12.39 Dan's Alone Day - Life at the End of Its Tether

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39. Dan's Alone Day - A Life at End of Its Tether

Dan's days before Ali had been shared with Margaret. Dan and Margaret had been made painfully pessimistic having experienced two world wars. And been deeply disturbed by the predictions of Thomas Malthus and the soaring overpopulation. So they decided against adding their own children to a worsening world.

   Margaret is gone and Ali arrived. Now, a month after the x ray knife, Dan is into the new swerve in his life. But although the x-ray to his tumor was precise, some excess x-rays sprayed over the thinking surface of his brain – striking and killing neurons and his mental power is less: he has more difficulty remembering words, and is more absent minded. Also it causes occasional epileptic minor fit with mental lapse.

   Ali has brought Dan to an oasis in his life. The usual old age worry -  having no money, no loving family or friends, becoming helpless - is gone.

   Experiencing Dan's day gives a view of life in old age, at the end of its tether.

Seven AM and Dan's bedside alarm buzzes. Under Ali's influence Dan uses the alarm to keep sleep light and make better use of mornings.

   He sits up. His bed folds out from a settee and is in the opposite corner of living room from window table. He reaches to turn on bedside radio. The news is all war.

    His bed is rather low and he stands up as old people should do, holding the bedside chair he uses for his nighttime medicines, paper tissues and book. His thigh muscles are weak making standing a risk for a fall. And a fall risks a broken hip. He takes care not to knock over the jar he urinates into at night. Dan's old prostate gland is doing bad things to his peeing. He is frequently losing a little in a drippy way causing moist pants, redness of inner thigh and urine odor; he needs to pee often and it does not come easy, especially after a deep sleep and he also worries the urine will stop coming out and it will be an emergency.

   One reason Dan is living so long is he studies and innovates. One innovation is hand pressure on his low abdomen in order to help the urine come out and his bladder to empty more completely, giving him longer intervals without needing to pee.

   Dan flips the radio dial to a new morning variety with a young fellow, Arthur Godfrey, who has a deep voice and likes to sing little ditties strumming his guitar as he does now:

           Run Rabbit, Run Rabbit – Run! Run! Run!

           Don’t give the farmer his fun, fun, fun.

          He’ll get by, without his rabbit pie,

          So run rabbit, run rabbit, run  ……

To the pleasant music, Dan makes his bed neat and folds it back to a settee. He was not previously so neat. Before Ali, he left the bed open and messy all day and ended up sleeping on it too much. Now with it neat, he can't lie back down on it until he pulls it open again. And just seeing the neat settee makes him feel good compared to when it was a mess and made him feel he was becoming the same kind of mess.

   What a pearl of a girl! he thinks.

   After cleaning up he walks to kitchen. Now in old age he has less power. It is hard to even raise a foot. So instead of taking firm high steps, he walks in short-step shuffle. The neurologists call it Marche a petit pas from the French “Small step march”. Walking this way risks tripping over small things but Dan is eagle-eyed because he had his eye cataracts removed by an expert 5 years ago and has a set of perfect eyeglasses for every occasion.
   In kitchen, Dan opens refrigerator. It is full of vitamin, mineral and health food supplements. Looking up at clock and seeing 8 AM, he moves to a portable radio by kitchen table and turns on Gayelord Hauser his favorite natural nutritionist. Hauser today is praising vitamin C as preventive for old age's ills. Dan is what might later be called a healthy food freek, purposely misspelled to differ it from the usual freak. He uses dozens of supplements and when he shops he inspects and makes many inquiries before buying. At first, Ali's tendency is to scoff but after she considers how Dan is living healthily, and rather happily, while most of his fellow age group are either dead or vegetating in bed, she stops scoffing.
   He sits down to breakfast on wheat-germ flakes that he covers with soy milk and fructose powder. He slices a big Florida orange and slowly eats it with his remaining front teeth tearing the juicy fruit away from the peel. He smears cream cheese on a matzo slab not because he is Jewish, which he is, but because matzo is healthy and delicious. But he makes sure only to buy the unsalted matzo.
   Dan does not read while he eats; he listens to radio. After eating he does not clean up. He is too weak and now he depends on Ali. His Margaret did not clean well and the kitchen got full of cockroaches and they invaded the hall, living room and the WC. And the refrigerator had a population of tiny ones. And gray rats came out of holes in the kitchen wall. Ali solved all that.

