Family - The Ties That Bind...And Gag! (3 page)

“YOU'RE NOT SICK ... YOU'RE IRREGULAR”

Scientific breakthroughs have come and gone in this country and have been ignored totally by my mother. No one will ever convince her that the responsibility for good health does not lie within the minds of each and every one of us.

From birth, my mother's cure-all for every malady I ever suffered was the same, “You need a laxative.” I went through grade school wondering why children went around with their legs and arms in a cast when all they had to do to get well was to take a candy-flavored cleansing agent before they went to bed.

It was uncanny how she could just look at you and determine how you were ready for a clean start in life. A laxative cured an upset stomach, headache, fever, stomach rashes, dizziness, and general run-down feeling. By the time she finished with you, nothing seemed important enough to open your mouth and complain about.

Around the age of twelve, she varied her diagnosis to include, “You're just bored.” All my friends had impacted teeth, blood disorders, viral attacks, appendicitis, dog bites, and pneumonia. I had all those things, but I was “just bored” and the cure was, “Get yourself something to do or I'll find something.”

After I was married, she offered still another second opinion: “It's just your nerves.”

“Mom, I fainted twice today.” (“It's just your nerves.”) “I think I'm pregnant.” (“Nonsense, it's just your nerves.”) She stuck to her story even after I gave birth to an 8-pound, 4-ounce bundle of nerves.

No one in this family has ever taken my illnesses seriously. Just once I'd like to get a virus that everyone else in town doesn't have. I seem to be the last adult female in North America to get it. I don't ask for Mother Teresa, but

I deserve a little compassion, especially from my husband.

“I don't feel well,” I said to him one morning. “I feel like my chest has been wound too tight. Pain is tap-dancing across my eyes. I save up my coughs until I feel adventurous.”

“Nonsense,” said my husband, “you're just bored. Everyone in the office has what you have. There's a lot of it going around and the diagnosis is they probably just need a career change.”

“You could be right,” I said. “I don't want to be married anymore.”

“Sometimes,” he continued, “it's just an attitude where you tell yourself you're sick, when in reality you are generally discontented with yourself. I've seen a million cases of this at work.”

“You didn't say that when you went to bed for three days after you had your teeth cleaned.”

“That's different,” he said. “I had complications.”

“A popcorn hull embedded in a molar?”

I think my trouble is I cannot communicate what I feel to my doctor. As for him, I have yet to understand one word of what he is saying. He speaks Latin ... I speak Reader's Digest.

Most people are like that. Ever since I told a crowd in a doctor's waiting room that I had a Bavarian cyst and two others had the same thing, I've been convinced we do not speak the same language. I suspect I am intimidated by anyone who wears white all winter and washes his hands 137 times a day. God, I'm insecure.

"You say I have this problem in my humorous bone?

As in Woody Alien?"

“Not that humerus.”

“Would you spell that please?”

“Of course,” he says. “Give me a piece of scrap paper and I'll make a diagram and label it for you.”

"Here, just tear off part of the gown you gave me.

There is nothing more humiliating in this world than to try to explain to your husband what the doctor said. “It has something to do with my nose,” I say.

“What part of your nose?”

“You know. The rect ...”

“Try septum,” he says. “What's wrong with it?”

“It's perverted.”

“Deviated.”

“Same thing.”

I've talked with people who told me that they had a cather inserted in them for a week (not to be confused with Willa).

Another friend I know could never remember his blood pressure numbers but said if his diabolic reading was under his golf score, he was happy.

When my grandmother once announced that she had a prostate deficiency and was told it wasn't possible, she snapped, “The way I eat, anything is possible.”

As one of the kids joined Mother and me at the table, I sneezed and blew my nose. “Are you coming down with something?” he asked.

“She's just bored,” said my mother. “Here, why don't you take a shot of this cough syrup.”

“I'm not well enough to take that,” I said. “What do you mean you're not well enough?” she said.

“Read!”

In bold letters the label warned if you exceeded the recommended dosage you could suffer from nervousness, dizziness, and sleeplessness. You could not take the medicine at all if you suffered from high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, or thyroid disease, or were presently taking a prescription antihypertensive or antidepressant drug containing a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. It was not to be taken if you had glaucoma, asthma, or difficulty in urination due to enlargement of the prostate gland.

