Life, Etc.

I spent 2 hours at the hospital getting an infusion. My ancient blood needed fixing. Too little iron, too little energy. Luckily, this clinic in the hospital is like a spa. Comfy recliner or bed, warmed blankets, and engaging staff who all seem to be delighted to work there. Daughter came with me.

Not that I've been idle. Between unplanned bouts of sleep, I am editing. Interestingly, the only writer in the anthology who has, seriously, the worst writing, is the one nagging me to get my arse in gear and finish the damn thing. I finally broke and told her her work doesn't demand editing, but a total re-write of all her work. Needless to mention, she was annoyed. I am always truly amazed at how oblivious some are. I farmed out two of her pieces to two other writers as I was slowly losing my mind at the rewrites - painstaking, and also, I was slowly losing my will to live.

I was disappointed in the Oscars. One Battle After Another was a ho-hum thing, characters way underdrawn, more like caricatures, but if you're into lots of bangs and violence without purpose, go for it. Sinners was another flop in my mind. The first 2/3 engaged me, but the last moved into the vampire realm, which has never appealed. Suspending disbelief is never my forte, and I felt that the writers felt rushed and had to finish the whole thing in a hurry. I did like the soundtrack.

My favourite movie last year was "Train Dreams". I'm old-fashioned, perhaps, in my lifelong love of film. But this film hooked me from beginning to end. In all aspects. The cinematography is breathtaking, the acting and script superb.

A couple of pics for Sunday Selections:

The Indoor Garden.

I'm in love with this writer. Truly.

My local beach, 40 shades of blue, sparkling in winter.

Childhood Trauma.

The hospital of 1949 horror still standing, 3rd window from left, 2nd floor.

Indulge me, please, if you would. This is long but heartfelt.

My #2 brother (I have 4) is going through an extremely rough time at the moment on a gurney in a hospital corridor exposed to lights, noise and the comings and goings of strangers. He's only allowed one visitor at a time. If you could call that interrupted and overheard time a "visit". He is very ill with a cancer that has gone crazy in his body and was moved (via taxi!) to hospital yesterday as he had developed clots in his left leg. Public health care in my home country is drastically underfunded and he told me last night that when he asked for a pillow there was none forthcoming as there were no funds for that kind of health care. To call me upset would be understating the whole situation as I imagine myself where he is and would want to die. A 'kill me now' scenario.

I'm in flashback mode Daughter reminded me today.

I'll give you the scene:

A six year old girl (me) in hospital with eye infections after an operation on them, plus a removal of adenoids and tonsils. Blood. Lots. In an adult ward as there were no children's hospitals back then, 74 years ago. Terrified. The adult patients around me "teased" me constantly. In those days child abuse was called "teasing" They told me my parents had forgotten about me, told me I was going blind. You get the picture.

Missing my mother who had two younger boys at home. My bandages were taken off one day and I was told to go into the corner to a baby's cot. Inside that cot was brother #2 with something pouring out of his ears. He was bawling his head off clutching his ears. I remember shutting down completely, holding his little hand. He was only a year old. He still had no words but "mama." 

I worked everything out inside my head. My parents were abandoning us, one by one. But they had missed brother #1 so they must be keeping him. Maybe he was a better child, maybe we were bad children like I was told by the priest at school. All born bad. Only when I had my First Confession would I be cleaned of my  original sin. Maybe I had infected my brother with my sin. As I had already  been told I had infected him with the measles that had put me and him in the hospital. 

Mum arrived that night. She and dad took turns each night. I wouldn't let her go, I screamed and cried and followed her down the stairs hanging on to her and I saw I had made her cry and that made me worse, shouting at her even more to take me and my brother out of there.

The nurses pried me off her and told me how awful I was upsetting her like that and threw me on my bed telling the ward not to speak to me as I was a very bad girl upsetting my mother like that.

My father arrived the following night in a towering rage. He dragged me over to my brother's cot and said I was upsetting everyone, the whole hospital, with my naughtiness and whinging and rudeness, look at my brother crying all the time on account of me.

