The Oppenheimer Report 1-28-13

This morning I woke up to commotion as the shift change was taking place for our healthcare workers. Yes, we are still here at the Taylors house, still sleeping on twin beds in Shauna‘s rather small (especially with all our junk in it) childhood bedroom, still working on getting the proper team of people together to make sure the Taylors are as safe as possible. We started out a new caregiver last night for the evening shift, and as if to test her abilities, Dr. Taylor immediately came down with a puzzling fever. That fever was a little higher this morning, and while not an alarming temperature for a healthy adult, it was more worrisome for a senior. We seem to be making headway convincing Shauna’s parents that they do in fact need the help we have put in place; that need has become fairly obvious. Luckily his fever abated and Dr. Taylor is back to his usual irascible, codgerly self (ever notice that codger and badger sound a little alike?), but it’s been a bit of a kick in the pants these past few weeks.

With reference to last week’s report discussing my not-to-sincere interest in pontoon boats, I Googled “high speed pontoon boat races” and came up with more videos on YouTube than I could possibly watch in a day. Ya gotta love YouTube! Indeed there are pontoon boats that have reached over 100MPH, and in one video I was able to experience the ride, from the passenger’s seat of one of these overpowered floating tubs, boasting a 600 Horsepower engine. Six hundred horses powering a 25’ pontoon boat! Believe me, that was one fast trip around the lake. I couldn’t tell for sure, but it may have been propelled by high performance surface piercing drives. Apparently pontoon boat design has advanced to the point where some of these tubs handle pretty well, and I was amused and surprised by how many people with too much time on their hands are doing exactly what I joked about doing.

What’s new in lifestyles of the rich and ridiculous? I once penned a soap opera spoof I called The Bold and the Bulemic, but I digress. It stands to reason that, in a shortened season, it wouldn’t take as long for the Toronto Maple Leafs to begin their nosedive down the toilet, and they have proved consistent. After an encouraging win against Crosby’s Penguins earlier last week, the “old” Leafs returned last Saturday night. Sitting on a 2 goal lead until the third period, they choked defensively, left their goalie out to dry, and allowed New York to score five unanswered goals. Thank you sir, may I have another. One of the Leafs’ star forwards had been badly injured in the Pittsburgh game, and their other overpaid big gun has yet to score his first goal. Same sh-t, different season. So glad they’ve all settled their money disputes … now what was it again we were paying you millions of dollars to do? Once again, bi-weekly performance reviews sound like a good idea. Ontario’s first (openly) gay Liberal Kathleen Wynne is the new Premiere of Ontario, at least until the next election is called. Former Italian PM Sylvio “Hound Dog” Berlusconi is in hot water (again) for his remarks praising Mussolini. Hey Silvie, remember the part about how he was a fascist and an anti-Semite? Who does that man's public relations?

Last night I watched Tony Robbins interviewed on Piers Morgan, and I used to make fun of the guy. In fact I am skeptical of most celebrity self help gurus, but I have changed my opinion about Tony Robbins. The guy makes a lot of sense. The basic theme of the interview was what can we do to heal America. The show featured various Robbins “clients” who had overcome great adversity in their lives. There was a teenaged kid who had been shot, I think at Columbine, a shell shocked marine who looked like the personification of trauma …. they talked about what they had learned from Robbins to help them turn their lives around. The common thread was that all of them found a way to get past their pain and self-pity in favor of some inexplicable drive to survive, and they did this by finding something bigger than their problems on which to focus. In most cases this involved helping others. Robbins pointed out that of all the things he could hope to have, money, fame, power, “happiness” … the one thing he aspires to achieve is meaning. I hear you brother! Me too! One does not find meaning by focusing on oneself. I watch so much television and read too many infotainment newspapers, and a lot of the “important” people covered are not role models. Lance Armstrong, Barry Bonds, Lindsay Lohan, Berlusconi, the Kardashians; some over-hyped singer on American Idol - these are not role models, and very few of them are heroes. For the most part they seem to be dysfunctional often egotistical human beings (just like you and me) held under a microscope. Perhaps true heroes are not all that interesting, because selflessness is not something people broadcast. Anyhow, that’s my rant and I’m sticking to it. A little meaning to my life is all I want.

Meaning .... and maybe a pontoon boat, with a jet engine, that goes 135 mph.

