more technocratic, more full of himself, and too much more pragmatic, which is to say, less bold and too politically calculating. Too much of an incrementalist. His honesty can be seen as an expression of his vanity. He may not have lied as often and brazenly as some of the others but he chose his words carefully. Sure, he’s smart, way smarter than the rest of us, but he’s too smart, and he lets you know it. (Again, there are implications in white folks thinking this about a black man. But intellectual vanity is a fault and a universally human one.) Donald Trump isn’t like any of them. Which, like I’ve often said, isn’t a compliment coming from me, and I’m glad to tell you why not. But what do the people who intend it as one, even grudgingly mean by it.

I have a few ideas.

Of course I do. It’s why I got into blogging, to tout my ideas.

Obviously there’s a vehement, vociferous, and dangerously angry and resentful contingent among his supporters---his mob of adoring fans---who like it that he’s not like any other President in being more cruel, more sadistic, more heartless, more overtly mean, nasty, and racist, and more willing to bluster and brag about his own “toughness” by which he and they mean his willingness to hurt people his mobs blame for their personal failures and unhappiness. Even Nixon wasn’t as naked in his appeals to the self-pity and sense of aggrievement of his Silent Majority. Even Nixon didn’t encourage his voters to cheer the pain of their fellow Americans.

And obviously there are many who when they say he’s not like any other president mean he’s not like one other president in particular. The one who came before him.

This is usually racist but it’s not just racist. They fear and loathe all liberals. What they fear and loathe most is that liberals aren’t “like me.” Barack Obama is definitely not like them, and he’s palpable proof that being “not like me” is in fact a good description of the vast majority of other human beings around the world. It’s dismaying but not surprising that Americans living in the 21st Century find that a scary thought. But they do. They find living in the 21st Century a scary thought.

Donald Trump, though, is like them, not just because he’s white in a world where not-white is actually the norm as well as the future, but also because he’s proudly, insistently, forcefully, aggressively to the point of being threateningly American. Lost in the narrative of the “economically anxious” Trump voter is how important it is to Right Wing Republicans---and Trump voters are Republicans. I don’t care what they claim about having voted for Obama. Look at who else they voted for and who they have voted for for decades. We didn’t get all those Republican governors and state legislatures by accident.---how important, I say again, it is to Republicans to be American. Trump doesn’t “apologize” for America. He sells being American as a virtue itself. One that makes us superior to every other nation without our having to do anything or stand for anything except being American.

They see the same blustering bully and blowhard the rest of us see and other world leaders see and look upon with contempt---even the ones who profess to like and admire him sneer at him behind his back. They know a chump when they see one---but they see someone standing up for America and spitting in the eyes of anyone with the temerity not to be rightly impressed and cowed. In Trump they see themselves standing up for Americans like themselves and spitting in the eyes of anyone with the temerity not to take them as seriously as they think they deserve to be taken. Trump stands up for America the way they would like to stand up for themselves generally. In Trump they see themselves empowered to be as bumptious and obnoxious as they like. In Trump they see themselves as they would like to be.

How do so many middle and working class people from the South and Midwest and the small town and rural areas of other parts of the country that are like the South and Midwest manage to see themselves in a (supposed) billionaire from the most cosmopolitan city in the United States?

Well, that’s the power of celebrity for you. What are celebrities but idealized versions of their fans? But then also there’s the universally human tendency to identify with the rich and powerful---powerful because they are rich. To be powerful without being rich requires too much virtue and talent and hard work. It’s easier to make money than be heroic. Republicans are especially prone to this. They believe money is the source of all happiness and a sign of a superior nature and God’s favor, and consequently despise themselves for not having enough of it. So they compensate by identifying with the rich. They also think they understand how rich business types make money and are sure that if given the chance they’d be rich business types themselves. Trump is the success they could be, should be, would be if only the system wasn’t rigged against them, the rigging abetted by typical politicians, including past presidents, and which Trump will undo, just you wait. That’s one of the things they mean by “Drain the Swamp!” They mean almost literally that what should happen for them is what the government did for their ancestors by draining actual swamps---open up land for them to get rich on. They don’t understanding anything about how government works except that it doesn’t work for them. In fact, it seems to be specifically designed to work against them.

