My mother died today, ending her 6.5 year battle with multiple myeloma, her 34-year battle with schizophrenia, a 7-week ICU battle with respiratory failure, and lifelong struggles with depression, anxiety, digestive disorders, and many other struggles. My mother had the most difficult life of anyone I ever knew, and I fought hard to make it better for her, often with a sense of futility. Throughout, I’ve been heartbroken for her inability to achieve happiness, or anything resembling a normal life. She fought hard against all of her ailments, right up until the very end. I wish I could say it was a peaceful passing, but it wasn’t. It was a warrior’s death, and even with massive doses of morphine, she met it with her eyes open. She was afraid.

She had a good day yesterday, but some time early in the day today, an obstruction appeared in her airway. It was visualized and described variously as a “skin flap,” a “lesion,” or a “lump,” that was preventing free air flow. The surgical team put together a plan to modify her tracheostomy to allow air to pass. However, her condition deteriorated so rapidly that surgery was deemed all but futile. It was expected that she wouldn’t survive the elevator ride to the OR. We made the difficult decision not to intervene. She passed around 5:30 PM. She is the second person I have watched die in 2011. I am done.

I’ve been watching too much TV. I know this. I have a problem. So I’m watching Grey’s Anatomy, Season 5, episode 8, and a new character is introduced. She’s described as being “a little off,” and I groan inwardly. Why? Because I know that they are setting us up for Standard Autistic Television character. There was a strikingly similar character on In Plain Sight.

As far as I can tell, TV writers, producers, and actors create these characters using a one-page bullet-pointed list with things on it like, “doesn’t make eye contact,” “doesn’t understand sarcasm,” and “preoccupied with one hobby or activity.” The problem with that list of traits is that it produces a character that doesn’t actually resemble any autistic people I know.

In Grey’s Anatomy, the autistic character, Dr. Dixon, is supposed to be a person with Asperger’s syndrome, which is now recognized to be a high functioning variation on autism. But she comes onstage as a sort of Rainman-lite, a person so stilted and impaired she could never gain the confidence of patients or colleagues, much less become a world-renowned cardiac surgeon. Moreover, within the first seconds that we see her, we are shown how terribly socially crippled she is by the fact that she is a strict rule-follower, doesn’t understand sarcasm, and acts pretty freaky when talking to patients. (Why isn’t the patient asking for a new doctor? I would if Dr. Rainman came into my hospital room going, “I like hearts. I’m good at hearts. There are rules. We follow rules.”)

So sarcasm–it actually doesn’t belong in the workplace. If you are making sarcastic remarks to your coworkers, you DESERVE to get a blank stare or to be asked for clarification. Sarcasm is petty, immature behavior, and an inability to pick up on it is not really the great disadvantage that TVland would have us believe.

Most adults with autism who are high functioning learn to cope with that particular handicap by asking for clarification or by ignoring the crazy stuff us neurotypicals say.

Although it seems very sexy and with-it to have an obviously autistic character turn up on a TV show, the reality in my experience is that people with autism seem merely reserved when you first meet them, and the particular quirks of the condition emerge only when you’ve spent some time with them. You may learn that they only wear natural fibers and carefully trim all tags from the inside of their clothes. You may find that they have a tendency to monopolize conversations or that they don’t like changes in their routine or they have trouble making and keeping friends. This is why it can be difficult to diagnose young children with the disorder. It’s SUBTLE.

Having someone walk on screen and be all fake autistic and stuff is just insulting. And not from an autism advocacy perspective. I am sure there are legions of people interested in advocacy who could tear this issue up. I’m just an ordinary television viewer, and would like for my viewing experience not to be spoiled by a poorly researched, poorly executed portrayal of a personality type that I’ve encountered many times.

Do better television people!

Meet Titus (black and white male) and Athena (black female). We picked them up from the Mosaic Feline Foundation last night. I’d never heard of that organization before, but it sounded strangely familiar. If you’re a public radio listener, and you’ve heard the words, “The Mosaic Foundation of Rita and Peter Heydon,” you’re on the right track. It turns out the Haydens are cat lovers, and this is their cat shelter.

It’s located in an industrial building near our grocery store that I’ve driven by dozens of times without noticing the large cat face by the front door. When we entered the building, we came in through an exam room/cage area with about a dozen kitties loitering about loose. We were then shown into a front reception area where we met with the foster volunteer and were introduced to the kittens.

