Client "L", Session February 26, 2014: Client discusses all the trouble she's having with health issues and how hard it is to get money from the government to assist her, reminding the client of how her family treated her. Client discusses the difficulties in her family relations. trial
TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:
CLIENT: What’s the good word?
THERAPIST: What’s the good word, Louise?
CLIENT: Let’s see. Monday I went to pre-op testing. Yesterday I went to Rhode Island Eye and Ear about a hearing aid. Today I’m here to see you. Tomorrow I’m seeing a nutritionist, and on Friday I’m having surgery.
THERAPIST: You are. Hernia?
CLIENT: Knee.
THERAPIST: Knee? They’re doing the knee again?
CLIENT: Mm-hmm.
THERAPIST: How about that?
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: What, so you met with him -
CLIENT: Last week.
THERAPIST: Was it Flint?
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: Last week, and he wanted to go ahead and do it.
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: What was, what did he have to say?
CLIENT: You know, he said, you know, he saw where the leg was swollen, and I says it’s like that every day, you know. And what happens? I says it gives out, you know. He looked at the x-rays that they had taken, and he says, “Well, I think we’ll go in and scrape and see what else needs to be done when I have it”. And I says okay, fine.
[00:01:16]
THERAPIST: So, they’re going to do some -
CLIENT: Orthoscopic surgery.
THERAPIST: Ortho okay. Okay. So you shouldn’t be, that shouldn’t tie up too terribly long then, huh?
CLIENT: Yeah, but knowing me, it will, because I heal very slowly.
THERAPIST: For some reason I was thinking they might replace the knee again or something. But no, he’s just doing some orthoscopics.
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: I mean, yeah, at this point everything’s serious surgery.
CLIENT: I said, with my luck I’ll go in for the knee and come out with, you know, needing a heart transplant or some goddamn thing. [laughter]. You know I never do anything right.
[00:02:00]
THERAPIST: Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Well.
CLIENT: And then after the knee, we started on cortisone shots for the shoulder that I broke there. So if the cortisone shots don’t work, which they’re ... really, the first one hasn’t, we’re going to need a new shoulder.
THERAPIST: A new shoulder? Oh my gosh.
CLIENT: A shoulder replacement. Yeah. Because right now it’s bone on bone. So.
THERAPIST: Okay.
CLIENT: I said, okay, so I’ll go for the knee, the shoulder, and maybe the hernia. [Laughter]. Maybe I should go for the hernia first, because they said the shoulder’s like an eight to ten month recovery.
THERAPIST: Is that right?
CLIENT: Mm-hmm.
THERAPIST: Well, yeah, I imagine. Yeah, yeah. I could see that.
[00:03:02]
CLIENT: So I says yeah, okay, we’ll see. We’ll see.
THERAPIST: So they’re, just cutting you open all over the place.
CLIENT: Yeah, we might as well just go for it. Get me while you can.
THERAPIST: What is it like?
CLIENT: All right. I’m hoping this will finally, you know, do the deal, but he said, “Well Louise, when you broke it the second time, we had to put a rod up your leg, remember, because your femur bone was sticking up through it?”
THERAPIST: Your femur was?
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: I didn’t know this about your femur.
CLIENT: Yeah. The second time. Well, I had the first surgery in ‘06, and then the following year, in ‘07, I fell out of bed, and my femur bone was sticking right up through the implant. The knee. So they put a rod up there, they re-fixed the total knee, and do you know when they do this surgery, that they have to have the guy that makes, someone from the company that makes these things?
[00:04:22]
THERAPIST: I hear they’re doing more and more of that, the people from the actual device, who sell the devices will have a rep there so they can tell the surgeon what to do.
CLIENT: Right.
THERAPIST: How to implant it. Yeah.
CLIENT: I says, oh. Okay. So, that was that, you know. I said I don’t mind.
THERAPIST: What about that, to you, having that person there?
CLIENT: Don’t faze me. I just hope, you know, it gets to feel better. Because it hurts like a sucker. You know. I told him I have a hard time getting in and out of cars. I said I can’t lift my leg up like this, I lift it over. I said if they stick me in the back seat, I gotta put my hand down and slide up. He says all right, we’ll see what we can do. I says, oh thank you very much. And then yesterday I went to Rhode Island Eye and Ear to see about a hearing aid, and she said I didn’t have enough loss in this ear to qualify for a hearing aid. It has to be, like, 38 to 40 per cent. And I only have 30 per cent loss in it. I said, oh wonderful. And, if you need a hearing aid, it’s $200 down when you go for your first visit, and then it’s $1800 when you have your, when you pick up your hearing aid.
[00:06:06]
THERAPIST: Mmm-hmm. It’s costly.
CLIENT: Yeah. Two thousand bucks. I mean, I don’t know where they think the hell I’m going to get that money.