There’s that Build the Wall mob. But there’s also a tear the walls down crowd. The figurative walls they feel closing them in and closing in all around them.  They feel themselves boxed in or boxed out. They feel things are so stacked against them that there’s no way to fix it except to tear everything down and start over. That’s why they’re fond of the bull in the china shop metaphor. Responsible, level-headed, thoughtful presidents don’t break the china. They don’t stir up trouble. They don’t shake things up. They see it as their job to maintain the status quo.

Trump is willing to break things. He likes to break things. And he’s honest about it. He tells it like it is. He says what everybody knows but nobody says. No typical politicians or perpetrators of Fake News, at any rate. The world is going to hell. The system is rigged. The elites have rigged it and the elites hate America and regular Americans. It’s their fault our lives are a mess. The elites. The Fake News. The Deep State. Those People’s!

Trump is a liar, of course, but he gets away with his lying because he sounds honest to the people he’s trying to swindle with his lies. He repeats back to them things they honestly think and feel. He uses words and expressions the way they use them themselves. He sounds like them to them. That’s not how any other president sounds, particularly the best ones, because they aren’t ordinary. They’re extraordinary. Which is fine with me. It’s what I want a president to be. But there’s a natural suspicion at work among most other people. How can someone who isn’t ordinary understand the problems and concerns and hopes and fears of ordinary people?

Trump sounds ordinary. As ordinary as they come. It’s ironic, when you think about it. Being ordinary is what he’s been most afraid of being his whole life and worked hard---if swindling and scheming can be counted as hard work---not to be, and now his greatest success is based on people taking him for ordinary.

I don’t know what the daughter was thinking when she said he’s not like any other president. I’m not sure if she likes or admires him. His presence in the conversation didn’t last long. She and her mother moved on to family matters and I stopped listening. The last thing she said about him, just about the only other thing she said about him in fact, so that this is possibly all she meant about his being different from any other president, “He doesn’t care what he says. He doesn’t care what anyone thinks.”

And that’s true, and it’s what makes him different from every other president, except Andrew Johnson when he was drunk, which was most of the time. The rest cared, at least when they were presidenting in public. They cared what they said and they cared what everyone thought. They saw it as job requirement. Not Donald Trump.

“He doesn’t care what he says. He doesn’t care what anyone think,” the daughter said.

Her mother only answered, “For a while there, I thought he was getting calmer.”

Hospital Journal. Day 55: Mrs M's day lilies

Posted Tuesday morning, June 26, 2018.

My favorite Cape Cod flowers are the day lilies. Mrs M’s are the hydrangeas. Day lilies aren’t peculiar to the Cape. They’re all along the roadsides here and stands and rows of them adorn countless yards. Mrs M planted some as a Father’s Day present for me a a couple years ago, before she began to get sick---one of the signs something was wrong I should have caught was that she lost interest in gardening. Our lilies aren’t the long-stemmed orange type that are ubiquitous in Chatham and they’ve tended to spring up in limited numbers. So far this season only the two have appeared but with luck more might bloom over the next few days. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll still be blooming when Mrs M finally comes home. She planted them for me, but I think of them as hers. I think of all our flowers as her flowers.

Hospital Journal. Day 46: Drama! The sequel?

Mined from the notebooks, Sunday afternoon, June 17. Posted Monday morning, June 18.

Given that the path from the neuro unit at Westchester Med to Helen Hayes is one many patients travel, this really could be the same woman continuing the same personal drama. She’s on her cell, pacing the hall outside the floor dining room:

“I’m very angry right now. I’m completely hurt. Why did you walk away from me like that? Why did you turn your back on me and walk away like that?” Long pause while she listens to whoever’s on the other end of the call. Then, calmer: “Where are you? I’m here. How do I get down there? I don’t know where I am.”

Hospital Journal. Day 33: Drama!

Mined from the notebooks, Monday evening, June 4, 2018. Westchester Med. Posted Monday morning, June 18.

Opening credits…

Drama! So much drama at the hospital. They ought to set TV shows at hospitals.

Tonight, out in the hall outside Mrs M’s room. Woman out in the hall on her cell. She doesn't sound happy:

"You need to meet me halfway. Meet me on Route 100. Pretend it's the bar, then you'll be more than happy to go."

Hospital Journal. June 14, 2018. Day 43: "More tanager, please."

Mined from the notebooks, Thursday afternoon, June 14, 2018.

