A Dramatic Life

I'm a big fan of drama; my shelves are stuffed with films and books with it. Once I even dreamed of making a career of it. But I never get accustomed to the excess of drama in my day to day life. Everyone has drama in their lives. Mine just sometimes has more of a David Lynch aspect to it. Observe:

Last week I was reading a really good book by Eloisa James called – I dunno, one of the Duchess books. All of her books are really good and several of them are Duchess oriented. I particularly liked DUCHESS BY NIGHT if anyone's looking for a recommendation. And the one I read last week – OK, I'm looking it up, it's WHEN THE DUKE RETURNS. Also, I was wrong. While I thoroughly enjoyed DUCHESS BY NIGHT, I skipped ahead to the woman-in-man's-clothing reveal because it was inevitable and I wasn't up to the ring-around-the-shenanigans to get there. I did love A DUKE OF HER OWN (also known as Villiers' book). It absolutely paid off all the hype I've heard about it. Plus, Eloisa writes a kicking book, and she's a Shakespeare scholar, so major points there. Go pick it up.

Back to last week. I was reading WHEN THE DUKE RETURNS (it's fantastic) and I was totally involved with it to the point that I didn't want to stop reading just because I was leaving the office. Oh, didn't I mention that? Sorry. We were on the slow slide towards the end of the day that day so I'd begun reading while at work. Caught up? Good.

I should say here that I am notorious for being unable to put down a book. I power read – once I've begun, I usually don't want to stop until I've completed the story. If it's a really good book, I just want to consume it in one sitting. If it's bad, I just want out, but this doesn't mean I stop reading. I cannot seem to grasp the concept that the book will still be there in the morning, which explains my long history of staying up late reading, often by flashlight to offset parental interruptions and/or scolding.

Anyways. Last week. I knew that if I went home, I was unlikely to be given the space and peace to finish my book (see above: parental interruptions – some things never change). Cannily (I thought), I decided to stop at my local Starbucks, treat myself to a hot caramel apple cider (oh so yummy!) and settle into a chair to finish my novel. This I did, cell phone lying on the table before me set on vibrate, 40s torch songs blessedly playing over the store's speakers. I even had a patron vacate a leather chair just as I was picking up my drink. Pretty dang close to a good night.

So, naturally, I had to pay for that.

I came to the end of the novel and consequently up for air around 8:30 pm. Automatically, I checked my cell phone; there were four messages. The first was an hour old message from my mother (no surprise there) apparently stuck at the physical therapist office with no ride home. The second was from the Life Alert people (we have their system in our apartment in the event my mother should fall or have a medical issue while alone). The alarm in my living room had gone off and they were unable to reach her. I was very interested to hear this as, as far as I knew, my mother was still at the PT office. The third message was from the Waldwick Police Department, telling me that they'd been called by Life Alert because my mother's alarm went off and they, the Life Alert people, were unable to reach her or me as it turned out. At this point, I was beginning to wonder if my mom was really in danger, or if she thought somehow that pushing her emergency button would get her a ride home from PT. Really not out of the realm of possibility for her.

The fourth message was the imaging people at my doctor's office reminding me of my mammogram appointment the next day. Cause anticipating that was going to make things better.

In case you don't know, this is how the Life Alert is designed to work: If it goes off, first they check with my mom at the house. When they can't get her, they call my cell phone. Normally, this is where it stops and has stopped in the past when the alarm has gone off, because I've been able to say, I'll look into it, and there ends Life Alert's responsibility. If they can't get me on the cell, they call my office. If I don't respond to those two calls and no one is responding at the house, then the company contacts the police to go out and check.

An aggrieved call to my mother found her safe and well and at home, but very upset. With her relative well-being confirmed, I let loose my fury, selfishly consumed with the thought that I couldn't go off the radar for two and a half hours. And that was before I checked in with the police and found out that they'd gone into my apartment to search for my mother. Now I was desperately praying that they hadn't kicked the door in as not only have I forgotten the combination to the lock box I put on my doorknob for just these situations, I also neglected to register the combination with Life Alert. Yep, I was batting a thousand on the home care there.

