Wednesday, February 22, 2017

The Morning After

103


I arrived at the mobile home before nine the next morning to find that my sister and her daughter were already gone. Checking on my mother, she thought they had gone at least an hour earlier and she had been alone since. But she pointed out that she had called my not as older brother and he would be getting emergency leave from the Air Force and flying out to take care of her. When I asked her when he'd be arriving, she said he hadn't figured out the arrangements yet, but when he did he'd be here to take care of her. In the meantime I told her that I'd be moving back in temporarily and would be bringing my computer here to keep me busy as well as some books. Was there anything she needed in the meantime? More water and the bed pan.
During my drive home the previous night I had stopped at the grocery store to find some bending straws to make it easier for her to drink water so that request was quickly addressed, as for the bed pan we finally guessed that the best technique was for her to roll to her side and then I place the pan where her seat would be once she rolled back. It took two tries to get this right and then she'd need time alone to do her business. I took this as my first chance to go back to my apartment and get a car load of my stuff for the stay. The new 'speed bumps' in the mobile home park quickly became the bane of my existence as I had to very carefully roll up one side of them and then gently back down the other side with my impact sensitive computer in back. Even without the computer, these lengths of asphalt curbing were so steep that they could only be taken at less than one mile an hour to reduce the abrupt, unforgiving jump they caused in the car. It was time to empty the bed pan and my mother rolled to her side again and I had to quickly intervene to stop the bed pan from rolling onto its side as well and spilling its contents. I then emptied it into the toilet and thought to take it to the kitchen sink where I could use the sprayer to rinse it out. Returning to my mother I asked her what else I could get for her. She said she would be fine for now.
Realizing I'd have to be spending the nights using her water bed so I'd be within ear shot of her, I stripped its sheets and blankets and put them in the washer next to the bedrooms. As the machine ran, mother called me back into the bedroom where she then cried about what had happened to her. My mother cursed my sister for not having a bathroom night light so she could see what room it was in the dark. She had gone passed it, assuming it was another bedroom door and then realized she had gone too far when she found the steps, instead, and fell down them. Our mother had apparently been at the foot of the stairs for a long while calling for my sister before she finally woke up and came to see what the problem was. She hadn't wanted to take her to the hospital fearing my mother's out of state insurance wouldn't cover it and she'd be stuck with the bill, but she finally relented after a period of mother's begging. The emergency room doctor told mother she had a broken pelvis and was to be kept in bed for the next few weeks until she healed up enough for a follow-up with a specialist. I tried to imagine a broken pelvis and all I could guess was a plate split in half with the two halves waving like wings whenever my mother moved. I couldn't imagine how she had been released from the hospital and neither could she.
The good news was, in her eyes, that my not as older brother would be taking leave from the Air Force and coming out to take care of her until she was all better and I wouldn't have to be there for more than a night or two. I thanked her for letting me know, especially as I would be returning to College in a week and wouldn't be able to help her full-time by that point. After a few more days of my mother assuring me my not as older brother would soon be arriving to take care of her, she finally concluded, ''I guess he can't get away, just now.'' Not having witnessed any of the phone calls she told me she had made to him, I didn't know how much contact she actually had with him about her condition, or what he truly told her. Years later when I'd talked to him about the time, he said he had never told her he would be coming out to help her so he didn't know why she had been telling me that. To my mind, though, my not as older brother had always been deemed 'the best child of us all' in her eyes and she was likely just expressing her preference as to which one she wanted to take care of her by imagining he was swooping out to save her.
