about molly | art | writings | contact | home
the avra valley dispatch: November 17 2004 --Transition Zone
Several weeks ago we made a quick little roadtrip to the Quartzsite area, which is near the California border and in gorgeous, desolate part of the southwestern desert that is part Mojave, part Sonoran desert.
Driving through the emptiness, I remembered how much I love the Mojave desert and I wondered if I should have moved to Palm Springs instead of Tucson. The Mojave is all about rocks and mountains and wide openess and abandoned dreams. I feel something almost visceral when I'm in the Mojave -- it's like a melancholy nostalgia; but for something I've never experienced.
::
The Comeback Kid
Buster's remarkable recovery should really have come as no surprise to me. After all, this is a character known for routinely pulling the tubes out of himself and jumping in a cab still in his hospital gown whenever he got bored of being a coma.
If Yosemite Sam and the Energizer Bunny had a baby, it'd be Buster. I wish the Democrats had his will to live.
Several weeks ago I relayed to Buster that the longterm care facility's social worker told me that he'd never be able to live on his own again as long as he had the trach and was on a ventilator. This was the first he'd heard of it, and apparently he took the news as a challenge: after his nurse found him squirming across the floor towards the door on his elbows, he was judged fit enough to go to rehab.
A week after that, I'm sitting in the rehab center with a trach-less, talking, and almost walking Buster discussing his options with a new social worker. After she left, Buster shook his fists after her, "Did you see that? She's trying to put me in a box and close the lid and I'm not even dead yet! No sir is she going to get away with that! No sir! I'll show her!"
The rehab center was pretty depressing; really, the end of the line for a lot of people -- and the nursing staff were contemptuous at best. Buster, fed up with the neglect, called 911 from his hospital bed and insisted they come rescue him or he was going to run out into the street.
So, Buster's back at the VA with friendly staff who actually care, and he's calling me at least twice a day asking when I'm going to bring his boots and his scooter to him and reminding me that when I buy those t-shirts he needs that he's a not a small, godammit, he's a medium. And how 'bout some jockey shorts too, the underwear they have in this place is crazy.
What every fashionable Power of
Attorney is wearing this winter:
HIV and valley- ever proof isolation gear.
Photo by Buster; 17 November 2004, room 319 at the VA Hospital in Tucson.