Once home I found my mother visibly shaken, as in literally shaking, the scotch and ginger ale not making any dent in her reaction. Why? Because when my mom got home from PT, transport issue resolved, my landlord S greeted her at the door in hysterics. Apparently not one, not two, but THREE local police stations sent men to my house along with an ICU mobile unit from the hospital. S let them all into the apartment relieving my door-kicked-in fears, and they thoroughly searched it, and then they searched the backyard with flashlights, and then they searched the front driveway with flashlights and then – they all went home.

And why you may ask? Why did all these fine public servants arrive at my house? Why had the Life Alert gone off when not only was no one in the house, but the lanyard emergency button was with my mother, out of range, nearly two towns away?

Cats. The company told my mother the cats must have set it off. Riiiggghhhtt.

While it's not nearly the point, I'm compelled to defend my cats by saying that the device is in the living room, which is blocked by a child gate whenever no one is in the room to preserve my furniture from territory marking kitties. No, they can't jump the gate; two are too fat and the other is too scared. It wasn't the cats. The bloody box malfunctioned.

Speaking of my cats, it's about 20 minutes after I got home that I said to my mother "have you seen the cats?" I mean, the cops were all over the place, but did they close the door behind them? Thankfully, all three almost immediately came out of hiding, so it was a nonissue – but clearly I am a bad kitty mother because this concern barely fazed me.

All this – ALL THIS – because I went off the grid for a mere two and a half hours. And yes, yes, I lied to my mother and told her my phone had turned itself off (which it does) when I just hadn't been paying attention to it. I know, I know, I'm going to hell for that one, or at least it'll be one of what's sure to be many things to tick off at the judgment seat. Got it. Don't forget to add a fondness for vodka. Thanks.

But I learned one crucial thing from this experience. Figure out the lockbox code? Yeah, that's a priority right now, but not what I meant. Get a new alarm box? Boy. Howdy. But not that it either. Find the peace within to care for an ailing parent without regressing to the point that I need to hide away in a Starbucks to read a damn ass novel uninterrupted? Pshaw. Like that's gonna happen.

So what's the come-to-Jesus epiphany I've had from my latest you-just-can't-make-this-crap-up experience?

This, right here, this exact sort of thing, this is why I make my bed every morning.

For the Hyphen Impaired

I am hyphen impaired. Hello, my name is Kiersten, and I am hyphen impaired. (Hi Kiersten!) I constantly have problems with knowing the appropriate times to include a hyphen in a compound word. Like post discharge. Or prework. Or low-molecular-weight heparin (that's a trick one b/c it uses an en dash, which blogger doesn't provide so you'll have to use your imagination). Despite my enormous progress as a medical editor over the five and a half years that I've been at this job, any use or even implication of a hyphen is cause for self-doubt and a deep consultation with my best-friend, Webster, and his long-time companion AMA (as in style guide). And then, I call my boss. Or wing it.

I don't really wing it.

OK - maybe sometimes.

Lately this disease has spread to my general typing capabilities. I've preferred typing to writing ever since I got the hang of it in my ninth-grade typing class (like they give that any more in high schools) where it was a hot day indeed when you got to use the electric typewriter. The advent of computer technology endeared me even more to the keyboard as the beautiful DELETE button (or dell-it as I've thought of it for many years thanks to my friend Barbara's husband Tony) made erasing errors much easier than using a messy white-out typewriter ribbon. See, I think faster than I can write and so I instinctively clutch my pen very tightly (hence the writing callus long adorning my fingers) as I strain to get words down before new ones crowd them out of my brain. Using a keyboard makes the process of transferring thought to text much easier and mistakes a quick, clean breath away from extinction.