Titus and Athena had been picked up from a feral cat colony only a couple of days before, but amazingly were not the little cuisinarts we expected. Titus is most of the way toward being a housecat already, and he barely protests when you pick him up and snuggle him.

Athena is less tame, and she will hiss and at times growl when you handle her, but then she settles down. Both of them fell asleep in our arms, so it looks like our task of “taming them up” will be pretty easy.

We had to wait a bit while one of the volunteers took care of some business, so another volunteer gave us a tour of the shelter. It was much huger than we realized. We walked through rooms and rooms filled with cats, most of them roaming free. There was an organization to the place. Although there were over a hundred cats, most of them had names. Special rooms were assigned for kittens, shy cats, and incontinent cats. They also had many sick cats that were being provided with treatment, or, in some places, a safe place to live until they die.

They had two 22-year old black cats named Thelma and Louise whose owner had been a shelter volunteer and had died of cancer herself. There was a cat snoozing on a blanket who had a brain tumor. Some were FIV positive. A makeshift isolation area contained kittens that had been exposed to feline leukemia. Etc., etc. It was pretty much cat-topia.

The shelter loaned us a cage for the kittens and supplies. When we got home and started setting up, Chewie knew exactly what was going on, and was so excited he couldn’t contain himself.

We took the cage up to Glen’s room and set it up. Chewie followed us excitedly. “YOU’RE SETTING UP A CAGE!” he observed.

We lined the cage with towels. “YOU’RE LINING THE CAGE WITH TOWELS!” Chewie pointed out, sticking his head into the cage.

We put a cardboard box, a food bowl, and a water bowl in the cage. “OMG A CARDBOARD BOX, A FOOD BOWL, AND A WATER BOWL!” Chewie said.

Given his level of excitement, we had to gate off the room when we put the kittens in. And then, because Chewie’s barking was upsetting the kittens, we had to gate off the whole upstairs.

Chewie is now repeating my patented Cat-Dog Friendship Program due to his inability to contain his FEELINGS for the kittens.

Courage, on the other hand, does not seem to have noticed the kittens. That, or he’s dealing with it in a very sensible way, by avoiding the whole situation.

Simba, when we put him in the room next to the kitten cage, took a long look at the kittens and then jumped out of the room, which was surprising to us. Diamond did the exact same thing. So the response of the resident cats seem so to be, “Those are kittens. I’ll be downstairs,” which is totally fine.

Titus and Athena are settling in. We left them alone after we got them into the cage. Glen heard someone crunching the dry kibble overnight, and the litter pan had been used extensively when I cleaned it this morning. Both kitties took wet food from my fingers at breakfast time, though Athena made her usual token protests. Titus squirmed out of Glen’s hand and was at large in the bedroom for a while, but was easily recaptured.

They are both extremely cute!

Two nice things happened today. First, I received contributor’s copies of the January/February issue of Analog, with my story “An Interstellar Incident.” I was really pleased with the illustration by Mark Evans. It really captures Stacy’s “I am so screwed” moment perfectly.

Second, I got a call from a cat rescue asking me to foster two 5-week old kittens that “need taming up.” That may sound like a crazy thing to do when your Mom is in the ICU, but I honestly think it’s perfect. My mother is a bottomless pit for compassion and caring. She needs everything I have and everything family has and everything the nurses and doctors had and more, and she can’t give anything back.

I need something to refill the tank. Young kittens thrive with love and care, and they give back. They give back at approximately 1000:1 on your investment. I was willing to take bottle babies, because, damn, how could you not. But the 5-weekers are probably a more reasonable starter case. So yay! I pick them up tomorrow.

My family has watched the first few episodes of season 1 of The Walking Dead, as it recently showed up on Netflix. Since my need for mindless entertainment is high these days, my standards are rather low, and as such, The Walking Dead is adequate, I suppose. However, I find myself running out of patience for it and other zombie-genre works rather quickly, as it turns out that zombies are not effective antagonists when stretched beyond their area of strength–namely, getting up off the ground and eating people by surprise.

It turns out, actually, that when you know a zombie is after you, they are almost easier to kill than those huge moths that hang out on your screen door because they are attracted to the light. Even fast zombies, actually, are rather unimpressive as enemies.

Consider: zombies have exactly one attack–straight ahead grabbing with hands and biting with teeth. They don’t hide. They don’t ambush. They don’t function as groups. They don’t retreat. They respond to stimulus in exactly the same way all the time.

