Miserable Day but Geoff is Here

Brother Geoff is Here: Our Mutual Self-Protection goes back 60 years.

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Much of yesterday was spent with deep aches in long bones and bones and joints. Then a swarm of staccato, searing pains coming down on the my hips and lower extremities and hands like a violent rainstorm. Hundreds of individual blips of pain with a few seconds and lasting only a few seconds. Even within the blips, there is a pain spectrum, some being mild, others being closer to 7/10. It is not really the magnitude of any particular pain, but the combination of all which prevents attempts at sleep.

I took 2 mg of lorazepam (valium like drug) yesterday, it just slowed me down during the day, perhaps helped me avoid nausea, but made it more difficult to get things done.

There is a screw up between my insurance and Stanford--there is no active contract since 8/31. I'm getting bills from all over, none of which are being passed through the secondary insurer, Medicare Part B. So, a fair amount of time is required to go back over the past month and trying to match a particular bill with a particular service.

I took a seconal after 8 PM but sleep was not deep and I'm wide awake and achy at 2 AM. My fingers are relatively numb  and making it much harder to type accurately.

Yesterday I applied for medical marijuana. I intend to try it to combat nausea rather than the constipating and oversedating other alternatives. It required downloading a form from the internet for the California program, then getting my attending doctor to sign a form, and then calling a distributor. I wasn't feeling well enough to see them yesterday....they come to the house, probably to avoid being ripped off. I'll let you know.

Does that make anyone more likely to want to visit me?

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My brother Geoff is still here after almost 10 days. We have watched a lot of football and the first two seasons of Breaking Bad. His presence here makes it easier for Jasmine to go to work and not worry about what kind of trouble I'm manufacturing. Geoff leaves tomorrow with an early morning train to LA and then a flight to Mazatlan where he spends most of his time.

Geoff:  My first memory. There is a crib in the middle of the one-bedroom apartment on 7th Street. There is a very scrawny creature lying on its back in the middle of the crib. He is crying. His appearance is a total surprise.

For the next few years, I don't recall much interaction with Geoff. He was too young to be of any interest as a playmate until I'm 6 or 7 and can begin to teach him to catch and throw, to run races, etc. He begins to come into focus after we move to the cracker box house in Parklawn and we begin to share a room with two windows on the southeast side of the house. I love having a room with a bed next to the window. I'm able to see neon lights about 1/4 mile away at the intersection of Riggs Road and East West Highway. I find them very comforting.

At 8 I'm living with Geoff on a day to day basis. He is a feisty guy and I'm impatient and we have our moments. Suzanne has her own small bedroom next door on one side, our parents bedroom is on the other side of ours.

At that point in life I am still bed wetting on a relatively frequent basis. Freud would say that one of the functions of a dream is to keep one asleep. When desires, such as hunger or thirst, appear in a dream, it is possible for the dream to incorporate food and water into the scene--anything to tide you over to a normal waking hour. For me, the dreams created various scenarios that made it okay to urinate in my bed. The dreams would tell me that I had already gotten up and was standing at the toilet, or that I was in a warm bath and no one would know that I had taken the liberty, or that I was in at the beach, or that I was outside behind a tree, etc. The dream was powerful.

I'm sure my parents were pulling their hair out with a child who goes from thumb-sucking to bed-wetting. My bed-wetting adventure that got the most notice was my sleepwalking into my parents walk-in closet and letting go in all directions. I sprayed all of their clothes. My father's murderous looks encouraged me to practice some routine hygiene, such as avoiding water near bed time and prophylactic use of the toilet at the last possible minute before bedtime.

The child psychologists would also note that my bed-wetting was associated with an episode where I burned my cats fur with matches. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macdonald_triad

In my case,  I didn't think I was hurting the cat, only her fur, just like burning my hair didn't hurt.

By 1951 all three of us children were very much aware that there was great frailty in our home situation. There were a lot of tensions. Mom was not happy about going to work. We were not happy to have an increased amount of supervision being performed by our father whose moods and actions increasingly controlled all that went on in the household for next few decades.