But recently, my fingers have become clumsy and I find myself typing "work" when I mean "word" and leaving "he" in a paragraph instead of "his" and not even noticing the difference through six or seven edits (this happened last night). Sometimes, it's just because my fingers aren't placed properly on my keyboard. Occasionally, it's simply that my keystroke hasn't be firm enough to register on the tiles. Often, it's only that my brain is off in some different direction. Slightly impaired again.

Which sort of explains the delay since my last, hasty post. I could attribute my lack of productivity to the Easter holiday (true), my sister's extended visit from Arizona during said holiday (still true), the newest unexpected hospital stay for my mother (holding steady on the truth meter), or the increased volume and velocity of work at my office (ding, ding, ding!). But mainly it's because all that's made me a little more than simply hyphen-impaired.

I made progress in the word count this weekend, spurred on my the truly excellent people at Liberty States Fiction Writers, and as spring eases out to an early summer and flowers erupt simply everywhere I look, I'm looking at four weeks till a southwest vacation and have a list of things I want to post about.

Good times are on their way. My plan is to share them here.

Oh, ALL RIGHT!

I will always remember 2002 as a Very Bad Year. Not the entire year - January to May rocked the house. I had a great job as promotion manager at Bantam Dell Publishers, a division of Random House in NYC, that I loved. I was enjoying my single late 20s in the city and, most especially fabulous, I took myself to Italy that April.

But then July arrived and I entered an extended period of unemployment, heartache, drama, and woe.

Ever since, I have looked back at that year as a watershed. I have railed against the Lord for those events and many that followed. I have begged to know why my life and plans alone were sacrificed for family needs, why (when I finally got my current job) I had been relegated to an uneventful job where my training and experience had no place to flourish, why I was continually blocked from changing my circumstances professionally, why I wasn't allowed to go back to the publishing industry I loved, why I had a job but no longer a career. Why, why, why.

This morning, as I was again late for work due to - stuff - I was hanging up my cell phone after alerting my boss to my delay and found myself marveling (not for the first time) at my good fortune. Had I managed to shift from the creative side of my agency to the account side (as I had endeavored to due two years ago in an effort to re-enable my career), I'm certain I would have been fired long ago for absenteeism or continued lateness or some other (probably valid) reason caused by the erratic life I've had this year with my mother's long-term illness and hospitalization. But my boss has been unbelievably supportive, allowing me to make up time and working with my erratic schedule whenever possible, and she and my colleagues have repeatedly pitched in to cover my account when I could not.

Then today, I read that Random House has been hemorrhaging big name authors lately. It's been having trouble for some time, evidenced most greatly when parent company Bertelsmann's CEO was ousted last year. Now RH has lost several recognizable names, two of whom (Iris Johansen and Tami Hoag) were directly managed by Bantam Dell. Big time authors. Besides being a longtime reader of these two authors, I had also worked on book campaigns for both of them - both hardcover and mass-market books - while employed at Bantam Dell.

And I thought: Oh. Crap.

After reading that news update this morning, my brain quickly flipped through the last six years. I could see how loosing my job at Bantam Dell in 2002, while devastating, was infinitely better than being there (or somewhere else in publishing) today and facing the current marketplace, especially considering our national economic meltdown. Instead, I have 5 years invested in my current company, the longest I ever been at a job in my whole life. I'm pulling down a higher salary (however limiting) than anything I could have maintained in publishing (finances in the publishing world are typically about 30% below other industries), which is especially helpful now that I'm supporting my mother. And while there will be shocks felt everywhere from these economy issues, here at least, there's less immediate fear of job loss. For now.

During those six years, I had to believe that the Lord had a plan for it all. How could I be a good Christian if I didn't? There had to be a reason for my suffering and sacrifice, a purpose I simply could not see but that might someday be revealed to me. I knew the lingo. I got the theology. I mouthed the platitudes. I had to be patient. I had to wait.

I really suck at patience and waiting.

