Miz S

The Amanda Update: It's Not Pretty.

Remember my friend Amanda? Crappy life, fucked-up disease, etc? Click here, here, or here if you need background. She has continued to languish in the intensive care unit of a local hospital. I have visited her, somewhat infrequently, what with my busy life, tra la, tra la.

On the down side, she still can't move her arms or legs and the doctors are not optimistic that she ever will use them again. On the up side, she  was finally  weaned off the ventilator.  Unfortunately,  that turned out to be a bad thing, in a way, because as soon as they were certain that she could breathe on her own they transferred her indigent, Medicaid ass to a different facility.

She is now in a "Nursing and Rehabilitation Center". I had pictured some state-of-the-art, Discovery Health channel type place. You know, where brave young men learn to walk again, urged on by brilliant physical therapists and a dedicated nursing staff.

Evidently, I exist in some sort of fantasy world. It turns out to be just a crappy little nursing home, somewhat dilapidated from the outside, filled with sad, sad people.

Her mother called me yesterday to let me know that she had been moved. She sounded very upset, and I tried to soothe her by  saying, "Oh, but now she'll get the physical therapy she needs!  Yay!"

I didn't really say "yay."

Then I went there to see her and I just about fucking lost it. What a grim place to spend the bulk of your remaining life. Because, let's be honest, her chances for a full recovery are almost non-existent. Her chances of contracting pneumonia or some other infection are huge. The doctors have told her mother that Amanda should have a living will in place with instructions about whether or not to resuscitate.

Amanda's roommate, oh God. She is sort of young-ish, (30's?) and her hands were encased in these gigantic sort of mitten bandages, as big as boxing gloves. Because, you see, she chews on herself. I watched her gnawing in a determined fashion on the bandages and saw her make quite a bit of progress. It was hard to ignore.

Amanda, who still can't talk, mouthed to me in an excited way that someone tried to kill her roommate by putting a pillow over her face yesterday! Amanda's grip on reality being slightly tenuous, you see.

At least, one hopes that this is the case.

I stayed for as long as I could stand it, then went home and ate about a thousand tootsie rolls. There being, you see, a mathematical relationship between level of grief and amount of chocolate that must be consumed.

Sorry. This isn't exactly cheerful fare for a Monday morning. And I feel as if I should have something wise to say here, but I don't, so I'm going to hit the publish button and go get ready for work.

Chatty If Somewhat Cheerless.

I changed my weblog description from "ever hopeful" to "divine if somewhat scattered". This is how Vicki described me on her blog one time, and I was charmed. Maybe I will change it from time to time when I get bored. If you have any suggestions, feel free to tell me. But be nice.

Yesterday morning I got an excited phone call from Evangeline after her night of debauchery at a friend's house, because the Children's Hospital Diabetes Lady sent information to her email about the process of switching over to an insulin pump. It is a long and complicated process (for reasons that are boring to the average non-diabetic so just trust me on this) but the first step is tonight at the insulin pump information session, where all the different company reps come to demo their products.

On Monday I mentioned that we already know that our health insurance won't cover a pump. I added, airily, that we would just pay it out of pocket, it's about a thousand bucks, we're not poor, wheee! Let's  go out and celebrate with sushi and sake!

I have no idea where I pulled that $1000 price tag out of. My ass, maybe? Because a little research today on the Internet uncovered a price tag of $6000 - $7000.

Evangeline looked crestfallen when we told her that it would have to wait. We can switch health insurance providers to one that will cover part (not all) of the cost, but not until January. So she would not be able to take the insulin pump class until she got back from Russia in May.

This is not the end of the world by any means. She manages just fine on her current insulin delivery system, and it's not a huge deal if she has to wait. But it still arouses my anxiety because I'M HER MOM I WANT TO MAKE EVERYTHING OKAY.  Also, I guess it arouses my guilt because we recently refinanced our mortgage and we have a small chunk of change sitting in the bank (not a huge amount, don't get excited), but it is enough to buy insulin pumps for 3 or 4  little diabetic waifs. We refinanced with the specific goal of fixing up our little mildew-y bathrooms and paying some college tuition.

So. I guess I want to take care of home maintenance and pay tuition bills more than I want Evangeline to have an insulin pump before January.

I do not think for a minute that this makes me a bad mother (she said, defensively), but it does make me feel bothered. I would much prefer to plunk out the money or wave a magic wand or something. I am bothered that our health insurance won't pay, and I'm bothered that it costs so much to begin with.

*  *  *

I have spoken to Amanda's mother several times since my surgery. Yesterday morning's phone call shook me up. Mrs. P said that Amanda is crying a lot (she can't make any noise, but her face wrinkles up into a grimace of despair, it's horrible to see, really) and that she mouths to her mother "Help me please." When I reported this to Josh and Evangeline I suddenly felt quite wretched and thought I might throw up. The doctors have told Mrs. P that they are not optimistic that Amanda will ever regain full use of her arms and legs due to the nerve damage. They are trying to find her a bed in a rehabilitation facility where she can be weaned off the ventilator and get physical therapy. In the meantime, the social workers are trying to find a group home for David to live in. Mrs.P is all worried that Amanda will be abused and raped in a rehab hospital, which wtf? Does that happen a lot? I tried to be a reassuring voice.

