TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 172

Wed Mar 7 07:34:12 PST 2007

March 7, 200000007

Dear Amazing wonders,

	So we took Meyshe to the doctor yesterday 
morning.  The doctor verified that he had an ear 
infection after removing a wad of earwax from his 
ear the size of a marble.  She prescribed an 
antibiotic and some ear drops for the pain. 
Good.  We were on the right track.

	Then yesterday afternoon, Meyshe came 
walking into the room and said, "What's this 
yellow stuff coming out of my eye?"  And indeed 
there was yellow stuff coming out of his eye.  It 
was gooped on his eyelashes.  His eye looked 
swollen.        Here we go again.

	I called the medical advice line.  The 
nurse said that it was all part of the same 
thing, the eyes being deeply involved with the 
ears; both are being affected by the same bugs. 
Put warm compresses on it.  The antibiotic ought 
to work on it.  Not to worry.

	So Meyshe is home from school on 
Wednesday morning, which is when I have my 
writing class.  DAMN.   I thought it over.  Under 
usual circumstances, I could leave Meyshe alone 
for a few hours, but while he's sick, I just 
couldn't see my way clear to leave him.  I had to 
call the instructor and give my regrets.  They 
were big regrets.  So should I write all morning 
in honour of the class I'm missing?

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Freaking the passengers

	A long time ago, way before I was born, 
before my parents had an inkling of each other, 
in fact, in 1932, my father, then seventeen years 
old, had a surgical procedure done on him to 
correct a deviated septum.  The condition had 
caused him a lot of travail, difficulty 
breathing, snoring, and it exacerbated his 
allergies of which there were a plethora.  He was 
surrounded by the pollens, grasses and four 
legged beasts to which he was allergic, and in 
allergy season, he was a mess.

	So, his father being an ear, eye, nose 
and throat specialist, decided to take a scalpel 
to the inside of his nose and rearrange the 
retaining walls.  They planned on doing this in 
the heighth of allergy season, which was not a 
good idea.  But it was all state of the art back 
in 1932, and he was lucky they even had septum 
shaped scalpels.  What happened was a series of 
flukes that nearly cost him his life and left him 
with a permanent scar and a neurological 
condition.

	The surgery seemed to go well enough, but 
the aftermath was not good.  An infection set in 
at the site of the surgery, and this spread to 
the mastoid bone which had to be removed.  When 
they were removing the mastoid bone, the 
infection spread to the meninges.  This developed 
into a cyst which put pressure on the brain. 
This all sparked a case of meningitis, an 
incurable disease, a near death sentence, at that 
time.  Only a miracle would pull him through. 
His parents, steeped in the culture from the old 
country, Lithuania, changed his name so the angel 
of death wouldn't find him.  I don't know how the 
name was changed, whether they had to go to a 
Rabbi, or a judge, but they did so. He lay in his 
hospital room, screaming and complaining, so that 
they had to move him to a private room.  While 
they were moving him, they took his name off the 
charts of the who's who in hospital beds, and 
this was read, erroneously, as a death.   His 
death was reported in the obituary section of the 
Passaic newspaper, and for years afterwards, he 
would bump into people who thought they were 
seeing a ghost, would rub their eyes, scream, or 
go into a swoon.  He used to tell that story with 
great satisfaction and pleasure.  The fact that 
he scared the bajeezus out of people tickled him, 
so he'd repeat the story without requests, many 
times, many times.

	About a decade later, when he was already 
married to my mother, the scar tissue on the 
mininges began to put pressure on the brain, and 
this caused what were called, "uncinate syndrome 
seizures."  He had a form of induced epilepsy 
that could not be corrected.  When he'd have 
these seizures, he never fully lost 
consciousness, but would be transported into 
another state.  He was awake but not awake. 
These were not shaking and quaking seizures. 
They presented themselves as a few minutes of 
bizarre behaviour.  Since his behaviour was 
pretty bizarre to begin with, it was sometimes 
difficult to tell that he was having an attack 
unless you knew him very well.  He might repeat a 
motion over and over, grind his teeth, stare off 
into space, say some weird non sequiturs, or just 
shut down and not say or do anything at all for a 
while.  Then he'd come out of it, not remembering 
a thing about what had gone on.  My mother would 
inform him that he'd had an attack, which would 
explain his feelings of disorientation and the 
gap in time.  Usually, he listened to her and 
took note.  It straightened him out a bit, 
relieved the state of confusion.

