No Saints around Here: A Caregiver’s Days

The Base Line

190 THE BASE LINE May 27 As I begin to fall asleep, I have learned to avoid thinking ahead, with a reassuring ripple of serenity. “Oh, yes! Martha is coming to help tomorrow after breakfast. I spent today doing all of my errands, and I can put off dealing with taxes another day. So tomorrow I will have a free morning!” My assumption is a mistake. It will alert the caregiver’s goblin. This goblin is the one who makes me trip as I take a carton of blueberries out of the refrigerator. I am hurrying too much, as usual, and I catch my shoe on an edge of the rug. All the blueberries spill over the rug. The rug is not very clean. It is also multicolored , with a dark blue and red intricate pattern that absorbs blueberries into invisibility. Until I step on one, then another. Squish. Splat. This is the goblin who pokes quite early at my sleeping husband , who ordinarily might not awake until eight, and so, as I start to eat my Cheerios, I see on my video monitor that James is trying to get out of bed. As I start up from the dining table, I jiggle and spill my cup of tea. Splash. Slop. After I hurry downstairs with James’s glass of orange juice, which I hope will let him fall back to sleep for long enough so I can finish my cereal (if not my tea), I tip the glass a little too high. the base line 191 He can’t swallow that much. It dribbles damply down his pajama top. I will need to change that immediately, as well as take time to make him newly clean and dry after a night of unbroken sleep. Sometime about now, I recognize that the day has already taken on a certain aspect, a definite character, something that threatens to become a metaphor for my life. I don’t put a name to this aspect until after I have returned to my (soggy) cereal. I sink back into my chair and try to eat slowly. I sip at a new cup of tea. But for several days, my digestive system has been antsy. It doesn’t like stress. It reacts in different ways. This morning, I feel very bloated and gassy, and fortunately, since I am alone in this room (and except for James downstairs, in the entire house), I can afford to indulge in briefly releasing that gas. Only, I grasp almost instantaneously, with shock, that wasn’t gas. As I race upstairs, needing to clean up another mess—and the morning has barely begun—I think that this is a day that will be dominated by the now-common four-letter excretory word that the New York Times still won’t print. When I finally finish my breakfast, I go down to the basement bedroom to let out my three cats. Three is too many these days. Two is too many. Even one seems a bit much. But I’ve had them all for ten years, and they are my cats. However, my affection for them drops precipitously when I open the door. They didn’t like being kept waiting so long. One (I’ll never know which) has again deposited a watery pile on the wood floor. Another (also unidentifiable ) has thrown up on the Indian-print bedspread, which has been washed so often it has an antique patina. Martha arrives. I clean up the cat messes. After fixing James’s breakfast and doing the dishes, I go downstairs to help her. For today is Dynamite Day. Almost all Parkinson’s patients suffer from constipation. Early in Parkinson’s, mild measures, combined with attention to diet, can help. Later, which is where James is now, every third day—if the base line 192 no action has occurred—a suppository is necessary, so powerful and usually so immediately effective that my caregivers and I call it The Dynamite. Did I ever imagine that I would be able to deal with The Dynamite ? To my surprise, I can. It helps hugely that James not only cooperates but somehow—I think by pretending that all this is not happening—maintains his dignity. I don’t know how he does it. Once absorbed into the body, The Dynamite continues to work, sometimes with unexpected and intermittent explosions over several hours. So cleanup...