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Let's Go Crazy

My husband’s hip is covered in dissolvable stitches and his leg is elevated on pillows as he snores through the evacuation alert, his CPAP machine is in the OFF switch on the bedside table next to his Steven King book, a recent gift from Santa. Firestarter. Seems prescient considering he started reading The Stand in 2020.

 

I have been sleeping in my daughter’s bright orange room since the surgery, the room she has begged me to repaint because now that she’s 26 and engaged, she no longer likes the kumquat color she chose at fifteen, when she determined pink was no longer cool. I have a painter scheduled at the end of the month. I realize, if the house burns down, I won’t have to choose a color.

 

So, I get the evacuation alert which prompts me to look at Facebook for the first time in days. I deleted the app on my phone because I hate Mark Zuckerburg and I am so scared of what is coming in just a week when a racist felon takes the highest office in the land on a day dedicated to the peace and hope of Dr. MLK Jr. I admire Jimmy Carter all the more for timing his death so flags around the country will be at half-mast that day.

 

What you need to know is that on New Year’s morning as flower-filled floats rode down the street of Pasadena, we’d only been home for twelve hours since my husband’s New Year’s Eve hip replacement. I was doling out his meds as he sat with an icepack under a fuzzy blanket when the room started to spin. I had the cold or flu or whatever it was he’d had the week before, my cough sounding like the bark of a mastiff. Pain began gripping my head. Float flowers blurred and the window light became blinding. I called Kaiser and they said I should go to Urgent Care asap.

 

My husband offered to drive me, hero that he is, walker stationed by his recliner. “Well then, call a friend,” he said, but I didn’t want to interrupt anyone’s New Year morning. My poor friend Carol just happened to call. Lucky Carol. She and I spent five hours at Kaiser Permanente on the first day of 2025, with me absorbing two IV cocktails of steroids, Benadryl and morphine and perhaps splashes of tequila and triple sec. That is all I really remember.

 

But the other meds I was given to resolve my resolvable medical crisis had warnings that I didn’t read. Who actually reads those? Who pays attention to the “don’t take if you don’t want to experience nausea, skin irritations, blood clots or death” that are speedily shared at the end of pharmaceutical commercials? I never did until I nearly lost my mind.


May cause F-bombs and withdrawal from friends.
May cause F-bombs and withdrawal from friends.

Within three days, I can’t think straight. I’m the Tazmanian Devil of Burbank. According to my husband and son, I’ve never uttered so many F-bombs, and it’s not yet Inauguration Day! These are supposed to be the best 19 days of the New Year and I missed them.

 

I feel like I’m watching the Suzanne Show from a distance and Suzanne is an amalgamation of Betty Davis as Baby Jane and Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman.


The day before LA becomes an inferno, I read the potential adverse reaction sheet from the pharmacy. Among them are headache (a symptom I saw the doctor to alleviate) depression, memory loss, confusion, trouble speaking, and bouts of anger.

 

And so, THIS is the Suzanne who receives the screenshot from a friend showing a Facebook post from one of our City Council members of flames behind the Hollywood sign, burning the hills a couple miles from my house. The Watch Duty app shows our home as a blue dot in a “be set to go” area smack in the middle of two raging fires and a new fire in a different part of the Hollywood hills. I go outside, masked because ashes have been falling from the sky like snow for days and my cough has not let up. I look at Mount Lee and there are no flames, thank God. I need to walk my poor neglected dog because I’m the only one in my house who can sort of walk, and that is when I see the glow beyond the Disney building. The Palisades fire is creeping over the hills in Encino. A friend texts me an image from her Burbank hilltop home, closer to Altadena, but I am closer to the blaze she sees.

 

Then I get the ping of an evacuation warning. This isn’t GO NOW but is bigger than the “get readys” I’ve been ignoring. While he sleeps, I back my husband’s truck into the driveway and open the garage door. Why did I bother to put Christmas decorations away yesterday? The wooden advent calendar that both my kids both want in our will goes in the truck. Because the doctor has told me I can’t lift more than 20 lbs, I move three family photo albums at a time into a bin without a lid. 1998 to 2024. The lifespan of my children. My son is with his girlfriend a mile away. “Should I come home?” he asks. “If we have to leave, then yes. If we get separated, I’ll text you the address to dad’s clients’ empty studio apartment in Marina Del Rey. That is where we will go if we have to leave until we can figure out next steps.”

 

I put an 8-pack of toilet paper into the front seat of the truck. There won’t be anything in the bathroom at the apartment that was recently vacated. I never asked my husband if it has been cleaned. I am grossed out, so I throw three packs of Clorox wipes left over from Covid into the suitcase.

 

I get my son’s guitar, his camera bag, his favorite boots and the Winnie the Pooh book he loved as a little boy, and set them by the door alongside a box of my daughter’s beloved journals. I stick my husband’s collection of meds and my own on top of the guitar case along with the Kaiser Permanente medication schedule because I know if we leave, I won’t remember what gets taken when. I lean his cane against the wall. At least by now he is off the walker.

 

Meanwhile I am off my rocker. I take a video of every room, every drawer and cabinet. A friend says we’ll need this if our house doesn’t make it. But one should not do such a thing while in a deep depression. I haven’t watched this narrated tour, but I remember not really caring about anything, which haunts me now with survivor’s guilt, as so many friends process profound loss. One of my most optimistic, Zen friends, who lost both his home and office building in the Palisades said, “I get out of bed each morning, because around 4-5 am the ‘nightmares’ start to descend upon me, and getting up is the only way to shake them free.”

 

A friend in Altadena, whose home miraculously still stands, faces years living amidst total devastation and nonstop construction co-mingled with alarming levels of toxins like asbestos, lead, and arsenic.

 

Yet at the time, I don’t have insight or hindsight. Crazy Suzanne should not have documented our lives and should definitely not have chosen what to pack.

 

The photo albums were smart, but when I finally unpacked a few days ago, there were no clothes save for my dress for our daughter’s upcoming wedding and the heirloom goblets for their first toast, still bubble wrapped from my father’s visit at Christmas. I chose to save my kids’ childhood stuffed animals, my husband’s letter jacket from ‘82, dog treats and poop bags, a single coffee mug and a bag of coffee beans without a grinder, a roll of stamps, a box of granola bars and bag of spaghetti, charging cables and my Purple Rain album.

 

At least 20 good friends have lost everything. I have only lost my mind.


As shared at Story Salon on January 29, 2025 when the theme was:

"The Good, The Bad, and The WTF: Stuff that Happened Since I aw You Last"

 

 

 

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