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 1/21/13

Another banner week in the Taylor household. We are still interviewing aids and have tried out three unsuccessful candidates (out of seven or eight we’ve interviewed) so far. There is a live-in caregiver program wherein a Canadian family can sponsor a foreign candidate to live with them while he or she applies for permanent residency and eventually citizenship. In theory it is a win win for everyone, but it doesn’t always work out that way. First of all, there is a waiting period of several months before a sponsored candidate is actually placed with a family, and there have been reported abuses on both sides. Families sometimes expect too much of the caregivers, who receive minimum wage and are sometimes treated unfairly according to accepted employment standards. Subject to a 2 year probationary period these candidates sometimes become trapped in an unpleasant working situation. As well, some of the candidates are not suitable for the job. Shauna has had an abrupt education on the many challenges to hiring a responsible caregiver. Some lie on their resumes, others want to be paid in cash to avoid paying taxes, and some are simply not very good at what they profess to do. It takes a special kind of person to be a good caregiver.

Denial. It’s not just a river in Egypt. One thing that has been on my mind a lot of late is that I seem to have skipped my mid-life crisis, and now find myself suddenly dropped on the outer fringes of that phase. I didn’t buy the sports car, or cheat on my wife. I didn’t get a hair transplant, or take up rock climbing, or whatever mid-lifers do when they see codgerdom creeping up in them. I simply got older and ignored it. As I get crankier and creakier, and as old age taps me not-so-gently on the shoulder, I stare perplexed at the salt and pepper-bearded codger looking back at me in the morning mirror, and I see my id fighting for its life. The denial I so criticize in my elders is the same denial creeping into my own life. The devil on my one shoulder is beginning to look like an atrophied little nebbish, as the “angel” on my other shoulder evolves into a bullying nag. More and more I fight a losing battle with the tyranny of common sense, and I foolishly long to lead my life with the reckless abandon of my 28 year-old self. Sadly that bad boy is disappearing like newly spilled invisible ink, and what is left is the Dr. Oz-your-health-is-your-wealth-no cholesterol-watch-your-salt-two-beer-limit-early bird-special Jamie. The last five year over-exposure to that which, if I’m “lucky”, represents the next twenty or thirty years of my life has made me hypersensitive to the aging process. More than once I heard my nonagenarian mom say she wished she were dead, and I find myself asking the imponderable questions, questions too dark for even politically incorrect me to discuss in an open forum.

Last Thursday, my longest running partner in crime and best friend Bob had to drop someone off in Toronto, and afterwards we attended the Toronto Boat Show together. It was a welcome break from what I have been doing for the past month. I must say the show was a disappointment, and every year there seem to be less and less hot boats to spark my marine fantasies. This year we spent a lot of time waiting in line to walk around shoeless on obscenely expensive luxury cabin cruisers. When I go to a boat show, I seem to gravitate to the fast, dangerous, overpowered little boats - boats one could envision naming “Suck My Wake” or “Oar-gasm,” and which have absolutely no practical value to a codger like me. In his typically insulting way, Bob suggested that I am “over the hill” so I should embrace my inner codger and buy a pontoon boat. You know, one of those floating living rooms. He thought that would be a suitable alternative for our little lake up north, taking into consideration that I am reluctantly entering that stage of my life wherein a floating living room even resembles real boating. By my definition, that is rafting. Although I am perfectly happy with the boat I have now owned for over 22 years, I did some pontoon boat comparison shopping just for fun. If I am going to consider one of these floating living rooms I want it to be stupidly overpowered, so I can annoy all the other cottagers by speeding around on this cumbersome blob of welded aluminum. One pontoon boat - I cannot remember the make - boasted a respectable top end of over 55 mph. There was a video of this 22’ pontoon boat making hairpin turns and blasting through rough chop with ease. High performance pontoon boats, now there’s a concept! Pretty soon they’ll start selling them with flames painted in the sides. Bob tells me that there are pontoon boats which can reach speeds of 100mph and that there are in fact pontoon boat races. Who knew?!

One of my nephews periodically texts me photos of his latest accomplishments souping up his Mustang GT. I think he’s got his 0-60 acceleration down to below 4.6 seconds. I suspect he wants to rub it in my face what a wimp I have become. Paranoia is one of the telltale signs of aging, by the way. I’d like to send him a photo of me cruising along in my new high performance pontoon speedboat at 80MPH, with “Ahoy Vey II” emblazoned on the side in fire engine red, while I’m driving with one hand, playing cards with the other, and watching television. This is how your fossilized Uncle Jamie does it.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2013 ALL RIGHTS

