Unrelated matters
Monday, 28 December 2015 06:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
carose59"I Don't Know Why. I Could Speculate, But I Won't."*
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I read an article in The New Yorker recently about a hospital where the survival rate of patients with a particular terminal disease is much higher than any other hospital. (I'm not being intentionally vague; I read the article sometime during the autumn and it's now late December and I no longer remember the names of either the disease or the hospital.) It was a disease that effects children, that they usually die from by the time they become teenagers, but one doctor has a program that is keeping them alive much longer. The reason for his success is constant vigilance, constant work, both by the medical staff and by the patients. Good enough wasn't good enough; taking a day off of therapy wasn't tolerated.
The point of the article was about how medicine, how medical treatment could be improved, but while I was reading it all I could think I was, I wouldn't have the energy to do this. I just wouldn't, not even when I was a kid.
My mother and I were talking the other day about our mood swings, and how it required a certain amount of emotional energy to call someone on the phone and talk to them, and I said it was like the tide: it comes and goes and you can't control it; when the tide is out, the tide is out and the energy just isn't there.
I've been feeling so bad about Pat for so many reasons, not the least of which is, if I was a better person, she'd still be alive. If I had looked after her better, she'd still be alive, and if I wasn't so selfish, I would have looked after her better. I believe that.
But I have to start letting it go, because I keep wondering about things that are wrong with me, various pains, and the whole one percent-possibility-of-cancer thing that I'm right now ignoring, and all I can think is that really, it would be all right if I had something terminal, because I don't really care about living a lot longer, and anyway, I deserve it. I'm not suicidal, but I am . . . not terribly concerned with living. It doesn't seem worth a lot of effort.
And besides, I feel very unhappy about this, the guilt is very painful, and it's making me feel like nobody wants to have anything to do with me. (Either that or it's true that nobody wants to have anything to do with me; I can't tell. But if I could get rid of the feeling, I could do more about making contact with people, and if I was doing everything I could and people were still . . . not there, well, then at least I'd know.)
If I had been a better person, stronger, more focused on Pat, on making her see doctors when she didn't want to, on making her eat better—
(I have no idea how I would have made her eat better. How do you force an adult to eat what she doesn't want to? For that matter, how do you force her to go to the doctor?)
I think we have a right to our own deaths. I think we have a right to be irresponsible with our lives, and choose how we're going to be irresponsible. I couldn't make her do the exercises the doctor told her to do, and making her feel bad because she wasn't doing them wouldn't have helped. I did what I could to make her happy; I did what she asked me as far as her health went. I could have done more, but I honestly don't believe she wanted me to, because I believe she would have asked.
The day Pat died, or maybe the next day, but probably that day because that's the day everybody called (and I never heard from most of them again), a friend who had just seen Pat a week earlier said Pat told her she was dying. I don't doubt that in the slightest, but I do wonder what she meant by it. Other people don't seem to be aware of her tendency to over-dramatize things. (But then other people never had to pick her up off the floor while she kept saying she was never going to be able to get up. It freaked me out when she said that, and I had to start answering with, "Well, then you better get used to the cats walking on you.") I don't know what to think. I keep thinking I should have known, but I'm pretty sure that's entirely the wrong thing to think.
If there was doctor who could have helped Pat, who would have kept her alive longer but who expected the constant vigilance and constant work I was talking about earlier—Pat would still be dead. Even though I'm doubting myself awfully right now, I do know this about her. She was not that kind of person, anymore than I am, and she wouldn't hate me for that. I did what I could, and she thought that was a lot; she told me so.
That was the first thing. The second thing was about my father's family, who I might have mentioned were crazy. Manic-depressive. My father had four uncles, three of whom died in the mental institution. The fourth one died in prison.
My father was manic-depressive. His brother, his only sibling, wasn't, but my cousin, his only daughter, is. I am, though I seem to take after my mother's side of the family more.
But my father had a cousin who was manic-depressive. He was married, no kids, and a pension from the army (because he had his first breakdown while he was in the service). At some point he was on some medication (I don't know what), but he stopped taking it, and he lived his life without it. He and his wife made the decision that they could do that, that they could live through the highs and lows without medication.
I don't know if they were happy together, but they stayed together, so I'm guessing they were.