There were times when Dad was particularly cruel in the mornings. A typical morning in the Sohr household in 1953 would be Dad coming home at about 7:00 PM after a shift as a security guard at Johns Hopkins Physics Lab in Silver Spring, M.D. I would have been home for a while after completing newspaper deliveries. Dad would take Mom to the bus stop so that she could get into work and then he would return home and cook breakfast, one of two dishes: fried egg sandwiches with bacon or pancakes. The Sohr children grew sideways and this seemed to be fine with our parents. It was at least a manifestation to the world that the kids were being cared for.

Some of those mornings could be filled with raging cruelty. If he were irritable, nothing that you did could please him. I remember him being upset with Sue and doing 50 strokes of brushing through her hair in a way guaranteed to cause pain. A made bed that would have passed inspection the previous three weeks might not be good enough today. Out of the blue, a backhand that laid you out on the floor. The blows could come out of nowhere.

In some later post, I'll begin to describe what I recall of my mother's response to this nightmare. From an early age, the children hoped that she would leave him if only for our own protection. Later in life my mother was hospitalized for psychotic depression on several occasions. During some of these episodes she would voice her regrets about letting things go the way they had during the early years. She was particularly upset with my difficulty establishing a healthy long-term relationship and viewed herself as having been at least partially responsible for some of my obvious deficiencies.

So the then-three Sohr children (Eric 8, Sue 6, Geoff 5) were living in what was frequently a crazy household, controlled by the emotional cycles of Dad, who would binge drink four to six times a year in episodes that would start by having a few drinks one day and drinking to passing out the next. However, he wasn't someone to sit down and just drink. Instead, drink increased his activity level. He was much more likely to shop, to interact, to be grandiose, to be silly, and to be mean. Normally we got the meanness or had to witness it directed at friends and acquaintances.

As children we learned to pull together. We needed radar in order to determine where we were in Dad's cycle. Getting a whiff of his breath when he came home was a good surveillance tactic. If he  reached out to give a kiss we could easily determine alcohol use. If alcohol was present, we would take the path of being polite, agreeable, with deference in interaction. If drunk and anger escalating, we would drop our masks and plainly show the fear that we were experiencing. This might make him angrier, in which case, we would apply another mask. But often the fear made him back off to the point that he did not demand our constant company. We could go to our rooms and deal with our anxiety out of his presence.

If he and Mom started fighting, we stayed as far out of the way as possible. We hoped that any of their fights would not escalate to the point where she left the house and put us totally at his mercy. While she was in the house, she performed the function of lightning rod.

Sometimes, it didn't matter what we did. It was just a matter of time until we kids got pushed around. We became consummate actors of the "fall." When getting hit with the backhand, better go with it. Try to hit the floor with your entire back, not your head. With the right cross, fall quickly to your right side and immediately raise up your arms indicating "no more." Get those goddamn tears going as soon as possible and let the snot fly...let him see you as being damaged as quickly as possible. Even at his drunkest it appeared that he did not really want to kill us, at least physically. Geoff suggests that we could have been teachers for European soccer teams.

The homecoming kiss was also useful, even if he had not been drinking. It became possible to pick up on his mood. If somber or morose, we would know to tiptoe around him. If he was having a good day, it as possible that we would as well.

This sibling cooperation forged us into a working union. We helped each other survive that childhood.

Geoff was a wonderful roommate. He did do our share of fighting. Our rollaway beds usually looked more damaged than we after a tiff. We were in our room avoiding contact with adults a lot as children. We spent hours playing games. In 5th grade I was learning chess and my 2nd grade brother began to beat my ass on a very regular basis. I was a reader, he was not. I went to the library and got some help and began to study chess for a few years.

Geoff was more athletic, more at home outside, doing things with his hands. He has a good spacial eye and good quality. I'm sure his dental patients miss him. I think for many years part of me was jealous of his economic success and shrewd business acumen. But he has come through so solidly as a brother, tending to Mom and helping her out of her house into a living arrangement where she thrived for several years. Finally, he was with her until the end and stood in for all of us.

I'll miss him tomorrow.

Geoff Sohr working on Mom's Problems 2003