I don't even know why I am telling you all this. It is so fucking bleak and depressing, and it will not end well. I can only hope that it ends quickly.

Sorry for being a buzz kill.

No depressing shit tomorrow, I swear. Only bunnies and puppies and rainbows.

Where Amanda Is Now.

An old friend of mine is on my mind this week. I want to talk about her. This is Part 3. 

Amanda's family is much, much more messed up than the little bit that I have talked about here. A frozen, fearful little group of people, intent on maintaining appearances and embracing proprieties. You can imagine how Amanda's life has fucked with their heads.  The dad died a few years ago. The brother has never forgiven Amanda for the transgressions she committed over the years, and the way she destroyed what should have been her parents' golden years of retirement. To this day he will not acknowledge her existence.

I have also not conveyed any sense of Amanda's desperate yearning to make amends with all the people in her life, especially her brother, or her genuine fragility, the way she is always on the verge of breaking into a million pieces of grief. The extraordinary shame that she feels for all the ways that she has fucked up her life and David's life. The way that she constantly apologizes for her very existence.

* * *

A little more than a week ago,  I steeled myself to make the annual call to Amanda's mother to find out how she was doing. Her mother told me that Amanda had collapsed sometime in June from a porphyria attack and had been hospitalized. She spent 12 days in the regular ward before being moved to the ICU after her body just sort of shut down. She has been in the ICU, intubated, on a ventilator, for almost 3 weeks now. A tracheotomy was performed a few days ago so that they could make her more comfortable by taking out the breathing tube. She is being fed through a nasogastric tube. She is catheterized. She is in pain. She is so weak that she cannot lift her own hand. She cannot speak, but she can answer simple questions by nodding or shaking her head. Her lungs collapsed the other day. She is feverish, and they have not identified the source of the fever.

She is completely aware of where she is, who she is, and who her visitors are. Her 80-year-old mother is there every day, then goes home to deal with David, who is traumatized by the absence of his mother.

I have been to see her 5 times in the past 10 days. I felt consumed with guilt for the first couple of days, because, well, I don't know, really. Maybe because I hadn't called her for so long, or because I have avoided contact with David in recent years, or maybe mostly because my life is good and hers isn't.

This is the sickest Amanda has ever been that I have known about. I think she will die soon, but I don't know. Maybe she can get strong again and return to her little apartment and continue to live her bewildering life.

* * *

I have thought about Amanda every single day for more than 25 years. She is always on my mind because every day, every single day of my life, I drive past her parents' street, and past the little path that goes into the woods where we used to smoke pot together, and past the elementary school that she attended. I walk my dogs on the field where her old junior high was. All over my house are little presents that she gave me over the years. At Christmas--a time of year where Amanda was particularly sentimental--I pull out dozens of ornaments and nutcrackers that she gave to my daughters.

I understand that Amanda made many foolish and sad choices along the way, but you will never convince me that she ever, ever had complete control over her fate. There were so many tosses of the dice where she just flat out lost. 

And because she was my friend, my best friend, I cannot reconcile myself to the way her life turned out compared to the way that my life turned out.

Ever since she sent me that Christmas card, many years ago,  I have been biting my nails and hoping against hope that everything would somehow be okay. But in the end, it will not be okay. It will just be sad.

What Happened To Amanda After High School.

An old friend of mine is on my mind this week. I want to talk about her. This is Part 2. 

Amanda's life between 1976 and 1986 is mostly a blank for me. We were not in touch, so what I know is only what she has told me. I know that she stole from her parents to support a burgeoning drug problem. I know that she drove the wrong way through the Baltimore Harbor tunnel when she was drunk and got into an accident. She was arrested and sent to rehab, where she met DJ, an up-and-coming insurance fraud perpetrator, a thief,  AND an admirer of Adolf Hitler.

Eventually they moved into a trailer together and had a baby boy, David. 

The trailer had no heat.

 Amanda got a job at Kmart, and dropped David off at the babysitter every day before she went to work. 

DJ stayed home and trained the pitbulls to fight. 

Amanda started to have unusual symptoms of horrible pain and nausea, and after some unnecessary surgery, was finally diagnosed with a rare metabolic disorder called Acute Intermittent Porphyria, in which certain chemicals build up in the bloodstream and then attack the nervous system. 

She was no longer drinking, and she was trying her best to be a good mother to David. She moved back in with her parents, where she would live for the next 10 years or so. 

I was thrilled when I got a Christmas card from her one year. We picked right up where we had left off, except now we were in our 30’s and we were mothers and we didn’t get high. 

I was a SAHM at the time. Amanda and I called each other frequently during this period, and got together with the kids every few weeks or so. David had his 3rd birthday party in our backyard, and maybe his 4th too, I can't really remember. I invited Amanda to a lot of family functions. I thought she just needed a friend and some time to get her feet back under her. 