*Bill Ayres
-:- -:- -:- -:-
I read an article in The New Yorker recently about a hospital where the survival rate of patients with a particular terminal disease is much higher than any other hospital. (I'm not being intentionally vague; I read the article sometime during the autumn and it's now late December and I no longer remember the names of either the disease or the hospital.) It was a disease that effects children, that they usually die from by the time they become teenagers, but one doctor has a program that is keeping them alive much longer. The reason for his success is constant vigilance, constant work, both by the medical staff and by the patients. Good enough wasn't good enough; taking a day off of therapy wasn't tolerated.
The point of the article was about how medicine, how medical treatment could be improved, but while I was reading it all I could think I was, I wouldn't have the energy to do this. I just wouldn't, not even when I was a kid.
My mother and I were talking the other day about our mood swings, and how it required a certain amount of emotional energy to call someone on the phone and talk to them, and I said it was like the tide: it comes and goes and you can't control it; when the tide is out, the tide is out and the energy just isn't there.
I've been feeling so bad about Pat for so many reasons, not the least of which is, if I was a better person, she'd still be alive. If I had looked after her better, she'd still be alive, and if I wasn't so selfish, I would have looked after her better. I believe that.
But I have to start letting it go, because I keep wondering about things that are wrong with me, various pains, and the whole one percent-possibility-of-cancer thing that I'm right now ignoring, and all I can think is that really, it would be all right if I had something terminal, because I don't really care about living a lot longer, and anyway, I deserve it. I'm not suicidal, but I am . . . not terribly concerned with living. It doesn't seem worth a lot of effort.
And besides, I feel very unhappy about this, the guilt is very painful, and it's making me feel like nobody wants to have anything to do with me. (Either that or it's true that nobody wants to have anything to do with me; I can't tell. But if I could get rid of the feeling, I could do more about making contact with people, and if I was doing everything I could and people were still . . . not there, well, then at least I'd know.)
If I had been a better person, stronger, more focused on Pat, on making her see doctors when she didn't want to, on making her eat better—
(I have no idea how I would have made her eat better. How do you force an adult to eat what she doesn't want to? For that matter, how do you force her to go to the doctor?)
I think we have a right to our own deaths. I think we have a right to be irresponsible with our lives, and choose how we're going to be irresponsible. I couldn't make her do the exercises the doctor told her to do, and making her feel bad because she wasn't doing them wouldn't have helped. I did what I could to make her happy; I did what she asked me as far as her health went. I could have done more, but I honestly don't believe she wanted me to, because I believe she would have asked.
The day Pat died, or maybe the next day, but probably that day because that's the day everybody called (and I never heard from most of them again), a friend who had just seen Pat a week earlier said Pat told her she was dying. I don't doubt that in the slightest, but I do wonder what she meant by it. Other people don't seem to be aware of her tendency to over-dramatize things. (But then other people never had to pick her up off the floor while she kept saying she was never going to be able to get up. It freaked me out when she said that, and I had to start answering with, "Well, then you better get used to the cats walking on you.") I don't know what to think. I keep thinking I should have known, but I'm pretty sure that's entirely the wrong thing to think.
If there was doctor who could have helped Pat, who would have kept her alive longer but who expected the constant vigilance and constant work I was talking about earlier—Pat would still be dead. Even though I'm doubting myself awfully right now, I do know this about her. She was not that kind of person, anymore than I am, and she wouldn't hate me for that. I did what I could, and she thought that was a lot; she told me so.
That was the first thing. The second thing was about my father's family, who I might have mentioned were crazy. Manic-depressive. My father had four uncles, three of whom died in the mental institution. The fourth one died in prison.
My father was manic-depressive. His brother, his only sibling, wasn't, but my cousin, his only daughter, is. I am, though I seem to take after my mother's side of the family more.
But my father had a cousin who was manic-depressive. He was married, no kids, and a pension from the army (because he had his first breakdown while he was in the service). At some point he was on some medication (I don't know what), but he stopped taking it, and he lived his life without it. He and his wife made the decision that they could do that, that they could live through the highs and lows without medication.
I don't know if they were happy together, but they stayed together, so I'm guessing they were.
*Bill Ayres