Taken Piece by Piece

 

I haven't heard anyone say that 2024 was 'their year' or 'the best year ever', in fact, quite the opposite. Let it not be just the Americans that feel the need to trauma dump at the end of this rough year. Go ahead, join in GB, Canada, Germany, Australia and elsewhere. Your people are here, connecting through the internets. Raise a glass of your preferred beverage and with a hearty yell, "Sod off 2024!" (or similar string of sentiments.)

I had cancer. It was cut out three days before my 50th birthday on December 12th along with it my uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes and cervix. I'm cancer free now. I wasn't prepared to be moonshot into menopause. I'm still not. There are so many questions! I turned to Reddit r/menopause and r/hysterectomy to hear from other women. It's an important time in a woman's life that society brushes under the rug unless they're a pharmaceutical company or advertiser pushing "Age Renewal" creams.

Honestly, who the fuck wants to be a "mature woman"? JD Vance and his Ilk will tell you the purpose of post-menopausal women is to help the child-bearing women care for the children. Fuck off! I'm going to teach the children how to use a sling shots and BB guns and how to cuss like little sailors! 

Shit cakes need toppings of course. I know my son didn't mean to give me the plague for Christmas, (okay, not THE Plague) but a nasty cold. I think I've torn an inner suture from coughing. It's not intolerable, all things considered. I barely remember Christmas day, it was my worst day with the cold, and I spent most of it in bed, under the covers, with the phone ringer off.

The bill is currently estimated at $32,000 for the surgery. We'll see how much insurance will pay of it or if they'll deny, delay and defend. I've already got them on speed dial trying to keep my mother's care funded for, just one more week, just one more week, just one more week......

It's not just that my body is exhausted, my spirit is exhausted. I can't even cry about it. Maybe I really have been just sitting here for the last few weeks with the 'thousand-yard stare' one gets from so much trauma at once.

The day before the surgery I had an interview for a job I really, really wanted. My spouse and I orchestrating how we would dose me with drugs, and he would drive me there and back so that I could do the final interview hoping they wouldn't notice any weirdness. Instead of calling me for that final interview the day after my surgery, they said that they really liked me, but decided to hire someone else. It's the only time I've cried this much. To reach out for a flame of hope only to get smoke.

The biggest layer of this shit cake though is that I didn't have time to contemplate my own health as I have been so worried in my effort to help my mom when I don't know what the fuck I'm doing or how to navigate all these state and local agencies and subsidiaries to keep her cared for! I just had to "get 'er done." She needed the 3-day stay in the hospital, but then they sent her to a rehabilitation place, no exceptions. Except the rehabilitation place hasn't done their job properly with having too many patients and not enough staff. So now she can't walk, she weighs as much as a young child, and they don't give her the medications on schedule which is incredibly painful for her. I've been pulling favors having people visit her and bringing her favorite foods to eat. Both so she eats well, but more importantly so that she knows she is not invisible and not forgotten.

I've finally found an advocate that my stepdad and I can rely on and soon we'll get her out of that terrible place and somewhere quiet where she can get more individualized attention. They put her in such a bad state neither my stepdad nor I could take her home to care for her. She now needs 24-hour care and despite 35 years of marriage my stepdad my need to divorce her to force the state to help pay for care, otherwise they would take it all, every last dollar to leave my 87-year-old stepdad homeless in an effort to recoup all money for her care. The poverty line was last updated in 2019, but the metrics used to formulate what the poverty line is in the U.S. hasn't been updated since the 1960s.

There is a large number of Americans in the class of "the working poor" that are homeless and make too much money to get federal or state aid based on these old metrics. I used to be one of them. The cost of housing used to be about 30% of a person's take home pay. Now it's 80% if not more, leaving very little money for food, utilities, gas or cell phone. I have talked to many homeless people in my life to the point that I was able to ask, "What happened? How did you get here?"

A lot of them say it comes down to medical debt, the straw that broke the camel's back. One guy was solidly middle-class, then he got rear-ended really bad by a hit and run driver who was never caught. It messed up his back really bad causing chronic back pain. He started missing work because of it and lost his job. His wife left because he had no job, struggled to find a new one and couldn't really help around the house because he was in so much pain. He has two kids he hasn't seen since they were toddlers. He hopes she told the kids he was dead, because he is so ashamed, he wouldn't want them to see him as he is.

The Republicans like to paint over huge societal problems with one color of paintbrush. A brush that always lays the blame and obligated penance on the backs of the people suffering. The homeless are homeless because they got addicted to drugs and blew up their lives. Women have problems because they are not married to strong good Christian men to take care of them. Gays and transgendered people are messed up because they are gay, obviously, not like they are messed up from being assaulted by strong good Christian men or denied basic human respect, right?

It's women's fault that birth rates are falling and there won't be a younger generation big enough to bear the weight of paying for and caring for all the elderly citizens. So, they'll threaten us and assault us and apply their laws to our bodies, but you know what, it's too damn late. I wanted to believe that we were better than this. That the old white Christian males would wake up and realize that all the people they disagree with are still Americans that they need to work for and work with, but no, it's too damn late.

I guess Octavia Butler was more prescient than I wanted to believe when she wrote Parable of the Sower and perhaps, we'll have to pull it out of Science Fiction and put it into Science Fact on how to collapse an empire.

If you read this far, you have my thanks. It's a bit stream-of-consciousness. I'm going to read it tomorrow and be embarrassed by all the spelling mistakes, but I stand behind my anger, frustration and sadness. They are valid emotions for challenging times. We should start a revolution! Maybe in six to eight weeks. I couldn't possibly flip a car in anger given my current state. (Although....I still know how to drive a forklift!)