If I ever did this again, my mother would never visit me. Never. Put that in my pipe and smoke it. Never. And that would mean she wouldn't see my brother either.

And I shut up. I shut up on situations when I shouldn't have shut up. I recognized at a very early age that my feelings didn't count, my voice was of no value. And I could be abandoned at the drop of a hat.

I learned to speak up through therapy and support, not to take things lying down, to call out evil and abuse. To help where I could, to scream and shout at authorities, to advocate for the homeless and seniors in poverty. To see and call out government ineptitude. To write and petition and not ever people-please to make my own life easier and never worry about what "others" might think. My true friends would love me as I love them.

I spoke up today, to my family to do more. To help my little brother more. To get him out of an intolerable situation if at all possible. To fight for him, for that little guy in the cot in the corner, crying himself to sleep. Exhausted.

 

The Waiting Game

I had all the tests done today. Boy did it take a whack out of me. I was so fortunate my niece was with me and did the wheelchair thing and waited and amused and conversed. I went to a smaller hospital, St. Clare's as I find them more intimate and friendly compared to the massive Health Science Centre which is exhausting even in getting parking before you begin the trek of endless halls and poor signage.
St. Clare's

Health Science Centre

So it was efficient with all the tests and the wheelchair really helped as my breathing after even a few steps is, well, rotten. EKGs are amazing now, none of that cold gel I remember but all these plasters, very fast and efficient and with a sports bra (ha! irony) one doesn't have to strip anymore for the lung Xrays.

Niece and I rewarded ourselves with a large farmer's type breakfast afterwards. We inhaled it.

SOS had a reading of our petition in the House of Assembly here in St. John's this afternoon. I hated missing it but I can only manage 1 or 2 events in a day and the hospital tests had wiped the floor with me.

House of Assembly

I'm so relieved to be home. Several people I met today were being admitted in various stages of distress and anxiety. I thought I might be amongst them and had felt so very sad leaving my apartment this morning.

I am so grateful to be home and just waiting for results and I am pretty positive in my outlook.

Thanks for all your support dear readers. It means more than I can say.

Denial

A friend was taken to the hospital with severe breathing difficulties.

We do this, as he did, when we're older: we pretend severe symptoms are:

(1)Passing
(2)Imagination
(3)A nuisance, but let's not tell anyone because, you know, they might over-react and worry and insist on stupid stuff like ambulances.

He's been hospitalized a week now and all sorts of nuisancy eye-rolling tests have occurred which he has shared with some of his closest friends.

It turns out there are four blockages in the veins leading to his heart, pretty severe blockages, which is going to necessitate by-pass surgeries as stents are considered too risky as he's 76. So he's in line for major surgery and it might be today.

Like myself, he was a heavy smoker and we quit about the same time, around thirty years ago.

BUT the lifelong effects are with us both. And when doctors and technicians informed me about MY smoking and the now disastrous effects on my legs and arms, my internal dialogue tells me they haven't a clue, look at the running races, the half-marathons, etc., how could a long ago habit affect me now?

My friend T has reinforced all this ridiculous denial for me. And I do so wish the young would quit while there is time. I quit in my forties after only 24 years of it but it was enough to do untold damage to my vascular system which has now aged and is unable to cope anymore. Much like my friend T's.

We've been led to believe it's lung cancer we should be worried about. But I, for one, ignored the fine print of it's other long-term effects. T has brought it all home to me, and now I really believe that yes, it was the stupid smoking that I'm paying for now.

What Keeps Us Going

I don't know the answer to the question for the "US" of it. I can only talk about me.

Talk. My friend and I talk. Yes, she's still in the hospital. We chatted into the wee hours of this morning, even though I had a "look-sharp-and-alert" meeting in a few hours focussing on local demographics. It was good to hear her voice and wit and intelligence. She's a brilliant woman.

She's taking notes of all the stuff going on around her and she read it to me and we were hysterical laughing even though a lot of it wasn't really funny at all but taken out of context it is. Hospitals can be cruel, callous places. Particularly for those who don't behave as expected - subservient to Demz in Charge.

