Snowden's Secret

Oh, you want to know how my mother’s doing. Sorry. I forgot you can’t just share bad news and drop it like a speeding ticket, or else you run the risk of caring cyber-strangers starting to fret. And you can only take advantage of caring cyber-strangers for so long. So, before I lose my cyber-privileges, here goes:

Mom’s home from the hospital and she’s not dying. Not unless she gets hit by a bus, at any rate. Which isn’t likely, considering the dearth of bus routes running through her bedroom these days. Although of course there’s always the porcelain one down the hall…

The short version is this: being bedridden and appetite-suppressed for long enough can make a person averse to getting out of bed or eating food. And if you think that’s not funny, well, there are lots of things not even funnier. Like the fact that Mom hasn’t been out of bed since early June.

Here’s the long version: The Lyme disease is finally cleared up – you might not know she had that, but she did – and when she finally finished the course of kill-‘em-all-and-let-god-sort-‘em-out antibiotics that finally cured it, her liver pulled the rip cord on its fall. Which is to say: it’s not actively failing anymore, but it’s not exactly pulling down straight A’s. In fact, it’s going to need all the tutoring and legacy-help it can get just to be a gentleman’s-C-student from now on.

The doctors say a transplant’s not an option, for two reasons: A. in the overall weak state she’s in there’s just no chance she’d make it off the table, and B. if she eats and moves around and gets her strength back enough to survive a transplant, she won’t be sick enough to need the transplant after all.

What I take away from that is: C. my own liver is standing down till further notice, so it’s okay if I go ahead and have a beer. And: D. just to avoid confusion for anyone out there who’d like to join me: I’ll be calling Mom “Yossarian” from this point on.

Yossarian needs to eat – the equivalent of six nutrition-drinks a day, the doctor said, plus as much healthy food as she can hammer down. But Yossarian can’t stomach any of it. The doctor says if she’d just eat she’d feel like eating (which gives me flashbacks to all the times Johnny’s tried to get into the union through the years), and if it makes her sick she’s under orders to wipe her mouth and turn around and try again.

So that’s where you find us. She's still not eating near what she’s supposed to – and she's still not out of bed at all – but she says she’s trying. Which is hard for the rest of us to understand. I mean, if somebody told me I’d never get out of bed again unless I could suck down a lump of dog shit, you can bet your ass I’d be holding my nose and making like Divine. All she has to do is drink a milkshake...

I don't know.

Oh: Chuck (TFT) is not dead, either, as it turns out.

But that’s a story for another time…

P.S. Yossarian doesn’t get on the computer anymore at this point, either, so I haven’t considered the possibility that she might read what I have to say. If she does, though, and if it makes her angry, then I hereby swear that if she comes here and kicks my ass, I’ll take it down.