The Doctor Will See You Now

D always falls asleep first. Which is really not ever a bad thing, because 1. he is much more of a morning person than I have ever been (even when I convince myself I am one) which means he gets me out of bed even when I hate doing it and 2. since he is a morning person, the two hours of daylight he has on me, I translate into the night time computer dawdling I've done since I was a little kid, while he ZzzZz's away. It usually works great. However, on the rare occasion that I'm really tangled up in the brain and I can't unravel the giant yarn ball that is my head, all I can do is sit next to him and wonder what he's dreaming about and listen to the steady in, out of his breathing, and feel very very jealous that he can drift off so quickly.

As D mentioned, we have a tendency to discuss fate. Fate which I often interpret as chance, or luck. I've heard that happy little phrase, "luck is just where preparation and opportunity meet." But, I've gotta say, that little blurb really doesn't sum anything up when your luck is pretty deep in the shitter. In the bitterly early morning hours today, as "luck" would have it, my mother threw open the door to my room and said, "I need you to take me to the hospital," in a far less dramatic fashion than you would expect so late at night, but with just enough gusto to scare the living hell out of me -- though I was completely drugged out on Tylenol PM. Now, aside from the fact that the word "hospital" at 4a.m. will freak any sane person out, my immediate mental associations to any phrase using that word are the rough equivalent of a mushroom cloud in the brain. But only one that occurs in under 15 seconds. Every year for three + years, I received a frantic phone call in the middle of the night telling me someone was in the hospital, or someone's test at the hospital came back reallll bad, or someone was being sent to the hospital because they had to get tests done cause they were maybe not quite so good. And for those three years any phone call I received past 1 a.m. EST would immediately set off alarm bells in my head. (Suffice to say, my mother's "I don't get why the computer screen won't turn on!" at 2 a.m. EST were a huge annoyance to me). Every hospital visit, with the exception of my own senior year of college, ended in death. Is that fate? That I should end up carrying bundles of flowers to the graveyard bigger than any I've carried to a happy occasion? Or is that luck? Because luck would imply that somehow the random chance and opportunity of all these unfortunate incidents, and all the environmental factors which conflated in such a way as to cause the deaths, is in some way benefiting me and make me happy/rich/amazing beyond my wildest dreams. Is that really what the deal is? Fate likes to take a nicely shined toe box and jam it up your butt hole? I'm digressing, though.

So this morning, as I struggled back to consciousness from the murky depths of Acetaminophen and Diphenhydramine HCl, I was trying to prevent myself from having the usual chest constricting panic attack that typically happens in these situations.

I hate sending family members to the hospital. Even worse, I hate leaving them there. You are the most helpless, useless person when suddenly the only people capable of aiding someone you would give your life for, are those who realistically have no ties to this nearest, dearest person in your life. Your best bet is to either piss off the staff by asking for the nine million blankets you think your loved one needs to stay warm, and yet another cup of that chicken bouillon soup since they can't eat any solid food, or to sit quietly in the corner of the room and stare at the red call button hanging from the bed post while you wait for yet another hour to hear from the Physician on call. This is bad, of course, without even mentioning the number of medical mishaps that happen on a daily basis. Because then there's always the latent fear that anything and everything will go wrong as soon as you step out the door of aforementioned loved one's pallid fluorescent lit room.

I realized today as I was driving home from the hospital, that even at the tender-ish age of 24, the time for me to care for my parents is quickly rounding the bend. My mother, who I have always regarded as unbeatably strong and indomitable in every way, was suddenly facing the realities of age and stress. I understand that my eventual fate, my eventual destiny, will be to care for my mother and send her into whatever next life she'll lead -- but it doesn't mean that I enjoy the idea of it. And it sure as hell doesn't mean I think it's fair in any way, or that I want to have anything to do with it. I feel like I'm in some sort of collusion with Annubis, so he can collect my mother's soul to weigh and then I can be on my way to figure out my own soul's lightness.

I feel like I barely know anything, and that I know only a fraction of what my parents both know/knew, and that being left here without both of them is the most terrifying prospect to me of all. I know it has to happen eventually, but I would much rather push that moment off for as long as possible by pretending that it will never come, than having to face the reality of a pathetically small room in an emergency ward at a dinky hospital.

This post didn't make any sense other than that I'm scared, and I'm sad, and I am utterly exhausted. And I wish I could fall asleep as fast as D can every night, because then I could just snore blissfully and never be left to pondering or making loud noises on my keyboard in the middle of the night while he slept so peacefully next to me.