I said to her: these writings of yours need to be a performance piece, seriously. For example: she is lying there with her eyes closed and two nurses are changing both her colostomy bag and her diaper and she overhears one of them say to the other sotto voce: "Did you ever see such a weird vagina?" And of course, this begged the question: how could they see inside her vagina, or did these two supposedly medically articulate people mean vulva or labia? How confident am I, she says, when the hospital staff can't accurately name body parts?

Meanwhile we crack up through further readings from her journal. Every overheard conversation or off the cuff remarks by doctors to each other, her hand-wringing visitors who find her 'difficult', her inept wheelchair pusher who loses control of all her life-giving gear in the garden and literally trips over all her tubes.

And that, my friends, that joyful hooting, keeps me from curling into a ball and sobbing my heart out.

Wallop!

My friend D**** and I email each other many times a day. As thoughts strike us. She likes my cursing. I curse out what ails her and the sometimes appalling treatment by the medical people at the hospital, her occasional depressive thoughts, life. You know. It all helps. She's told to "Be brave" a lot. Have you ever heard of anything more unhelpful when you are scared to death of tumours lumping out the hidden organs of your body and half your bowel is lodged somewhere in the trash outside the hospital labs?

So I tell her to ask these medical morons to please change places with her - they can lie down in her bed and she can yell at them to be brave after she's sliced them open. I said that to a team of them once, when my surgical wound opened up and started bleeding all over the hospital floor and I was screaming and they said it to me. It shut them up.

For what is bravery? Those poor teenage soldiers in both "world" wars smiling while they were used as cannon fodder and slaughtered?

Chin barely quivering while biopsies confirm your worst fears?

Whimpering quietly under the covers when the pain meds fail to ease your suffering?

As far as I'm concerned not groaning/moaning/screaming/yelling in pain is just protecting the delicate sensibilities of those around us, right? It's a very good thing to let that pain out. Why bottle it up for the ulcers to play with?

I was sharing with some friends over dinner last night the fact that I am now terrified of walking in case the sudden paralysis in my legs stops me cold in my tracks, as has happened in the past, and heaven forbid I should burden someone with having to come and get me.

And we all had a good laugh, like gawd forbid we should be a nuisance to anyone even though we're crumpled on a heap on the road, breathing our last.

It must be Irish. Or something.

Let me die bravely, right here on main street.

Sorry for your trouble for having to shovel me off to the side.

D**** and I had a good laugh over that one.

Terminal Technology

So. I write to my friend who is, to all intents and purposes, terminal. In the hospital. With bags and tubes and discomfort and pain and anger and frustration and fear.

These are her wishes. This is her e-mail from last night exactly as written:

Not a great day

Cleaning draining

Dr visits

Intravenus injections daily now - no oral

Learned how to check blood

Endericonolist testing gor cancer now

Sugars still up but coming down

No visitors please right now

No calls

Cannot answer easily

Easier to communicate by email

I am not going anywhere

This is my reply:

I hope today is less painful for you.

I hope your spirit can take little journeys inside you to better places.

I remember an A-Frame near Tweed where we had such a happy weekend sitting by the water. I was knitting. You were cross stitching. And we talked and talked.

I still have your needlework (in a frame) hanging on my wall.

{{{{{Dxxxx}}}}}

I thought to send a shared memory every day. I think that would help me if I were her.

Who's to tell? Who's to know?

I know I wouldn't want anyone around me. Email is good. Very, very good. The right distance.

And PS - this blog is anonymous, otherwise I would never breech her confidence.

Flashing Lights

Where Ansa is on our driveway became covered in snow a few days later so the ice underneath was not visible.

Yup. Many of those lights to write about.

(1) Flashing lights: A really, really bad fall on the ice resulting in the stars and moon in front of my eyes. Short term memory loss. Swellings on lower spine. Like the humps of a camel. Pain. Oh pain. Increased blood pressure.

