Mrs. Fossilfuel's Castor Oil Adventure

Do not read this while eating.

I've now spent a few days with the 98-year-old Mrs. Fossilfuel. She sleeps a lot, and I check on her every ten minutes or so to make sure she's OK. Or at least OK for 98. Sometimes, to keep warm enough (though her house is kept at 81 degrees) she wraps a pink scarf around her head and over her eyes, and resembles an ancient, reclusive movie star napping at a day spa. She only needs a discarded script next to her bed.

She eats simple meals, fixed to a very precise set of instructions. I fix them as best I can, being a very reluctant visitor to the kitchen, and she always says they taste good. Even if I have to take the pear back and peel it, or the hot milk is not hot enough. Her microwave is, in microwave years, as old and tired as she is. I heat her milk in it for 5 full minutes and it is still not quite hot.

Mrs. Fossilfuel's purse is kept right next to her pillow at all times. Except for when she goes to the bathroom, during which time she asks her caregiver to follow behind her as she hobbles there with the help of her walker, and to bring the purse, then place it next to the toilet where she can see it. It's too sad to be insulting. As though she could protect herself from a dishonest person who came into her house.

Now. About the bathroom. Though Sherrie, the overnight person who comes four nights a week from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., tells me that Mrs. F. indeed walks to the bathroom when she has to go, she will not do it for me. She insists on peeing into the cottage cheese container next to her bed, while I gather her robe and nightgown upward from front and back, and hold her steady with that as though she is a wooden marionette. Her legs shake and I worry she will collapse any second. She gets upset when she can't "go", and asks me to go to the bathroom and turn the faucet on so she can hear it. I do. And then she can't hear it anyway. When finally the first drop falls into the container, she says "Oh, here it comes, honey." And then "Listen, here comes some more." It is a urine play-by-play. Two things come to mind during this.

1. Dennis Miller says that one way you can tell you're getting old is when you start peeing in Morse Code.

2. When my grandma was alive, if she felt weak or had the flu, she'd say "I'm shakin' like a dog shittin' peach seeds." This is how Mrs. F. shakes.

This past Saturday, she said she was terribly constipated. Terribly. Since she would not walk to the bathroom, she laid in her bed actually trying to poop in her pants. She refused to even attempt to walk to the bathroom so I was stumped as to what to do. I couldn't just take her outside and beat her with a shovel. Could I?

When I would check on her, the grimace on her face made me grimace, and she was seemingly in pain from straining. I asked, tentatively, with my shovel behind my back, if there was anything I could do.

She asked me to go to the kitchen and mix this up for her:

One ounce of pineapple juice
One ounce of castor oil

She said this is the potion her mother told her about, (yes, her mother, who I believe was a contemporary of Betsy Ross) and she learned it from an old woman who was an expert in natural healing. And a contemporary of Cleopatra.

Right now you might be saying to yourself: Oh, Candy. I know you didn't give Mrs. Fossilfuel a full ounce of castor oil. I know you didn't. Because only a true dumbass would do such a intensely dumbass thing.

But Candy is not terribly well-versed in castor oil. Also, since Mrs. F. has been deemed "coherent," it is not my place to tell her what she can and cannot have.

So yes. I gave her the mixture in a measuring cup and she drank it. It was 3:00 p.m.

At 4:50 p.m. the world grew dark.

When I checked on her, she said "Oh honey, I think I need the pot." The "pot" is her name for the cottage cheese container.

In my estimation, it was way too late for that. But perhaps I was too hasty in my judgment. After all, she had so far only soaked her robe, nightgown, and bedsheets in shit. Great pools of shit. For a moment, I could not move. My muscles came to a complete frozen stop as my cognition took hold of the news that I was somehow going to have to deal with this flurry of feces.

"Oh my God, Mrs. Fossilfuel. Let's get you to the bathroom."

"Oh, honey. I just can't."

It was then that I wanted to kill her.

I'm going to condense this next segment, partly for your sake, partly for mine. But let me just say that when I helped her sit up, there was a long, juicy, horrible sound coming from her nether regions that I thought was the devil himself calling my name. I was shocked to the bone that this feeble old woman who is as fragile as a wasp's nest could rip off such a sinister, echoing frapp that could peel the fur off a baboon. But there was no time to be shocked. Mrs. Fossilfuel was unloading every morsel of food she had eaten since she had stood on the dock as a three-year-old bidding farewell to the Titanic.

For the next hour, I tried desperately not to breathe. I went through five pairs of latex gloves, a full roll of paper towels, opened the windows that would open, plunged the toilet numerous times, and listened to comments like "Oh I feel so much better" from Mrs. Fossilfuel, the old woman who had transformed herself into a rectal pinata.

When Sherrie came for the night shift, she took one whiff inside the house and started loudly calling the name of our Messiah. I explained what had happened. I told her she could kill me. I just didn't care any more.

When I got home, Scott came up to hug me as he always does. I waved him off because I was too tired to summon the words "Don't hug me. I've been slithering through shit." I sat on the kitchen floor, leaned back against the side of the oven and said "Please bring me some alcohol." He did. I drank. And I told him the story, as I threw everything I was wearing into the washer. And then threw myself into a hot bath.

Here is how Mrs. Fossilfuel thinks. Here is how she prioritizes things:

When Sherrie and I had moved her to a chair and sat her atop a pile of plastic grocery bags to keep the chair safe from her radioactive brown lava, and were scrubbing her bare mattress with carpet cleaner and trying not to lose the will to live, we pulled a clean sheet out of the closet to put on her bed while the mattress pad soaked in bleach. Mrs. F. looked at it and said "Oh, don't use that one. It's all cotton. It wrinkles."