In The Walking Dead, they show us that the zombies are attracted by loud noises, which is supposed to discourage people from hunting them, the logic being that if you shoot one, you will be swarmed with many more.

But that’s perfect, actually. Like moths attracted to a light, you can move the zombies by making noise. All you have to do is estimate the number of zombies in an area, stockpile an ample supply of amunition, recruit an adequate number of competent shooters, occupy a defensible position, and then rack em and stack em.

This strategy is in fact explored in World War Z by Max Brooks–a book that should have been the book to end all zombie books, but was in fact, paradoxically, the book that kicked off the whole Zombie Rennaissance.

Instead of saying, “Oh, right, the zombie trope has no staying power beyond a single night of apocalyptic terror because the monster has too many weaknesses,” writers around the world apparently responded with, “You can write books with zombies in them? Cool!”

Which I suppose is fine for them and their fans. But not for me. Because after, what, a decade of zombies proliferating in books, movies, I am still sitting her saying to myself, “Bring plenty of ammunition, sit on the roof, shoot until they’re all dead.”

I can hear you. I hear you saying, “But what about a place like Atlanta, Georgia, in The Walking Dead, which is surely overrun with millions of zombies? You can’t bring that much ammunition.”

And I’m here to say that even when your foe numbers in the millions, when he lacks the tactical skills of the average road-killed possum, it is still not that hard to kill him. Of course you don’t load up on ammunition and march into the center of Atlanta to head shoot every zombie in the city. However, it is not that hard to devise a strategy to kill them efficiently.

Here, take a minute and think about it. I’ll bet you’ve got one.

Here’s mine. Nibble away at the edges. Set up zombie traps on the outskirts of the city where numbers are thinner in some kind of choke point or box canyon. Call the zombies in with loud noises. Then blow them to hell with explosives. Retreat. Set up a new trap on another part of the city perimeter. Keep going until you’ve reduced the numbers sufficiently to go in with snipers and lots of ammunition.

Here’s the bonus. The zombies never get any smarter. They will come limping along the 20th time you sound the car alarm as easily as the first time.

It’s not easy to take characters seriously when they are outsmarted by villains that are themselves no smarter than a sea cucumber. Why should I care about their love lives or attachments when it’s obvious that natural selection is trying to weed them out?

Today Jim C. Hines writes about blogging, and about the purpose and benefits of blogging for writers. Blogging is obviously not compulsory for a writer, but quite a lot of writers keep blogs. I love reading blogs by professional writers, because, duh. They write well! However, because the purposes of writing and blogging are somewhat orthogonal, it can be difficult for writers to figure out why they should blog, how to do it, and how to make the most of it.

I’ve been active in online social networks (we used to call them “listservs” and “newsgroups”) since 1994 or so. That’s a long time! I like to write and I like to communicate with people by writing and reading. It’s who I am. But I’ve had trouble forming an identity as a “blogger.”

It’s a little-known fact that back in about ’95-’96 that I was briefly a superstar of the web. I made a web page for myself and published amusing anecdotes on it about my ferrets. To my utter surprise, the page consistently drew between ten and fifteen thousand hits a month. That had to be practically everyone on the internet at the time, no?

My ferret phase has passed and since then I’ve had trouble figuring out what my “niche” as a blogger might be. And all the experts agree you have to have a niche so that you can cultivate authority and be at the top of Google search results for your niche.

Well, I just don’t have a niche. I don’t have any hobby or area of special expertise that I would want to blog about every day forever. That held me back for a long time, until I decided to simply ignore the “expert” advice and be a Whatever-style blogger. Plenty of my favorite bloggers have no particular niche, either.

Then, recently, I realized I DO have a niche. My niche is “writer.” I read and participate extensively within that niche. The trick with writer blogs is that they’re not laser-focused on writing. Sure, there are occasional writing craft, process, and promotion posts. But the essence of the writer blog is that it’s often not about writing. It’s often about laundry. Or cats. Or politics. Writers don’t have a niche. They have a buffet.

In addition to writing, Jim Hines features posts on gay rights, rape victim advocacy, book reviews, parenting, autism, and LEGOs. He can be entertaining and authoritative on any of those subjects, and you don’t have to like every item in his buffet to be a satisfied reader.

Jay Lake‘s blog features a great deal of personal content. For the kind of person and writer he is, it couldn’t be any other way. Jay’s buffet includes updates and introspection on his cancer journey, thoughts on parenting and relationships, writing process and progress posts, and political and current event observations. Jay also likes to share interesting web links via a periodic “link salad.”