(2) Flashing lights: Emblazoned on neon inside the skull - call Daughter.

(3) Flashing lights: Ambulance pulls into driveway, they check my swellings, stretcher me, put me into ambulance. Two lovely, lovely women.

(4) Flashing lights: they pull the ambulance over periodically to check my vitals, BP, sugars. I am IV'd.

(5) Flashing lights: inside hospital, overhead, on probing lights into eyes, ears. They have called ahead I am given a room in spite of other sick souls in corridor.

(6) Flashing lights: I am moved to a long steel table and my whole spine xrayed. "Sorry," says Blaine the technician,"This is very painful." "Not at all," I say back to his belly laugh, "I've given birth twice."

(7) Flashing lights: As I am released four hours later: no bones broken, tissues bruised and swollen but unbloodied. Strong bones, my doctor says, really, really strong bones. A light of overwhelming gratitude fills me. This could have been catastrophic and it wasn't.

Yeah, I hurt. Yeah, I walk like I'm 105 and I don't recognise the purple and pink and black swollen mass all over my behind and down my thighs. And I'm told this will worsen before it gets better. And I'm not sleeping well as I keep waking with pain.

BUT, so very many have it so much worse. So very much worse.

Thanks for all your kind thoughts and wishes out there. They mean so much.

And on the 8th Day...

This is a photo that Daughter took up at the Tigeen the other day, the bay reflected on the French doors. I love it.

This is the 8th day of a cold I suspected was sourced somewhere in Ontario and gifted to me by Daughter who returned from there.

I was doing fine with it, relieved it hadn't turned into a bronchial nightmare like times past. I had poor lungs as a child, double pneumonia and pleurisy by the age of 10 and heat treatments in the hospital for about a year afterwards. I can still smell that machine, odd that, and I can't find any information on it on a Google search. It was a night out for my mother and me. Every Wednesday night. And we would walk from the hospital to a distant bus-stop afterwards as the fare was cheaper. Today, I can't imagine my father coping alone with the children at home, the youngest about a year old.

It's funny how one can think of something far off in the past and it opens up a floodgate of memories. My mother would always buy me a chocolate bar afterwards - I would take forever to choose it in the newsagent's across from the hospital - for being a "good girl" and lying so still on my stomach under the lamps. I imagine my lungs were being dried. I must have been a wheezy child but I have no recollection of that.

And here I am today, 8 days into this nasty bug and feeling worse than the last 7 days. I slept most of the day, coughed and hacked so much I got a rare headache and yes, I'm cranky. I have too much to do to be this sidetracked by my body.

What was that again? Oh yeah, it's telling me to slow down.

Aye, aye, ma'am.

"Looking Forward to Boredom"

I think it was Daughter who said this on the phone during the week and I laughed and laughed. Me too, honey, I said, imagine a day of doss, bon-bons, jammies and a good solid book to munch through.

I for one am run ragged, you wouldn't believe the half of it but it now sounds like everything is falling into place for Irish performance. Meanwhile I had to put some writing together for a Writers' Festival in October and that took a whole day. I sure hope I am accepted. Fingers crossed. Not counting chickens there at all. I want it so bad I could *insert whatever*.

I visited a dear friend in the hospital today. He is a very private man, likes a lot of quiet, solitary aloneness. Much like myself. He had booked a private room but none were available so he was ensconced in a four person ward.

I have never seen anything like the activity around him. Ever. I think two of the wardmates were dying, which was awfully sad. But exceptions were made to the Rulez for them. So there were screaming toddler grandchildren running around one bed. On another the old fellah was requesting Irish songs from his daughter who had brought her guitar. And the third? He was being tested by a therapist for dementia who had to scream a series of comprehension testing questions at him (spell 'wall', take 7 from 100, and on). And his wife had a whinney of a voice which would first pierce your eardrums and then echo back to give you a migraine.

I have been to circuses that were quieter than this ward B was thrown in.

I found it extremely hard to keep a straight face as his horror-filled eyes would fall on mine every few minutes and he would just about sob: "What fresh hell is this, OSS?"

