#and like i'm concerned because nursing homes have such an awful reputation

[unionizedwizard]

(hercule poirot voice) ze psychology! monsieur! this is the point! you must understand the psychology!

so. about the psychology:

1) why in hell would my mother attempt to poison me via a book? like what was the POINT?

- i highly doubt this was meant to kill me. first of all because there would have been easier and safer methods to do so, as my friend pointed out; secondly because this is a pattern (the infamous case of the "infant abandoned on the sidewalk for an entire day before being returned by the neighbors at nightfall" comes to mind, among others.....), she loved neglecting me and endangering/ignoring my safety; thirdly because i guess my unnatural and inexplicable survival skills must come from somewhere...

- but mostly because i think i was more use to her alive than dead. firstly because me dying would have put her in danger of being suspected by the authorities (possibly. honestly i'm not too confident the cops would have investigated in the first place but you never know), and her chief concern was always social respectability and her reputation. and secondly because she needed to have someone to exert her power upon. i was challenging her authority, unlike her husband, and she did enjoy breaking me. it was something she said & made obvious very often btw, not me having heard too many fictional villain monologues. (maybe i like unhinged villain monologues because they remind me of home, tho........)

- so why the poison? why this?? i think it was some sort of enrichment for her. she always found it hilarious to see people suffer (she always talked gleefully about the awful things she put her students through, like humiliating them, making them cry and panic, banning them from slouching or using the bathroom or drinking water in class....), whether it was strangers or people she knew personally. she found it genuinely entertaining and openly despised people who did not ("stupid and sanctimonious people" she called them)

- she didn't consider me as my own person, she openly and constantly reminded me i was her creation and therefore her possession, and a disappointing, useless failure of a creation at that. she would have considered it normal to use me as an experiment subject. it was well within her rights according to her. (she was especially fond of telling people (while i was sitting right there) that when i was born and the nurse put me in her arms, she took one look at me and said "oh well, this one's a failure. better luck next time"). like i know how this sounds but it was just. normal at the time. just a fun anecdote to tell (in her defense i was a weird and disappointing baby) (but anyway this is neither here nor there)

- i will read queen margot to learn more about the poisoned book that's part of the plot, apparently, but as i said in my original post about this whole thing, she LOVED recreating random book events or dialogue in real life, and subtly. the metanarrative dramatic flair...... i think she would definitely get a kick out of seeing me suddenly get sick without knowing why, while holding the very clue that could lead me to the answer of the mystery. that is 100000% something she would do.

- she hated the fact i was really into literature because it was *her thing*, and kept sabotaging my efforts by convincing me i actually didn't know how to "truly read, not just consume and destroy books". (i will stop there but there's a lot of things to be said on the topic). she gave me very few books, growing up, so this gift and especially her forcing me to finish reading the novel were highly out of character for her

- i'm hazarding a guess which might be a bit over-the-top here but: it might also have been meant as a deterrent. conditioning me to have an averse reaction to reading or something (she *was* very fond of dumas)

- finally, why the three musketeers? i can think of three points that would make this novel the perfect candidate for such a project: 1) it is a typical, inconspicuous gift for an 11 years old (even though it didnt fit my own tastes); 2) it is an uncommonly long novel, meaning exposure to any potential poison would be particularly high; 3) as mentioned before, it would have been thematically perfect: a clue, that only she would have known about (she does like her tragic irony and double énonciation and mindgames in general)

genuinely, it does fit with her personality. i think she would have found it a way to have a bit of fun and conduct a nice little experiment + power trip combo.

[michipeachiii]

I haven’t given any updates but SO’s mom is in the hospital... again. So I’m pretty sure I mentioned that she was in the ER not too long ago and they said that she had a UTI and was discharged. 

Well.

It was not a UTI, we all knew this. No way she had a UTI. Anyways a few days later she gets a call from one of her doctors and they tell her, you guessed it, she needs to go right back to the ER and evaluated for kidney failure. 

She ended up being hospitalized, put on fluids, and given another blood transfusion. They deemed it necessary to do a kidney biopsy and concluded that she has stage 4 kidney necrosis and they’re hoping antibiotics and steroids will somehow help it. At this point, she’s been given so many diagnoses that I’m not sure what the fuck is going on anymore, or why, or how. 

So she’s been in the hospital I think for 4-5 days now but plot twist, they’re not looking to send her home, they said she needs to be in a nursing home. 🙃 I just... cannot explain... It feels so unreal? I think the thought process is that they don’t think she’s safe enough to stay home and needs constant care. Which that’s fine, no one is arguing that, I think SO and I were kinda alluding to that already when SO’s mom would call us because she needed SO’s help getting to or out of the bathroom. (And by that I mean that that’s a major red flag of not being able to take care of yourself efficiently or safely. It’s a major warning sign that if things do not improve, you end up where we are now.)

I think what’s frustrating is that SO’s mom... sometimes it feels like she doesn’t know how to try to get better? I know that sounds super mean to say but hear me out. Like when she wasn’t eating we would try to find different options for her that would give her strength and she would literally turn her nose at everything and not make any attempt to eat. (We knew we needed to start her back up slowly on food. She didn’t want jello, pudding, yogurt, soup, broth, meal replacement shakes etc... Basically we couldn’t get her on a liquid or soft food diet at all. We barely got her to drink Powerade.) We would ask her what she wanted and she’d say she didn’t want anything, and she’d literally let food go to waste. She would just stay in bed all day not eating or hydrating and we would plead with her to do something, anything, because we knew she’d end up back in the hospital. And this was shortly before she needed that first transfusion (last month I think). We would try to motivate her to at least sit up in bed or just take a few steps, because we were trying to avoid atrophy and trying to rebuild her strength and stamina but she wouldn’t want to do anything. Again, I understand the toll this must be taking on her body, but what I’m trying to say is that what we were doing is what they’re going to be having her do at the nursing home. I’m not trying to blame her for the state she’s in, I just feel like the help we tried to give her she maybe didn’t have the motivation for or something. Maybe she didn’t think it would ever get so bad or be so serious so she didn’t feel our sense of urgency when it came to getting her better. 

I think what’s frustrating is that the doctors are telling her she needs to go and she’s trying to say that she doesn’t need it, that she’s fine at home, that she’ll work on herself at home. But its like how can you work on yourself at home when we come around and you refuse to eat for days at a time, and refuse to move out of bed for anything other than for the bathroom. Again, I’m not trying to blame her but honestly, she needs a more structured space to be in because what we’re doing to provide for her sometimes seems really hopeless and feels like it goes nowhere. SO and I do not have the same tools or abilities or resources that doctors and nursing homes have when it comes to caring for someone in SO’s mom’s condition. 

Our convos would usually go “You need to do XYZ” and she would say she doesn’t feel like it or doesn’t want to do it, then she’d end up in the hospital and they would tell her she needs to do exactly what we’re telling her to do, she gets sent home and then ends up in the hospital within a week because she’s not doing anything different. 

And honestly and unfortunately she does so much better in a hospital where they push fluids and watch her food intake and all that. She weirdly enough, looks and sounds so much better when she’s hospitalized only to crash once she’s back home. It’s so frustrating, it’s so maddening to even think that she may be better off in a nursing home than she would be in her own home.