10 October 2010
 
Hypoxia

(F-14 Tomcat fighter makes a close-aboard pass. Official US Navy photo.)
 
What a magnificent day it was, marred only by a football game that I attempted, with some success, to ignore. I had to get the Harley cleaned up to make the best possible impression on a prospective buyer who failed to show up. It was all right, though, washing the machine under the brilliant blue skies, feeling the gentle zephyr of early Fall on my skin.
 
To get the bike in and out of the garage meant I had to retrieve the electronic opener out of the Bluesmobile and tuck in into my jeans. The is no convenient place to put one on the bike, so I had to transit the lobby rather than going direct to the basement. The mail had arrived, and to avoid making another trip, I checked with Betty at the desk to see if anything had come in the soon-to-be-gone Saturday delivery.
 
Betty is way cool. She was an exotic dancer, back in the day, and her eyes still have a sly merriment about the human condition, which she saw tumescent and real.
 
The mailman was there, handing over to her a plastic bin filled with advertising flyers that the residents refused to take out of their boxes.
 
“This stuff is clogging the system,” he said. “Nobody wants it.”
 
I shook my head sympathetically. Junk mail constitutes the bulk of his deliveries these days, the interesting stuff arriving by other means. Mine included a thick FedEx envelope from my Brother, who just paid a visit to Raven and Big Mama at Potemkin Village, their new residence in the little village by the bay.
 
He had already communicated the results of the visit by modern means, and I read his email with interest. Big Mama has her days, some of the time perfectly lucid and other days she is way out there. He apparently experienced both. Here is what he reported:
 
"It is Friday and I woke in my own bed.  Nice for a change.
 
Yesterday I went to the folks' apartment at precisely 8:30 am to say goodbye before leaving town.  I told them I would be there at 8:30 am and I was feeling good about walking in at exactly the right time.
 
So it was I was a little taken aback when Mom glared at me from the couch and demanded to know where I'd been.  (Was I suddenly back in high school?)
 
"We have been up since 6 AM!  We went downstairs looking for you.  Nobody was eating doughnuts!  You were nowhere to be found!  Your father's exhausted!"
 
Sure enough, Raven was fully dressed but leaning back against the couch snoring at the ceiling.
 
"Mom, I said I'd be here at 8:30 am, so we could go downstairs for the coffee and doughnuts they put out at 8:30 am.  We went over it several times, Mom, 8:30, 8:30, 830."
 
"Well, we've been up since 6:00 am and I've had visions of you lying mugged in a parking lots!  We've been worried sick!"
 
So much for a pleasant goodbye.  Big Mama is in the grips of her own dementia.  Wednesday evening she was talking about all the houses she'd lived in, but she couldn't even remember the house she lived in two months ago.  I took her on a mental tour of the house back in suburban Detroit . . . after we talked about the yellow gate & yellow door she remembered it was a corner lot with a white fence . . . it took a while to remember the house across town we moved to in the early 1960s, but she remembered the creek in back and the ducks and all the hated wall paper she scraped off . . . just like she remembered painting out the blue/green stripe on the edge of the roof on the house in Grand Rapids where she moved in 1968.  She even remembered going past the place five years ago and seeing the remodeling that the new owner had done to put pitched roofs over the old flat ones.  
 
She thought it was odd, though, that we (us three kids) had just bought a house near the hospital.  She vaguely remembered that their house used to be near the hospital.  She thought it was a strange coincidence . . ."

I finished the note and saved it in the file with my sister’s memoir of this hallucination of a summer. I can’t say enough about what she did to get the folks out of the house and away from the car. It left her a wreck.
 
I wasn’t nearly as strong as she was. I recalled one of those conversations with Big Mama a couple weeks ago. She remembered her house that day, but asked me if I knew that the house was in Petoskey. I said I did- they had been there for twenty years. She said it was very strange that the city was all around it.
 
I agreed, even while I was thinking that it was very much like talking to someone in the grips of hypoxia.
 
The. Navy uses low-pressure chambers for recognition and recovery training fro oxygen deprivation. The point is to sensitize you to the importance of watching your oxygen at all times. The training consists of exposure to hypobaric environments at or above 20,000 feet. Real air crew had a periodic re-certification to emphasize the point, and I went along to get flight certification to ride in Navy jets off the carrier.
 
There were six of us in the chamber, and they gave us oxygen masks and bled the air out to a simulated altitude of 20,000 feet and then had us remove our masks  to demonstrate the fact that you get goofy without pain and start making serious errors in judgment.
 
Thank goodness the instructor kept his mask on. We were able to get back down without serious incident. That isn’t true with Big Mama any more, since her trips to the stratosphere are uncontrolled.
 
I remembered one of the accident reports I used to get in the official mail when I was still in the Fleet. One of the strangest was a Class Alpha that happened to an F-14 Tomcat crew who were trying to get a cool picture taken by their wingman.
 
The idea of cool pictures is as old as aviation itself- think of the crucial photo documentation that Orville and Wilbur Wright had snapped at Killdevil Hills on North Carolina's Outer Banks.
 
Ever since, aviators have been trying to get photo evidence of their mastery of the air. In this particular sad case, the crew decided to remove their flight helmets (and oxygen masks) and substitute their khaki garrison caps for a close-shot to show how devil-may-care they were in their magnificent multi-million dollar supersonic flying machine.
 
Long story short, the substitution was made, the close-aboard pass was done, and then the curse of lack of oxygen got them. The Wingie saw what was happening, and shouted into the radio for the duo to get their masks back on, but the moment of conscious decision had passed, the die was cast, and nothing could be done until the un-commanded jet fell astern and eventually circled with the unconscious crew to impact the ocean far below.
 
When I got the bike put away in the garage and eventually wandered back into the apartment, I opened the envelope. There was a big stack of bills of one kind or another that had come to the apartment. Bib Mama had opened them, and some had cryptic notes on them. I will have to sort that out this morning and pay them and have the statements come to me direct.
 
This is getting way too complicated for Big Mama. For about the millionth time I thought I would never let this happen to me.
 
I have been trying to puzzle out what the stack of my parent's bills means to me, and by extrapolation, what mine will mean to my kids.
 
I sighed. I guess you don't get that moment to choose your fate in this insidious disease. Just like hypoxia.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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