My mother wasn't sure what she could eat and eventually decided on canned Spaghetti O's as a food she could easily just swallow without chewing. At first I tried to feed her with a spoon, but she decided it was better if I propped up her head with multiple pillows allowing her to drink it down from the edge of the bowl until she was done, then I would remove all but one pillow so she could return to lying flat. And so the days went for the first week, her diet of canned Spaghetti O's being supplemented with occasional glasses of juice between the routine glasses of water. She just lay in the darkness and I guess she let the time drift by her as the days wound on. I would sit at the computer on the dining room table and surf online or sometimes watch television with the sound very low waiting for the next time she'd call me for food, liquid, or for help with the bed pan. While she had been on vacation during the holiday weekend this had happened, it soon dawned on us that I needed to call the hospital kitchen where she worked and inform them of her injury and that she would have to be out indefinitely on medical leave until she was well enough to return.
To break the monotony, Daina would sometimes sneak over for the evening and we'd quietly watch television together as I waited for the next time I was called to mother's bedside. One time Daina needed to use the restroom but, as it was next to mother's bedroom, she decided to wait until our current show was over and then go home so as not to disturb her. At the next commercial break I went and got myself a glass of ice tea and then sucked some into my mouth and gently spewed it through my pursed lips back into the glass making a peeing sound. Daina lightly punched me in the leg in response. I'm so evil.
Toward the end of the week, I called a social services group who specialized in helping older people with mobility issues and asked what services they offered. I told them of the condition my mother was in and that I'd be returning to College with the following week, asking if they had someone who could check on her during those times. I also asked what other help they could provide and requested overall advice as the only guidance I had about the whole thing was what my sister had told me. They said they would check into it and call me back. I gave them the mobile home phone number and, after not hearing back for a while, I walked to the post box to get the daily mail. When I returned mother was angry at me as they had called back and she had answered the phone. ''I don't need any help from strangers!'' she yelled at me and I told her that the help request was in part for me. It turned out I didn't need any help either to her mind and so I concluded that when I returned to College the following week that it meant she would be able to take care of herself.
In reality though I continued to live with her for the next two weeks and still took care of her except for the six hours from the late morning to the late afternoon when I took my classes.
By the third week she was well enough to get up and painfully hobble on her own. I moved my stuff back to my apartment and no longer spent the nights there. When I took her to her first specialist appointment, she found out that her pelvis hadn't been broken all the way through, just fractured. That was why staying still had been allowing it to heal over time without any intervening surgery or devices needed to stabilize it. Until the end of June I continued to check on her and be with her a few hours in the morning before College and a few hours after College to make sure she was doing as best as she could. By the end of July, she was well enough to return to light duty at her job, thus I was out of a car and back to taking the bus for my needs so I just ended up calling her once a day for the rest of the month to check on her and insure she was doing all right. By August she and I were back to our lives as if nothing had happened, having little contact once again.
But something had happened.
One day, she asked for me to come over and see her for 'something important' that evening. Rather than take the multiple hour ride on the bus, I asked Daina if I could borrow her car when she was done with work and she agreed. I drove over to my mother's mobile home and rang the door bell I had installed for her a decade earlier and she opened the door and was glad I had come. She had recently figured something out and it had been a profound insight for her and she wanted to share it with me. We sat down at the antique dining room table and mother looked to me. ''I just wanted to tell you that, when you came I couldn't understand why God would want me to have another child under those circumstances. When I didn't have a miscarriage and the doctors even revived you when you had been born dead, I couldn't imagine why God wanted you here so badly. But now I know.'' She reached out her hand and placed it on the back of my hand already resting on the table, ''God sent you to me so you would be here for the time I broke my pelvis.''
I could tell by the gentle and warm look in her eyes that this was important for her, but for me all it confirmed was she hadn't wanted or valued my life until this Summer.



