I’ll admit. I’m frustrated by my mother’s recalcitrance on health care. She doesn’t want to see a doctor for anything, even though she’s been coughing and has had a runny nose for weeks now. It’s allergies. Probably. But I worry it isn’t, or could turn from allergies to bronchitis, asthma, or pneumonia.
She doesn’t have a PCP – hasn’t for years now. She didn’t like the last one she had and never sought another. She saw a specialist who confirmed her ALZ status and who prescribed anti-anxiety medication, but that’s it really. If for no other reason, she needs a PCP to prescribe or renew medications. And Lord knows we want her prescription for anti-anxiety medication renewed. It’s the only thing that can keep her on an even keel and give the rest of us some peace.
I just don’t know how to convince her that this is important. Don’t understand her reluctance. Of course, with Covid still stalking us it might be almost impossible for her to be registered as a new patient with any doctor. And even if she does get admitted, they will undoubtedly test her for Covid because of the coughing and runny nose. How will she begin to understand that? She doesn’t understand Covid as it is, no matter how many times we try to tell her. I don’t say “Covid” to her. I say it’s a sickness, like a really, really bad flu. She might understand that because it is a frame of reference that still lodges in her mind. Covid does not. It simply can not.
Later in her life, like at 80, she always said that doctors don’t care about old people. That the elderly didn’t receive the care that younger people did. Doctors were just out for the money, etc., etc. These are ideas picked up from my father rather than her own point of view. The irony of all of this is that my mother worked in a state-funded university teaching hospital for over 25 years. She was a clerk who booked appointments for patients and acted as a liaison between them and the doctors in the outpatient clinic where she worked. Even more ironic, or sad, she worked with neurologists. (And urologists. Don’t ask me why these two specialties were in that clinic since they patently don’t have much to do with one another.)
She had a good relationship with her colleagues and the doctors, most of whom are dead now. There was one doctor, younger than the others, who was, is still, a neurologist whom I called upon when we wanted a diagnosis on my mother’s condition. I got nowhere. She hardly recalled my mother and was dismissive. Couldn’t help at all, not even with suggestions of where to call. Maybe my mother was right. Maybe they don’t care. Maybe it was just that doctor who just really didn’t seem to give a shit about someone she once knew.
Mom cared about her work. She cared about those patients. She used to go in early to get a start on her day bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, just “on” like an Energizer Bunny all day long. I worked in the clinic one summer when in high school, not reporting to her, thank God. It was a big place and I was a file clerk reporting to the office manager. What a godawful and boring job that was. But I went into work with her, of course, and she made her morning stops at various departments picking up computer printouts and patient punch cards to prepare for the day ahead. I don’t think the clinic opened ‘til 9, but she was in by 8 at the latest, without fail. Mom also rarely took vacation or sick time, so by the time she retired she had accumulated something like three months of vacation pay. That was back in the day before “use it or lose it” of course.
In the fullness of time, Mom retired and was hired back as a consultant at 20 hours a week or something like that. This was cause for much anguish later in life, before she was diagnosed with ALZ, but well on her way. I think even from the get-go she felt that working as a consultant was like double-dipping or somehow illegal or wrong. Of course it wasn’t. The state wouldn’t have asked her to come on in that capacity if it was. The state got the benefit of her experience without having to pay out benefits so it was win-win for them. Still, it stuck in her mind and as her illness worsened she became convinced that the woman down the street, who worked for the state, would turn her in. That “they” would come after her and demand all of that money back. Or that she would be imprisoned. She would make dad take another route out of the driveway that wouldn’t pass that house, or duck down in the passenger seat so she couldn’t be seen. She wouldn’t walk by that house and refused to come to my house for awhile because the woman next door was a state employee. It wasn’t until I convinced her that my neighbor had retired that mom would unbend enough to visit.
That particular demon has been laid to rest, but “they” are still out there. “They” still torture her tortured mind. It’s different “theys” now, but no less real to her for all that it is haunted imagination.
