The paralysis my boy has from the stroke is a complete stone-drag. One of its crueler aspects is his not always knowing whether he needs to piss 0r not. Some sensation is returning in partial ways, but this fleshly deadness still means paper undies, catheters, salves: the whole catastrophe. Since I change them twice a day, in my home you will always find a bucket of bleach solution, filled to the brim with catheters. It's not like the baking smell of cookies wafting through the house, but it's mostly what's going on around here.

Changing his catheters, draining out piss, and washing them is not something I find onerous in the slightest. I keep remembering my mother telling me how Rennaisance ladies used to  brush their teeth with urine to keep them sparkling. Hopefully, having snowy tooths made up for their faces rotting off from all that white-lead make-up. But probably not. On the catheter side of things, I wouldn't like anyone else doing this for him, any more than I'd want them checking him over for possible skin breakage. Call it my geriatric jealousy.

But he says he wouldn't like it either. It's not that I'm terribly swift at swapping out catheters, or rubbing on anti-moisture barrier cream; I'm not. But if you've been through a long illness or injury, you get pretty sick of the quick professional touch: there for only as long as it needs to be. And you can understand why; lingering touches from the med-tech would be beyond creepy. Still, even beat-up and puny, you can get really over just being a carrier for tubes, paper panties, and non-odorous salves. Touch is needed and I need it too.

I need to drag out the diabetic cream and message his nice long, elegant feet--feet I've always envied, since mine tend towards the squarish, like a bear's. I need to admire his skin color: in Colette's words, "...like a peeled banana". He's one of those rare blue-eyed blonde's who effortlessly tans to a creamy cafe au lait, whereas I don't tan at all. I just turn the color of old farm equipment. I need to stroke his face, his whitening beard that doesn't register to me as white, but more an extension of his blondness.I need to rub his back in the mornings, just so he'll say, Ah. Ah. Ah. That feels good. I want something to feel good to him, in the same way I cudgel my head trying to come up with a non-salt, no-sugar diet that tastes good. Because, Jesus Christ, the man should have something good in his life, right now, of all times.

Because of the fucking Foley, as I think of his catheter, he's plagued with infections. As soon as one is cured, and he presents himself to have the catheter removed, an opportunistic infection arises. He's been through four so far, two of them very bad. One was a MRCR staph, awful enough to require that everyone look strangely bee-like in bright yellow hazmat suits. The medication he took was dripped in through a port in his wrist, at roughly $6K a shot four times a day.

One day, trying to add up the dollars, I realized he'd been dripped $72K's worth. Since we fall into the foggy area of the poor and uninsured, we won'tpay $72K, but we'll pay a lot. But I wondered then, Who in hell can afford this? And my answer, as always, is no one. No one can afford American healthcare. And that's some sad shit.

So when we got the urologist's report on Monday, my heart sank to my very feet. It was another infection, the nurse explained to me. And there was no pill for it. That meant another $72K's worth, a five day hospital stay, and our certain financial ruin. However, I discovered that the Infectious Disease Clinic had an out-patient program, so at least he'd be spared the stunning boredom of lying in a hospital. But since it's under contract to Baylor and not a Baylor facility, we could wind up paying full freight, or have to beg for a second mortgage at the very least.

The Charge Nurse I talked to was very kind, as are most people at Baylor. Yes, she said, the cost would be "thousands and thousands of dollars", but maybe her business office could talk to the Baylor business office... She called me back early the next morning to say that we could be admitted but it would have to be through the ER, the way all uninsured patients are admitted.

So my boy and I wrapped ourselves up in sweaters and scarves, got out the wheelchair, his discharge papers itemizing all his drugs, and schlepped out to the car. We're both getting skillful at wheelchair lifts, but it gets exhausting fast. Still, we made it into the car, somehow I got the fucking wheelchair into the trunk, which is yet more proof that God exists, and off we went to pick up the latest lab report, and thence to the Baylor ER down Gaston Avenue. The scenic route if you like your scenics corroded-looking.

Dallas is at its worst during winter. It's a city that was never meant for cold weather, although it reliably has cold weather every goddamned year. Still, people insist on planting banana trees and other tropical effluvia, which also reliably dies. My boy says that you can judge the delusion quotient of any resident by how many banana trees he's planted, and I believe him.

So that day down to the ER was one of those blank cold days when everything looks brown. Just really brown.The leaves are brown, the grass is brown, the bushes are brown, and I was starting to feel kind of brown myself.

We got to the emergency room and were admitted to the waiting area. It wasn't crowded, but the people who were there needed to be there. An old lady with congestive heart failure was telling her son to go on back to Corsicana and tend to his cows. She'd be okay. Surely someone would roll her to a hospital room, while he nodded uncertainly. An old black neatly-dressed homeless man was told he couldn't get his medication there, because it was for a chronic condition and he nodded gently, just showing he understood. Another black man sat near him; he was much younger, very handsome, holding a burned hand upright hissing, with pain. A frightened but solemn young Mexican couple brought in two tiny infants who were much, much too quiet. 

"Are you sure this is the best thing to do," my boy whispered to me. He glanced around at the collective stoic patience and misery.

"You mean being here, in ER?" I asked.

"Yeah. Is this the best thing for us to do?"

"It's the only way we'll get admitted anywhere. But it really is the only way to get into the Infectious Disease Clinic," I said, " I know that much."

"Well, okay," he said, settling back wretchedly in his wheelchair. In my haste to get us there, I'd forgotten the chair's cushion and his ass was killing him.

 Soon enough we were admitted to an ER cubical, and a med-tech drew off five blood samples, before my boy knew what hit him. We waited an hour or so, donated a piss sample from the fucking Foley, then donated a fresher sample.

"Blood looks good," our nurse told us, smiling, and I felt a slight easing of the heart. My boy had gotten so lethargic, I'd been very afraid his bloodstream was contaminated  too.

And then the doctor came in. He was short, round, grey-haired, and he listened very, very, very carefully to our Job's list of medical woes. I handed him the lab report, saying we'd been advised to go to the infectious disease clinic to get a drip, since there was no pill for this.

The doctor glanced up sharply. "I have a pill for this," he said.

"Really?" we asked, "Do you really?" We goggled, scarcely believing it.

"Just a minute," he told us, and returned in about that time. "Here," he said, handing us the script. "Three of these for ten days."

I stared at it. Penicillan. Goddamn penicillan.

It's the sole reason I'm alive today, instead of dead from infected tonsils. My uncle was the ship's doctor on a sub during WWII. He was given one shot's worth of that new wonder drug and never used it. "Never saw anyone who needed it that bad," he told me later, "and I just had one shot."

When I filled the prescription later that night, the pharmacist frowned. "Fiftysix dollars just for penicillan?" she asked. "That can't be right."

"Never mind. I'll pay it," I said, whipping out my debit card. "I'll pay it."

And later that night, lying back in his bed smiling, my boy said, "What a strange blest trip, " and he teared up some. "We had angels today. Real angels."

Then he looked over at me. "Nothing happened the way I thought it would," he said.

Like the best stories, I thought.

And I could hardly wait to tell it.