John Scalzi writes about family, current events, music, film, and pets. He also enjoys taking pictures and posts photos to illustrate many of his posts.

Writers don’t have niches. Writers have buffets! Our niche IS a buffet, and that’s fine. My buffet includes pets, ruminations on cancer and health, body image, pets, food, airstream trailers, parenting, yoga, dogs, cats, and pets.

Because I’ve been boning up on blogging, I’ve realized additionally that many of us writers are kind of lazy bloggers. Most serious bloggers in other niches, say vegan gluten-free recipes for homeschooling Moms, are conscious of traffic and are looking for opportunities to promote their blog and increase traffic.

Writers, on the other hand, open a new post, blather into it, and click publish, with a “There! I have been erudite! Behold my erudition!”

Writing great content is essential, but it’s not sufficient. If you are a writer who publishes books or short stories, your blog will attract readers who have enjoyed your work and tracked you down. If you want to attract blog readers outside your readership, you have to pay attention to traffic and take steps to boost it. Most readers who come to your blog to read about your exploits in underwater scrapbooking will NOT buy your urban fantasy about swing-dancing werewolves. A few will, though.

The trick with a blog is to get traffic high enough that the small percentage of casual readers that convert to book buyers adds up to real numbers. The best way to do that is to engage in blog promotion activities.

When I first got So Shiny started in September, I chased traffic like crazy, and was able to boost it to three-digit unique visitors daily. Now that the novelty has worn off, and I’ve been kind of tired, I’m not chasing traffic, and blog hits are hovering in the low two-digits daily. Blog promotion makes a difference. I don’t have a book to sell those ten daily unique visitors, but I hope that by the time I do have a book to sell, I’ll have daily unique hits up in the thousands (or more), and will be able to convert a fraction of those buffet visitors into book buyers.

Of course, my approach to all of this is not the only right way to go. It’s perfectly fine not to blog, or to blog without being traffic-conscious, and doing things that way won’t negatively affect your writing career. For those that have an interest in taking it farther, however, there’s a lot of potential!

I’ve received many notes of sympathy and concern from friends during this crisis of my mother’s. Many people have said that they would like to help, or wished they could help. There is not really much that you can do materially to help Mom, as she is getting pretty much the maximal help a person can get for the illnesses she has. However, there is one simple thing that many people can do that may not only help Mom directly, but will help others and may even help yourselves.

If it is appropriate and you qualify, please consider giving blood. This is something I have decided to do when I am able to do it. (As I am battling the physical effects of anxiety, I think it’s probably unwise for me to be a pint low right this minute.)

Mom has gone through literally too much blood for me to keep track of. She’s had platelets almost every day, and just a few days ago they gave her two units of whole blood. Your blood donation will help to replace the blood she is consuming.

When people think of blood donations, they usually think of people who have had accidents. That’s certainly a big source of need for donated blood. But there is also need among people who have cancer, like my mother, or who have blood diseases. People receiving surgeries may need blood unexpectedly if things go wrong, and sometimes things go sideways during childbirth, resulting in heavy bleeding. There are many uses for blood in health care.

In short, your donation of blood is never wasted, and given the unpredictability of human existence, the life you save could be your own.

If this inspires you to go out and give blood, please let me know. It will make my day.

If you are ineligible to donate blood, you can still make a difference by encouraging others, and by supporting blood, organ, and tissue donation among your friends and family. There are more than enough eligible healthy donors in the world to provide all of the needed donations, so raising awareness is just as important as physically donating.

I donated once, a long time ago, during a high school blood drive. I was very proud to be old enough to donate, but I found the experience triggered some kind of phobia and I had a lot of anxiety. After more than 20 years, I’ve decided to try again, because it’s really important.

Things are grim here. This ICU nightmare continues with no real relief in sight. My coping strategies are breaking down, and anxiety wakes me up well before dawn each morning. It’s worst, actually, when Mom has a good day. I develop the worst possible case of waiting for the other shoe to drop, and so far it always has. I feel that Mom’s situation is recoverable, and that Mom can get through it with the right treatment, but my confidence in the doctors’ ability to act correctly and swiftly is low.

She is on her fourth bout with pneumonia. Since she first fell ill with it, the pattern has been the same each time. She shows signs of worsening illness for several days before she has formal signs of infection–most importantly a fever.