The bird on the get well card to Mrs M in front is a Western Tanager. I know that because I looked it up. I’ve never seen one. They and I have have never crossed paths in their natural habitat. They’re called Western Tanagers for a good reason. Several species of Tanagers call North America home. Western Tanagers in the west, Hepatic Tanagers in the more southerly parts of the Southwest, and, here in the east, Summer Tanagers and Scarlet Tanagers. I’ve seen very few Summer and Scarlet Tanagers that I know of. Both tend to stick to the woods and there they like to keep to themselves way up in the treetops. It’s possible, though, that I’ve seen more than I think, I've just thought I was seeing cardinals---to whom tanagers are related---or largish goldfinches. Male Scarlet Tanagers are bright red, in the summer. Male Summer Tanagers are red all year. Go figure. Female Tanagers and juvenile males of both kinds are yellow with black trim. Same with non-breeding male Scarlet Tanagers. At any rate, I was pretty sure it was a tanager when Mrs M opened the card, a tanager or one of the dozens of species of warblers. But before I checked at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s indispensable website, All About Birds, I asked Mrs M if she knew what it was.

“That’s a hummingbird,” she said with the confidence of a degreed ornithologist.

Mrs M is not up on her birds, as a rule, but she knows what a hummingbird looks like.

The question is whether she was looking at a tanager but seeing a hummingbird, not seeing any particular kind bird or not seeing any bird at all and just guessing what it might be, knew it for a tanager, or thought it was some other kind of bird, like a goldfinch or a warbler, and said hummingbird by accident or said it intentionally because that’s the only bird’s name that came to mind at the moment or that she could make herself say, or if she was just kidding around.

It’s hard to know what Mrs M’s thinking because it’s very hard for her to say what she’s thinking.

I usually talk to Mrs M as if we’re home on our front porch and she’s all better and back to being her old self. Sometimes, not often, but more frequently as the days have passed, she talks back as if we are and she is. I do it because she is her old self, she just has trouble expressing herself in her old self’s way. This is what her speech therapists are trying to fix. She has several neurological malfunctions that cause her cognitive problems and trouble when she tries to talk. Or it may be her cognitive problems that are causing speech problems. I’m still not clear on which is the cause and which is the effect. It’s seems like a vicious cycle. The cognitive and speech problem combinations have technical names. One is initiation. She knows what she wants to say but can’t always get the words out when she wants to. When the words do come out, they come out clear and strong and in her old voice, although often it's a little hoarse. Not being able to form the words is a “motor planning disorder” called apraxia of speech. That’s not one of Mrs M’s problems. Mrs M has no trouble forming words, just, like I said, getting them to come out sometimes and, other times, getting the right ones to come out. There are an additional two problems at work here. One is aphasia. She simply can’t think of a word. The other her therapist informs me is called semantic paraphasia.

There’s another problem Mrs Mr is dealing with. Perseveration. That’s going to need its own post.

Semantic paraphasia shows up like this: a patient in Mrs M’s condition---Mrs M, for example---unable to think of the right word (aphasia) or unable to force it out (initiation) will intentionally---or unintentionally---substitute a word or a phrase that’s close in meaning or sound to what she wants to say. This leads to some interesting word choices and sentence constructions that are amusing---funny but not just funny. Amusing in the way poetry is amusing. For instance, Mrs M has asked me to “unfascinate” the seatbelt on her wheelchair. And shortbread cookies are “sunshine cookies”, and all her young female therapists are “Kellys”, as if that’s their job title, probably because her first physical therapist back at Westchester Med was named Kelly.

So a tanager is a hummingbird is a cardinal is a goldfinch is a warbler. And how do you like that, Gertrude Stein?

This presumes Mrs M saw a bird at all.

She’s still showing signs of what her neurosurgeon taught me is called neglect on her left side, and, to encourage her to use her left hand and pay more attention to her left side, I was sitting on her left when I helped her open the card. It’s possible she didn’t turn her eyes even to the little degree it would have taken because, essentially, nothing to her left fully exists to her yet. It’s there but not there. As the doctor explained it, if told to hold her own left hand in front of her face, a patient with neglect of the left side won’t, simply because her own left hand isn’t there for her, and she won’t even miss it. Hold her hand up for her and ask whose hand it is, and she’ll say, without any curiosity or interest, “I don’t know.”