THERAPIST: You don’t have it.
CLIENT: Yeah, so I’ll just be there with a tin can, go “Hey!”. So they tell me that if I’m having a conversation with a person, I have to be able to see them, and it can’t be off this way, and if I’m, I have to, like if Deborah was over there talking, I would have to turn this ear to her. No out-of-room conversations. I can’t be in the bedroom and yell out to Deborah or her yell out to me to answer something, because I can’t hear what the hell she’s saying. I have to stare at people and be able to learn to read lips. I said, well I know sign language, and she says you do? And I says yeah. I don’t think she liked that too much, but I didn’t give a shit. Uh huh. So I says okay, you know. And then they gave a list of things that Deborah should do. Deborah says yeah right.
[00:07:30]
THERAPIST: These were suggestions of how to live with the 30% hearing loss.
CLIENT: Mmm-hmm.
THERAPIST: Okay.
CLIENT: So I said yeah, okay, fine. You know?
THERAPIST: Yeah. Well there’s just like, there doesn’t seem to be enough kind of, help for you.
CLIENT: No, no. No help. My tooth that I went did I tell you I went to the dentist from Amherst health and alliance? Because my dentist won’t take me because of my insurance?
THERAPIST: Oh, okay.
CLIENT: So, I called Amherst Health Alliance, and they had the dental, so I called and they said, “Oh we’re not taking any new patients”. I said, “Well, I’m a member of Amherst Health Alliance.” I said, “No other dentist will take me because of my insurance, and I have a tooth that needs to be pulled”. So they told me to come in like, three days after I talked to them. So I went over there, and it took her 45 minutes to do x-rays. By the time my x-rays were all done, she didn’t have time to pull my tooth out. So that’s going to be pulled out St. Paddy’s Day. March 17th. But in the meantime, last week I was chewing a piece of gum, and the whole back of my tooth came out. So now it’s like, this cold weather kills me, because it goes in the mouth.
[00:09:23]
THERAPIST: Oh, yeah, you can feel it in your nerves or something.
CLIENT: It’s all open. Yeah. So I don’t know whether to call next week and see if they can take me.
THERAPIST: Take you in earlier. It really hurts?
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: Oh boy.
CLIENT: So we don’t know about that.
THERAPIST: It sounds like you feel you really need some better care and there’s nothing out there.
CLIENT: Thanks to our lovely president, Mr. Obama, there’s just not anything out there for the elderly. You may as well just, you know. Croak and go in the ground.
THERAPIST: Mr. Obama doesn’t offer a heck of a lot, huh?
CLIENT: Yeah. I mean, what’s a person supposed to do, if they really need a hearing If I really needed a hearing aid yesterday, I wouldn’t have the money to pay for it. You know?
THERAPIST: Yeah, yeah. So did they tell you not to go without.
CLIENT: What are you supposed to do, you know? I don’t know. I called up, what was it. AARP there? For over 50 people? Because I’m over 50. The kid I was talking to didn’t think I needed any more health supplementary things.
THERAPIST: Insurance?
CLIENT: Yeah. I said okay. I said, well, I need dental, do you have it? He said well yeah, that’s a different thing. So maybe I should call up and see if you have anything for hearing aids, huh? You know?
[00:11:15]
THERAPIST: So hearing aids is not covered. Unless you have 40% or more?
CLIENT: Yeah, so I really don’t know what, you know, they say people are supposed to do. Do they have hearing aids at the Goodwill store? Can I get some from somebody who just croaked? You know?
THERAPIST: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that what you’ve been talking to me about, your care, the care that you’ve gotten in general has just been, you know, everybody trying to do something, but it not really feeling like it’s working much.
[00:11:59]
CLIENT: Yeah. You know. It’s like Jesus, you know, let’s not start.
THERAPIST: Let’s not start?
CLIENT: Get me on health issues, you know. If you don’t keep chasing and chasing and chasing, and you know, you don’t get nothing accomplished. Because they certainly don’t care about your health.
THERAPIST: Well, that’s what I hear too, is a feeling that you have of, do people, does the health care even care? Where’s the care in the health care?
CLIENT: Yeah. I mean, and then I guess if you were on Rhode Island Health Standard, you could get this, you could go to a dentist of your choice, but I make too much money for the Rhode Island Health Standard. I says oh well. Figures.
[00:13:05]
THERAPIST: You do from what, the -
CLIENT: From Social Security.
THERAPIST: From Social Security.
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: Oh, okay.
CLIENT: They have a level of how much you can -
THERAPIST: Right.
CLIENT: You know? And I collect too much Social Security according to them. I mean, what they think is a lot is really not a lot to me, you know?
THERAPIST: You don’t have $2000 just lying around.