   Dan looks at the clock. Nine. He shuffles into living room, pulls his portable Underwood typewriter from the bookshelf to table by window and starts typing. He is writing a novel The Mammon Madness about the credit business, which he knows well because he worked 30 years at it. Mostly he wants to teach readers how the banks improperly stimulate persons to take bank loans in order to buy homes or cars or big money items with the aim that the poor creditors will be unable to repay and then the bank can make more money by taking all the creditor's possessions, like their homes, and money from the bank accounts. He asked Ali to edit. It is well written but Ali is sure Dan will never find a publisher because of the content.

   He does 2 hours typing. For a very old man he is a good typist and corrects with white-out. Recently he and Ali discussed what a brilliant invention it would be to have an electronic typewriter in which you could see what you typed and correct on the screen before it got typed out. Dan gave his view that the best writers are able to edit their writing in the brain before it comes out in their fingertips. To a certain extent he does that. But Ali does not do that and so she wastes lots of time throwing away typed sheets and doing too much retyping. At the rate she is going, it will be a lifetime before she finishes her novel. The new invention they discussed would solve the problem and benefit the 99% who cannot edit in their heads before it comes out on the typed sheet.

   He glances at wrist watch. “Time for morphine!” It is only recently that Ali introduced him to Morphine but already it gives him a reason to stay alive. Repeatedly feeling so good makes one want to live on creatively, even into very old age or in a situation where, before, one might have been considering suicide. So with Dan now.

   He shuffles to kitchen, takes the vial out of refrigerator and goes to cupboard for a cleaned syringe and injection stuff. Going back to living room he sits on sofa and using a magnifying glass to be sure no mistakes he fills the thin small syringe with 2 mg morphine – Ali's dose. He prepares his left arm below shoulder with swab of alcohol and plunges in the short needle attached to his syringe. It is the shallow injection that Ali advised. She warned him never to inject it direct line into blood vessel, what addicts call “shooting up” not only because of worry about overdose, which with 2 mg is not a problem, but because the effect is too quick and too brief. Immediately on withdrawing the needle from arm Dan presses the cotton on the site to prevent loss of the morphine. With 2 mg, every little loss counts.

   Dan lies down on sofa glancing at wristwatch to time the effect. It is a sunny summer day outside and he lies near the open window so the morning sun fully shines on his body. He has opened his dressing gown and lies exposed. Ali told him Morphine's pleasure effect is enhanced by the sunshine's heat on one's body. And it is so.

   With his morphine dose, Dan prefers not to read or eat or drink. He just wants to lie back with no pillow. And he does not cover his eyes like Ali.

At one minute on his watch he is just starting to feel the effect: a loss of normal worries. It is like a weight off the mind making him optimistic. He is thinking I am in the best place at the best time doing the best thing.  How lucky I am even at 83, to be alive and experience this pleasure.

At 2 minutes his ankles, knees, wrists, and navel tingle with the pleasure. The place in his head where the tumor became a scar and normally gives him a mild ache, now with Morphine, is a point of pleasure. It seems to his analytic mind that Morphine molecules use the same nerve pathways and neurons as pain impulses use, but do something to convert the pain to pleasure.

   From 5 to 10 minutes he experiences what Ali calls a peak-plateau, and then the effect slowly recedes but even at 1 hour he feels good.
   Dan is a new user of morphine so he has not developed tolerance to its effect as Ali has. After years of use she feels much less of the direct pleasure effect. She mostly gets the mental effect.

   Dan sleeps. It is light sleep, lasts an hour and pleasant with nice dreaming. Even though Ali gets energized by 2 mg Morphine, an old man like Dan, lying down, warming his body and no worries stimulating his brain, naturally lapses lightly into sleep.
  End Section; next, click 12.40 Educate Brenda 4 - Lou's Latin Quarter .