Crazy Days

My daughter sat by my bedside yesterday, tears rolled down her cheeks, “Ma, you’ve been ‘gila’ for many weeks.  When we took you out, you walked right onto doors and things so we had to hold your hand tight like we hold a kid. And you were like a kid, you took everything without sharing. We were going to share a tub of frozen yogurt but you ate the whole thing. You refused to let me have any! I had never seen you like this!

“The doctors had to tie your hands to the bed railings because you kept getting out of the bed and walked all over the ward. And you were talking nonsense. You don’t know how to take care of yourself. The only thing you can do is eating or sitting on the toilet bowl. We have to take care of you almost totally. And you shook your head like crazy every time we talked to you!” She laid her head down onto my chest, and cried softly. “I thought I lost you!  I want my mommy back.”

She recalled one time when she grabbed my shoulders and shook me several times because I was shaking my head for more than ten minutes.

Really, seriously, I don’t even know that things had gotten that serious
.  
I was even like the inmates in “One flew over the cuckoo’s nest”?  

Only a few fleeting scenes of me in a hair cutting place, at a yogurt restaurant and walking in a mall floated in my mind. I seemed to have yelled at the young guy who cut my hair too short, and I was only pacified when his boss came to thin my hair out with nice techniques so that my short hair didn’t look too boyish.

The reflection on the mirror in the toilet was shocking. I looked like my father when he was in his dying days. So much resemblance! And the white hair on top of my head seemed to have grown more abundant in the last few weeks. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t look at my physical self anymore.

It has been more than three weeks since I came to UM.  

I can’t sleep at night due to the noises and commotions all around. The novels I am reading are keeping me sane. For several hours, my mind would go off somewhere else in other worlds and live in the novels like an observer. That is the only time I do not walk around the ward. I’ve been prescribed sleeping pills but I take the pill only after I grow tired of reading, and that is around two to three o’clock.

Sometimes, when I am reading, my mind jumps into work matters. Oh, I need to remind ZYT about this, how about write that proposal and try our luck, we must let the older interns delegate to the new ones…my mind strategizes so I jot down on my note pad. My handwriting is very bad nowadays. The toxicity of the peritoneal fluid has made me forgotten how to do many things. One of them is writing. Sometimes I can’t even read what I write.

“You ‘ve to keep trying, keep learning so you can start all over again when you can get out of the hospital. Don’t stop.” Lucy, my hospitalization councilor reminded me. Lucy had SLE remission so bad over ten years ago that she had to stay in hospital for one year to recover. 

She had to learn to speak, write, and count.    

My daughter’s testimony is verified by my sister who said to me, “We’ve never seen you like this. It is kind of scary to see you becoming a totally different person.  Your ‘gila’ days were stressful for us because we didn’t know what else to do except follow the doctors’ instructions. When you turned round and round in the shopping mall, I wished I had a dog leash to control your movement.” My daughter and her narrated several other incidences which I have no memory of.

The only person who is ‘cool’ and seems unfazed by my gila days is my 82 year old mother.

“We just have to help her and let the doctors do the rest.” I remember her sitting by my bed side reading newspaper and talking to other patients. And praising the young nurses so that they would change my soiled diapers because I wasn’t allowed to even go to the toilet.

I want these gila days to disappear, no more.

By Ching Ching