CLIENT: Then they went down on the food stamps, because they increased the cost of living on your check, so they went down on your food stamps, like seven bucks on mine. From $112, $113 I was getting, whoopee, they went down to $105. But I sent them back a letter, I went up to the bank and got my statements, because I do everything on the computer. I marked down like, this month alone I paid $100 for ride services.
[00:14:19]
THERAPIST: Is that right? $100?
CLIENT: Yeah. So I’ve spent over $700 since last May.
THERAPIST: Is that right? On just the ride? Wow.
CLIENT: Yeah. So I can send that in and get my food stamps upped. They’re just impossible.
THERAPIST: Really squeezing you, huh?
CLIENT: Yeah. Yeah. They just keep turning and turning and turning.
THERAPIST: It’s like the old man saying the well is dry.
CLIENT: Yeah. Oh yeah. Sounds just like the old man. “The well is dry. But come take a look at the new car I just bought myself. Paid cash for it too”.
[00:15:14]
THERAPIST: There’s this sense though that there’s more to be had, there’s more that they can offer but they just won’t.
CLIENT: Yeah. I don’t see why all these congressmen can’t take a cut in pay.
THERAPIST: They’ll squeeze you for seven bucks, huh?
CLIENT: You know, all these politicians here in Providence, they gave a list in the paper of what some of the high cops are making, the patrolmen are making by taking extra duty, by being out there directing the traffic while they’re fixing the street. Yeah. It’s all extra.
THERAPIST: Oh yeah. So there’s more to go around, it’s just not going your way.
CLIENT: I mean, it’s not me in general. It’s every person out there.
[00:16:07]
THERAPIST: I think, I think that this really hits an important area to you, Louise, because of how, because it’s not, you’ve had this, it does kind of sound to me the way you describe it as an experience very similar and reminiscent to a father who has all this stuff and won’t, out of some kind of miserly kind of attitude, that’s the way it kind of attitude, that’s the way it kind of can -
CLIENT: And the person that, you know. Everybody gets a Segway in the family. They got four of them. I think the initial time they used them was when they first come out, and they were just sitting in the garage.
THERAPIST: Who had the Segways?
[00:17:05]
CLIENT: Oh, my father had one, Lola had one, Heath had one -
THERAPIST: Is that right? Four of them. That four.
CLIENT: The four of them. All four had brand new cars.
THERAPIST: Yeah, and you kind of left out in the cold in this very dramatic way. Did he used to, how much kind of, before all this went down with him and your mother, how much of a financial support was he to you?
CLIENT: Really not much. I mean I worked for him. I worked for him since when I turned eighteen. Sixteen. And then eighteen full-time.
THERAPIST: And were you drawing a paycheck, or was it ...
[00:18:01]
CLIENT: Oh, no, I was getting a paycheck.
THERAPIST: You were.
CLIENT: Yeah. It wasn’t what I wanted for a paycheck, but...
THERAPIST: It was less?
CLIENT: Yeah, well I suppose like, I think I got the average pay.
THERAPIST: Is that right?
CLIENT: Yeah. “Well, you’re not paying any rent. What do you need all that money for? You got a car any time you want to use it”. Then I got my mother’s lovely old Ford station wagon with the wooden doors on it.
THERAPIST: Right, the wood panels?
CLIENT: Yeah, oh yeah. That was my first car. Heath got a convertible. Chevy Impalas, you know? Things like that. Me, I get to load the fucking station wagon.
THERAPIST: The grocery getter, huh?
CLIENT: Yes. Yes.
THERAPIST: He gets the man’s car, huh? The fast ...
[00:18:59]
CLIENT: Yeah. You think I got a convertible? Shit no. Even then he’d still never let you, as I said, hear the end of it. “Well, you got a car. You got this, you got that. I don’t know why you want to move out. You don’t pay no rent”. Okay, fine.
THERAPIST: Yeah.
CLIENT: I just didn’t give a shit. And then when I started hanging around with the French kids, they came by on a hot day in the summertime where I was working. I was out there doing and no sooner than they came in the door, “Bye, I’m off”. Summertime was, you know, wasn’t a busy time. I believe my Aunt Olive, who worked there too, I said “Auntie Olive, you can stay here. Bye”.
[00:20:00]
THERAPIST: And off with the Canadians, huh?
CLIENT: Yeah. [chuckle] Yeah, I was a character. What can I say? But I looked at it this way: I could fit an awful lot of Canadian boys in that station wagon, believe me.
THERAPIST: It had its benefits, huh?
CLIENT: Did it ever. [laughter] Let’s see. Last time I was here visiting you, you’ll never guess who called that night.
THERAPIST: The Big D?
CLIENT: Mark, Mark.
THERAPIST: Oh, Mark. I thought you were going to say Darla.
CLIENT: No, Mark, the one and she called that night too.
THERAPIST: You’re kidding me.
