I wish I knew why it is that at the times we most need other people around us to comfort and support us, we find ourselves physically, technologically, financially, and psychologically unable to reach out to ask for that help.

I've been running these past few weeks trying to keep up with what's going on with my mom, while trying to find a job before unemployment runs out completely, while trying to get this gig selling cutlery going, while trying to deal with bills, the apartment, housework, and the upcoming Passover holiday. It's been overwhelming, to say the least. The days I would normally be spending out on demos and getting shopping done, I've spent running out to Queens. This weekend's rains left us largely without phone or Internet service, and to top it off, a completely unforeseen coffee spill on my notebook has me working off an external keyboard that is annoying and painful at best. Keeping the phone lines open for emergency communication leaves them unavailable to chat with friends... but how much would I tell friends and family anyway? Pieces of the picture don't show the entire landscape of why I'm feeling psychologically and emotionally paralyzed, and why I'm having trouble dealing with any single aspect of this conflation of issues.

Needless to say, I've not been doing anything positive for my own health, either. Lack of sleep, lack of time, and too many meals on the road are not doing well for my testing regimen, nor for following a reasonable diet, nor logging. The only reason I'm getting any exercise in is that I need to get to the office (three miles each way) by bicycle.

Also: I wish I had a magic wand to break through the infirmities that come with age or the complications of illness and disease.

As of this afternoon, Mom is still in cardiac intensive care. While the valve replacement went relatively well, it has been taking her longer than predicted to recover. The current news is that she needs a pacemaker, and her medical team is trying to time the procedure to be best for her health and overall recovery. What bothers me about the whole thing -- besides this being my mother and everything happening so quickly -- is the communications issue. Mom has been losing her hearing for a while, and she's had vision issues, so communicating with her is tiring and trying at times. Add to this the slowness of illness and the standard hospital pharmaceutical cocktails, and the issue is compounded. Add to the top of that all of us -- family and medical staff alike -- being so used to communicating with people who can see and hear reasonably well, that we sometimes forget to slow down, repeat, or ask for confirmation that Mom has received and processed the information we've tried to give her. I don't want Mom to lose the dignity of being told what is happening and why, in terms and media she can understand, and being able to make her own care decisions. Sometimes, though, it seems as if the medical staff says something once, sotto voce, at normal speaking speed, and either expects Mom to have heard/seen/processed, or for my sister and I to translate or make the decisions -- as if Mom were not right there in the room and competent to have a say in her own life!

Just like my mother's concerns about hospitalization and surgery are colored by her mother's experience, the issues surrounding my mother's ability to receive information are colored by my experience. While I was too young to recognize my great-grandmother's geriatric senile dementia, I saw her son's (my grandfather's) senses decline starting in his late sixties, and I saw the route by which my father's family's Alzheimer's develops. First, it is a deterioration of hearing, and sometimes vision. Then, along with the lack of ability to receive input comes the isolation concurrent with a deterioration in the ability to walk and carry about normal life errands. When we add to that the financial stresses of living on a fixed income that is insufficient to cover one's daily needs, one tends to further isolate one's self in one's abode, compounding all these modes of physical deterioration, leaving one to live more and more in memories and imagination, withdrawing from the world until one is no longer capable of communicating with it. One's sense of time twists and distorts, and stronger memories crowd out the weaker ones... It is a painful process to watch, made more painful by understanding that it is one I will more than likely experience myself in a generation's time. I've seen it happening with my father's sister, and now, my father (who still does not want me to know about it). I'm afraid that Mom is on the verge of starting down that same path.

And I'm afraid that if I can't quickly get a handle on everything else that I am supposed to be doing, so will I.