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Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Dumped

102


I would be restarting College in a week and was getting ready for the significant change in my life having a daily task would bring. I already had my schedule and purchased my books and was starting to page through them in anticipation. When I was out, either visiting Daina, the downtown area, or across the street for my daily soda, I received a phone call from my sister living at the Wyoming/Montana border. She left a message that she was on the road driving my mother back to town and I was to take care of her as she had a broken pelvis. She gave me a time when she and her daughter expected to be at my mother's mobile home that evening.
I was dumbfounded. Our mother annually made road trips to visit my sister for a few days and this year she was going up for my niece's high school graduation just after Memorial Day. Beyond that I didn't have a clue what might have happened and checking the time and bus schedule realized I'd have to leave immediately if I was going to be to her mobile home to meet them when they arrived. At the time, Daina was busy and not at home so I wouldn't be able to reach her about the news until later. Getting to mother's place, it had been two years since I had last been there during the science fiction group's art auction and in the intervening time they had installed lengths of asphalt curbing to act as speed bumps. I guess they decided to save money on having actual speed bumps put in place and had these four inch tall, abrupt rise and decline strips put across the roads instead. As I was on foot, it wasn't an issue for me at the time, just more of a jaw dropping curiosity. Getting in the mobile home itself, I found little had changed other than the water bed in my old bedroom, which I had already heard about, otherwise everything else was as I remembered it including my mother's old bed still in place in the master bedroom. Apparently she slept on the waterbed then walked to her old bedroom for everything else.
It was around an hour before the little convoy arrived, my sister driving her SUV and her daughter driving my mother's compact car. My mother was laying down in the back seat of my sister's car and we had a chunk of time for my sister to tell me the gist as my mother tried to get out. My sister rented a split level house with a half flight of stairs from the bedroom section to the main floor. As the story went, after being there for less than a day, my mother had tried to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and misjudged the length of the hallway in the darkness, falling down the stairs. Her cries of pain had woken up my sister and when it was clear it was more than a bruise from the fall they had taken her to the only hospital for evaluation. With X-rays they found she had a 'broken pelvis' and had to be isolated in bed for the next few weeks as it healed up.
At this point my mother had gotten herself out of the SUV, but couldn't stand and collapsed to the driveway where she began crawling to the steps of the mobile home. My sister and niece just watched this while I felt we should be doing something but my sister said this was the best way for mother to get around. Stunned, it eventually dawned on me to open the front door of the mobile home for her and make sure the rest of the path was clear. As my mother crawled up the steps to the front door with grunts of pain, pausing for a moment to rest and have a cry, she finally got herself to the floor of the mobile home and began crawling to her bedroom. My sister and her daughter seemed to take this situation as more of an annoyance, describing how mother had been 'moaning & groaning' the whole nine hour drive back to Colorado and 'put on a show' trying to use a restroom at one of their gas stops along the way.
As 'it wouldn't be fair' for her daughter to miss her graduation the day after Memorial Day, they would be staying that night in the mobile home and then heading back toward Montana the following day at which point mother would be my responsibility thereafter. When I noted I didn't have a car of my own to visit mother each day, they noted that mother wasn't going to be using her car anytime soon.
Mother had finally reached the master bedroom and was crawling up into her old, traditional, bed. With her cries of pain as she did this, I left my sister in the living room area and went to see if I could help. While she had gotten her chest onto the surface of the bed, she wasn't able to lift her legs up, over the edge. She said she had to keep her legs together because of the break and I eventually figured that meant I should grasp both of her calves and lift up her legs and pivot her onto the full bed while she used her arms to turn her chest, keeping her body as straight as possible so as to not inflame the injury. Once she was lying face down on the bed, she next wanted my help rolling her over onto her back, then helping to remove her dirty clothes which had become stained and tattered during her crawls. This was my first time seeing my mother undressed down to her undies as I undid her pants and pulled them off, then unbuttoned her blouse and scootched it up behind her back and past her head while she continued to lay, then holding each sleeve taut as she pulled out her arms. She asked for me to straighten the pillow under her head and then get her a glass of water for her bed stand and get the bottle of prescription pain pills out of her purse. I did and she had me take out a pill and put it to her lips and then she tried to lean upward to drink a sip of the water and cried in pain but fought through it until she was able to get that sip and swallow the pill. She settled back down and asked me to pull the blankets over her and move the bed stand phone within her reach. With her now resting, I returned to the living area.
My sister said that they would take care of mother for the night and that I should move back in the following morning for the next few weeks, if not months, until mother was better. As she couldn't leave the bed, the hospital had given them a bed pan for mother to use when she needed to go to the bathroom. It was at this point that I learned mother shouldn't be moving or traveling until she was better. I didn't point out the obvious contradiction of this given the trip bringing mother back to Colorado and then having to crawl out of the SUV and to her bedroom. While they couldn't stay to help as they had to get back in time for my niece's graduation, I mentioned that I was entering full-time college classes after the following week. My sister thought I should then probably cancel my college classes for the Summer so I would be at the mobile home all the time to take care mother...
Given that they weren't willing to skip a graduation ceremony to care for my mother for a handful of days, and reflecting on mother being the person who had repeatedly abused me as a preteen and then harassed me during my years of health problems in late nineteen eighties, I considered the idea of canceling my return to College to take care of her and thought: LIKE HELL!




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Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Returning To College

