In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss(15)
I have studied up and watched dozens of English videos about this process (including the 2011 one featuring Sir Terry Pratchett, who died of Alzheimer’s in 2015), and some of them are weirdly uplifting and some of them are unbearably sad, but not, for me, as sad as they will be. I also watched Still Alice a couple of times, on the sly. Julianne Moore, the actor, is beautiful and talented, and Alice, the character, is flirtatious and warmhearted and wise, and I enjoy the movie, sort of, until I find myself getting irritated with her winsomeness and unyielding charm, but at the end, when her former self tries to guide her current self, via prerecorded message, to suicide, I cannot watch. I walk in and out of the room a dozen times, each time willing Alice to bring the laptop with her to the dresser, to balance it properly, to not drop the pills but to manage to take them and achieve what her more-present self had hoped for. I watch this movie, in bursts, when Brian is working out or taking a walk. Everything else I watch is reality TV, which Brian despises, in which every character is a pretty shabby human being, or English comedies, specializing in the hilarities of class conflict, which he used to love.
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Brian wakes up the next morning with stomach pains. He thinks he’s constipated but he’s also reporting bowel movements, so we’re both stumped. His stomach is tender to the touch.
Me: Maybe you have appendicitis.
Him: I don’t.
Me (thinking, Why are you being stubborn and ridiculous?): You could have—
Him: I had my appendix out years before I met you.
Me: Where’s the scar?
Him: Have a look.
He stretches out like a white sea lion and rests his hand on the scar.
Off he goes to urgent care, five minutes from here. He insists on driving himself. I don’t feel good about letting him go by himself (and this is the last time I will ever let him do that. All doctor’s appointments are now joint business). He drives off. (For fourteen years, he beeped the horn every time he drove off, because he liked me to stand on the porch and wave goodbye, whenever possible. He has turned me into a wave-from-the-porch person, and I do it for everyone who pulls out of my driveway. Now people who don’t do that for their guests seem to me to be lacking something, as I was.) I hear from him after about an hour. Someone (doctor, nurse, PA?) has told him a bunch of things at Stony Creek Urgent Care, which he mostly misreports (I think, but maybe not), scaring the shit out of me.
“An emergency MRI? What for?”
“I don’t know.”
I never get to speak to the doctor who sends him to New Haven for what I think are an ultrasound and bladder scan and blood tests. New Haven, which has been my home city for forty years now, feels to me like Rome at rush hour: confusing, dangerous, impossible to navigate solo. I have two appointments with patients, starting in a half hour. (When Brian retired three years ahead of schedule, I started doing psychotherapy again, in my little Stony Creek office. Smart to see that we were going to need the cash. Stupid not to have scheduled a neurology consult right then.) Between sessions, I talk to my dear friend and assistant, Jennifer, who’s in New Haven, and when Jennifer asks if I’d like her to meet Brian in the ER (where he may or may not be having an emergency MRI, where he may or may not actually wind up), I cry and thank her. She meets him at the ER and keeps him company. She calls regularly and texts for the next three hours and is reassuring, every time. He doesn’t need to see any specialists, there is no MRI, there was never an MRI, he’s not being admitted to the hospital, and nothing is terrible. She says later, We had a great time, just goofing around. You know me and Brian, we joked about everything. He handled it all really well, she says, but sometimes he forgot what the doctor’d just said.
I’m pissed off. (I do not find myself yukking it up with Brian in ERs, or anywhere else, these days.) I want to point out that not understanding the doctor’s directions is no one’s idea of “handling it really well,” but I’m crying too hard and I thank her, as I should.
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Diverticulitis it is. Ten days of bland but not raw food, and some smooth peanut butter on white bread is okay but no peanuts or popcorn. Jennifer promised me that in Brian’s diverticulitis info packet, there’s a list of foods he should eat for the ten days of antibiotics and a few recipes for rice/dairy/chicken. There is no list. I am furious and frightened and turn to Dr. Google before I drive to the grocery store. It’s a boring diet, especially for a man who loves chorizo, habanero sauce, Szechuan chili oil, and Popeyes chicken. I sympathize and keep offering rice and canned fruit and cheese and yogurt and baked chicken, and when he says, “How about chocolate?” for the third time, I just say no and then I go cry in the bathroom. He wouldn’t have followed me out of the room fourteen years ago, and he’s not going to start now.
The next day starts calmer and then not so much. Brian feels no worse and goes to the gym and buys a cable for the Garmin in his car. We’ve had a straightforward conversation about his need for a new GPS, and not his vintage version, which seems to be missing some important, smaller byways. He schleps all over eastern Connecticut, without me, and finally gets the cord he needs. He has been remarkably persistent and I admire him and I was scared witless when he’d been gone for five hours. I congratulate him and tell him all the bland goodies that await him. I wonder if I should hide his keys or if we will have to negotiate every drive for the foreseeable future. (We will.)