cold

I got a text message at 5:31 AM on Wednesday. My sister did too. The messages were from our brother, saying "Call me please".

By the time I woke up saw the message and called him, his phone was off and his voice mail was full.

My sister called me Wednesday evening to ask if I knew why there were ambulances and emergency crews all over Huntington Ave. Looked it up. Nope. Called her back after I saw a traffic report about a haz-mat spill. She promised to be careful and to call me later. I went back to work, writing my lecture for Wednesday, coughing, sniffling, and feeling kinda crappy.

Then my brother called. He was in a South Shore (MA) emergency department, and he was "wigging out" or some such phrasing.
"Well what's going on?" I asked.
He said he'd been cleared by medicine and was waiting to see psych.
To me, this signaled meth. I said "So you're having another - episode?"

I don't know for certain why I do this. I sometimes take my cues from him on it. If he's speaking openly about it, saying "I picked up" or "I used", then I feel like he'll be ok with me using more direct language. If he seems to be avoiding direct terms, then sometimes I will avoid them too.

I think my choice to comply with the oblique phrasing is because, at those times, I'm afraid I'll scare him off if he sees me as being aggressive or pushy when it comes to talking about his crystal meth addiction and his efforts to break it. I think it's because there have been times when I've insisted on saying "Did you use?" Or even more explicitly "Did you use meth this weekend/last night/today?" and when I've not heard from him for a month after.

So Wednesday night I didn't pry or push.

Later Wednesday night, my sister told me when she had last called the hospital, they told her our brother was outside, waiting for his ride home. "Are you his ride?" the hospital staff member asked my sister. My brother was fetched from where he was waiting outside the hospital. On the phone, he was unable to distinguish my sister from our mom. My sister tried to correct him and he got upset and hung up on her. However, according to the nurse my sister spoke with when she called back (concerned), our brother was alert and oriented and was being discharged.

Neither my sister nor I could believe that they were actually discharging him from the E.R. after only a couple of hours, moreover, that they had apparently discharged him to the curb.

And then Thursday came. I called my brother from campus, full voicemail. Sent a text message. Last night my sister and I talked only briefly. I felt like hell after teaching and then working in my rather chilly office for 4 hours. I got some work done but given how much I was coughing when I woke up this morning, I'm not sure it will have been worth it in the final account.

This morning, someone left a message on my house phone. When someone leaves a message on the answering machine on my house line, the machine helpfully beeps to let you know you have a message waiting. Much like a cell. Although I didn't wake up to the sound of the phone ringing (I blame the cold meds), I did hear the beeping of the answering machine. As I worked my way into wakefulness (believe me, it was work today), I realized there were in fact two beeps - the leading louder answering machine alert and the softer call of the cell phone which was smothered in the deeper reaches of my purse.

Both messages said roughly the same thing, each with slightly different details. My brother had gone back to the hospital and had been admitted. He has an aggressive pneumonia. He is in a lot of pain, is on O2, morphine, vancomycin, and his O2 sat is being closely monitored.

I can't go up to see him because I'm sick, still getting sick in fact it seems. They don't like you going into hospitals with a nasty rattling cough like this. This means there's fuck all I can do now. Just sit down here and
- craft a writing assignment which will elicit the clear and skillful written forms which I am to believe are sitting fully formed inside my students just waiting for the felicitous conditions under which they will burst forth in a fit of glorious, APA formatted erudition
- try not to smoke
- hope my brother rallies
- hope the organism isn't something on the order of MRSA
- hope he can be transfered to a hospital where the one E.R. attending isn't a moonlighting horse doctor