CLIENT: No.
THERAPIST: She must have heard us talking about her. Her ears were burning.
CLIENT: Mark was just coming in the door and she calls on the phone.
[00:21:00]
CLIENT: Mark called me and he said “I have to ask you a question”. I says “Yeah, what?” He says, “Did you have Erin call up my house?” Which is this girl Erin, that lives in my building, that used to party with him and Deborah.
THERAPIST: I remember.
CLIENT: I said, “No, why?” He says “I don’t know, for some strange reason, she called my house and wanted to know what kind of beer I drank”. I said, “No, why would I have her call your house”. He said, “I don’t know”. He says: “It just seems kind of funny that she called my house last week and then that one that lives next door to you, she cornered me up at the end of the street”. I says, “Had nothing to do with either one of them”. He says, “Oh, you didn’t?” I says, “No.” So it was like, you know, he wanted to talk, and I says, “Well, I’ll see you”.
[00:22:03]
THERAPIST: He wanted to talk?
CLIENT: He wanted to.
THERAPIST: Yeah, what about?
CLIENT: He just wanted the conversation to keep going.
THERAPIST: Oh, okay.
CLIENT: So I said, “Well, nice talking to you”. And I hung up. Five minutes later he’s back on the phone again. “Is it okay if I come down and see you?” I says, “Sure. Feel free to.” Of course he calls a third time. “I’m at the door. Let me in”. I said “Okay, fine”. So him and I are trying to talk, Deborah’s on the phone with Darla, you know. So we talked for a while, and you know, I don’t know. He says, “Well, I wanted to come by a lot sooner, but I didn’t think you’d let me in the door”. “You can come by any time you want to come by” you know?
[00:23:00]
CLIENT: So then the next day we had the lousy weather. Snow and rain and stuff.
THERAPIST: Right, that Thursday.
CLIENT: So he calls me up, “Want to go for a ride?” I says, “I’m in my pajamas”. He says, “That’s all right. Put a coat on.” So we went for a ride. Went here, went there. Came back to the house. He parked the car in the driveway in the parking lot. Back in the house, and it was right to the bedroom. Deborah’s sitting in the other room. He didn’t give a shit. So that was that.
THERAPIST: That, well, what...
CLIENT: [Laughter]
THERAPIST: There’s a lot more to it than that, Louise.
CLIENT: So after, like, four hours...
THERAPIST: Four hours huh?
[00:23:55]
CLIENT: Yeah. I says “You better get your ass home, the fucking phone “His phone was ringing and ringing and ringing. He wouldn’t answer it. So I says, “Next time she calls, answer the fucking phone, because you’re going home”. She was like “You fucking asshole. Where the fuck have you been?” He says, “I’m at my mother’s.” She’s gone yelling at him some more. He says “You want to talk to my mother? I’ll get my mother and you can talk to my mother”. I’m saying to myself, what the fuck if she ever said yeah? But she goes “No, I called you, not your mother. I don’t want to speak to her”. That was that. Following week, he’s back over the house again.
THERAPIST: The following, oh this past last week.
CLIENT: Yeah. Yeah. So Monday he started a new job. So we’ll see how long that lasts. He’s working for the City of Concord.
THERAPIST: What’s he doing?
[00:25:03]
CLIENT: He’s a janitor at the Craig school in Concord. He works 2 the afternoon to 10:30 at night. Five days a week. Monday was his first day. I said I don’t know if I’ll see you on the weekend or what, because generally he’s with the family on the weekend. He says, “Oh give me a month or two and I’ll have a secondhand car”. He says “And then I’ll be over on my way home from work”. I says “Oh boy”. And of course my lovely neighbor Kelly, who hates him with a passion...”
THERAPIST: Oh yeah.
CLIENT: was there when I was letting him in the doorway. She gets all the way up to her doorway and she turns around, she says, “I fucking hate you. You’re nothing but a user and a loser”.
THERAPIST: To Mark?
[00:26:15]
CLIENT: Yeah. That was that. I mean, how is a person supposed to feel after somebody yells that out to you? You know?
THERAPIST: What did he do?
CLIENT: He just ignored her. He says, “Now you know one of the reasons why I didn’t like coming over anymore, because of the drama”. I says, well, it had nothing to do with me, you know? Just because, I said, I’m not causing the drama. I said, but then again I guess I am, because I let you in the door, you know?
THERAPIST: I think it’s also that Kelly is not just speaking for her, but she’s speaking for you too.
CLIENT: Oh yeah. Yeah, she’s watching out for me.
THERAPIST: Yeah, and yet, at the same time, there’s this very, while you feel really mad at him and frustrated with him and at the end of your rope a lot of times, there’s something just very powerful with him to you. A man that wants to be with you.
CLIENT: Yeah. He wants to be with me, but yet he won’t admit it.