So she simply guessed at what bird might be there not because she saw a bird but because I told her there was a bird there to see.

And then there’s the way vision works in all of us. We don’t see the world as it is in totality. There’s too much sensory information coming at us for our brains to take in, more---much more---than it can process. What we “see” is an approximation constructed by our brains---if they’re functioning as designed---into an image that is enough like what’s really out there that we can navigate without walking into traffic, so to speak. It happens, though, that, routinely, necessary information gets left out or false information gets put in. We see things that aren’t there and don’t see things are. This happens in nanoseconds and is usually almost instantly self-correcting. Now and then the process is too slow and we wind up saying to the cop or the paramedic, “Wow! I never saw that coming!”

It’s possible that the process is still too slow for Mrs M and isn’t routinely self-correcting yet. If that’s the case, her doctors and therapists assure me, it will get better as her brain continues to heal.

Meanwhile, whatever’s the case, Mrs M is probably doing a lot of guessing, and some of her guessing might not be a direct symptom of her neurological condition at all. It’s a symptom of Mrs M being Mrs M. She’s maintaining her pride. She doesn’t want to admit she’s not operating at full capacity.

And there’s the real possibility she’s being a wiseguy.

She might have meant to tease me by calling the tanager a hummingbird, knowing that it would set me off and I’d make a pompous ass of myself in front of her just as I’ve done here explaining the differences between hummingbirds and the various species of tanagers. All throughout her ordeal, Mrs M has never lost her sense of humor or her determination to take me down a peg when I need it.

At any rate, to the friend who sent the card: It arrived today and Mrs M likes it very much and sends her thanks. She’s keeping it close at hand so she can cheer herself by looking at it again and again. The last time she asked me to show it to her, she exhibited some more semantic paraphasia or, as I prefer to think of it, she waxed poetic.

“More tanager please,” she said.

Hospital Journal. Day 37: Apparently Habbie has learned what work is

Mined from the notebooks, Friday, June 8, 2018. Posted Tuesday afternoon, June 12.

Doing a little scribbling in the common room while Mrs M takes a nap. Patient, man in his late fifties, in a wheelchair talking to his wife as they enter and settle themselves at a table. Man was expecting someone to come with her to visit.

“Where’s Habbie?”

“He’s working.”

“He’s where?”

“He’s working.”

“Working? He’s working?”

“Yes. He’s working.”

“Does he even know what that is?”

Mrs M's new view

Mined from the notebooks Wednesday afternoon, June 6, 2018. Posted Monday, June 11.

This is the common room just down the hall from Mrs M’s room in the rehab hospital. It’s going to be my office window for the next four to six weeks.

First things first. Thank you to all of you who have helped us out these last couple of months, and I’m not talking just to those who were able to help us out financially. I mean all of you! Your kindness, concern, encouragement, prayers, and love have kept all us Mannions going. Ken and Oliver join me in giving you our heartfelt thanks. It’s been hard to tell how much Mrs M has been able to take in, but I’ve been passing along your messages and I’m sure at some level she knows how good you’ve been to her and she’s sending you her love and thanks.

I’m sorry haven’t gotten out individual thank you notes yet, but they’re coming. I promise.

Now, the big and important news. Mrs M is not only out of the intensive care unit she’s out of the hospital where she had her surgery. Surgeries. Four of them. She’s still in the hospital just not that hospital. She was discharged from Westchester Medical Center yesterday afternoon (Tuesday, June 5) and moved to Helen Hayes Rehabilitation Hospital. This was always the plan. It just happened about three weeks later than we expected. Mrs M had a very rough time of it after her second brain surgery. Worried the hell out of her doctors for a while. Worried the hell out of me more. I’ll post more details soon but for now the main thing to know is that two more operations later the crisis has passed and she’s ready for the therapy that will get her up on her feet and moving again. I’m putting it mildly. She has to undergo a lot of therapy in order to get back control of her body and to start speaking and thinking like her old self. They’re going to be working her hard. (They’re already working her hard. She’s with her speech therapist now. She worked with a physical therapist and an occupational therapist in the morning.) But the doctors and therapists are fairly confident that she’ll be back to her old self in, well, that will be determined over time. They’re thinking four weeks at least, but six weeks is more likely. Then she’s probably going to have to come back here regularly as an outpatient for a few more months. But it all depends on Mrs M’s strength, determination, and resilience and she’s has plenty of all three.

