As Denise Shore experienced her first moments of consciousness she became aware of an intense pounding in her head. She was hung over again from a hard night of drinking. Her head felt like it would explode. She rolled her face into the pillow to try to go back to the fog of sleep where the pain would stop. Even this small movement made her nearly sick to her stomach. She tried to go back to sleep without success. As she became more lucid she realized her bladder was also protesting its current overfilled condition. Her eyes focused on the clock. It said 11:26. She remembered the car clock, it said 03:48 when she pulled it into the garage. Her head hurt so bad she didn’t want to get up so she tried to ignore the bladder discomfort but it became obvious that she could no longer do so. She rolled to the edge of the bed and tried to sit. When her head came up her stomach protested the action. She lay back, slid off the bed and crawled to the bathroom, emptied the trash can on the floor and slid up on the commode. She had done this quite frequently in the last few years. Urine and vomit came out of her almost immediately. Two minutes later she was back on the floor, too exhausted to move. But at least her stomach and bladder weren’t protesting. She pulled a towel off the rack, rolled it under her head and fell asleep on the bathroom floor.

When Denise woke again she managed to get into the shower and turn on the water. It took more than fifteen minutes for her head to clear enough to let go of the handhold in the shower. She washed her body with a cloth that was there from the day before, shampooed and got out of the shower. Still feeling exhausted and queasy, she put down the lid of the commode, picked up the towel she had used for a pillow, and sat down to dry. As she sat there her bladder was protesting again. She lifted her body, then the lid, and sat back down. She emptied her bladder again. When she felt more stable she went back to her bedroom. She pulled out underwear, put them on, pulled a robe over them and went downstairs. She would do her hair later.

Three years ago the twenty five year old Denise who with a little help from makeup could pass for thirteen or thirty five would have been awakened at six thirty by a housekeeper. Her clothes and towels would have been laid out for her and a light breakfast would have greeted her when she came downstairs. But the live in housekeeper was gone. She left after a hung-over Denise threw dishes at her three mornings in a row. The string of housekeepers ended when payments to the agency stopped three months ago. She was now having a housekeeper come in once every two weeks to clean up. The agency was requiring pre-payment.