Ingenting

Last time I visited my folks, I took my mother to the pain doctor. I gave her her space and let her go in without me. A half hour later the shellshocked doctor staggered out of the examining room, begging me to rescue him. 

My mother views doctor visits as one-way socializing. She does not listen to a word the doctor says. She just waits for him or her to take a breath as her cue to start talking again. The doctor explains that the last time my mother came in, he had given her a pain shot with specific instructions: Do not bend over or make any physical effort for 48 hours and keep a pain diary so we can see if the shot worked. He wonders why my mother had not returned after 6 weeks, as he had asked her to.

In the car on the way back, mother explains that it wasn't her fault.  When she got home, the kitchen clock  fell off the wall and landed behind the oven. Rather than wait for someone physically able to come over, she yanked the oven away from the wall and got down on all fours to retrieve the clock. Needless to say she got NO benefit from that shot. As for the diary, I could have told the good doctor that would never happen.

 

Fast forward to the current visit home. I have to take mother to a new pain doctor. (Concerned she may have driven the last one insane, I consider checking the local mental hospitals for babbling physiatrists.)  Somehow I manage to get to the pain doctor even though I am clearly going THE WRONG WAY and we would have gotten there ten minutes earlier had I only followed mother’s directions. She’s already been to this new doc once, right after COVID hit. The doctor gave her one pain injection with instructions to come back for a second one. But when mother returned, she was told it had been too long since her COVID test and she needed to get retested. That's a lot when you are 89 and the only person you allow to drive you is the yard guy who hates doing it and is never available. (Never mind that your daughter gave you the number of a service that specializes in driving old people around. They are not the yard guy.) 

After vehemently refusing my help, mother is trying to fill out forms while we wait in the examining room. The form requires a description of your pain. Mother has to circle or skip words like Dull. Sharp. Throbbing. Nervy. Burning. Cold. Nagging. Stabbing... So many words! This is stupid, mother exclaims. How can I decide? All of it. I feel all of it. It depends on the time of day. Next, she has to rate her pain from 1 to 10.  How ridiculous. Rate it against what? How do you ascribe a number to pain? Quelle connerie! (Connerie is French for bullshit).

 

Enter a handsome young male nurse. 

Nurse: Mrs. Becker, where is your pain? 

Mother: Well, it’s in my lower back

Me: (Trying to be helpful because I know how this is going to go) The gerontologist says it’s lumbago.

Mother: It’s also in my knee. And my left arm and right shoulder. And right across my clavicles. It feels like a thousand tiny bombs are exploding all over my torso.

Nurse: Mrs. Becker, can you tell us where it hurts the most?
Mother: EVERYWHERE. It hurts everywhere. (Much extraneous information follows. What’s wrong with her husband, how much better she felt 2 weeks ago, how she’s sure her COVID shot had a lot to do with it, how she has no help because her daughter lives in California and her other daughter lives in France,  how she was walking to the Safeway just last week, how spry she was three days ago...)
Me: Mother, you need to specify where it hurts the most. Otherwise all they can do is tell you to take Tylenol.
Nurse: Can you describe your pain?

Mother: Yes. It hurts.

 

The nurse looks at me. I cross my eyes, which, after years of practice, I am very good at.  He realizes it’s hopeless and gets the doc. The doc manages to cut through the avalanche of words and find out that my mother has a trigger point. She injects the trigger point with something.  I am a bad daughter. I should have asked what but at this point, it could be cortisone, Lysol, or balsamic–I don't care.  All I want is to GTF out of there before I lose what’s left of my mind.  The doctor tells me my mother is a tough lady who overdoes it and isn't a good listener. I resist asking Dr. Obvious why we are paying for a diagnosis I could have made myself. 

Then the doctor sends another handsome young guy to see us–the TENS expert. As he sticks electrodes on my mother's back, he explains the principle behind TENS. I chuckle silently through gritted teeth. I know my mother will think this is another “connerie”. There is no way in hell she is going to stick electrodes on her back in a prearranged pattern and sit still for forty minutes in the morning and forty minutes at night. Not to mention operate anything with buttons and a screen. 

 

She hates the TENS machine. This connerie feels like a large insect is crawling on her back.  The young man tell her the company will send the TENS machine, which costs $600, to her house so she can try it. She can either return it or she has the option to buy it for $25 a month.  She politely agrees but on the way home, she vents about the stupid questions, the stupid nurse, the stupid doctor, and the stupid, stupid connerie of a TENS machine. I point out that there is legit science to it and that my hospital clients use it on women in labor. No, it is a connerie and as usual, I have no idea what I’m talking about.

 

The next day, my sister calls and tells my mother that my brainiac nephew who knows everything, studies artificial intelligence, and is going to the French equivalent of Wharton, has heard of TENS. He says they use it on Olympic athletes. Mother perks up. If her genius grandson knows about it, there's a small chance it's not a connerie.

 

Monday comes and no TENS machine. Tuesday, still no TENS machine. I say nothing but decide I better call them and check on the whereabouts of the machine tomorrow. That night, I go out to dinner with a friend. When I come back, Mother is in a tizzy. Turns out the TENS machine came while I was doing errands for her on Monday. Of course she never told me and now, she has lost it. We look everywhere but deep down I know it’s hopeless. In the past two years, her house has eaten:
Two sets of car keys–at the same time

A bunch of jewelry she had hidden in her underwear drawer

A credit card

Her wedding ring

Every important paper that’s come in the mail. (Somehow solicitations from Smile Train, Doctors Without Borders, the Native American School, the Paris Jewish Museum, the DNC, Children's Hospital, and that "charming" Chuck Schumer never get lost).

Most of this stuff eventually turned up but it can take months.

 

We search everywhere for the TENS machine. And I do mean EVERYWHERE. No, mother shouts. Not upstairs. I never took it upstairs!  I look anyway. The attic room. No! Mother yells. Not the attic. I didn’t GO to the attic. I keep looking. The basement (a regular archeological site. There's no telling what you might find there.) No! Mother screams. Why would I have taken it to the basement? No, not in this drawer, that closet, the sewing basket, the medicine cabinet, or the freezer. Not behind the hutch or under the bed or in the secret compartment in the antique desk. Also not in the hanging shoe container in the coat closet where, last time she visited, and long after the car got rekeyed, my sister finally found the two missing sets of car keys under a pair of mittens.  I keep looking. My parents' caregiver looks too. Zilch. Zippo. Nada. Or, as Bergman would say with existential Swedish bitterness, ingenting.

 

Last night was garbage night. We conclude that mother inadvertently put the TENS machine, which came in a padded manila envelope, out with the recycling. Hopefully some lucky garbage man is using it on his lumbago.