THERAPIST: Yeah. Yeah.
CLIENT: You know?
THERAPIST: And as unpredictable as he can be, there’s that, there’s a powerful feeling of getting that kind of contact with a man like him.
CLIENT: I told him, I said things aren’t going to be the same as they were before.
[00:28:00]
CLIENT: I said, for one thing, you get no money from me. None whatsoever. And I said, I will not buy booze for you. So there won’t be any beer here waiting for you, there won’t be any vodka here waiting for you. Because I’m not buying them. And I’m not giving you the money to go buy it. So either you come over sober, or you come over shitfaced from somebody else’s house. I says, but when you come over shitfaced, don’t think things [00:30] are going to be “Oh hey, how are you?” They’re not. I says, you’re not putting me what you put me through the last time. “I’m sorry, forgive me”. No.
THERAPIST: Yeah. Yeah. What you go through is quite a lot, especially given how much he means to you, to have a man that’s in your life like that and really give you a lot of the things that you really want from a man, and then to kind of, the well is suddenly dry. The well’s back on, the well’s dry, the well’s back on. It’s really powerful.
[00:29:24]
CLIENT: Hopefully now that, and it’s a union job, so hopefully he’ll stick with it, and he’ll be getting a good paycheck every week, and stuff like that, and see how things go. “I’m going to start paying you the money back I owe you”. I says yep, when I see it I’ll believe it. I says but you’re not giving me $25 and then borrow $50. I says, no no. It’s not working that way. You know? So forget it. So he said, “okay, don’t worry. He said oh, just to let you know, I did get your letter in your” [inaudible 00:30:09], I sent him a nasty letter.
THERAPIST: Oh, yeah, I remember that.
[00:30:16]
CLIENT: I guess Deborah opened it. And she said “Who’s this Louise that you owe money to?” And he says “Uh, I” and she says, “Is it Louise from the gym?” I guess this woman Louise belongs to the gym. And he goes “No, why would I ask her for money?” “Well I want to know who it is”. And he says, “Well guess what? It’s none of your business who it is”. And he says “Oh, okay. But I kind of, I did get ahold of the Christmas card first before she did”. I says, “Oh shit”.
THERAPIST: What was in the Christmas card?
[00:30:59]
CLIENT: Oh, I just told him to make sure he looked underneath the Christmas tree. Maybe Santa Claus left him a set of balls. You know. I just, just nasty, you know. I said believe me, you deserved it, and I said you’re lucky I didn’t ring your goddamn doorbell. Don’t think I wouldn’t have. I really, you know. I says I thought of it, but what can you do? So I says oh, I says how’s your sex life with Deborah going? He says “What sex life?” He says that after being with someone for 25 years, he says it just doesn’t, you know, click anymore. He says she don’t want it. I says oh, what a shame. Been there. She don’t even want to be bothered to have sex with her husband? Aww. I says, I don’t know, what can I tell you? Keisha’s doing good. She goes to this Transgender group.
THERAPIST: Yeah, right. They’ve got a lot of programs like that.
[00:32:26]
CLIENT: She has a lot of friends from there. She wants to be called Justin. Justin. J-U-S-T-I-N. He says oh, can’t you pick a black name instead of Justin? I says, “Well I don’t blame her” [laughter]. So yeah, they elected her campaign manager of the group that they have. Whatever that involves. So yeah, she loves it. So I says, well that’s good.
THERAPIST: And where does she go to school?
[00:33:11]
CLIENT: She goes to [] high school. It’s in Cheshire. They say it’s supposed to be for the bad kids -
THERAPIST: Is it kind of like an alternative school?
CLIENT: Yeah. She goes there, and you know. There are maybe five or six students in a class.
THERAPIST: Okay, yeah, yeah.
CLIENT: But she’s still getting all, you know, A’s and B’s. I said well, so wasn’t Darla.
[00:33:58]
THERAPIST: How was it to see Mark then? I mean I know you talked about what you said to him, and what was it like for you then? What was it like to have him back in your life?
CLIENT: I like having him back in my life. You know. But I’m not going to go through all that shit with him, with the drinking and you know, I need money. Tough. You did without it for five months, six months, whatever long it’s been, so I says do without it some longer.
THERAPIST: Was he sober when he met with you?
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: Yeah. that’s what it sounded like. I got that feeling. Yeah, okay. You like having him back?
CLIENT: And I like having him back sober. That’s his whole problem. I says, You told Annie next door that you gave up drinking. He says “Well, I, you know, gave up 90% of it.” He says, “I still have an occasional drink now and then”. I says “Oh, I can imagine a casual drink for you, that’s a half gallon of booze”. I says, You told her that everything’s fine, he says “So I lied”. He says “What do you want me to do, tell her everything stinks at home? Deborah doesn’t want to have sex with me?” Sure, sure.