That’s the big news. The little news is that there are several comfortable, semi-private places for me to set up my computer and write right here on Mrs M’s floor, including the room pictured above. There were none that I found at Westchester Med. Now I’ll be able to do some catching up, which is why what’s going to start appearing here on the blog is a random mix of current news, not so new news, what’s already old news, and ancient history. Make sure you check the dateline on posts so you’ll know why I’m posting about, for instance, a month-old David Brooks column.

Again, thank you again, and thank you all for sticking with the blog. If you’d like to send Mrs M a card she and her speech therapists would much appreciate it---they can use them to help her reorient her focus so she can start reading again. You can send them to my address:

PO Box 1197, New Paltz, New York, 12561.

Hospital Journal. Day 18: Hill Street Medical Center Blues

Mined from the notebooks, Sunday, May 20, 2018. Posted Monday, June 4.

 The Westchester County Jail is next door to the hospital. Actually, it’s essentially on the same grounds and looks like an extension of the med school campus, except for the razor wire. The hospital is for all intents and purposes the jail infirmary. Jail is a leftover term. It’s a prison with a population of longterm inmates, convicted felons of various degrees, although I’m not sure that includes first-degree ones. Ill and injured prisoners who wind up at the hospital are still prisoners, of course, and need to be guarded, which helps explain why uniformed law enforcement officers are in and out of here all day and all night and why the drive in front is as busy with rollers and police vans as the title credits of “Hill Street Blues”. At shift changes, the groups going in and out the doors sometimes seem to feature as many badges and as much Kevlar as stethoscopes and white coats. Tonight as I was on my way out, I met a trio coming in, all with big white letters spelling out CORRECTION on their vests

They entered in a line. The male officer in the rear was olive-skinned, fortyish, possibly Hispanic but possibly Arab-American, shovel-jawed and good-naturedly grinning, with his bill cap pushed back from his forehead and and his short-sleeved uniform shirt revealing that both his arms were as tattooed from his wrists to his elbows as an NBA star’s or many of the inmates he guards’. In the middle was a short and stout white woman in her late forties with a broad, smiling face and her sandy blond hair pulled back tightly, snow white roots showing around her forehead and temples. And in the lead was a tall, dark, and handsome white guy in his early thirties, as good-looking, trim, and fit as an actor playing a heroic cop on TV. Unlike the other two, his mood was unreadable. He didn’t look dour or grim, but he was serious and purposeful, his mind on the business at hand. When he stopped to check off boxes on his tablet and then to lift his left shirt collar point to say something into the microphone clipped there, the other two stayed in line behind him, their smiles not dimming in the least. The tall officer spoke softly enough that I couldn’t hear his voice even though the lobby was as quiet as you’d expect with the midnight shift beginning.

This reminds me. The city of Yonkers is in Westchester County and it’s not far from here, and Yonkers cops are among the regular police presence, although they’re often here in the company of ambulances and enter and leave through the emergency room which is in a separate wing that’s practically a whole hospital unto itself, so I haven’t run into many of them, just glimpsed them a long ways down the hall, striding alongside gurneys shuttling patients to examination rooms or ORs. But one day early in Mrs M’s stay I shared an elevator with one, a young female officer who looked like a cop, carried herself like a cop, a wore the serious, unreadable expression of a cop, but, I noticed, had just had her nails done. Her nails weren’t long or oversharp, the tips were rounded, as a matter of fact, but they still seemed more practical for office work than patrol duty. Pink polish but not pink polish.

Before I headed out to the car, I stopped at the cafe to grab a cup of coffee for the road. The grinning, olive-skinned corrections officer had gotten there ahead of me. I said he looked either Hispanic or Arab-American, but he could have been black but with a very light complexion or could have been white with a somewhat dark one, Greek or Italian, maybe, or maybe he was all of the above or some combination, a typical American of the already arrived future type that makes Trump voters so angry, insecure, and afraid. Whatever. He was at the coffee bar making himself a large cup of tea. His grin had grown into a full-fledged smile that he was wearing just for himself. He’s probably cheerful by nature but I wonder if hospital duty is an assignment corrections officers look forward to. I imagine it is. Change of scenery, change of pace. More comfortable surroundings. Many chances to sit down. Friendlier company. And much less physical risk. When I Googled the jail---because I always do my homework---three of the first four news stories that came up were about officers who had been in altercations with inmates, one put in the hospital as a patient herself.

