trying to sew up wounds that never heal
An unpublished journal entry from 12/23/2020.
NOTE: This journal entry was originally posted on December 23, 2020, but was taken down at the advice of many people due to the active nature of the case at the time. I re-published this with some edits in October 2024.
I am currently recovering from surgery, and if we want to be brutally honest, that is not even the most stressful thing I have to deal with at the moment, given all the drama going on with the world, my family, everything in between.
That said: it’s inconvenient. My procedure was Monday; a fun little three-hour procedure to try to sew up a wound that never healed when they repaired my hernia. In the shower, you could see a loop of the green rubbery mesh material, as if someone sewed up a pillow with one of those soldiering wires wrapped in plastic, except the pillow is, well, my fat. And that hernia repair surgery was a direct result from the surgery before that when my appendix exploded in 2017. Maybe I’ll write about that someday when I stop having flashbacks about the NG tube. I was on my feet more yesterday but got a little feverish in the afternoon, and given my track record on surgical recovery decided to stay reclined in bed all day, letting my stomach get used to the stapes, playing video games, and, well, writing this.
Given all of this downtime, I feel like I should be doing something — writing, coding, something productive. While I know 2020 has just been an awful year for everyone, my year also came with a neverending shitty situation with a side of elder abuse and two helpings of mental illness, and I know I should be kind to myself. This has been a year where I should probably congratulate myself for making it to the next day without breaking down physically, emotionally, or mentally.
I make it to the next day fine, just without any of the good feels of actually achieving anything.
America’s mental health system is fucked up.
Officer Garcia at the Fremont Police Department tells me this as he goes on a rant to me over the phone. It’s 7 am in Miami, which means it’s four in the morning in California.
My therapist tells me this as well. “REAGANOMICS!” He exclaims, flabbergasted by the decisions of politicians from the 80s to essentially shut down mental institutions which would have made solutions for my sister more obvious. And then I’m the one consoling him. “I know… I know.”
I agree with them, but that’s all I can really do.
Angela was offered to join a behavioral court program. She agreed to it, and then in the eleventh hour, refused services.
This is legal in the state of California.
Once my sister refused services, her case was transferred back to criminal court, where a judge released her for time served. The District Attorney called to forewarn us, which led to a conference call between myself, Mom, her city caseworker, and a translator because I don’t know how to say “district attorney,” “litigation,” or “restraining order” in Chinese. In two languages, three people told my mother to lock her doors, and if Angela comes back to call the police immediately because of Mom’s restraining order.
Angela gets picked up and goes back to Santa Rita jail. She stays less than a day. Mom calls me again, tells me that while she was gardening, she left a side door unlocked and Angela had let herself in, sat in the living room watching television as if nothing had ever happened. We tell her to call the police again. She does.
This happened again yesterday.
The police are frustrated, but once they drop her off at Santa Rita, he tells me on speakerphone, it’s out of their hands. “What about conservatorship,” someone asks, and everyone else on the call sighs.
The problem with Angela and conservatorship, we learn from her former caseworker and a public defender assigned to her case, is that Angela “presents well.” She isn’t well kept, she’s doesn’t use drugs or alcohol, she can, for the most part, hide her schizophrenia from strangers. People may find her eccentric, but Jesus, so am I. The only time her mental illness is obvious is when she’s in the house talking to the voices in her head and, you know, beating the shit out of my mom, maybe Dad. Conservatorship, we are told, is a bureaucratic, expensive legal procedure which, by the way, might not even work.
Unless you are the estate of Britney Spears. We don’t count them.
So, we’re running out of options. We’ve tried to bring up moving my parents to an elderly care facility — and in my dad’s case, an assisted living facility, but both of my parents have flat out refused. “Well, if you’re going to move me in one, it better be a nice one,” my mom says. “And I refuse to share a bedroom with your father, but I should live next to him, you know? Just in case.”
“Would you move in with us to Florida?” I ask on the phone, a kind of hail Mary. I look over to Kareem who looks up from his laptop; it’s tough to read his expression.
“What about your father?” she asks. It’s a rhetorical question we all know the answer will be.
“Also, no Chinese people in Miami.”
Dad’s dementia has ramped up pretty hard. He now talks in a dialect I can’t understand, uses vocabulary words he never taught me. He signs checks with his name in Chinese rather than English. He calls my uncle his son. I don’t know if Angela hits him too.
But it means there will be no ideal solution for anyone. In the immediate time, the endless loop of jail and her returning to the house, and then sending her back to jail every two or three days will continue, indefinitely. It means, in a base case scenario, my parents will be in an elder care center, probably one that Mom won’t be thrilled with, but it’ll mean her safety. It will mean Angela will be homeless. I try to look inward for some empathy for her situation, but the well has run pretty dry.
Instead, I have started mapping out worse-case scenarios in my head.
😔
❤️❤️❤️❤️