THERAPIST: Mm-hmm.
[00:35:55]
CLIENT: So he goes “What did she do, come running back and tell you everything?” I says, “Just about.” I says, “And boy did it feel lousy”. He says “Why?” I says, “According to her, everything’s wonderful with you and Deborah, you’re doing much better and blah blah blah blah”. He goes, “Well, as I said, I’ll tell you what’s happening, but I’m not telling her what’s going on in my life”. I said, “Well whatever”.
THERAPIST: Yeah.
[00:36:32]
CLIENT: Do what you have to do. I know he hates depending on the wife for anything. For a ride, she’s got to drive him to work, then she’s got to go back and pick him up, because he doesn’t have another car. He hates that with a passion.
THERAPIST: So yeah, he depends upon her to get back and forth.
[00:37:06]
CLIENT: Yeah. As long as he keeps the job, at least he’ll be getting a secondhand car to drive around in. That should be interesting.
THERAPIST: What?
CLIENT: Him getting a secondhand car and on the way home from work deciding to stop at my house.
THERAPIST: Yeah.
CLIENT: Show up at home at 1:00. She’ll love that.
THERAPIST: Yeah, you’re kind of wondering how that would look.
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: What would that, what do you think it would be like for you?
CLIENT: I’d love it.
THERAPIST: You’re concerned about what it would be like for him.
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: How he, how he’d kind of pull that off.
[00:37:58]
CLIENT: Oh yeah.
THERAPIST: What do you think?
CLIENT: Oh, he’ll pull off. He’ll pull it off. He doesn’t give a shit if she yells at him or not. I think he’s so used to it it bounces off one shoulder and, you know? In one ear and out the other ear. Yeah. When she calls, and she’s swearing at him and everything, he says, it just goes in one ear and out the other ear. He’ll get dressed and then he’ll just sit there and talk, and I’ll say “Aren’t you supposed to get home?” “Aw, when I get there I get there”. Other than that, I have been living a nice quiet life.
THERAPIST: What about Darla?
CLIENT: Um, oh she had called because she hadn’t heard from us. I says “Yeah, Deborah, she called because she got a Valentine’s Day card from you and nothing from Nanna”. She mentioned to Deborah, she says, “I think Nanna’s card got lost in the mail” and Deborah says, “Nanna didn’t send you a card because she was mad at you. She was upset with you since Christmas”. I says, “Oh well”.
THERAPIST: What did you learn?
[00:39:31]
CLIENT: I don’t think she learned a lesson from it, because her next question to her mother was, “I might go to my prom but I’m not sure”. Because you’ve got to buy a dress, and then you’ve got to buy your shoes, and then you’ve got to get your fingernails done and your toenails done, and then you’ve got to get your hair done, and then you’ve got to rent a limousine. So Deborah says, “That’s why you go with other couples, so you can split the cost of the limousine”. Of course I’ve always told her if her father doesn’t want to pay for it, I would pay for the dress and the tickets. There’s no way, I just don’t think it’s right just because [inaudible 00:40:18] can’t afford to send Evelyn to the prom, I don’t know if Evelyn can get a date, that Darla should have to suffer.
THERAPIST: Oh, yeah. Right.
[00:40:36]
CLIENT: Evelyn’s the one that, she takes so many classes like, she’s supposed to be a junior like she should really be a senior, but she’s in her junior year. So she takes freshman classes, because she never passed it. So she takes a few freshman classes. She also has to take a few sophomore classes, and then also her junior classes. She just flunks everything, year after year.
[00:41:06]
THERAPIST: Okay. Yeah.
CLIENT: And they just, you know, they put you on to the next grade, and you take, you know. You’ve got to take, you flunked out of math, so you’ve got to take that, and you’re flunk English, and you know? She’ll still be in school when she’s about twenty. She’ll be graduating from high school. I said “Why don’t they just let her quit and let her go for her GED?” You know? It would be a lot easier for the girl and a lot less embarrassing.
THERAPIST: Yeah, so sounds like Darla was looking for, was hoping for some help from you guys about paying for this.
[00:41:56]
CLIENT: Yeah. Which I don’t mind, but I haven’t heard back from her.
THERAPIST: Haven’t what?
CLIENT: We haven’t heard back from her. I don’t want her to wait to the very last moment and say Nanna I need $600 for a fucking dress that I’ll only wear once. Uh huh. I tell you. These proms are getting mighty expensive. Mighty mighty expensive.
THERAPIST: Mighty expensive, yeah, sure.
CLIENT: Girl scout cookies. When Deborah was a kid, she was a Brownie, and I was the troop mother. Cookies were only a buck a box. Now they’re, I think they’re only two or... I hope they’re not more than two.
THERAPIST: Oh, I bet they’re more than two, right?