Hospital Journal. Day 20: "I only have half an hour for lunch..."

Mined from the notebooks, Wednesday afternoon, May 23, 2018. Posted Thursday morning, May 31.

On the patio. Young nurse on her cell at a nearby table  Thin, dark haired, dark eyed, narrow-faced but with a big, wide smile that doesn’t seem to ever go away and a merry voice. Not eating her salad as she talks but absently turning over the greens with her fork.

“And then he told me he was trying to get Nidia pregnant, and I was like, Wow!  Yeah. He just wanted a baby. Then he had the nerve to text me to wish me Happy Birthday. (Listens to her friend who I guess is expressing concern for her feelings.) I’m not sad. I’m not! I’m actually happy for him. Hey! I’ve got to go. I only have half an hour for lunch. Bye! Love ya!” She ends the call. Thumb scrolls her phone. Finds a missed call and rings the number. Another friend. “Hi! Sorry I couldn’t take your call. But, listen. I only have half an hour for lunch, so let me tell you…”

But a noisily chatting group of people takes a table between us and I can’t hear what the nurse has to tell her second friend. But I like imagining it’s a repeat of the news she gave her first friend, delivered in the same merry voice.

Hospital Journal. Day 23. May 25, 2018: Mrs M sends her regards and sometimes her attention

Friday, May 25, 2018.

If nothing else I’m getting a refresher course in elementary neurology.

Dr W stopped in to see Mrs M today. Dr W and Dr B are good explainers. They give you the details without too much jargon with the intent of helping you understand what they’re doing and why instead of intending to impress you with their knowledge and expertise. I am impressed by their knowledge and expertise. It’s a question though whether I understand. But today Dr W explained the concepts of “regard and attention” and “neglect,” and I think I followed.

“Regard” is when I say hello and you focus on me and let me know by word, expression, or gesture that you are aware I’m there and recognize I said something although not necessarily what. “Attention” is just what it sounds like. You continue to focus and let me know not just that you’re hearing me but that you’re following what I’m saying or at least trying to. When Dr W came into Mrs M’s room and greeted her, he didn’t see any sign of attention or even regard.

But then he came around to the right side of the bed to examine her, she gave him more than regard and attention. She waved hello and answered his questions with thumbs ups. Dr W thinks that her lack of regard and attention when he approached her bedside from the left was due to “neglect.”

“Neglect” is the brain’s reaction to an injury on one side of the brain. Surgeons don’t like the word but surgery is injurious. As you know, the right side of your brain operates the left side of your body, and the left side of your brain is the in charge of the right. If you’re injured on the right side, the brain tends to focus on that side in order to concentrate on healing that side and forgets, that is, neglects, the left side, leaving it to fend for itself, which, without the brain giving it orders, it tends not to do. You can show someone whose brain is neglecting her left side her left hand, ask her, Whose hand is this? And she’ll say I don’t know. That’s Mrs M. Her last two surgeries were on the right side and the resulting edema is causing her to “neglect” left side. Dr W tried the Whose hand is this question and Mrs M looked at her hand with obvious indifference.

This is all fascinating. Well, as I’ve noted before. It would be fascinating, if it wasn’t my wife who was the subject of fascination.

Hospital Journal. Day 5: "I don't need his sexual advances!"

Monday, lunchtime, May 7, 2018.

Waiting in line at the cafeteria grill. Ahead of me, two women talking over the plexiglass partition at the counter, a counterwoman waiting for more burgers to come off the grill so she can dress them and and another hospital staff worker waiting for her order to come up. Both are middle-aged but the counterwoman is near fifty and the and staffer is in her late thirties. They are both Haitian and their conversation alternates between French and English, each one switching back and forth as she needs to, with a statement in French getting an English response as often as a French one and vice versa. And just as often a speaker will follow up her own French sentence with her own English one and even switch from one to the other and back in the same sentence as if she’s thinking simultaneously in both languages. But at one point the staffer switches to English and sticks to it and the counterwoman does the same so I can eavesdrop on this exchange:

Staffer:  I just come to work, do my work, and be joyful, and help others be joyful so they can get through the day. I don’t need his sexual advances!

Counterwoman: Did you tell him that?

Staffer: Of course!

Counterwoman: Good for you!