Hubris.co.nz

Dave and Jessie asked how Oma’s doing now. The short answer is: I don’t know. I went to see her on Monday and found her to be a lot more perky than she had been on Sunday, but the nurse was dressing her arm, and the wound from where she fell was the size of my fist, and suppurating (ha, I learnt a new word at work from editing transcripts of Michael Hurst talking about Macbeth and the transcriber had written “soppy raging sores” and I thought that was what it was, and my mentortype person raged/laughed at me), and her arm around it was all black and rotton and it just made me feel so bad to look at it. Oma was talking much clearer, but the battery in her hearing aid was flat, so it was like the worst conversation ever, and I fled after twenty minutes. She was supposed to go home today, with someone coming in to check on her and change her bandages and stuff, and I think Mum was going to go with her for a bit, but apparently she’s not as well as she thought she was. My cousin Jacinta’s written about how Oma is a stroppy Dutch woman (and I also found out she’s 87), but she’s so teeny tiny and from everythign I’ve ever heard, strokes aren’t something that are that easy to get over. But she IS doing better.

Did you read between the lines in the previous paragraph where I listed the people who took the time to find out more about the things that are affecting me in my life right now? Yeah. This causes a conflict in me, because yes, I turned off the comments on my last entry because I didn’t want a string of “hope she gets well soon!” nothingness, because I know that I hate having to do that publically too, but you know, I’m not exactly very hard to get ahold of. Ick, yes, I’m making this all about me, when she’s the one who’s sick.

Speaking of being all about me, and all about the people I know over the interweb, and my insecurities and everything else, I’m having my not-in-hospital Birthday & Flatwarming and Halloween Drinks on October 29th, and you should come, please. I’m calling it drinks cos I’m scared I won’t have enough friends to make it a ‘party’, so I will try to keep expectations low key so as to avoid disappointment. Please bring a friend, and you get bonus points if you come in costume, and super super bonus points if you a) dress up as me or b) come in a bear costume.

In keeping with my Wellingtonisa post about Drinking Wellington on the Cheap, Karen and I went to Chow for cocktails and then dinner tonight. Her apartment isn’t up to fire standards. The builders suuuuuuuuuuck. Then we tried to come up with metaphors to be the opposite of “I love you like meat loves salt” for how much I hate someone (I am petty. I need to let things go). She texted me after I got home to say that I hated her like ten thousand spoons when all I needed was a knife, and also that she’d forgotten to give me Gareth’s book, yet again. I think Wellington needs a large system of tubes, or flying monkeys. That’d rock.

Remember how last week I was all bawling my eyes out cos I slipped down the stairs, and then I was like “this is how I am going to die, alone and old”? No? Well it definitely stuck in my mind, and seems especially stupid and/or poignant today. Oma had a stroke on Saturday night. When Mum rang me today on my cellie I was like “oh man, I so can’t be assed answering this” cos I thought she’d be hassling me to write her a brochure, but I decided the grumpy answerphone message would be even worse, so I answered and found out that Oma was in hospital and that they didn’t know how long it’d been between the stroke and when she finally managed to push her panic button. Mum had slept about three hours and she wanted us to go to the hospital to see Oma.

I hate hospitals. That’s a dumb thing to say, because of course, I don’t think that there’s anyone who actually likes them. But the idea of death, or mortality, or any kind of situation that I can’t do anything to fix scares the crap out of me. I feel really fucking useless and I don’t know what to say. I fall to pieces. It all seems like foreshadowing to me. That said, it was easier to go there with Anji and Karen by my side, except when we got to Oma’s ward, she was asleep, and neither my mother or my aunt was there, so we didn’t know what to do. We found some seats further down the corridor and I suggested that maybe we should go and get coffee while we waited for my dad to text me back and/or for Oma to wake up. When we were strolling out through the maze of hospitalness, our aunt drove up, so that was good. We went to The Ballroom, and when we got back up, Oma was awake.

She was struggling to talk, only managing about two words at a time, and what with her being deaf, and also us not speaking Dutch, it was really hard – at one stage we could see that she was close to tears with frustration. but she was glad to see us and seemed to perk up some. She was covered in bruises from falling over though, and so battered. Oma’s always been tiny, but she seemed even smaller. So fragile. I just made stupid jokes. The old lady in the bed opposite us lent us her chair because she said no one would be coming to visit her and I wanted to cry some more. They don’t know if Oma’s speech is going to be permanently affected, and obviously she can’t go on living by herself anymore. I haven’t even called my mother to see how she’s doing, although Anji talked to her.

I don’t want to get old.