CLIENT: I gave the guy next door, his niece, and I ordered ten boxes of cookies. The cookies are in. I gave him $40. I hope ...
THERAPIST: Four bucks.
CLIENT: For ten boxes of cookies.
[00:43:13]
THERAPIST: Four bucks for a box...
CLIENT: Two bucks for ...
THERAPIST: Four bucks.
CLIENT: Forty bucks.
THERAPIST: So four bucks a box.
CLIENT: No!
THERAPIST: Ten boxes? Forty dollars?
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: Yeah, four times ten.
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: Forty bucks. I mean, four dollars a box.
CLIENT: No, they’re not four bucks a, four dollars a box.
THERAPIST: You said forty bucks...
CLIENT: Yeah, for ten boxes. At two bucks a box.
THERAPIST: Where are you getting that math? Four times ten is forty.
CLIENT: Oh.
THERAPIST: Yeah.
CLIENT: Oh, they can’t be that much money.
THERAPIST: Oh, yeah, I bet they are. I bet they are. You gave him forty bucks.
[00:43:59]
CLIENT: Yeah. Well maybe my math is off.
THERAPIST: If you did twenty bucks, if you gave him twenty bucks, that would be two bucks a box.
CLIENT: Yeah?
THERAPIST: Yeah.
CLIENT: I’ve got to go online and look that one up.
THERAPIST: Yeah. So anyway, yeah, it’s changed.
CLIENT: All right. I think I went online and I looked it up. It said it was only two bucks a box.
THERAPIST: Is that right? Well. Maybe they have a deal or something.
CLIENT: I don’t know. I’ll look it up again when I get home.
THERAPIST: Yeah.
CLIENT: Boy. I says, well, tomorrow night I get to eat all my Girl Scout cookies that I like. Because then after midnight I can’t have any food [laughter].
THERAPIST: Is that right? What happens after midnight?
CLIENT: Nothing to eat because I’m going to have surgery the next day.
THERAPIST: Ohhhh. Okay, okay, yeah. Yeah, how long are you going to be laid up for, do you think?
[00:44:59]
CLIENT: Oh, not long. Maybe about three or four days.
THERAPIST: Oh, okay. So we’ll be good.
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: Yeah, well, gosh a lot cooking. A lot, yeah, and stuff, just important stuff going on with, I guess, with Darla too. You know, there’s something, obviously something has changed for Darla, she’s gotten, she’s gotten older, that’s been really, I mean obviously you have a lot of affection for her, love for her, and yet I think you’ve found that this kind of, whatever she’s going through now has felt uncaring to you.
CLIENT: Hmm.
THERAPIST: And painful. And I think there’s an element of that certainly in the mix to her, that she hasn’t been what she used to be in that kind of very kind of connected, and very wanting to be close and something has shifted for her.
CLIENT: Mmm-hmm.
THERAPIST: It’s been very hard on you.
CLIENT: I mean, she always was, and still is to this day, very polite. You know?
THERAPIST: Not mean spirited.
CLIENT: All the old ladies in my building love her. “When is she coming up again? When’s Darla going to come up?” And it’s like “I don’t know!”
THERAPIST: You don’t know, right.
CLIENT: Whenever she can come! She’s going to go to college down in Georgia for two years, and then come up here to Providence and finish her college. Because that’s what her father wants.
[00:46:58]
THERAPIST: Oh, okay.
CLIENT: I says, yeah. Okay. Cheap prick. But she’s got enough scholarships offered for her to get into a better school.
THERAPIST: Is that right?
CLIENT: Yeah. I’d like her to come up and go to Grinnell or something.
THERAPIST: What year is she?
CLIENT: She is a junior.
THERAPIST: Gosh, she’s a junior. My gosh.
CLIENT: So this is the year to pick, you know. And as I said, she has all A’s in her academics. Maybe one or two B’s. She scored high on the tests that they do down there. They have a different name for them.
THERAPIST: So whatever the MCAT’s is for them?
CLIENT: Yeah. So the kids got a good brain on her head. I don’t think that she minds going out and do something productive. Nothing like her mother, you know. Maybe she can teach her mother how to, you know? I keep saying to Deborah, “Deborah, you’ve got to do something. You’ve got... it’s just, it’s useless!”
[00:48:18]
THERAPIST: Darla’s not going to have that problem.
CLIENT: No.
THERAPIST: She’s kind of a much more of a go-getter than her mom.
CLIENT: Right. I said, “Deborah, what’s going to happen when she comes up to go to college?” I said, “And you’re still living here on the couch?” I says, “Come on, Deborah. I can’t afford to take care of you, and then have Darla come and live with me also”. I said, “What am I going to do? Get a bunk bed for my bedroom?”
THERAPIST: Yeah, that’s not a three. That’s not a two-seater, that place. It’s definitely not a three-bedroom.
