Wednesday, January 19, 2005
It's all set.
Routine doctor's appointment in Mesa on Monday at 1500. We leave Prescott around 1000, arrive there around noon and check into a motel close to the doctor's office; pick up some lunch someplace, probably fast food, which will delight my mother. She'll have time to take a short nap at the motel and refresh herself for the rest of the day. We'll check out of the motel around 1400 and head over to her doctor's office. After the appointment we'll head down to MCF's house and enjoy an evening of good friends, good conversation, good dogs, good food, etc. Sometime in the evening, well after rush hour, we'll pack ourselves back in the car and return to Prescott. We're both looking forward to the trip. MCF suggested that we forget about the motel altogether, that Mom could nap at her house. I told her there's an excellent chance that Mom'll leak through while she naps and I'd rather she do that at a motel than at a friend's house. I'm taking along a plastic sheet to slip under the bed sheet just in case but, you know, motel laundries are set up to handle stuff like this. A house full of friends, all of whom are continent adults, is not.
The weather has been beautiful up here, in the low 60's during the day, plenty of unadulterated sun, but Mom still thinks it's too cool and will only stick her nose out the door long enough to say, "I'm not going out there!" I'm hoping that an afternoon in a sunny Chandler back yard with treasured friends while the temperature is in the 70's will warm her up a little, get her moving, perk her interest in moving about outside the house up here.
Funniest thing: Today we watched a couple of episodes of the first season of Northern Exposure, which I finally ordered. One of the episodes was "Soapy Sanderson". In this episode an elderly man commits suicide. It is mentioned during the episode that his age at his death was 82. When Mom heard this she said, "82?!? That's so young to die!" That's my Mom! One of the aspects of the episode that heartened me is that Soapy Sanderson, at 82, with a broken hip which happened when he fell from a tree he was climbing, is scolded by Dr. Fleischman because he isn't doing what the doctor told him to do and, if he doesn't he can't expect to "improve". This is one of my fairly frequent litanies to my mother, and from her doctors. And, yet, she continues. It put me in mind of the episode we watched yesterday, Brains, Know How and Native Intelligence, during which Dr. Fleischman and Uncle Anku, a tribal medicine man, agree on several aspects of medicine, including that the body is, in many cases, an amazing self-righting machine. Of course, in the case of Uncle Anku's urinary bleeding, it isn't, and his pride must be addressed in order to convince him to seek western medical treatment. In my mother's case I don't think pride is the problem. I think, for the most part, she simply doesn't want to be fooled with as much as doctors would like to fool with her and, frankly, I don't blame her. In most cases I support her. I think, at 87, considering her entire life profile, that, as with Soapy Sanderson, she has the right to decide when to listen to medicine and when to say, "Hey, go practice on someone else and leave me the fuck alone! It's okay with me if I don't qualify as AARP's Amazing Ancient of the Year!"
The weather has been beautiful up here, in the low 60's during the day, plenty of unadulterated sun, but Mom still thinks it's too cool and will only stick her nose out the door long enough to say, "I'm not going out there!" I'm hoping that an afternoon in a sunny Chandler back yard with treasured friends while the temperature is in the 70's will warm her up a little, get her moving, perk her interest in moving about outside the house up here.
Funniest thing: Today we watched a couple of episodes of the first season of Northern Exposure, which I finally ordered. One of the episodes was "Soapy Sanderson". In this episode an elderly man commits suicide. It is mentioned during the episode that his age at his death was 82. When Mom heard this she said, "82?!? That's so young to die!" That's my Mom! One of the aspects of the episode that heartened me is that Soapy Sanderson, at 82, with a broken hip which happened when he fell from a tree he was climbing, is scolded by Dr. Fleischman because he isn't doing what the doctor told him to do and, if he doesn't he can't expect to "improve". This is one of my fairly frequent litanies to my mother, and from her doctors. And, yet, she continues. It put me in mind of the episode we watched yesterday, Brains, Know How and Native Intelligence, during which Dr. Fleischman and Uncle Anku, a tribal medicine man, agree on several aspects of medicine, including that the body is, in many cases, an amazing self-righting machine. Of course, in the case of Uncle Anku's urinary bleeding, it isn't, and his pride must be addressed in order to convince him to seek western medical treatment. In my mother's case I don't think pride is the problem. I think, for the most part, she simply doesn't want to be fooled with as much as doctors would like to fool with her and, frankly, I don't blame her. In most cases I support her. I think, at 87, considering her entire life profile, that, as with Soapy Sanderson, she has the right to decide when to listen to medicine and when to say, "Hey, go practice on someone else and leave me the fuck alone! It's okay with me if I don't qualify as AARP's Amazing Ancient of the Year!"