She looked more beautiful than ever. 

Amanda fussed over my girls and bought presents for me all the time. She apologized constantly, for no particular reason. 

Some years passed by. David's development didn't seem quite on target, and he was diagnosed with Asperger's. David's father went to prison, which seemed like a good place for him to be. Amanda got sick and was hospitalized a couple of times. She started abusing prescription drugs again, and she screamed at David a lot.

She shoplifted.

I was in and out of her life during this period. She and her parents were fighting all the time. It became agonizing to call her and hear the latest crisis, or to get the phone call from her and hear her weeping and begging for a ride to the drug store. I understood that she was a drug addict, and that there was nothing I could do to fix her, but I guess I hoped that some miracle might occur. Or maybe I just didn’t know how to politely extricate myself from a very painful friendship. 

Her doctor prescribed morphine for her to dull the constant pain caused by porphyria. She became addicted to the morphine, and she continued to abuse other drugs. 

She and David moved into a subsidized apartment not far from her parents' house. David was 10 or 11 and she was still bathing him. All over, if you catch my drift. She insisted he couldn't wash himself, which was bullshit. I reported her for child abuse. A social worker was assigned to her and David. 

David's weight ballooned, Amanda's weight dropped. He became big enough to rage against her. He started to hit her. 

Oh, I could go on like this for several more paragraphs but I think by now you have probably absorbed the basic gist of the story. Amanda was the biggest train wreck that ever came down the tracks. 

Happily for me, Amanda became lackadaisical about returning my phone calls. I decided to interpret this as permission to step away. I was sick of Amanda's fucked-up, insoluble problems. I had my own goddamned problems to deal with. I stopped calling her altogether. 

Every now and then I call her mother, just to make sure that Amanda is still alive.

Part 3: Where Amanda Is Now.

My Best Friend in High School. *Edited For Clarification*

An old friend of mine is on my mind this week. I want to talk about her. I am splitting this post into 3 parts because, you know, boredom might set in while you are reading the saga.

My best friend in the small private high school that Josh and I attended was a girl named Amanda. She was a tiny little blond thing, with huge brown eyes and beautiful cheekbones. Amanda was smart and funny, and she was so impossibly pretty that boys either stuttered around her, or became overly bold and tried to feel her up on the stairwell which she would almost, but not quite, allow.  Her flirtation skills were finely-honed. Although she had a steady boyfriend (who attended public school), she would sometimes appear to relent and invite some hapless boy over to her house. But when the boy showed up, Amanda wouldn't be there. "Amanda is out for evening," her father would say gruffly. This happened over and over to certain dumbass boys at our school.

I adored Amanda. She wore tight sweaters and platform shoes. I lumbered around after her in my flannel shirts and blue jeans and hiking boots, bumping into desks and dropping things. We mocked the boys who worshipped her. We smoked cigarettes together. We sat next to each other in Psychology class and passed notes back and forth. We walked out onto the train trestle near her house to get high. We listened to Linda Ronstadt records in her room, which had posters on the wall and a vintage painted white ladder that she used as a plant stand. I thought that was the coolest thing in the whole wide world.

Her mother was an even more beautiful version of Amanda. Her mom knew that Amanda smoked cigarettes, and she would pick up cartons of Marlboros for her at the grocery store. This was astonishing to me.

Amanda's father was a dick.

He kept a list on a yellow legal pad of everything bad that she did, and would take it out ceremoniously to add the newest offenses as they occurred. Many years later, Amanda told me that he used to touch her breasts when he was drunk.

It was obvious even in high school that Amanda was troubled. She had run away from home when she was only 13, and had stayed with a much older guy. A juvenile court judge had told her parents that if she ran away again, she would go to Juvenile Hall. Her parents sent her to see a psychiatrist.

I was baffled by the fact that she became an entirely different person when a boy was around. Normal conversation was immediately replaced by light flirtatious banter and long, meaningful eye contact. She became a little more helpless, a little softer. She would tell a lot of lies, and just shrug her shoulders about it later. It was as though boys were not real people to her, but some sort of prey that required her to use a different form of communication.

It's difficult for me to try to explain how I remember Amanda as being so genuinely sweet and kind on the one hand, and so callous about those boys' feelings on the other hand. Later, I figured out that Amanda really hated and mistrusted men and was constantly acting out all sorts of dramas with them. I suppose that she derived pleasure from using her charms as a way to hurt boys, and therefore all men.

She drank a lot, even by high school kid standards. We partied together the night she graduated from high school, a year ahead of me. She was wearing hotpants and a tube top. We went to a couple of different parties together, and she drank like a god dammed fish. Naturally, she was driving. Back then, friends did let friends drive drunk. She got so drunk that she wet her pants. 

Our friendship had cooled a little by then. She liked Josh, and so did I, and this pissed me off and confused me.

We drifted apart. I did not invite her to my wedding four years later, but I dreamed that she showed up at my wedding wearing a white dress.

Tomorrow: What Happened To Amanda After High School.