Health Care

My sister called, with an update on my parents. I can't follow the ins and outs of the health care system. 16% of the people that go into hospice pull back out. Most of them, I imagine, to die at home, though there is no home, in many cases. Hospice, by definition, is a place you go to die. The iceberg on which you drift out to sea. They put you on a morphine drip and you remember the past. Dad got a little better, and they realized he'd been put on the drip a little too soon so they took him to the hospital (2 miles, $750) where there was some confusion because Medicaid doesn't like to cover both hospital and hospice nor the ambulance in between. Brenda, bless her, is handling this. I couldn't do it. It all makes me want to dig a hole where I could go to rest, freeze to death, be back-filled over and forgotten. Maybe once a year someone raises a pint to salute my stupidity; not that, rather my recalcitrance, everyone smashes their whiskey glass against the Blarney Stone, and somehow, everyone gets home. I'd finally gotten to sleep when I heard a couple of gunshots, a pistol, not that far away. I got up and noted the time, 12:50, which meant it was actually 12:36, because my clock is 14 minutes fast. It's just a game I play. Looking at the time. And almost exactly thirty minutes later there are headlights on the driveway. The deputy sheriff checking on the gunshots. I let him inside and tell him what little I know, two shots, close together, then a vehicle headed west on Upper Twin very fast. I tell him to look at the new sign for Mackletree Road because it didn't have any bullet holes yesterday. Signs don't last long in the country. TR called from the museum, wanting to know which company sold a certain type of light bulb. I couldn't remember, but called him back a few minutes later with the name of the company. I usually remember something I've forgotten just after I stop thinking about it. Most of us do. I've done surveys. I think it's a hard-wired thing. The Ur-Brain tells the Conscious Brain to just get on with whatever it was doing, and it would instruct the reference demons to search the data banks. Laugh, but it's true. Stopped at a traffic light, I look out the window at a plant that I know perfectly well, but I can't remember its name; light turns green, I look both ways, instruct my foot to come off the brake and give it some gas. Teasel was the plant, of course, how could I have forgotten that name. I can do a thirty minute lecture on this plant without notes. Spent the day with an interesting book about survival at the very limits, Life At The Extremes, and read book reviews; late in the afternoon I took a walk, and the freeze-thaw cycle was in full effect. Each of my feet weighed a hundred pounds by the time I got back home. Add mud to the mix. Pagan is from pagus, the countryside. What they do out in the sticks.