CLIENT: I said Jesus. I said, “Deborah, it’s crowded in here as it is. I got you, three fucking cats, Deborah, that I get up every morning, it’s either 4:30 the fucking cat wakes me up, 5:30,” and then once my cat is awake, her cat wakes up because he thinks it’s time to book it out the house. Well, go in the other room, you open up the door, you no sooner turn your back to him and he’s clawing at the door to get back in. So it’s up and down. It’s like playing jack-in-the-box. Up and down. Up out of the seat. Back down, and then up, and I’m like, you know, enough is enough. And she’s in the bedroom passed out. I got up at 4:30 this morning. I went and laid back down at 5:30, I think I fell asleep til 8:30. She slept until goddamn quarter to twelve.
[00:50:17]
THERAPIST: Wow. Yeah. She wants to kind of hibernate. While her daughter is wanting to be out in the world.
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: Yeah, so you’re doing the surgery Friday.
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: And you don’t know what the update is on the hernia stuff, huh?
CLIENT: No, not until I...
THERAPIST: You get those blood sugars down?
CLIENT: The blood... Oh please, it was six hundred. Over six hundred Saturday night.
THERAPIST: Wow, Louise. You’ve got to be careful.
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: What are you, is it because what you’ve been eating?
CLIENT: yeah.
THERAPIST: A lot of sugar?
[00:50:59]
CLIENT: No, I didn’t eat until late that night. Didn’t have supper until late that night. So that raised up my sugars that high.
THERAPIST: Oh, okay. Is it hard to eat early or something? Is that what the deal is?
CLIENT: Well, I’m up early, but my problem is, if I get up early, I don’t eat early. I don’t know, my mind’s going every other way but eating.
THERAPIST: Is that right?
CLIENT: Yeah. And I know I should eat the first thing when I get up.
THERAPIST: You’re not hungry.
CLIENT: I’m not hungry. So then...
THERAPIST: And you don’t even think about it huh?
CLIENT: Right. Like I, what did I, oh I had cereal this morning. Probably about 10:00. I had a bowl of cereal. That’s it. I haven’t eaten since. So I’m really not hungry. So I might not eat again until I don’t know, seven, eight o’clock?
[00:52:06]
THERAPIST: Okay.
CLIENT: But, you know, I, you know, probably will have ... I noticed my darling Deborah never defrosted anything for supper tonight. So it looks like either scrambled eggs or cereal for me. Which I don’t mind eating. She was supposed to have gone food shopping, my lovely neighbor took her, and of course when my neighbor was done, Deborah quote, said she was finished too. Which she wasn’t. I’ve been waiting for fresh fruit, I’ve been waiting for a lot of stuff. Vegetables and all this crap. Still haven’t gotten anything.
[00:52:59]
THERAPIST: Wow.
CLIENT: I says, shit Deborah. I says, she loves to come over and eat here, and when we have a meal and have leftovers, you’re the first one taking them over to her, I said, but yet she can’t take you fucking grocery shopping?
THERAPIST: Who is this?
CLIENT: My neighbor Annie.
THERAPIST: Oh, okay. Okay.
CLIENT: I just get so aggravated. I say, every night, Annie comes home from work between four and four-thirty. You’re out the door, you’re over to Annie’s smoking a cigarette, you’re anywhere from a half hour to an hour. I say Deborah, I don’t feel like waiting for you to start cooking at six o’clock at night and then it’s not ready until seven. No. I says, once six o’clock comes, I don’t want to eat anything after that hour, because that’s what’s raising my sugars.
THERAPIST: Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah, she won’t commit herself to that.
CLIENT: I say, you know, I can have a piece of, I can have sugar-free Jello, things like that, but...
[00:54:04]
THERAPIST: But nothing like a big meal.
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: You surely do have a lot of work and not a lot of help for yourself.
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: All right, well, so, we’ll meet again in two weeks.
CLIENT: Aren’t you going away?
THERAPIST: No, well that’s the third week, so we don’t miss ...
CLIENT: Yeah, I think we meet on the 12th or something.
THERAPIST: Yeah. I’m gone the week of the 17th, so we won’t miss any of our meetings. When you, it worked out okay last time, waiting out there?
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: Okay. Okay. What happens? Do they come in this building, or did you, you just keep a lookout every once in a while?
CLIENT: Yeah.
THERAPIST: They don’t call or anything? You just have to keep a lookout? Okay.
CLIENT: [inaudible] bastards.
THERAPIST: What time do they come?
CLIENT: Um...
THERAPIST: Or what time were they supposed to come today?
CLIENT: Today? 4:14.
THERAPIST: 4:14? They give you that kind of level of...
CLIENT: Oh yeah.
THERAPIST: Specific, wow.
CLIENT: They’re like, we’re going to pick you up at ...
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