Memoirs of a Flower Child - George S Geisinger (the best books to read txt) 📗

the longest time, until I finally realized the impossibility of any mature intimacy between us. The deciding factor was her emotional instability. She was as unstable as if she were still 12 years old at 23 and 24.
The night before my hip surgery, she came to my hospital bedside, and put on quite a show of worrying about my mortality, and the prospect of my need for major surgery, weeping and wailing about how I must please not die, Papa, please don't die. She just could not go on without me, and apparently went to the nursing station, where she apparently assigned a Do Not Resuscitate order on my medical chart, “by order of the family.”
The next morning, before I was wheeled into the OR, the nurse came in and put the DNR wristband on me, as my “adopted daughter” must have ordered, since there is no other person in my family who would do such a thing to me, and she was hoping to gain my mother's inheritance from my will, by the idea that I might die on the table, coupled by the knowledge that I had let her know, in so many words, that I loved her so dearly I had put her in my will.
Well, I know what DNR means, and I demanded to have the wristband removed from my wrist and my chart, and essentially made a point, and practically a major scene, in front of the entire OR team that I am a Full Code, and don't spare every effort to revive me if the need arose during the surgery.
I've been told that my “daughter” was in the waiting room during the surgery, which lasted a full four hours, but I never saw her afterward, not to this day.
I heard nothing at all from the girl after surgery, for a full month running. Until that time, she had been very active and loyal in her attentions, in spite of the idea she was living with a boyfriend in her mother's home, with her mother condoning the arrangement. But I was too sick from the injury and surgery to handle making any out-going phone calls, and could scarcely struggle to the nursing station with my walker, to receive phone calls from people like my sister and my power of attorney, when they called, however infrequently, however long they waited for me to have enough recovery to be able to hobble to answer the telephone.
Even though I was expecting the girl's visit at every moment, she never appeared at the rehab at all, and never called me on the phone. Just before my discharge from rehab, to return to assisted living, I was finally able to call her house phone, with inquiries whether I had given the girl checks for thousands upon thousands of dollars, as my fantasies had had it, and whether I had been too much of a nuisance, as I talked to her mother on the phone, asking about whether the woman minded me staying in their garage while I had been recuperating. The woman assured me her daughter never acted as thought she had been given any major sum of money, and assured me that her garage did not have any of the physical features I described over the phone.
I had been delirious, imagining all sorts of things after four hours of surgery, under the knife so terribly long.
Nonetheless, I learned how to walk again, first with a walker, which I could not do without for quite a while, though throughout the entire process I was still a mere 59 years of age, and expected myself to have more vitality than I actually had.
The surgeon subsequently told me I have osteoporosis at an unusually young age, with the calcium leaching out of my bones, for no known medical reason he could find, though he researched and pondered quite deeply. I continue to take high doses of calcium twice a day in pill form, while I drink endless glasses of whole milk, hoping I'll still have enough bone density to be at least somewhat mobile when I really do get old.
I'm afraid I'll end up with an entire skeleton of disintegrated bones before I ever pass away in the first place. The idea scares me no end.