	To control these attacks, they put him on 
Dilantin, a potent anti-epileptic medication that 
played tricks with his moods, gave him a hot 
temper, made him even less predictable and more 
frightening then he had been before.  I tiptoed 
around him, but often got screamed at for no 
apparent reason, or accused of a variety of 
wretched transgressions of which I was wholly 
innocent.  Whenever they adjusted his medication, 
we had to watch out for the side effects, because 
they could last days, weeks, while his body got 
accustomed to the new dosage.

	He knew what to do to bring on an attack. 
Drink alcohol.  He was not supposed to drink 
alcohol at all, because of the interaction with 
his medication and the likelihood that it would 
bring on a series of seizures.  So when he wanted 
to torture my mother, he'd open up a bottle of 
beer, or slam back a glass or two of rotgut wine. 
Then she'd have to hover over him to prevent him 
from hurting himself or compromising others' 
safety.  He'd get a delighted naughty sadistic 
look on his face and say, "I think I'll have a 
beer!"  He'd wait for a reaction.  If there was 
none, he'd rattle around in the refrigerator, 
finding a can of beer or cheap wine and he'd 
noisily pour himself a glass, take it in front of 
her, repeat his commentary.  "I think I'll have a 
glass of wine.  Here goes. . . "  And he'd pour 
it down his gullet in one swallow, then smack his 
lips loudly and exhale, "Aaaaaaaah!"  It wasn't 
long before the effects of the insult to his 
chemical balance showed up in an uncinate 
syndrome attack or two.  He'd glaze over and rub 
his leg repetitively for a couple minutes.  Or 
continue to do whatever he'd been doing when the 
seizure came on.  I watched him keep spooning 
sugar into his coffee.  A dozen times, maybe, the 
sugar mounding up above the liquid before it 
dissolved and fell into the cup.

	"Justin, you've just had an attack.  You 
know you shouldn't have alcohol.  Why do you do 
that?"  And if he were still determined enough, 
he'd get himself another glass, playing with his 
own body to pull a sadistic trick on his wife.  I 
never understood it.  I just loathed it.  It rid 
me of any sympathy I might have had for his 
neurological condition.  I found him contemptible.

	Once, we were on a trip up through 
Oregon, probably visiting his sister, Selma, in 
Portland.  We were traversing these windy 
mountain roads, sheer cliffs on one side, and 
curlicues of asphalt under wheel.  He was 
driving.  Suddenly, his grip on the steering 
wheel became rigid.  He kept steering to the 
center of the road.  He was staring off into 
space.  My mother was good in a crisis, as you 
can imagine she'd have to be with three neurotic 
kids and a lunatic husband.  She grabbed the 
wheel, steered the car back to the right, to the 
side of the road, reached over with her foot and 
put on the brake.  The car came to a stop.  She 
pulled on the emergency brake.

	"Justin.  You're having an attack."  He 
just stared.  "Get out of the driver's seat and 
come around to the passenger's side."  He opened 
his door, got out and walked around the car to 
the other side, got in, sat down and kept staring 
ahead.  My mother had traded places with him. 
Now she was driving.  She drove on for a mile or 
so when he finally came out of his seizure.  He 
suddenly looked startled, the old stiff muscles 
and angry disposition emerged.  Glory be.  He was 
awake.

	"What happened?" he asked, seeing that he 
wasn't where he had been and there had been a 
chunk of time removed from his memory.

	"You had an attack," she said, softly, so 
that Daniel, Dana and I wouldn't hear what she 
was confiding in him.  But we were on top of 
this.  This was a family moment.  We were at high 
alert.  We would have heard a kleenex hit the 
outside of the car.

	"You had an attack while you were driving.  And I took over."

	His face turned red.  "I did not!"  He 
turned to us in the back seat.  "She's lying. 
She's trying to make me go crazy.  I didn't have 
an attack, did I!  This is all part of her plan 
to make it seem as if I'm crazy, when it's she 
who's crazy!"

	We shivered, white to translucent, 
shaking our heads, "No."  She kept driving. 
After a while, he stopped ranting.  But the 
subject kept coming up, and it was enough to keep 
us scared.  That was part of the beauty of his 
condition.  He could scare the living daylights 
out of us for free.

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-- 

Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net