Heller - Youd Better Not Die or Ill Kill You

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A Caregivers Survival Guide to Keeping You
in Good Health and Good Spirits

JANE HELLER

Copyright 2012 by Jane Heller.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

Recipes on reprinted from: The Very Best of Recipes for Health by Martha Rose Shulman. Copyright 2010 by Martha Rose Shulman. Permission granted by Rodale, Inc., Emaaus, PA 18098.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available.

ISBN 978-1-4521-2602-9

Chronicle Books LLC

680 Second Street

San Francisco, California 94107

www.chroniclebooks.com

ALSO BY JANE HELLER:

FICTION

Clean Sweep (formerly Cha Cha Cha)

The Club

Infernal Affairs

Princess Charming

Crystal Clear

Sis Boom Bah

Name Dropping

Female Intelligence

The Secret Ingredient

Lucky Stars

Best Enemies

An Ex to Grind

Some Nerve

NONFICTION

Confessions of a SheFan: The Course of True Love with the New York Yankees

For Michael Forester,
my brave husband and best friend

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I cant take the pain! Michael wailed. Just get a gun and shoot me already!

My then-boyfriend-now-husband scared the hell out of me that day in 1991, both because he wasnt the type to wail and because he was suggesting that I do something pretty Kevorkianesque. In the eight months since hed moved into my Connecticut house, I had never heard him raise his voice, much less beg for assisted suicide. Besides, I didnt own a firearm, not even one of those benign-looking mini-revolvers you can carry around in your handbag like a BlackBerry. The one and only time I fired a gun was during a college fraternity party at a gentlemans farm in Virginia. Everyone was taking part in something called skeet shooting, which, as a Jewess from Scarsdale, was as foreign to me as doing my own nails. My date showed me how to hold the rifle, I pulled the trigger, and I was blasted backward with such force that the hole in the ground is probably still there.

Should I call an ambulance? I said to Michael, not having a clue what I was supposed to do. I was a writer, not a doctor, and my nurturing skills were nonexistent. I didnt have kids. I didnt have pets. I didnt even have plants except for polyester ones, and even they looked wilted.

All I knew was what Michael had told me early in our courtship (in the most offhand, who-cares way) that he had something called Crohns disease, which, I later learned, is an autoimmune disease of the gastrointestinal tract whose trademarks arewait for itabdominal pain, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting, rectal bleeding, intestinal blockage, osteoporosis, neuropathy, skin rashes, clubbing of the fingers, and severe depression. Since he had exhibited virtually none of the above atrocities and assured me that hed been in remission for years, I paid little attention back then. We were in love, wildly attracted to each other, eager to be married and begin our sure-to-be-blissful future together.

Clearly, I was delusional.

No ambulance! yelled Michael. Do you hear me?

They could hear him in Azerbaijan.

He continued to thrash around on our living room sofa and I continued to circle him as if he were an explosive about to go off, and our housekeeper, an extremely focused Peruvian woman named Maria, continued to vacuum the carpet under our feet since it was her day to clean and I hadnt canceled, due to the sudden onset of Michaels condition.

Ill take your temperature again, I said, feeling the need to do something, anything. I grabbed the thermometer and stuck it under his tongue. The verdict: his fever had spiked to 105.

Im so cold, he said, shaking now, convulsing.

Enough was enough. Even a dip like me knew it was time to call 911.

As Maria and I waited for the EMT guys, I tried to figure out what, exactly, had happened to my beloved. It was his head that was killing him, not his gut, and he said he felt as if someone had broken his legs. The fever could be causing the head and body aches, but what was causing the fever?

And then it hit me: the pills hed been taking for the past month. Hed gone to a new gastroenterologist whod put him on a drug called 6-MP. Could he be having a reaction to the medication?

I offered up my theory to the EMT guys when they arrived. They nodded and called me maam and looked like a cross between firemen and backup dancers for Lady Gaga, but they were more interested in swaddling Michael in blankets and lifting him onto a gurney than in listening to my chatter.

I backed away, gave them space, and wondered what Id gotten myself into.

Growing up with a mother who had nursed two sick husbands (my father had brain cancer, my stepfather had complications from epilepsy), I had vowed to marry for healthto avoid being saddled with a mate who would require me to become that most dreaded of all things: a caregiver. What Im saying is that the lastI mean, the very lastthing I was looking for in a man was a medical flaw. I would rather have married a crocodile.

Not that I didnt admire my mothers devotion as well as her lack of squeamishness when it came to seizures, bedpans, and vomit. (I had a thing about hurlingwas terrified of doing it, being around someone doing it, even sitting through a movie in which someone was doing it.) I thought she was heroic, really I did, but I had no desire to follow in her footsteps. I had seen entirely too much dropping dead on the part of men and was looking for a guy who would hang around. When I met Michael, a tanned, lean, physically fit photographer who was so vigorous he had crewed on a 1920s schooner, sailed it to the Caribbean twice, and even survived a fall overboard into the Atlantic during a noreaster, I said to myself, Woohoo. Heres a live one.

So much for that, I thought now, as the gurney transporting Michael made its way down the stairs and out to our narrow streetat the very same moment that an extremely large van pulled up to the house.

Heller residence? the driver called out the window.

My heart lurched. I had completely forgotten about the boatthe do-it-yourself kit for a little woody dinghy that Id ordered from Wooden Boat magazine as a surprise for Michaels birthday. Hed been eyeing it for weeks and I couldnt wait until it came. I just didnt expect it to come while he was being carted off to an emergency room.

I jumped into the street and started directing traffic and tried not to have a nervous breakdown. I convinced the driver to unload the boat and leave it in the garage under Marias supervision, then climbed into the front seat of the ambulance, and sped away to the hospital.

Michael was in the back being worked on, and I kept craning my neck to check on him. And then I started cryingloud, heavy, ridiculously wet sobsand blubbered, Please tell me hell be all right.

Dont worry, said the ambulance driver, becoming the first person to utter what would become a lifetime of Dont worrys.

There was more fun to be had at the hospital. Since cell phones werent as commonplace as they are now (plus they were the size of suitcases), I had to call Michaels gastro doc from a pay phone in the emergency room. I didnt reach him, naturally, because he was a Very Important Doctor, but his resident took my call.