Mom is a severely immunocompromised cancer patient with a history of bone marrow transplant, disease refractory to several different agents, and recent chemotherapy. Everything is complicated by major mental illness. On the medical floor, doctors were not shy about nuking her with prophylactic antibiotics. In the ICU, the fear of antibiotic resistant illness is such that the doctors will NOT prescribe antibiotics until there is an actual fever, and not just a low grade fever, but a proper 101 degree fever. By the time Mom’s beleaguered immune system offers those signs, things are pretty dire. I estimate that each of the last two pneumonias, with their delayed (to my mind) diagnosis and treatment, has cost Mom TWO WEEKS on artificial ventilation. It is devastating to watch her getting so close to getting off that damn machine, then watch her decline again for three or four days.

This last time, I rattled cages as hard as I possibly could. I cried and yelled on the phone to doctors. I attempted to lay out a scientific argument. I appealed to their compassion. The doctors flatly denied that there were any “clinical signs” of pneumonia, and refused to treat with antibiotics. At first they even refused to take any cultures.

I contacted patient relations and was told if I didn’t like the medical decisions of the doctors, I could find another hospital. That’s pretty much a kiss off when you’re talking about an artificially ventilated patient in the ICU.

I also contacted my mother’s primary care physician and her home oncologist. They seemed more sympathetic, but it’s impossible for me to tell whether it made a difference. Some communications may have happened behind the scenes. Hospital risk management got involved in some way that may or may not have been helpful. In the end, they still didn’t put her back on antibiotics until she had a proper fever, after five days of decline, five days that the infection had time to multiply without treatment. I did everything I could, and it wasn’t enough.

When I challenged the doctors to tell me why she would show a pattern of improvement on antibiotics and then decline off them, they said things like, “I don’t know,” (seriously), and “I have only been on the case for two weeks and haven’t seen the things you’ve seen,” (seriously), and “you have to trust us.” Then they said other things like, “We can’t prescribe antibiotics to every patient whose family demands them,” and “We can’t run a full body scan on every patient in the ICU.” (Because, you know, I suggested that if they don’t know what’s wrong maybe they should do some tests and find out.)

I understand the danger of antibiotic resistant organisms on a personal and scientific level. Personal level: two out of three people living in my house have suffered from infections caused by antibiotic resistant organisms, scaring the living daylights out of all of us. Scientific level: I have a Master’s degree in Biological Chemistry and used to teach the subject at the 400-level to premed students. (I could have taught the 500-level class in the med school, too.) I have literally cloned genes for antibiotic resistance INTO bacteria using genetic engineering methods. I have written many, many articles about antibiotic development for an audience of PhDs and MDs–a subject which ALWAYS revolves around the problem of antibiotic resistance.

When doctors lecture me on antibiotic resistance, I cry with frustration, because I don’t know how to tell them that from an evidence-based perspective, I think this case is different. It’s clear I’m out of options. I am not sure if they get it or not. The doctor came to me yesterday, and said things that may or may not indicate that they intend to treat more aggressively and longer this time, but I honestly wouldn’t be surprised to see the cycle repeat again until Mom’s body can no longer take it.

I am not doing well or fine. I keep working because I have to, but it’s hard to concentrate. I know the hospital inside out and upside down after so many visits. In my mind, I have walked myself to the emergency room many times to tell them I need treatment for anxiety that is keeping me awake at night and causing me to monologue inside my head endlessly. I haven’t done it yet, because I haven’t quite fallen off the cliff.

Yoga is very effective at managing anxiety, but my ability to do yoga has broken down. A couple of weeks ago, I lost the ability to do camel posture. Camel opens your chest, or your heart chakra if you subscribe to that system of belief. It can help with anxiety, but there comes a level of tension and anxiety where your body rebels if you even think about doing it.

I’ve often said that getting in the car and driving to yoga is part of the yoga. That ability left me this week. I can no longer do getting-in-the-car-and-going-to-yoga-class posture. It’s just gone. My body and mind rebel. It will come back later.

But I do what I can do. Instead of walking myself to the emergency room, or calling my physician for pharmaceutical intervention, I lay down on the floor and assume the one pose that we never lose, no matter how bad things get. I stretch out on my back, and let my feet fall to the side, rest my hands at my side, and look at the ceiling. Corpse pose.

And the spring that is wound tightly in my chest loosens just a little. My shoulders lower toward the floor millimeter by millimenter, my breath gets slower slowly, and after a while the monologue inside my head goes quiet. For a little while.