The Oppenheimer Report 1/14/13

Last Friday was a good example of the chaos by which I presently find myself surrounded. Shauna had to drive her mom to her two doctor’s appointments, and I stayed at home to watch her father, who now requires constant supervision, especially during his frequent visits to the lavatory. While I was on “the dad shift” an installer from Sears finally showed up, a day late, to install our new cook top, after the previous installer flaked out and didn’t bother telling us he wasn’t coming. Then of course there were complications with the installation, as there always seem to be, and I had to make an executive decision to allow a modification which could potentially have ruined the existing countertop. Fun fact: installers used by big retailers like Sears will not always do cabinetry and countertop alterations in order to make an appliance fit, so make sure you cover this when you buy your appliance. While I was pleading with the installer to mangle our countertop with a reciprocating saw, in the two minutes during which I took my eyes off the video monitor, Dad Taylor had disappeared from view. I then ran down the hall to find he was trying to sneak in an unsupervised bathroom visit. Then, as I was attending to him, the phone rang, and it was a potential caregiver calling to schedule an interview. When we are over our heads as caregivers, sometimes we can‘t catch a break. As I mentioned in last week’s report, we were forced to dismiss a health care aid last week - our day shift caregiver - and that left us shorthanded. Incompetence is in my opinion a huge problem in geriatric care, and while the woman we fired did not physically abuse our parents, she was decidedly incompetent, and could have done (and almost did do) them harm by misrepresenting her capabilities. I don’t think we North Americans are doing a very good job of protecting our most at risk elders from substandard care. I also think elders are low on the food chain for medical care. Populations are expanding, people are living longer, many do not have the means to fund proper care, and many doctors are over-burdened … you can see why the aged might get swept under the bus. Once again I ask, what good are medical advances, if we increase the quantity of life without any quality?

One thing I have noticed, both with my parents, when they were near the ends of their lives, and now with the Taylors in their late eighties, is that old age seemed to jump them like a mugger in the dark. One day they were doing just fine, the next day they were overwhelmed, and in a cloud of denial so thick you could cut it with a knife. All four of my parents said the same thing: they said didn’t see it coming. Then comes the anger and depression, and guess who takes that heat? Dementia is only one of many ways old age gets ugly, and believe me, I have seen the ugly side of old age. Senility is a psychological minefield, and for the children, or for any inexperienced caregiver, it can be a real emotional kick in the ass. I only wish more people would talk about it. Learn from my mistakes, because believe me, I’ve made them all! There seems to be an unwritten taboo against discussing the mental decline of one’s loved ones, as if it’s some horrible family secret which, if revealed, will erase all the dignity and goodwill that loved one has earned in his or her long life. I never bought into that. My mom was as crazy (oh, how politically incorrect of me to say that) as she could be before she died, and I don’t mind talking about it. It doesn’t change the good and charitable woman she was. It wasn’t her at all, it was mental illness, but it was who she became. While it is hard not to take the whole thing personally, I could not do so and survive emotionally. In some indirect way, maybe this is why we have all these gun-toting lunatics floating around undetected among us. Not enough people are talking about it. There are a lot of mentally ill people out there, old and young. After the Newtown, Ct. shootings, which so appalled the entire world, I read a gripping article which began “I am Adam Lanza’s Mother.” It was written by the mother (not Lanza’s) of a violent, mentally ill child. She was becoming afraid of her uncontrollable child, and eloquently recounted the complicated hell she faces every day. Caught in the catch-22 of medical and law enforcement bureaucracy, she was pointing out how hard it is to know how to protect her child from harming himself or others around him. I made a comment in a recent report that the families of the mentally ill bear some responsibility for their bad behavior, but this woman made me realize how hard that can be. Her boy may not be on anybody’s radar until he acts out. The challenge is figuring out how to respond proactively rather than reactively.

Final notes. We can all breath a sigh of relief (he sneers sarcastically), because the NHL owners and players have reached an agreement, and will now play about 48 games to complete this truncated season. To rub salt into the wound, the geniuses (two of Canada’s media giants) who now own the Toronto Maple Leafs decided now would be a good time to fire Leafs GM Brian Burke. I don’t know if Burke was an effective manager, and much was made of the fact that he could not turn around the Leafs’ downward spiral in the 4 years since he took the reins, but I suspect that other forces conspired to scuttle this cursed team. One last time, for this season anyway, I proclaim my utter disgust. How one of the richest franchises in the NHL could so horribly fail to provide a suitable and competitive team for so many years is far beyond me … I mean Uranus is closer (and I’m not talking about Gary Bettman).

