Better Than Dead

…but I’d rather starling.

My mother’s 90th birthday is coming up soon (April 7) so I wanted to do something special for her. Her surrogate sons and daughters and I are giving her a little party on April 9, but I wanted a nice surprise for her, too. For her 80th birthday, I made her a book, and I didn’t want to repeat myself. So I found some pictures, wrote some captions, and our own hominysnark of F-bod Studios took them and turned them into lovely wearable art (Mom loves her some sweatshirts). I’m so happy with them I wanted to share—but shhh! Mom doesn’t know, so don’t tell her.

Tonight’s viewing: The Social Network or DVR’d movies/shows? Hmmm… 5 Feb

Bioshock much more intense shooter game than I thot it would be. Fascinating and–did I say intense?–but just bloodier than anticipated. 5 Feb

@[NameRedacted] No worries. At this point, I don’t trust Life enough to totally unclench.  5 Feb

So this is what relaxed and unclenched feels like. I find that I like it. 5 Feb

@[NameRedacted] George brings many nuances, non-Biblical info about Lilith and “dark” goddesses in general. Very eye opening. 5 Feb

@[NameRedacted] Mysteries of the Dark Moon Goddesses by Demetra George a great resource for Lilith. 5 Feb

SteveMartinToGo Steve Martin Retweeted by pj_thompson Got some great pictures of paparazzi today. Man, they UGLY! Went through their garbage too. Found my own garbage in their garbage. 4 Feb

Mom is back in her room having juice. 4 Feb

Have moved on from coffee to hot chocolate. Really not bad for machine stuff. 4 Feb

I always bring so much stuff to distract me while waiting but am too distracted to use it. 4 Feb

Mom is in recovery though still out of it. Everything went well. We got in early and done early. 4 Feb

In sympathy with my iced in friends I scraped a thin coating of ice off my windshield this morning. 4 Feb

The coffee at least is good. 4 Feb

I have spent way too much time in waiting rooms and hospital cafeterias this year. [12 month period vs. calendar year.]  4 Feb

“You want the Haggis? You can’t handle the Haggis.” #FamousMovieQuotesMadeBetterWithHaggis 3 Feb

JillCorcoran Jill Corcoran Retweeted by pj_thompson For all of you querying agents…. RESEARCHING AGENTS: http://bit.ly/6WFMMT 2 Feb

MJMcKean Michael McKean Retweeted by pj_thompson Hey, fans: shooting begins next month on Indiana Jones and the Early Bird Special. 2 Feb

It’s been a terrifying week, actually. Tuesday night, after a day of running errands and feeling fine, my mom got a terrible stomach ache after dinner.

“I’m just going to sit down for a minute,” she said, sitting in the rocker in the living room.

“You just sit there and I’ll do the dishes.”

“Okay. It really does hurt, but it usually goes away in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

She’s been having these stomach aches after dinner for a couple of weeks, you see, but they always go away after a short while. This one was persistent.

So I did the dishes and I realized she’d been quiet for a long time. I came in to check on her and she’d passed out. I don’t just mean a little faint—she was gone. Completely unresponsive, head slumped forward, pale, clammy, cold. In fact, I thought she was dead for a few terrifying moments until I picked up a pulse. I jumped for the phone to call 911, but her head lolled back and she made this scary aspiration sound, so I tipped it forward again, and she got sick, and then she started to revive a little, but by that time I had the paramedics on the way and the 911 operator on the line. They got there really fast and she was wuzzy but talking a little by then. By the time one of the nice firemen and I had gathered up her medicines and they’d loaded her on the stretcher, she was actually sort of chatty. The paramedic said they’d stabilize her in the ambulance, but it looked like she’d be okay, then they transported her and I followed in my car.

Something must have been in the air that night because the local hospital E-room was full up, as were many of the others except Brotman, which is a horrible place, and when the paramedic mentioned it, Mom declared, “I’m not going to Brotman! Don’t take me there!” Which actually unknotted some of the sheer terror in my stomach a little if she was being that adamant. They managed to get her into Santa Monica-UCLA, but even that was almost full. On the drive there, I passed three other ambulances in full cry.

She was very thoroughly checked out at Santa Monica. They couldn’t find anything sinister going on until they did a CAT scan of stomach and then they found an undiagnosed stomach issue—the doctor described it as a kind a hardening of the arteries in the intestines so that she wasn’t getting enough blood in her stomach when trying to digest food. That’s what had been giving her stomach aches. Blood thinners and smaller meals will help with that issue. I’d had a bout of 24-hour stomach virus the previous week, and that may have been contributing to things. She had the same symptoms as me in the following day and a half.

Why did she pass out in such a scary fashion? The pain this time had been more intense than previous times and the doctor’s theory is that she passed out from the pain. Her heart is sound, her BP had come back up, she’d stabilized, so at 2 a.m. we took a taxi home from the hospital.

Don’t get me started on the parking problems around Santa Monica hospital. There is no emergency room parking longer than 20 minutes. I had to walk a block and a half in the dark from a $10 parking structure to get to the emergency room and I wasn’t about to repeat that at 2 a.m. It all seemed quite minor compared to what we’d gone through earlier, and I was so grateful to be taking her home again I didn’t worry about it. I was still grateful the next day, but rather “perturbed” when a neighbor gave me a ride to pick up my car. I’d pulled into a legal visitor’s parking space okay, but it was one of those double ones and I didn’t pull all the way to the wall. They had booted my car and were going to tow it. I don’t usually do the hysterical female thing because it’s just not my way, but I pulled that trick out of the bag that day and launched it on them. Besides, I was in a legal space. They unbooted my car and let me drive away.

