We were in Huntsville Alabama for the first few days of the month for the wedding of L’s long-ago inamorato, who has married a 57 year-old Republican judge. How Republican? She was a Trump-pledged delegate to last month’s GOP convention, so that Republican. There were, no shit, approximately four hundred people at the reception dinner, or “superspreader event” as we coastal elites call these things. I’m reasonably confident that I was the only atheist Democrat in attendance.

I worried that the venture (which, needless to say, I had not been keen to attend) would be hard on L. We mainly kept to our air-conditioned hotel room for the duration of our three-day stay, L sleeping most of the time. On the flight back to California she became nauseous. Upon application (having searched the seatbacks in vain) we were advised that there were no “barf bags” to be had, or perhaps the limited inventory was reserved for the gentry in the wider seats up front, so we were obliged to improvise (don’t ask).

We returned home close to midnight on Sunday. The following day L reported to CæsarCare for her scheduled bloodwork. Following this we went grocery shopping, and as were were about to head back to The Crumbling Manse™ the hospital called her, saying “get to the ER, stat!” Her “creatinine” levels had skyrocketed since the previous round of tests a fortnight ago, suggesting incipient renal failure. She has been hospitalized since.

The doctors have no idea what’s going on, what has been causing the condition (the creatinine levels are considered “life-threatening”), and are at this point merely attempting to beat back the symptoms. Urine, and all the insalubrious metabolic detritus that is ordinarily carried off with its discharge, has been backing up in the system because the usual egresses are obstructed.The left kidney is more or less hors de combat; the right barely functioning, but grossly enlarged. At the moment she has a “stent” in place, intended to pass such piss as makes it out into a bag, but this appears to leak.

I’ve spent most daylight hours since Monday afternoon at the hospital with her. Lina is, I must say, a “difficult” patient. Her typically obdurate temperament has ballooned into full-blown Adult Oppositional Defiance Disorder. The doctors attempt to discuss her options; she interrupts and talks over them, ignores what they tell her. They want to perform a biopsy. “Why would you do that when you don’t know what you’re looking for?” When their advice is uncongenial she has recourse to the gambit I have come to like least about her in our domestic disagreements: “I don’t care!”

She understands but does not, on some level, appreciate the seriousness of her present condition (which, incidentally, for as long as it obtains, precludes further cancer treatment): Told that she might have to submit to a shunt that will route her urine to an external vessel that she will have to wear forever, she flatly refuses to contemplate this. Advised that this might in consequence cause outright kidney failure, which will require dialysis, she replies “Never. I’ll go into hospice care and stop eating and drinking.” Well, you know, spoken in the heat of the moment. But she’s convinced herself that she knows better than the doctors, certain that her condition is consequence of the course of antibiotics she’s lately been taking for a urinary tract infection—the medical team shakes its collective head, but what do they know? Plenty, I suggest, which earns me a “why are you taking their side against me?” Sigh.

resignedly,

It’s “Oppositional Defiant Disorder” (my error) and it’s a thing not of my devising.

Lina isn’t a god-botherer, but she’s a parishioner (and a former deacon) at a local Presbyterian church. I tend not to darken the doors of houses of worship lest someone fling holy water on me: the stuff raises nasty welts.

We had an “end of life strategies” consultation with the hospital staff this afternoon. We are left with the impression that said end could come as soon as this month; almost certainly before the turning of the year. It strikes us both as hard cheese that, as she has fought a spirited rearguard action against the original disease, this new foe should enter the fray with a stab in the back, or, I suppose, a blow to the kidneys. We pretty much knew what was waiting at the bottom of the slope, but had expected the gentler gradient to continue for longer, and not this apparent precipice. Still, as my man Updike put it, we do, after all, survive every moment except the last.

cordially,