from
The New Yorker, April 26, 2010
RX FROM THE CURSING MOMMY
BY IAN FRAZIER
 If you’re wondering
what happened to the Cursing Mommy column
scheduled for today, please don’t
worry—“How to Make a Festive Holiday
Centerpiece Out of Used Coffee Filters and Then
Throw It at Your Fucking Husband’s
Head” will definitely appear next week.
Instead, today I want to take an upbeat and
problem-solving look at a very timely subject
that all of us have to deal with and may be
feeling a bit confused about, and that is health
care.
Now, many of you are probably like me in that
your husband considers his work to be of such
extreme importance that all supposedly lesser
tasks, such as the handling of health-care
paperwork, are left totally up to you. Fucking
Larry should fucking pitch in and help, but
trying to get him to actually do
anything—well, good luck, is all I can say.
The good news, however, is that the health-care
paperwork deluge need not be the dreadful terror
it seems. Organization, efficiency, and a clear
sense of your filing system are key. In order to
ramp up mentally for this challenge, I like to
start with a big pot of the super blend from
Coffee Blinders, with twenty per cent more
caffeine (saving the filters, of course, as I
always recommend we do).
All of us understand by now that we belong to a
betwixt-and-between generation, which makes us
responsible for the health needs not only of
ourselves and our usually oblivious spouses but
of our children and our aging parents, too, as
the generation that preceded us lives endlessly
on and on. But no matter, because today I’m
going to demonstrate how one particularly tricky
problem with the health-care
bureaucracy—making sense of the needs of my
eighty-five-year-old father, currently in a
nursing home—may be simplified.
First: if you do not own a fax machine, I advise
you to go out and buy one. Everyone in the
health-care industry, I have found, loves to
employ the fax. Actually, I see a fax is coming
through on my machine right now, so while it does
I’ll freshen my coffee and give you some
background information that may be helpful: my
father, whom I now just call Ray, left my mother
many years ago, and she is now dead, and at some
point he became involved with a woman named
Marjorie, who is quite a bit younger and larger
than he is, and she has taken an apartment not
far from the nursing home. My, this fax has a lot
of pages, doesn’t it? I’ll just stack
them for the moment on top of this pile of
cardboard boxes of Larry’s old hockey
equipment which he has put here.
I think the fax is done. Yes, it is:
“Transmission complete.”
Fine. I now have thirteen—no,
seventeen—pages of news, and no doubt
essential forms for me to fill out, from Elmcrest
Manor Court Senior Retirement Center and
High-Temperature Crematorium (strike that last
part), which I will make into a neat sheaf for
inclusion in my files. And I want to say, just in
passing, that it is so wonderful that the fax
machine worked smoothly this afternoon, because
sometimes it jams, and when that kind of thing
occurs, as regular followers of the Cursing Mommy
may recall, I sometimes become upset, scream
profanities and obscenities, break crockery, give
people the finger, and sweep all kinds of
documents (including, occasionally, ones I should
hang on to) off the dining-room table and
straight into the trash. But not today, thank
God! Instead, I will now reveal an important tip
you really have to know. It’s so simple, and
you’ll thank me for it later many times. I
have here an ordinary stapler. Proper use of this
device will go a long way toward solving your
problems with health-care paperwork.
The minute you receive a fax or a mailing from
those insane time-servers who are ruining our
lives, write on the top sheet with a
laundry-marking pen what the letter or fax is
about, and then staple all the pertinent pages
together, as I am doing now (wham). All
right, no staple (wham) came out that
time. (Wham. Wham wham wham wham wham wham
wham wham wham.) Oh, how ridiculous of me.
The stapler has just run out of staples, I
believe.
Like most staplers, this Bostitch model that I am
using is quite easy to reload. You just lift up
this top thing . . . somehow . . . ouch . . . Has
Larry been fooling with this goddam thing?
O.K.—there. You lift the top thing, and then
inside there’s this kind of spring dealie
which goes on this sort of rail, and you take a
bunch of staples like the ones I have in this
little box, and they’re kind of glued
together—now they’re breaking apart,
God damn it—anyway, they go on the rail
dealie with the spring behind them—why
doesn’t my father’s fucking girlfriend
ever have to do any of this shit, I
wonder?—and then the spring pushes the
staples up to where they come out—get up
there—and you close this top
thing—ouch! Damn it! And then (wham wham
wham wham wham) the fucking staples STILL
aren’t coming out! (Wham wham wham
wham.) And now they’re coming out three
at a fucking time! Oh, I so despise this shit! (Wham
wham wham wham wham.) And the fucking Bush
Administration, too—how I loathe them! (Wham
wham wham wham wham wham wham.) Did it work?
(Wham wham wham wham wham wham wham wham wham
wham wham wham wham.) All right, I think it
worked.
Yes, it worked, finally. And now I see, after
having stapled about ten million fucking staples
into the upper left-hand corner of this pointless
fucking document faxed to me by the fucking
nursing home, that I HAVE STAPLED THE TAIL OF MY
BLOUSE INTO THIS STUPID FUCKING BUNCH OF PAPERS!!
AND IT’S ONE OF MY FUCKING GODDAM FAVORITE
BLOUSES!! WHAT WAS I FUCKING THINKING?? FUCKING
GODDAM LARRY!! FUCKING GODDAM GIRLFRIEND AND THE
BUSH ADMINISTRATION!! NOW I HAVE TO PICK THE
FUCKING STAPLES OUT WITH MY FUCKING
FINGERNAILS—OH, OUCH! OW! OWWWWW! (Rip
tear smash crumple tear smash.)
(Pause.)
Sometimes, after a busy afternoon coping with the
ins and outs of our modern health-care
bureaucracy, I like to lie face down on the
living-room carpet with a cushion from the sofa
on top of my head and back, as I am doing now.
This position may look a bit strange, perhaps,
but who gives a fuck, if I find it comforting to
have a sofa cushion on top of me. When I get up,
if ever, I am calling the fucking nursing home
and giving them my father’s fucking
girlfriend’s fucking telephone number and
telling them absolutely never to phone or fax me
again, or I’ll put dynamite in their fucking
lobby and blow the building to tiny bits. . . .
No—I will not blow the building to tiny
bits.
One thing I would like to point out about my
earlier cursing outburst, which I do regret, is
that never once did I say that I wished my father
would just fucking die, because in fact I do not
wish it. That much. Usually.
I can’t keep lying here much longer. Soon
the kids will be home. Oh, what a fucking
horrible day this has been.
Looking for new ideas in the garden? Get the
Cursing Mommy’s yard-and-garden manual,
“I’m Going to Kill Those Fucking Deer
with My Bare Hands, I Swear I Am: A Guide to
Seasonal Plantings,” possibly available at
many stores. |
|