Ten years of glyphosate insanity have given many non-celiacs an insight into the celiac experience. It's hard to describe this experience within the terms of this web site's contract, but this web site will try. These days many people know they're celiacs because their celiac relatives had their blood tested when they were children, but for a long time, the way people knew they were celiacs was the specific scary symptom known as celiac sprue. Sprue, a word most often used to describe the similar effects of a tropical bacterial infection with similar symptoms, is a frothy diarrhea and/or vomit that looks a bit like chocolate mousse, only streaked with blood and flecked with particles of undigested food.
Celiacs usually have had years of experience with their "spastic colons" before developing sprue, and usually manage to suffer discreetly. Most of the sprue in North America lands in toilets or "leaks" into Depends, or other brands of padded plastic-lined pants. People with unexpected glyphosate reactions don't always realize what's going on, which accounts for a mess I saw beside the road on the way in on Tuesday morning.
When young people have this symptom, what leaps to mind is probably cancer. When older people have it, what leaps to mind is "Not able to take care of self. Not fit to be in 'nice' retirement project." Or, if you've watched Roseanne Barr's classic movie She-Devil...
"Incontinence!"
Sometimes it's obvious that loss of bowel or bladder control is one of the things that wear out all at the same time as an aging body really does shut down and stop living. Some people grow old and die that way.
Then again, sometimes even at age eighty or ninety a person is fully conscious, has some ability to walk, and yet loses control of per excretory functions in the same way and for the same reasons a young person might.
During our conscious lifetimes most of us have episodes of incontinence, sometimes accompanied by loss of mobility. Some of these episodes are alcohol-induced; others are known as Norwalk Flu.
Others are glyphosate reactions, and although these reactions may threaten to become chronic, the good news is that people recover from them. Usually recovery begins as soon as the level of glyphosate inside the body drops below the individual's threshold level--typically about the time the poisoned food is flushed away.
During the week I talked to a couple of people from the local retirement projects. They were talking about how sick their neighbors in the projects have been, about which ones were helping which other ones scrub messes off the floors--mercifully, the projects have hard tile floors that don't show bleach spots.
These are the people for whom do-gooders have been snapping up all those cans of corn and boxes of cereal at must-sell prices, because people who wanted to buy canned corn and cereal at the regular price had already noticed that it made them sick. "Well, it's outdated food." Yes, and it was unfit for consumption by any living creature before it was outdated, too; that's why.
I read that a clueless young singer is dedicating a concert to "farmers," raising money to donate masses of unsalable glyphosate-poisoned and probably genetically modified grain to "hunger relief." Ooohhh. And the people buying tickets to that concert think they don't believe in punishing welfare cheats by measures like one I've often proposed--oh how mean I am!--of requiring welfare recipients to spend 40 hours each week on a day labor site. Some of the people who spend their cash on drugs, by choice or necessity, and tell food bank volunteers that they're hungry, are in for torture. Could they but know what knots their insides are about to tie themselves into, if they had the choice, they'd beg to be sent to that day labor site!
During the week I was also reminded of the time a friend's father moved into a retirement project, had a minor accident during the night, and was caught bleaching a spot in the morning. On his first full day in his new flat he was told to move, or be moved into a nursing home, that day. My husband and I had just moved into a house the seller had fitted with brand-new wool carpeting, and were enjoying the downstairs rooms, ourselves--it was still hot enough that a computer wouldn't run in the upstairs office; but my husband was a bit indignant that I'd even asked him before inviting the friend's father to move into our downstairs bedroom. The way we were brought up, you don't let your elders, or your friends' elders, be put in nursing homes.
Instead, of course, you Care (it really ought to have a capital C): You move into their house if possible, or they move into yours if necessary, so you can be no more than one room away from them at all times. You wheel them to the bathroom if possible, or haul bedpans back and forth. You wash the sheets, and the quilts that go between the sheets and the rubber mattress cover, during the times when you're not walking behind the person to make sure person doesn't fall, or otherwise doing the person's bidding. You get up in the middle of the night. You make the care of this person's dying body the focus of your life. Whether or not the person knows you're there, or has any idea who you are: no lucid moment when the person might have a message of love, pardon, or forgiveness to leave should ever be lost.
The first year or two I lived in the house now known to cyberspace as the Cat Sanctuary, my mother was showing me how this is done. Oh, what a...it was sixteen months actually. Grandmother was a Perfect Southern Lady and a heroine. Mother was not, strictly speaking, Southern but she was also a heroine. They were very, very polite to each other and usually didn't dump their real feelings on my brother, Dad, or me. I was a skinny, sickly, undiagnosed celiac child but that was the year I was skinniest and sickliest.
