Thousand cuts

I was going to write about how the hostility of the voice message the nurse left on my cell phone hurt. It felt physical listening to it in the quiet of my night lit
bedroom. "I don’t know if we can keep calling this long distance number. You need to buy an answering machine. "

Anyway , she launches into a confusing message about taking something today uh that should have been yesterday, whenever it was that he told her it was to happen whenever it was that she finally decided to leave the message.

I resist and rail against any and all dictates that require me to expend money when none is offered. I called her in the morning to find out that she was relaying the doctor’s directions for me to take an increased dosage of coumadin. I can guess that I am the cause of decreasing levels as I have been eating broccoli, again.

She says with a voice of gathered fury,
You should buy an answering machine
I am poor and paralyzed, I say.
Well they don’t cost a lot, we just got one.
I don’t know who "we" is.

And as a matter of fact I had just the night before ordered one from eBay, after checking to see if my LifeLine would still work with an answering machine hanging off the same line.

This afternoon about a half hour after I arrived home and as I was cathetering there was a knock on the door – I can’t get to the door right now I yelled, please stop by later. Ten minutes later there was a knock on the door and I said the same thing. I was annoyed.. any/everybody who could knock on the door without having rung the outer door buzzer, lives here and so knows that I am in a wheelchair.

Unless I am in the wheelchair , I can’t get there—wherever that is, either to the phone or the door. I run into all this impatience or lack of understanding. People buzzing and buzzing the door or knocking and knocking. It was Audrey, the housekeeper, there were meds for me in the community room, she said. I gathered up garbage and rolleddown stairs to the community room. No one and nothing was there.

I had to go in the office.

N. was there looking like a peckish female Danny Thomas. Her lipstick was gone. She made me wait in silence as she waited on hold or through messages because she sat in silence for minutes on the phone. S, I wonder if my daughter and I could get a ride tomorrow between 10 and 12.


She hung up and explained my daughter is in town…..ahh I said and you and she go horseback riding? I started to tell her a story and she said cut me short saying she was expecting a conference call.

I reflectedbriefly on the time she wasted by not multitasking before and getting me my meds, which she well could have since she was on her cell phone.

So I said, I’ll cut to the chase. I was told my meds are here. I had thought to share my experience with stables and horse business in Corning and surrounds, just to connect, and decided it was after all, easier to just see her as another mean insect.

It’s easy for me to not to occupy my distress. Sometimes I can forget about the pain and even just be seated someplace vs. being stuck.

And I wonder if I’m cheating. How unhappy should I feel. How hard shouldI try.

I want to veg, to space, but am acutely aware of how precarious it all is, how little time I have…