And Ooo-Whee, Shut My Mouth, Slap Your Grandma
My grandmother, who is 85 and a diabetic, nearly went in to a coma a few nights ago because her blood sugar level dropped to a staggering low. Frantic phone calls, an ambulance, and a late-night visit to the emergency room ensued. Fortunately, she is OK and recuperating at my parents' house.
It is widely known that there exists in my family a strong propensity for Being Stubborn. Everyone in our family is stubborn to some degree (particularly my brother, who gets it from both my mother's and father's sides, and whose stubbornness is -- I'm quite sure -- entirely capable of exerting measurable horsepower). My grandmother is, literally, the Mother of all Stubbornness, and nowhere is this currently more apparent than in her abject refusal to eat enough food to sustain human life.
A couple of days ago, my mother called me at work, laughing her ass off, to tell me this: My brother (in a battle of wills that I can only imagine must have been nothing short of apocalyptic) was trying to get Grandma, who is a bit hard-of-hearing, to have something to eat, and every time he called to her from the kitchen, she responded with "Huh?"
My brother: Woman! You need a hearing aid!
Grandma: Huh?
My brother: YOU NEED A HEARING AID!
Grandma: NO! I don't have to urinate!
My brother: NO! I SAID YOU NEED A HEARING AID!
Grandma: And I told YOU I didn't HAVE to urinate!
My brother: NOOOO. I SAIIIID. YOU. NEED. A. HEAAAAAAARING. AIIIIIIIIID.
Grandma: Oh. No, I don't need that, either.
We've asked her to please eat more; we've begged her to please eat more; we've threatened putting her in "a home." All to no avail. My mother and aunt, desperate to get nourishment down her gullet, signed her up for Meals on Wheels, which is a daily service that shows up at her house with a fully-cooked, ready-to-eat lunch and dinner. All she has to do is unwrap and eat. We all thought this plan was going reasonably well until the other night. The reason she almost fell in to a coma? She simply hadn't felt like eating dinner, which, in a diabetic with her medical history, is sort of akin to someone in renal failure saying, "Eh. I think I'll just pass on the dialysis today, thanks just the same."
In an attempt to get to the bottom of the problem, we've asked her why she doesn't want to eat. The answer she gives is this: "I'm not hungry, and I can't stand all those colors." Colors? Fuck ... what? COLORS? What are you talking about, old woman? "You know how that food is," she says, her face contorting into a look of disgust usually reserved for someone who's unexpectedly come into contact with a great deal of fecal matter. "It has all those colors mixed together. It makes me sick to even think about all those colors." Then she shudders audibly.
How do you argue with that? There is no way to counter, because there is no way to remove the color from food. We've discussed simply feeding her nothing but vanilla milkshakes and cauliflower, because technically, white is not a color, but rather the absence of it. We've also discussed calling the optometrist to see if he could outfit her with a set of black-and-white contact lenses so she can't see all those fucking colors. So far, though, we've not arrived at a single feasible solution, and if we don't come up with something soon, I think my mother might just tie her up and start shoving garden salads down her throat, screaming, "No colors, huh? Take THAT yellow pepper and THAT cherry tomato, bitch!"
None of this would surprise me, because just as we all stubborn, we're also moderately (lovably?) insane, and one of the unspoken things that keeps my mother and my aunt from throwing up their hands in defeat, from pitching Grandma into a nursing home where her eating will be someone else's problem, is that they know, just as I do, there is some part of us that is exactly like her, and I hope that if I am so lucky to survive for another five decades or so, there will be someone around to protect me from myself.
posted by Kate at 2:17 PM link/comments