“You could chance it,” said my son, “and if you get a reaction contact the Poison Control Center as soon as possible.”

“Here's one you can possibly take,” said Mother, grabbing another bottle. “Let's see. Are you pregnant or a nursing mother?” (I groaned.) “Just checking. Do you have an ulcer? Are you allergic to aspirin or do you have a bleeding disease?”

“What's a bleeding disease?”

“You'd blame me,” she said, tossing it back.

“How about this one?” asked my son. “The side effects are dryness of mouth, drowsiness, temporary blurred vision, dilation of the pupils, disorientation, memory disturbances, dizziness, restlessness, hallucinations, confusion, skin irritation, dry, itchy, red eyes, and you can't operate any dangerous machinery.”

“Unless that includes the stove, forget it,” I said.

“Put these on the top shelf,” I said.

“Why?” asked my son. “There are no children here.”

“These should be kept out of the reach of sick people.”

“I hope you're not going to ruin the holidays for everyone,” said my mother.

“Grandma, you sound just like Mom when we were little. Every time someone asked Mom what we were getting for Christmas, she said, T really don't know. Either a chest cold, stomach flu, or walking diarrhea. They always come up with something ... even if it is at the last minute.' ”

It was true. I don't know if it was the anticipation and excitement of the season or the wear and tear of the end of the year, but the kids fell apart on schedule every holiday.

We always used to hear stories of Christmas ... about how people went to parties or watched the big tree at the courthouse being lit up. Once when I was at the drugstore having prescriptions filled, I even saw a group of people singing. I didn't know what it was all about so I asked the druggist. He said, “They're called carolers and they go out and sing in front of homes and sometimes they're invited in for punch and cookies.”

“But how do they get their medication?” I asked.

“They're not sick,” he said.

Not sick! That was the first time I realized that not everyone got sick at Christmas. It made me curious about how other people spent the holidays. All I know is in our neighborhood of cookie-cutter houses in the suburbs, flushed faces and fevers were a way of life.

We'd fix a buffet of antibiotics, clear broth, 7-Up, and Jell-0, hoist a glass of Kaopectate, and propose our traditional toast, “TO MENOPAUSE.”

“MOM, WE'LL TAKE

CARE OF HIM"

As Grandma made her exit, I collared my son and said, “About the snake.”

“Mom,” he said, “there is no need to hyperventilate. It's just for a couple of days. Besides, I thought mothers were supposed to be there for their children.”

“You show me a boy who brings a snake home to his mother and I'll show you an orphan.”

His siblings joined us. “She was the same way when we wanted to bring Harry into the house, remember? 'Don't feed him at the table. Go wash your hands. Don't kiss that dog, you don't know where he's been.' ”

“Now he follows you around all day,” said my son.

“You'd be lost without him,” said my daughter wistfully.

“Sometimes I think you love that dog more than you love us, admit it.”

Admit what! Harry is a bundle of bad breath who should be owned by an attorney. He never passes a thigh without sinking his teeth into it. He bites the hand that feeds him. Mine. And there were promises made the day he came into the house that were never kept.

He would never be fed from the table. (True, he had his own chair alongside the rest of the family.) He would sleep in his own bed (providing it was a waterbed filled with Perrier). Whenever he piddled or dropped a bomb in the house, it would be cleaned up by the first person who saw it. (Astigmatisms flourished.) He would be trained by the children to do his business outside. (He has lived with paper so long, we bought him a subscription to the New York Times.)

Today he is eight years old, and if you can visualize a fifty-six-year-old man in a shaggy fur coat who watches television for six hours each evening and never leaves the room for a commercial, you got it.

Harry knows nothing about nature. He has never seen a tree, a blade of grass, a curb, a pillar, or a car tire.

He has no curiosity as to why the velvet on the chair is so hard for him to relieve himself on, or why they would make a plush carpet so difficult to balance yourself on three legs.

Heaven knows I tried. I praised him when he went where he was supposed to, and I punished him when he missed the paper. It always worked for the kids.