I suggested Ipod earbuds or earplugs but he has an inner ear problem and dizziness gets exacerbated if he puts anything in his ears.

I shared the above blog title with him and he whittled out a tiny smile.

Sometimes boredom is a good thing, yeah?

Pacing

The first time I felt the Black Dog pacing was at an impossibly young age. Age 6. I would not have known it was the Black Dog, of course. I would have called it being afraid and very sad.

At that age, I had had measles which affected my eyes with ulceration. It necessitated hospitalization as the infection had also spread to my adenoids. In those days there were no children's hospitals so I was put into an adult hospital. I remember all of my stay there, it stands out in a kind of gothic starkness. There were no children in the ward I was on. Just all these adults. And casual cruelties were thrown my way (my eyes were bandaged for about 4 days)- being deliberately misled as to where the washroom was, my few toys being hidden, my hair being pulled,another patient assigned to feeding me and deliberately missing my mouth, all this accompanied by raucous laughter,etc. In those days it was called "teasing" today it would be called abuse. I was wretched.

It was to get worse.

My throat was healing from surgery, my eye bandages were removed when my mother visited with some handmade clothes for my doll. Including a little nightie. When she was leaving, I followed her out of the ward and as she went down the main stairs I screamed and screamed until my throat bled. I fell on the floor until I was carted off (roughly I remember) and told to behave myself.

The following night my father visited. In a rage. He told me I had upset my mother terribly and if I didn't promise to behave myself she would never visit me again.

It was to get worse.

I woke up the following morning to be told there was a great surprise in a cot (crib) down the ward from me. Come and look.

I did and there was my baby brother, under a year, pulling himself up by the bars, recognising me, delight all over his little face. I remember touching his soft head, rubbing my hands over the bandages on his ears. It seems that the measles had given him massive ear infections and primitive tubes had to be inserted to drain them so he wouldn't go deaf.

I remember feeling overwhelmed. I remember thinking my parents had gotten rid of their defective models and were just keeping their perfect middle child (another brother).

I resigned myself to a life on a Dickensian ward, knowing that keeping my mouth and tear ducts shut would mean a possible sighting of my mother again.

My therapist said it was one of the defining moments of my life.

It certainly removed the foundations from it. The idea of abandonment has always haunted me. More than anything the abandonment of myself by myself.

On another note, in adult hindsight, I can't imagine what my parents were going through with two of their children in hospital.

Knowing the reason for one's anxieties and irrational fears will not fix them. I'm just very grateful the episodes get further apart as I move along on my journey.

I'm not at the point where I can chase the Black Dog off my psychic landscape yet. But his visits are shorter and I recognise his pacing and know that he will get bored very quickly if I don't feed him.

And I think I know what to do to protect myself. Very little contact with other, more 'normal' humans, and some contact with those who know exactly where I am.

Pace on, BD, pace on.

Changing Times

A dear friend whom I was meeting for dinner tonight (I know endless rounds of delightful dinners out with friends seems like a permanent lifestyle for me at the mo)texted me to say she had severe pains in her abdomen and was taking herself off to the hospital.

Whoa, nelly, what? I text her back. Where are you? What hospital? Silence. I leave messages at her home, on her blackberry, on her office line. Silence. One of my messages I say: Yeah, I've been there with severe abdominal cramps, mine was a ruptured appendix followed by peritonitis.

She finally texts from a Women's College Hospital ambulance, they are taking her directly to Toronto Hospital for emergency surgery. We continue texting. She is outside the operating room, saying it is pointless for me to be there, they have diagnosed her with a perforated appendix (I know, I know, I should be a diagnostician)and are taking her in for the surgery immediately.

All digits are crossed for her. I am so glad she had the sense to take herself off to the hospital once the pain hit and that she is now in good hands. I won't relax though until I know she is OK and I hope to see her tomorrow.

I find it extraordinary that in a few short years so much has changed in how we communicate and how instantaneous and immediate it all is.