Anyway, I took the girl's name out of my will, which I had so foolishly put it into in the first place, and even more foolishly let her know about it in the first place. She became quite the gold digger in the long run. Apparently, though I hate to admit it, her motivation to associate with me in the first place was that I was that I might receive an inheritance from my mother, and might also receive one from my aunt as well, and she had apparently done everything in relating to me, from the beginning, to get the advantage of being in my will so she could cash in, in the first place.
She even tried to buy my car for a pittance, finally calling me on the telephone at the assisted living home where I was, talking nasty, angrily and hatefully to me over the telephone, being obviously annoyed that I had survived surgery, and had not freed up my mother's inheritance money soon enough to suit her.
In fact, I finally realized her treachery, and made arrangements to take her name out of my will altogether, and found her to be extremely uncouth and hateful toward me, because I had survived surgery and she did not get what she wanted as quickly as she wanted.
Since my mother and aunt have both passed away now, I've yielded to an invitation offered by my brother and his family, to relocate to another, quite remote city away from that annoying person, in another assisted living situation several hours drive away from anywhere that poor excuse for a “daughter'' cannot hope to drop in for a visit, to torment me and attempt to manipulate me any longer.
Now I'm within a local call and a local visit from my brother's family, and this was a very advantageous situation until my brother and his wife seem to have become particularly put out with me for the moment, and I'm going along with my own life and with my own future under my own steam in the assisted living place I find myself in, and I'm well enough set up to get along without my brother's family for the moment, since I'm apparently being expected to do it, as well as getting along quite well enough without the girl who dared called herself “my daughter,” under what I have begun to realize were very false pretenses altogether.
I'm left to my own devises, and have recently graduated from using a walker to using my cane again, with a goodly amount of strength and reassurance in the state of affairs where I find myself. I'm quite resourceful, and can get along fine without my real and false families, until the real brother and sister in law decide to come around again, whenever that's going to be in the future.
I've been recovering from my fall and surgery from the end of October to the latter part of April, and my progress is remarkable. I have very little issue where my walking ability is concerned. My knee bothers me more often than my hip, except when I'm sitting down. The only other thing about the fall that bothers me, is my right shoulder, but I'll put up with that and the bothersome knee as well, since I'm drowning in medical bills already.
I had given rave reviews for the food in the small assisted living community up north, but I must add that where I find myself now is an assisted living facility having a census of well over a hundred residents, requiring two separate settings for meals, and I must say their food is usually better than a lot of the institutional food I've had to live with in various times of my lifetime. At least there is a relative anonymity in numbers here, and my every thought, word and deed are not a matter of public record here, like it seemed to be at the smaller place. I am not the talk of the town, incessantly here, as I suspected up north.
Of course, I'm spending my inheritance hand over fist to live in these institutions, but I have not come up with a less expensive alternative. I really don't mind being in assisted living. I find it agreeable enough, but I've racked up a heap of medical bills, as big as a mortgage on a medium sized house, I'm afraid, and I have no idea how to remedy that fact either, except to whittle away at it for as long as I live, I guess. It's the only idea I can come up with. There are many people who get into lifetime debt one way or another. I'm just one more bozo on the bus.


Fraud
Chapter 13

I gotta wonder, sometimes, what God wants from me. I know the language, I know literature, I know what makes music tick, I know crocheting, I know decency.
Grandma, Aunt Flo, Aunt Oli, Aunt Vi, Sarah and Mom all taught me about basic decency. By the time I really had to know, I found my way to what is good and decent and right. I've made a lot of bad choices in life, but I was awful rebellious, too. It came to me naturally.
I used to hate to be alone. Now I don't mind, as long as I can get in a few meetings of the program now and then. The program means a lot to me. It took away a lot of the insanity in my life, calmed things down a lot.
People come around and use me, just because I want to have a little company in life. People have always done that to me. They got my money and whatnot, but it was only money, right? I'd starve, and be all strung out. I've been used and abused a lot. I don't want to be saved from being alone anymore. I want the kind of friends who just like me for who I am, instead of all these jerks who think they're going to get something just because I'm nice to them.
The last user I had to deal with was a young girl in her early twenties who tied my emotions all up in knots about being a “father figure” to her. She said her daddy died when she was 12; would I be her daddy? Heck with that. She just wanted my inheritance money from mother. She even asked me how much money I inherited from mother. “How much?” she said. I told her, too.
I even told her when I put her in my will, giving her money right and left, for food and gasoline, etc. I had to get away from her. She was trying to kill me with a DNR on my chart when I was going in for hip surgery, “by order of the family,” they said. The girl called herself my “adopted daughter” so often, she made it stick at a real live nurse's station at a real live hospital, the night before my hip surgery. You should have seen the performance at my bedside that night. She should have gotten an Oscar. I think I was the last person