When the house became carpeted with wall-to-wall urine and our guests had to keep moving lest they be mistaken for a wall, we installed a doggy door.

The doggy door is an 8 1/2-by-12 1/2-inch opening cut into a $400 door. To the dog, it is like jumping the Snake River ... blindfolded ... on a tractor mower.

The training proved to be rather simple. Within an hour, I figured out if you pushed the plastic insert with your nose hard enough, it opened to the outside, and it was just a matter of trying to jump for a little impetus, balancing your paws on the sill, and pushing yourself through.

It took Harry a little longer to comprehend.

“Do not look upon it as the Berlin Wall,” I said one day as I rubbed my raw shoulder. “It's a two-way street. You can go out and you can come back in whenever you please.”

One of the kids came in one day full of excitement. “Mom, Harry is standing at the door trying to get out!”

Unfortunately, it was not the door we put the hole in.

One day I was in the kitchen when 1 heard a dog auhority on a talk show. The host was asking him what to do when a dog wet on the same chair all the time. I dropped the dish towel and ran in just in time to hear the dog authority smile and say, “Throw away the chair!”

When a dog allows you to become his best friend, you owe him ... big. Food is his primary source of pleasure.

My husband came into the kitchen one night, dipped his spoon into a bowl, and said “Ummm. Tastes terrific. What is it?”

I said, “Chicken, bacon bits, onions, and kidneys.”

“What do you call it?”

“I call it the dog's dinner. We're having beans and franks. Go get washed up.”

“Do I want to know what's in this bottle filled with brown fluid?”

“It's a new beverage for dogs who are 'sick of drinking just water.' It's flavored with beef.”

“That's quite a jump for someone who drinks from a toilet,” he said. “Besides, how do you know our dog is sick of drinking just water? Does he say yuck and spit it out?”

My husband had a point. We've never had a dog who sang, talked, wrote notes, or communicated with us in any way.

“We just have to trust someone,” I said.

And trust we have. During the last few years I've seen the selection of dog food grow from a couple of bags of nuggets by the grass seed near the door to an entire aisle of options. On blind faith, I've lugged in cheese and beef pellets, dry food that turns sensuous in its own gravy, jerky snacks, liver-flavored cookies, bones that whiten dogs' teeth, and cans of gourmet dog food to combat boredom.

“Let me ask you a question,” said my husband. “Has this dog ever gotten excited about any dog products touted on TV?”

“You know the only time he reacts to anything on TV is when lie goes to bed during PBS pledge week.”

“He doesn't care,” said my husband. “For all we know, he's probably a vegetarian and doesn't know how to tell us. We could throw him a raw potato every day and he'd be happy as a clam.” He tilted the bottle of beef-flavored drink, took a sip, and winced.

“What did you expect, gusto?”

He looked at the dog and whispered, “Stick to the toilet.”

Despite all the demands pets put on you, in the pecking order of a family, they are right near the top. I have to admit I have had a better rapport with Harry than any other member of the family.

There is a reason for this.

You can call a dog and when he comes running to your side, you can say, “I don't want anything. I just wanted to know where you are.” Try this with a kid and he'll break your knees.

A dog will sit with you through the worst television show in the history of video, and if you like it, never once will he try to change the channel and get something better.

He never entertains friends, forcing you to retire to your bedroom like a felon serving time.

He never lies to you and never gets upset if you don't remember his birthday.

Any relationship is strengthened by a friend who can keep a secret. You tell a dog you don't know what you'll do if you can't come up with the interest on your charge card before the 15th and he'll keep it to himself.

There was a story of a man in Wisconsin who said his wife and his dog did not get along. One of them had to go, so he put an ad in the paper that read, “WIFE OR DOG MUST GO. WIFE IS GOOD-LOOKING BLONDE, BUT IMPATIENT. DOG IS GERMAN SHORTHAIR, 2 1/2 YEARS OLD, SPAYED FEMALE. YOUR CHOICE, FREE.”

He received more than twenty calls from people interested in the dog. One caller said he had a short brunette and an English setter and wanted to know if they could swap.