101


Toward the turn of the year, from Nineteen Ninety-One to Two, Cindy of VocRehab contacted me and told me of a job skills class at the local 'Manpower' office. Given the date & time, I arrived and it turned out to be more of a slide show on Manpower and their involvement in the physical job contracting community. That might sound a little nebulous, but I was afraid I'd get in trouble if I said they seemed to have only jobs in the construction, plumbing, and electrician fields. That's what it seemed to me at the time and I decided to leave without signing up. One of their people noticed this and intercepted me asking if I was going to sign up. I noted that I was focused on the computer programming field and they didn't seem to be involved in that. She agreed and asked if I had a degree, I noted that while I had over a decade of hands-on experience, I only had a few years of College and wished to complete my degree but my Vocational Rehabilitation counselor was against that. While she agreed Manpower was probably not the place for me, she did know of another community resources group who might be able to help.
With the new name and address in hand I went there a couple days later and signed up on the general intake wait-list and spent time in the waiting area until I was eventually called. I talked with the intake counselor and mentioned my past employment history, years of health problems that were now behind me, and desire to finish my degree and get a computer programming job. She thought that was a great idea and asked if VocRehab had told me about the 'PASS Plan'? As they hadn't, she explained Social Security's Plan for Achieving Self Support option: It would allow me to target some of my disability income toward a work related goal, such as completing a college degree, and that portion of my disability check would be reserved for that purpose. With the reserved amount taken out of my monthly income, I would qualify for alternative welfare payments to keep my monthly income above a minimum level. Checking the numbers, it would only put me back to the same income level I had when I moved into my first apartment and as my current apartment had a lower rent, I could effectively use my entire disability check of over five hundred dollars toward college tuition and still be ahead in my monthly budget! This seemed like a great idea and I said I wanted to sign-up. She was willing to help, but I needed to first research the exact numbers I needed for the classes.
I found I couldn't face the thought of returning to my former Business College given the loss of five years and instead decided to enroll at the local Community College. As we had our final science fiction club meetings there I was familiar with the campus and the idea tickled me to now go there to complete my education. Providing my information they ordered a copy of my Business College transcript and they would review it to see how many of my credits could be transferred. Then they would know how many more classes I would need to take with them to complete my degree. The following week when I returned to discuss the results, the adviser was very dour as she asked me to take a seat. As the Business College and the Community College were not under the same accreditation system, they would only accept about one percent of my credits toward a degree at the Community College. I was slack jawed and couldn't accept that I would essentially have to pursue a degree from scratch. But she assured me that was how the system worked. I asked her what other options I had and she simply said I should see if I could complete my degree at the Business College.
Having to put pride aside, I withdrew from the Community College and checked for the bus routes that went to the business college section of town. As fate would have it, there wasn't a bus that went directly to it, leaving me with the closest bus stop being just shy of a half mile away from their building. Still, as Spring was coming and soon after Summer, I could imagine making that walk on a daily basis as part of attending classes there. To test my theory, I took the bus and then made the walk. While an uphill trek to the school, it was only a modest rise and I would be making it fresh at the start of the school day, and then have the gradual downhill walk on the way back to ease me to the bus stop. Arriving at the school building and walking into the familiar main entrance I found I hadn't needed to worry about returning here. As five years had passed since I had withdrawn due to my health issues, there weren't any remaining students who would recognize me, which would have placed me in the awkward position of explaining where I had been for the past half decade. Further, most all of the office staff had changed over as well. While the headmaster and his assistant where the same, they had since seen a sea of other faces and mine had been lost in the waves.
Walking the halls to the office, I was surprised by how fewer students there were. In the intervening years other Business Colleges had opened in our town and the once jam packed halls here were now half empty. At the office, they had since built a reception desk to filter the incoming people and I greeted the receptionist. A night student herself of both American and German parents, she worked days at the College to make ends meet. When I told her I was a former student looking to return after a few years, I was allowed into the inner portion of the office to see their adviser. Talking to her, it turned out their course curriculum hadn't changed much which meant that, likely, all of my credits would still be good. She wouldn't know for sure until she received a copy of my transcript from the main office out of state and I filled out and signed the required paperwork. When I returned two weeks later, all was good and their financial adviser found that I could just afford three classes a semester using my PASS Plan budget combined with Pell Grants which I would easily qualify for given my low income level. While I could take four classes a semester, I'd have to sign up for a student loan to bridge the gap and as I'd already, unintentionally, been released from my past student loans due to my health problems, I didn't want to test my luck by letting them know I was now better enough to return to school. Plans set and budget figured, I returned to the community resource group to let my counselor know and she helped me complete the forms to begin the Social Security PASS Plan and make sure it was in place so I could return to College with the summer semester.
When I next saw Cindy of VocRehab and excitedly told her about this news, she was very angry with me as she had told me the previous year NOT TO RETURN TO COLLEGE. She would have to check with her supervisors to see if they should drop me as a client for disregarding her advice. Leaving the appointment I felt it wouldn't be any great loss given how little she had helped me in the preceding year. Then I realized I would lose the free monthly bus pass they had been giving me during that time. Yet with a little research at the bus hub downtown I found that, as a student, I could qualify for a discounted monthly bus pass of only ten dollars if I needed to. I figured I could swing that.
I was soon called back to the Vocational Rehabilitation office. They had decided to keep me but, as I had gone against my assigned counselor's advice, they were transferring me to a new counselor, 'Greg', who would be advising me from now on. It turned out Greg was a huge fan of the idea of my completing College and using the PASS Plan system to do it. Not only that, but VocRehab had recently joined in a partnership with The University of Colorado and their job placement people would be helping to find job opportunities for me in the background while I was attending my classes at College...
It turned out losing Cindy as my adviser was a huge stroke of luck!