It was a relief, later, that Dad was one of the older people who don't actually want that much of a time and energy commitment from their children. Some people don't. All blind people spill things on floors and Dad didn't mind his daughters mopping his floors, but when his bed needed cleaning he shouted through the door, "Go away. No females allowed here! Your Cousin John Doe can come in if he wants to."
There's actually a wide range of opinions about family care. Some people like to be visited by all their young relatives, but fret about some of their relatives not being big and strong enough to catch them if they started to fall. Some don't mind being cleaned and dressed by a same-sex relative, but would give themselves heart attacks from pure humiliation if they were cleaned or dressed by an opposite-sex relative. Some would feel mortified if they had to be cleaned or dressed by any of their own children. Some want to spend their last days with one "special" heir. Some want to draw up a rota where all their younger relatives, roughly in proportion to the degree of kinship, spend some time with them during every week.
And some people really do want to be allowed to die, when they've stopped living, without any particular effort to keep their hearts beating longer. Some people feel very strongly about this. Sara Teasdale, among others, loathed the thought of being helpless and useless so much that she committed suicide when, according to doctors, she was probably in no danger of any permanent disability.
Is it, as writers like Stephen King and Jacquelyn Mitchard have postulated in fiction, the last act of filial devotion to help a dying parent commit suicide? I hope not. But it may be the last act of filial devotion to witness all those heartbreaking documents people find it necessary to write, rewrite, and videotape, affirming that they don't want their bodies artificially prevented from dying when their minds are ready to go.
So, suppose you are (somebody I know). You have a grumpy old relative who replies to all hints about home sharing with "I'm only seventy-five, I might have an overnight date." He likes being alone in a big empty house. He seems to be living on cheap greasy meat, Coca-Cola in the morning, and beer in the evening. You try to leave healthier things, like those crisp and juicy summer apples, at his house. He offers them to other people, warning them that he ate one and it didn't stay down ten minutes. (That is a glyphosate reaction. He has other problems too, but if you monitor his complaints, they follow the timing of the poisoning of the railroad near his house. He felt bad after inhaling vapors and then couldn't keep that glyphosate-poisoned apple down.)
So one day he doesn't answer the door. You let yourself in, and you find him lying on the bottom of the stairs, facing up, on a broken knee, a broken wrist, and two cracked ribs, barely able to push his face out of the horrible little puddle on the step nearest his head. As you approach, making guilt-stricken pity noises, he screams something that sounds like an atherosclerosis rage attack and vomits on your feet. Clearly he "can't take care of himself." Is it time to put him in a nursing home?
If he recognizes you and says no, the position of this web site is: NO. It may be time for you or someone else to move into the basement. Because he's old and has lost bone mass, it may take longer for his bones to heal than it would for yours or your child's. Because he's humiliated enough by having this reaction, even without your having seen it, he may be very unpleasant to be around--even for himself. But his life's not over yet.
He could go back to work, if he had a job he enjoyed doing, as soon as the knee permits.
He can probably drive, as soon as the wrist permits.
If he's been the head of the clan, or of your branch of it, he still is.
When we get glyphosate (and the similar chemicals some eager fools are offering to replace it) out of the food supply, your relative's digestion will probably become regular again.
Trust celiacs on this. A lot of us have already been as sick as your relative is now--some of us at appallingly early ages. We didn't tell you because we knew you didn't really want to know, but, if you know someone whose favorite fragrances are all sort of compatible with Oxy's Pet Odor Eliminator, there's a reason for this. We went gluten-free, we'd been overtraining just in order to be flabby or skinny sickly people all those years, we became positively athletic and so perky as to be annoying.
A glyphosate ban will have similar effects on your competent but incontinent elders. And the one who's seventy-five just might have a hot date again, too.
And the one who wants to be in the retirement project rather than the nursing home, if he can't be in his own home? The retirement project is the place for him all right. We know because he still knows where he is.
Am I going to move into the project as your relative's attendant? Don't be ridiculous. This post is about women as well as men, but if we're talking about male retirees, moving in with them is for their sons or nephews to do. For me to do it would be a disgrace. That some men in the project are not living with their sons or nephews in their own homes is already a disgrace. Don't get me started.
Even for me to move in with someone else's mother or aunt would be a disgrace, because hello, my own mother is an eighty-year-old celiac. I have to be free to stay with her, if that becomes necessary.
However, considering the number of retirees who are having these occasional episodes of incontinence, I see no reason why the retirees shouldn't pool their resources and hire a few younger people to come in and mop their floors.
It's not incompetence. It's not senility. It is SIMPLE FOOD POISONING.
No comments:
Post a Comment