It’s complicated

My car is a piece of junk. It’s a 2000 Honda Passport, which means it has a solid engine. The engine will probably be running in the year 3000 because the Japanese know how to make a long-lasting engine. But all the other parts on the car are sloughing off as if it had automotive leprosy. The cooling system, the A/C unit, the radio, the door handles, the windshield wipers, the window tinting, the starter, the driver’s side front wheel — they’re all failing. My car was named Mr. Coffee by our nephew Tikin, because it sounds like it’s percolating a fresh pot. When I open the hood, it looks like the guts of a terminator with irritable bowel syndrome. It’s all so bloody complicated.

And yet, compared to the human brain, it’s as complicated as a block of wood. And all those problems, though massively irritating, are relatively minor compared to even a small brain glitch. A mechanic with even rudimentary knowledge of vehicles could fix everything on my junk wagon in a week. And even if I got overbilled by double the value of parts and labor, it wouldn’t push our shaky financial situation of the bottomless cliff of debt.

Have a little faulty wiring in your thinkbox, however, and you may as well put on your wet suit because the tsunami of financial shit is going to drown you pretty quickly. We’re on a slowly deflating dingy waiting for the first big wave of bills to hit. And today something happened that tells us there will be a second big wave closely behind it.

A few days ago, Shade woke up feeling very lethargic. His therapists mentioned they noticed a change in his personality. He wasn’t the happy-go-lucky jokester he normally was. Very unresponsive. And he couldn’t keep up with the therapies. The doctor canceled his afternoon sessions. Aitza assumed it was maybe depression because it happened the day after I left after visiting a few days. The following day he was back to his old self.

Shade shows off his veins before getting an IV for his MRI tonight

Well, today he did it again. He was disoriented. He couldn’t lift his arm as high as he had previously. He screwed up basic addition problems. He didn’t laugh at jokes. And it took two therapists to help him walk as he couldn’t place his feet properly and kept listing to the left. Brooks Rehab Doctors Prudencio and Spirres consulted with Doctor Trumble back at Florida Hospital and they thought it wise to get more tests on Shade. So they put him in an ambulance to Wolfson Children’s Hospital PICU in downtown Jacksonville. He’s going to have another MRI, MRA, and MRV with an angiogram to see if there’s anything going on in his wiring. Not that they could really do much even if they found something. Aitza will be here with him for a day or two. Hopefully not more, though we don’t really know until we get the results of the new tests. (They just wheeled him out.)

This should make me appreciate the relative simplicity and affordability of my car. But it doesn’t. I hate that POS.