She Said Her Name was Emergency...

 

     ...she said her telephone number was 911.

     In retrospect, it seems pretty fucking heartless, something approaching the karmic, that Barb and I would derive so much pleasure from that song. It's from "Baby Likes to Rock It" by the late Steve Ripley and the Tractors. Until about a week or so ago, I'd play it for Barb when she couldn't feed herself and I had to spoonfeed her.

     Sometimes it worked, lately it wouldn't. Then yesterday, she stopped eating entirely and I could get very little fluids in her. When I came home from running errands today, I found my girlfriend couldn't walk any more.

     She's been starving herself and refuses to swallow anything and the starvation finally caught up with her. So today, I had to make that heartbreaking call to 911 that I'd been putting off for the last week and a half.

     Once the hospital staff sees what they're dealing with and they run some tests, there's a very real possibility they won't discharge her into my care. They may insist on putting her into a nursing home. I don't know what their legal purview is.

     So, why didn't you take her the hospital sooner, you may ask? Originally, I was going to. I was going to have a friend take her, the same one who'd driven us to Concord just two Fridays ago, the last time Barb and I ate together at a restaurant, maybe ever.

     But the day we were to take her, two Mondays ago, she rallied. She got out of bed by herself and even got to the bathroom in time, something she hadn't managed to do for weeks. I thought, as with one scary spell last year, she'd regain some of the ground she'd lost after that weekend. Hindsight being 20/20, I guess I shouldn't have been so hopeful. Hope is a luxury often denied you when you're caring for someone with dementia.

     When she began presenting symptoms of other ailments, I thought if I got her to a doctor's office, they'd find out what was wrong, prescribe something and she'd be better. But that never happened.

     It seems like a million years ago yet like yesterday when I wrote that post announcing Barb and I had fallen in love online and that she was moving in with me, that we'd get married.

     Well, the marriage didn't come off because our finances were so unstable and have been so ever since I lost my job a month after I moved into our apartment then Barb lost the job I got her at a local sign shop. But the bottom line was, we'd defied the odds. She got a fairly decent guy on the rebound, and we've been happy beyond words with each other since she arrived on July 31, 2009. The picture you see above was one I'd posted August of 2010 the day her new eyeglasses arrived from a now-defunct start-up company.

     Life doesn't hand out crystal balls and maybe there's a good reason for that but sometimes they'd sure come in handy. I'm not so big a man that I can say with all honesty that if I saw her dementia down the road, I would've made the same decision. But the fact is, I did invite her up here with the promise that I'd take care of her every need within my limited means and, for the most part, I've done just that.

     I did get her that sign shop job I promised her, exactly a month after her arrival, and I gave her a clean, safe home to live in. The day she arrived, I'd even bought clean bedding, brand new towels and wash clothes and bath mats, never used, because I wanted to give her as soft a landing as possible after driving 1533 miles to be with me.

     But promising to care for someone's every need always comes with a back half, the unspoken half, one that you'd think would never have to be made- That the recipient agrees to allow the other person to care for them. 

     Before today, she'd stopped allowing me to feed her, to hydrate her. It was as if she was giving up. That she not only didn't know why she was giving up but that she was unaware she was giving up. If someone gives up so completely, you have nothing to work with and you have to turn things over to medical professionals who may know what to do.

     I'm just a hapless bastard in his 60s with some adult diapers and a few bed pads. I don't live in a nursing home. I tried to do the best for her, I swear to God I did. But I turned 64 last January and had a massive heart attack last July. At some point, when you're in the position I am, you have to throw up your hands and turn over care to those much better equipped with deal with it.

     They say you never know how much you love someone or something until you lose it. I've been losing Barbara bit by bit for years now. Consequently, I find myself loving her a little more each day as I lose her by degrees.