Sometimes Our Hearts Break A Little.

I glanced out my window the other night. I was struck by this oul fellah struggling along on his cane to the requisite 25 feet from our building. Snow was coming down fast, the plows had been around three times already.

He balanced himself carefully on the stick and lit up. Rules are no smoking in the building or within 25 feet of it. The rule is taken seriously. Even when you're dying of lung cancer.

As he is.

As a recovered nicotine addict (2 packs a day when it was allowed everywhere even on planes and post partum in the maternity wing - yeah, I know, appalling breathing smoke on our newborns, you would be dumbfounded if you saw a photo of back then, I do have one somewhere) I sympathize with him. We attribute my late brother's death to tobacco, he had quit for years and then went back for about 10 years which, I believe, nailed him to the cross of cancer.

All 6 of us siblings were smokers and quit along the way. My own withdrawal (no medical support back then, 38 years ago) was so terrible I knew I could never smoke again as I would never quit again.

This poor fellah tried to quit. I just know he did. All smokers do whether they say so or not. And now, in his late sixties he's dying one of the worst kind of deaths. Fighting for breath, plugging in tanks, yearning for the one thing that would bring him a comfort he defines.

Yeah. I'm so sad for him. 

PS I can't post this on local social media as many would know him.

Update

Nothing worse than blog silence is there? I know of many who dropped off over the years never to be heard from again and one wonders.

I decided many moons ago not to do this if it all possible. After all, 20 years of blogging, or close to it, (I haven't checked timeline lately) has a wee audience and camaraderie and a vested interest (we hope) in our well-being. Not the royal we there but referring to us valiant bunch of bloggers.

So on followup from previous post here I am with a leaky lung (hello breathlessness!), I was just full of fluid, in a retention competition I would have been in serious running for the gold cup. And, oh yes, congestive heart failure which scared the bejaysus out of me. He showed me the lung xrays, good gawd, sez I how was I walking around?

You did very well in coming in to see me so fast, many put these symptoms down to a bad flu go to bed and well, sez Doc and gave me a sad look.

He measured the diameter of my lower legs, my left was 2" bigger than my right. All fluid. So 8 pills, heavy diuretics, confined to barracks until Friday when I see him again with (hopefully) my breath back and my lungs released from their misery and bonus - matching legs.

He is meanwhile lining me up with a cardiologist, an echo chamber cardiogram and a halter for 24 hours to check on my errant heart and is very busy assuring me that with modern medicine, this is not overly serious but will need the consistent and ongoing attention of my newly expanded team of specialists.

Elsewhere, I resigned form all boards, committees and upcoming teaching projects and my life is now an empty blackboard filled with sock-making, reading and writing as I await further marching orders into the maw of medical speculation and testing.

And seriously? I can't praise my medical team highly enough.

And universal health care. Every country on the planet should have it. It is a human right. Like water.

Herewith a pair of socks I knit for Daughter - just to cheer us all up.

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.