Mom was quite sick for a few days and her primary care doctor said to keep her hydrated, but don’t force the eating issue too much. She managed to start eating (albeit lightly) by yesterday so I thought I might actually go to work today, but then the stress caught up with me and slammed me. I haven’t felt at all well today and stayed home. She’s alert, eating (still lightly), and we’re going to her doctor next week.

But I can’t quite leave that terror behind. Somewhere in me there’s a post on death and dying wanting to be written and the cycle of life, but not now. I don’t know when I’ll be ready to face that one. Who ever is ready for that one?

So I fought my way home last night in beach traffic from Santa Monica to Westchester. Traffic’s been ugly lately and there just isn’t any good way to pass between these two areas. I was so looking forward to getting in my jammies and finishing the book I was reading. But no. Mom had another bird crisis.

Gotten herself worked up again, too. “I hate to do this to you but she’s acting sick again and I called that bird place in Santa Monica and said we’d bring her in as soon as we could.”

“She’s probably going to lay another egg.”

“When I described to that bird place how she was acting, they said we better bring her in to make sure she’s not egg bound.”

Egg bound. Wherein a bird’s got an egg in the shoot that won’t come out. They can die from it. What could I do? I changed out of my work clothes and got back on the road, back to Santa Monica. The bird, I should note, was hopping around and acting perky by this time, but far be it from me to point that out.

Yes, she had an egg in there, but didn’t appear to be egg bound. And no, it isn’t unnatural for her to just start laying eggs now after so many years. I knew from experience that was so, but the nice vet lady reinforced it. And yes, it was probably the calcium supplements Mom had been giving her which helped her produce eggs. Sometimes they go years and years, then start laying; sometimes they go years and years and never lay. I wish Baby had been in that latter category, but alas. The nice vet lady said that if she didn’t lay an egg in the next 24-48 hours, they’d induce, and maybe later look at giving her something to inhibit egg production. She can’t do without the calcium. She had a severe deficiency last winter and stopped being able to fly. But that was another bird crisis some months ago. Returning to the present bird crisis…

Tips for natural inhibition of egg-laying: (1) Baby is to be locked into her cage. Apparently, any stimulation such as flying around the house, sitting on Mom’s shoulder and watching TV, throwing pencils on the floor and ripping paper up is right out for the next two weeks. That kind of stimulation (since she’s bonded with Mom) can bring on the egg-laying. (2) Mom must cover her cage earlier in the evening than she has been (moving from 7 p.m. to 4-5 p.m.) and leave her covered later in the morning. Apparently, the more hours of light, the more it stimulates egg production. (3) If she lays another egg, leave it in her cage. Having an egg to fuss over can also inhibit egg production.

Fortunately for at least part of this scenario, when Mom uncovered Baby this morning, she had already laid her egg. It currently resides in her cage to be fussed over.

And I sincerely hope this is the end of bird crises for the moment. Or at least, the next time Baby acts like this Mom will recognize that it’s just another egg in the oven.

I should preface this story by saying that my mother is a strong Valkyrie of a woman, even at 89. She’s also damned sharp and not frail and she most definitely doesn’t cry often, so when she called me Thursday morning at work sobbing, I definitely sat up and took notice.

“What’s wrong, what’s wrong?”

“My little bird is very sick,” she sobbed. “I called his vet, but she’s not in and they referred me to an emergency bird place in Palos Verdes.” That’s a long, unfamiliar way for someone who doesn’t drive freeways and doesn’t have Google Maps or internet access or a Garman.

She adores her baby bird, she does. He’s been a great companion for her for the last seven years or so, and she’s quite protective of him. Because of that she’s sometimes been convinced he was dying when he wasn’t, so I asked her to describe his symptoms. It didn’t sound good. He wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t do anything, just sat on his perch (a little shelf in the back of his cage) with his eyes shut and his feathers ruffled. When birds don’t feel well, they sit for long periods with feathers ruffled.

“Maybe I can find a bird clinic that’s closer and easier to get to,” I told her.

So I got online and found a place in Santa Monica. She called them and they told her she’d have to come in for an evaluation to decide if it was a true emergency worthy of calling in the bird expert. She didn’t like that and had worked herself up into a real state by the time she called me back. I was more concerned about that then the bird, I’m afraid, but concerned for him,too. I told my boss what was going on (well, that my mom had a crisis situation going) and he told me to go take care of my family. So I called her and told her I was on my way and maybe she could call the Santa Monica folks back to tell them we’d be therre.

It took me about twenty minutes to drive from work to Mom and during that time I couldn’t help remembering a disturbing dream I’d had on the weekend in which her bird had died. So I wasn’t happy with the Universe sending me precognitive dreams when we’d made a deal after my dad’s death that It wouldn’t do that anymore. It was a long damned twenty minutes, I’ll tell you. I pulled into the driveway and rushed towards the house.

Mom met me at the door. “He laid an egg!”

Picture my jaw hitting the front steps. Picture me grabbing the porch rail. Hear in your mind’s ear the sputtering noise I made. “He what?”

“He laid an egg!” She was beaming. “And he’s just fine now! He’s talking and his feathers aren’t ruffled and he’s eat and jumping around and he’s his old self again.”

“Now quite his old self,” I told her, “because he is quite clearly not a he.”

We called the bird clinic and told them we would not be coming in. I made it back to work, having only been gone and hour, and took it as an “early lunch.” Everyone there was quite relieved that the mysterious crisis had been averted.

In our defense, I should say that even the vet said, “I think he’s male, but it’s difficult to tell with starlings.”

Indeed.