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Wednesday, February 1, 2017

Research & Dead Ends

100


The one thing I hadn't expected when I told Daina of my mixed-sex background was enthusiasm. I guessed it was more a case of she was thrilled to finally have someone she could share dark family secrets with, rather than her being happy about my 'situation'. But I was happy to accept it versus the many other unhappy results I had imagined. From her classical studies, she told me of two examples of similar people she knew of who seemed to have the same physical issues as I did: Akhenaten, and Siddhartha Gautama. Both had become religious reformers, and one of them didn't end up so successfully at it. I didn't know what to make of her comparisons, but it already left me feeling more like an underachiever.
Akhenaten was an Egyptian pharaoh circa 1352 BCE who was revolutionary in that he insisted on Egypt leaving behind its polytheistic history and become a monotheistic society with the Aten, also known as Ra-Horus, as its god. While he pushed the movement as he lived, once he died it was abandoned and Egypt returned to its polytheistic beliefs. Having reigned seventeen years he was distinguished by his feminine-like appearance and is over shadowed by his better known son, Tutankhamun. Though, if he and I truly shared the same 'situation', I'd be hard pressed to see how he could have been a biological father.
Siddhartha Gautama was a spiritual teacher from the ancient Shakya republic of the continent of India. More of a personal enlightenment philosophy than a deity based religion, his teachings are roughly that suffering is a part of existence and that suffering is in part caused by one's own desires. One of his tenets, that teachings should not be accepted unless borne out by one's own experience, seemed to echo my own life's lessons. His teachings eventually coalesced into Buddhism and has been a more enduring belief system. While some depictions of him reveal a feminine styled body, these depictions may just be culturally based as I wasn't able to find any notes about a possible mixed-sexed background.
Soon after I told Daina of my 'situation' she wanted to go to the library and look up all the information she could. She invited me along and I forewarned her that the few times I had tried over the years I had found very little, if any information. Still, I was game to try again and she picked me up at my apartment.
When we arrived at the largest branch of the library we combed the catalog for books without luck, then she checked for recent magazines and found an article on 'pseudo-hermaphrodites'. The magazine article focused on how Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome 'X/Y' genetic women were often deemed to make the most desirable looking women and noted that some of them had often found jobs as models or even as Hollywood actresses. While the article as a whole didn't go into as much medical detail as I would have liked, it did give me a new term to keep in mind: Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. Also finding the article seemed to make Daina satisfied, joking that perhaps my mixed-sex background was why I had been so interested in selling television scripts to Hollywood.
My sessions with my new psychologist, Samuel, had reached the point that it was time to hunt for a doctor which could medically evaluate my 'situation' and make suggestions and give me advice on it. Too often being intersexed was deemed to be a plumbing issue and many urological surgeons touted themselves as the doctors to see about it. But ultimately all they did was perform surgery to 'clarify' the plumbing but otherwise seemed to have little interest or knowledge of the total, lifelong, ramifications. We did finally find a general practitioner who was not wholly specialized in the intersexed field, as those doctors were very few and far between, but had become aware of it and come up to speed on the various issues over time while helping an initial patient he already knew. He had since gained a positive reputation when handling such issues and with his name I was able to find his contact information. I gave his office a call to discover the steep 'initial evaluation fee' and the lack of insurance coverage for it. While my latest apartment had a significantly lower rent than my previous apartment, allowing me greater flexibility in my finances, I realized I would still have to save for at least the whole year before I'd have enough money for the visit, assuming I didn't have any drop in my income in the meantime.
Yet what else could I do on this other than save that money, bit by bit, over the months or years to come?
I let Samuel know that my telling Daina of my 'situation' had gone well and he asked if I was going to tell anyone else. I decided I wasn't until I had the medical consultation and thus gained a better idea of how I would address my 'situation' before telling more of my friends. He thought that made sense and we reduced our appointments to once every month or two to keep in touch until I could go forward and make the evaluation appointment...




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