It's much harder to believe in the dark emptiness of an aching night filled with pain. I still railed. I still begged. I cultivated festering anger and dissatisfaction. And that 's not all in the past tense. But in that revelatory moment this morning, I could see how the Lord worked through these trials and personal losses to set me up for what's happening now. My heart might still yearn for things lost that I valued so greatly, but I could now see and be grateful for His unfathomable, far-flung vision so massively greater than my own.

Well, maybe not too grateful.

I could feel Him smiling at me this morning, that gentle, knowing look when a recalcitrant child finally gets it. I could hear Him in my head offering a mild rebuke with a slightly taunting "See?" (though I'm betting the taunting aspect came more from my own inner voice than a holy discourse with my creator.) To which I, of course, responded in my normal, humble, repentant (ahem) way -

"Oh, ALL RIGHT!"

Inhibited Productivity

I was able to get some writing done today while sitting next to my mom at the rehab center, but not as much as I'd like. It was a helpful distraction from what was going on in the bed next to Mom's.

We've had some problems with dementia stricken roommates. Martha, her first, is completely unaware of what is going on around her and calls for help nonstop in a broken voice that sears my heart. Eventually, I had to ask for her to be transferred so my mom, two weeks post op and still very sick, could get some much needed rest. Dottie, Mom's more recent roommate, also suffers from dementia, but she is still aware of things and people around her as the madness - and it definitely is a sort of madness - ebbs and flows. Problem is, Dottie's dementia makes her nasty and vulgar and she has begun to behave violently towards the nurses, throwing things at them and cursing them. I'd had enough when she became threatening to my mom, at one point coming up to Mom's bedside and getting right into her face. That was it for me and I burned up the phones at 9pm on a Sunday night to make sure that wouldn't happen again. Transfer number two.

She's been without a roommate since early in the week through no effort of ours, but that changed on Friday when a new resident, Rosa, was moved in. Rosa is 89 years old and was just in the hospital for bleeding in her brain. She's receiving hospice care and is dying. Her family, particularly her daughter Nellie who is of an age with my mother, is standing vigil at her bedside with fair consistency and they have been very pleasant and conversational with my mother and I. They are Russian and as the family speaks amongst themselves, I overhear amazing stories of things that have occurred in their lives as émigrés and in their mother/grandmother's life. When they are using English. Otherwise I just listen to the cadence of the Russian flying about the room. I'm touched that even the youngest generations, teenagers, fluently speak Russian. It shows the sort of thing that's important to this family.

Initially, my mother was disturbed to be given a long-term care roommate in her rehab ward, but as the days have progressed, she has been there to answer some questions posed by Nellie as she begins to read the bible for the first time. Nellie has shared some of the things that Rosa has said or asked for as she's been declining and these experiences seem to have opened Nellie up to the gospel. This has shifted my mother's focus and has, I think, eased her misgivings as it appears that she has been deliberately put into this woman's life for a reason. Nellie herself told me that they have had some good conversations this weekend and that my mother is a wonderful woman. It's good to be reminded of that.

But it's been difficult for me to witness. Not Nellie herself or even Rosa. My own medical experiences and caring for my mother through her medical crisis these past months has inured me to the realities and unpleasantness of basic care. Still, the distance from my grandmother's declining health and eventual death last year is faint and those events echo in the tableau unfolding before me. The cell phone calls to family, the numerous chairs clustered around the bed, the hush tones of conversation, the cardboard trappings of hasty meals, the strong caregiver at the center of the circle of grief. The pressing weight of inevitability.

I know these movements, I recognize these scenes. I reenacted them myself all too recently as I battled to keep my mother alive, to keep her fighting. My mother would lie there, disoriented from fever and pain, and her lost expression in a face that so mirrors my grandmother's, a face that reverberates in my own, was a painful deja vu. And as this family walks a path I've now trod twice, both times successfully in very different ways, it's difficult to sit typing away about romantic drama when an all too real drama is right before my eyes.

Reason enough for inhibited productivity.