The other day I saw on the attention deficit disorder news channel that an asteroid is scheduled to pass close to earth in 2036 and may even make contact. Let’s see, that’s 23 years away, which makes me 80. That should be about right. Screw the nursing home, I’m going out with a bang. Divine intervention!

Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The Oppenheimer Report 1/7/13

Did you all whoop it up this year? I spent the evening stone cold sober, for perhaps the first time in almost forty years. My sparkling beverage was a delicious pomegranate and blueberry lemonade concoction, with just a hint of raccoon. Intoxication quickly loses its appeal when every five minutes there is another geriatric crisis. Both in-laws are just now recovering from the flu, we have had nursing conflicts, scheduling snafus, a fall necessitating a 911 call, a nurse who had to be let go after it turned out she’d completely misrepresented her credentials (the one nurse who had come to us through an agency). Dad Taylor got sick enough at one point that we called in a doctor to put him on an antibiotic. Our First Night celebration consisted of a simple meal I prepared and which we served in the formal dining room of the Taylor house. While dinner was anything but fancy, the psychological benefits of eating a proper dinner, for the first time in three weeks, cannot be over-emphasized. Indeed this was head and shoulders above life in a hospital bed, with lights switched on and off and loud speakers blaring every half hour. Everyone appreciated the meal. Little pleasures we take for granted become monumental when put in the proper perspective.

Last Saturday was the first time since December 12^th that Mom Taylor had been out of her house. I took her out to do her banking and some shopping. She has been pining to get out of the house for weeks, and although Metro Toronto is now experiencing a widespread flu epidemic, I made the probably ill-advised decision that an outing in disease-infested Toronto might be a preferable alternative to the psychological torture of being homebound. Our mission was to buy a new cook top. The one in her kitchen needed to be replaced, and after we researched our options on “your internet” ( as in “go on your internet and find me a new cook top”), we set out to a nearby Sears to place our order.

Sears was packed last Saturday. After ten minutes searching for a suitable parking spot, we bravely threw ourselves into the mayhem which is Sears around Boxing Day. In the large appliance section we began inspecting some of the ceramic cook tops on display when a salesperson named Brian came up to us and asked us if we needed any help. I told him we’d decided on a cook top unit and just needed to buy it and arrange for installation. From that point on we entered the twilight zone. First, he tried to persuade me to buy a different product from the one we’d chosen online, with features we did not want or need, for more money than we intended to spend. Having done my Consumer Reports due diligence, I already knew what I wanted, and I politely held my ground. Strike one against Brian. At this point I took a good at the guy and did an involuntary double take. He looked like a malaria victim, suffering from a high fever, exuding an almost palpable aura of sickliness. He was a man probably in his forties, well spoken, and likely over-qualified for the position he was in, but he looked completely disheveled. His shirt was half out, his hair looked unwashed and uncombed, his bespectacled eyes were bugged out and red, and he was holding what looked like a handkerchief against his perspiring face and neck. As he rather persistently attempted to sell me something I did not want to buy, he went into a convulsive coughing fit. He made a feeble effort to cover his mouth with his arm, but the cough was so violent that he lost all control. My mother-in-law recoiled as if she’d just been exposed to the Bubonic Plague, gesturing frantically to me, and in full view of Brian, that she wanted no part of this Typhoid Marty. Brian was oblivious, likely due to his 103 degree fever, and I, figuring that by now I’d been exposed to whatever toxic germs had been spewed into the surrounding 2000 cubic feet, just wanted to complete the transaction with as much grace and expediency as possible. Had there been another salesperson available I would have dropped Brian like a hot potato, but I just wanted to get this transaction done and to get out of there. As my mother-in-law looked on horrified from a safe distance, I watched Brian, in his fevered delirium, bumbling confusedly through the necessary paperwork to complete the transaction as he babbled his fever-fueled frenzy of nonsense. At one point he was standing inches away from his manager at the cash register when he coughed directly into the guy’s face. At this point I began to laugh, and I turned around to see my mother-in-law looking as if she had just swallowed rat feces. Brian was still yammering on as I pumped a blob of the omnipresent hand sanitizer into my hand, gingerly grabbed the one corner of my invoice he had not touched, and beat a hasty retreat. The piece de resistance was that, as I was leaving, I noticed that the handkerchief with which Brian had been blotting his face was full of blood. On top of the laundry list of other disgusting things about Brian, he was bleeding from an open sore on his neck. I turned to my mother-in-law and asked: “How can I find out if I’ve contracted leprosy?” - Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED