Monday, February 28, 2011

Where is Fitzwilliam Darcy when you need him?

Looking for an idiot example? Here ya go, compliments of the house:
I had a bit of a weekend. When all was said and done it involved a migraine, a fever (?), nose-bleed, jaw bleed, fainting, concussion and post-concussion check up. Because apparently spending hours waiting to be looked at is more productive than sitting at home. Anyway...

No, I'm not the idiot. And I have the MRI to prove it! No, to me, the most ridiculous thing about the whole event was being told to "not faint where there are hard things to fall on that could cause further injury".

Oh. Ok. Didn't realize I could plan where and when to faint. I think I'd prefer no fainting at all, actually. But I guess, if it looks like it might happen again, I'll make sure there is a bed, a couch, a floor covered in cushions or some burly guy to catch me when I do go.

If that's true, we're screwed

First of all, I do not find mental illness funny. As a matter of fact, if I'm crying at work it's because I am working on mental health records from the late 1800's and early 1900's. So much that we can treat now that back then was eithermisunderstood, or not understood at all.

Because if it was either of those things, then the solution - those poor people, that this was a "solution" - was to bung them into the hospital. Hospital for lunatics, the insane or the mental depending on what decade you're talking about. Even the names are sad.

Sometimes one comes across things that read differently today than how they were originally meant to be read. For a while I wondered at all the patients whose "final disposition" was written down as "eloped". At first I was shocked, and then I gave myself a lecture: there should be no reason for patients/inmates in a mental hospital to not be allowed to marry. But then it occurred to me - duh - that it probably meant something else back then. And it did; to elope means "to escape from the authority of". That's why we use it the way we do. Kids running away from their parental authority to get married. We still use it, even when a couple isn't running away from any authority. Just the running away for a quick wedding is an elopement. That column in the registers now makes sense. Lots of people escaping, not lots of people getting married!

Sometimes, if I'm lucky, something strikes me as funny, and I can get a little chuckle in the midst of sadness. For instance....

There is a column in one of the ledgers regarding how a patient died, if they did die in hospital. Lots of what you'd expect, pneumonia and old age being the biggies. Suicide, sadly, makes a fairly regular appearance. What worried me last week was one patient who died of "idiot exhaustion".

This is terrible. I am around idiots all the time. And yes, they're exhausting. I just didn't think it could be fatally exhausting.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

I have a little list

I am back from vacation. It was a vacation that had lots of rest time (yes, even with the twins running about!) and, consequently, lots of thinking time as well. I even had an afternoon at the spa.


My sister not only loaned me her car to get there and back (saving me the cost of a taxi) but gave me a gift card to bring the cost down. She has a number of gift cards, but no time to use them. I love the spa; twins or not if I had gift cards I’d find a way to use them! No complaints from me though, her having them helped me afford a lovely afternoon at the spa on Bear Mountain.

Sitting outside not enjoying the mineral pool (they very clearly stated that it was a mineral pool, not a hot tub. And they were right, the water was luke warm at best), I decided I should work on something to put in the blog. I’ve been getting very slack on that front, yes? So I did.

I thought about what I want to see when I look back on my life. Whether I’m looking back from a rocking chair at ninety, or in the few seconds before the falling piano lands on me next week, it doesn’t matter. What did I want to see? The words that came to me were if and should, did and tried.

I most emphatically don’t want to see "ifs "and "shoulds":

What is I had married someone else?

I should have moved when I had the chance.

What if I had stayed in Quebec?

What if mom and C. had lived?

I should have borrowed money and gone back to college.

I should never have dated that guy more than once.

I should have moved out of the house if I couldn’t keep up on repairs.

I should have worked harder on the business.

What if I had borrowed money for that café?

The list goes on, as such lists are wont to do. So I’m stopping there, because I don’t really want to think about it any more. And I don't want any of you to start thinking along those lines regarding your lives, so stop!

I do want to see a lot of "dids" and "trieds". Even if the things I tried were failures, so what? At least I tried them!

I’ve loved.

I’ve lost

I tried marriage

I have children

I’ve grieved

I wrote

I tried getting published

I traveled

I tried to have my own business

I tried to be a better person

This list could also go on, and I hope it does. Whether it’s next week or fifty years down the road, I hope the second list is ten times longer than the first. A hundred times longer! In fact, I hope the first list never even comes into play, so there.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Instant Karma

The title was suggested to me by a friend who was there for the whole of the story I’m about to tell you. I’m glad she was there for the weirdness. Why? Because sometimes I watch people shake their heads in disbelief as I answer truthfully when they ask something like “anything interesting happen today?”

When something that is odd for most people but seems par for the course for me happens it’s nice to have a witness. Or, as in this case, witnesses. I don’t think you can count the swearing person as a witness to her own craziness. And no doubt, in her mind she was the one encountering a crazy person. Certainly in this case that’s what the woman thought. So, on with the story!

The Girl and I were going to a tea with a friend on Saturday. The original plan was to meet there. En route to picking up The Girl, the friend that we were meeting called. She was stuck – or rather her car was – could we go to her place and help her get unstuck? Of course we could! Not only was she a friend, but this is Saskatchewan. There is an unwritten code here; you see someone stuck, you help get them unstuck. And not just because one day you too will be stuck in snow and require help. It’s just the done thing is all.

So I got The Girl and on we went. When we got to the alley behind my friend’s house, her car was just by her garage, well and truly stuck in the snow. The large expanses of snow-covered ice weren't helping the situation, but the main problem was defintely the snow bank the right front tire was buried in.


We tried pushing but it was clear that it needed shoveling and/or something to provide more traction on the ice. Stopping to decide what to do I noticed there was another car stuck further up the alley. So when our friend went to get a shovel, The Girl and I walked over and offered to help. And the woman who was stuck said “no thanks, ugly, I’ve got it covered”. And she stalked off. And I stood there trying to figure out what she’d said. Because it sure sounded like she’d just called us (or at least me) ugly. But that didn’t make sense. I don’t mean because I’m a beauty, I mean just as a reply to an offer of help it didn’t really make sense. Like someone asking you what you want for supper and saying “football game on the weekend”. The two just don’t go together. In the end, though, we just walked back to the car and she walked back to her house (she was stuck several houses away from her house).

She went into her house, slammed the door and in the clear cold air of winter we could hear her as she shouted “F***!!!!”. No mistaking THAT word, even muffled by being yelled inside a house. Now who knows what was behind that. Maybe she had a job interview that she was going to miss because she was stuck? But…why not get help, then? The Girl and I looked at each other, both a little puzzled. But with a shrug we just turned away.

Apparently, turning away was not the done thing, because the next second her back door slammed open and she screamed “Get a F******life!!”. And I do mean screamed, people. With the intensity of someone who has been harassed for weeks by people making her life a misery.

How odd, was my first thought. I mean, I have a life. There I was on a Saturday with my daughter and a friend, off for tea and some book shopping. Sounds like a life to me! I didn’t know what her day was like, though, so best to just leave her alone. (I have a co-worker who's mother was treated horribly for no apparent reason only to find out the next week- when the customer aplogized - that the abusers wife had just died and he was getting donuts and such for everyone who had waited through the night with him at the hospital. He was beside himself with grief and hadn't meant to be so rude to her. So now I think twice or even three times when someone is rude to me for no apparent cause. Who knows what's going on in their life at that moment?)

Between shoveling snow away from one tire and putting kitty litter under the others my friend’s car did get unstuck. And despite the rudeness, I thought perhaps we should try one more time to help the swearing woman get unstuck. So The Girl and I walked towards her, and I said “kitty litter helped get this car out, maybe it would help with yours?” She did answer, and she didn’t swear which you would think was an improvement in relations. Not exactly; her reply was “you are MENTALLY ILL, go get some HELP”. Screamed at full volume. Naturally.

My first thought was that she was telling us that she was mentally ill. And didn’t want help. But she repeated herself, so her intentions were perfectly clear. The Girl and I, for offering to help get her car unstuck, were ill. Mentally ill. Clearly, only a madwoman offers to push a car out of a snow bank. Didn’t think I needed help, but I was willing to leave and at least get some tea. And maybe she would be able to get the car out some other way. Wait for spring, perhaps?

One other thing, the best bit of all, in a way: the title. Why instant Karma? It’s because when we told my friend about the first rebuff, she said that the woman only got stuck in the first place because she was taking great pains to NOT help my friend get unstuck and out of her way. She decided it would be better to go the long way around and not help. And that’s how she ended up stuck in the snow at the other end of the alley.

I was going to call the post “but I want to know the story” because that is what kills me about stuff like this. What was this woman’s problem? Why was she so angry? Why take it out on people trying to help? I hate not knowing the rest of the tale. But I’ll live with it. And hope that whatever was making her so unhappy got better. No one deserves to be that angry and unhappy all the time.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Sooner came sooner than expected

Perhaps some of you will remember this paragraph from a post in November:

*That point isn't now. And given that the second dentist I saw (my dentist wanted confirmation that the surgery was necessary) pointed out the problem on the other side of my mouth. What? Some other problem? Turns out that the fake tooth I had cemented in 20+ years ago needs to be replaced. I knew there was something wrong-ish going on - floss was catching on something, and eating things like apples I had to avoid that side- but didn't realize it would entail more than a minute to fix it. So still no apples for me. I haven't had an apple since September. Hard to, when you have to bite carefully on one side of your mouth and not at all on the other.

Well, that problem is going to be fixed sooner instead of later. Why? Because on Monday I bit into a cracker. And three teeth fell out. On fake, and the bits on each side that had been holding it in. I bit a cracker, felt something weird, opened my mouth and a little group of three teeth fell into my hand. Along with a lot of blood.

I spent Monday afternoon at the dentist. The place where the original root canal/fake tooth was couldn't be saved. So they pulled the three roots of that right out. And then they sort of cleaned things up, and burnt stuff to stop the bleeding. Put in a temporary cap thingy where they'd taken the roots out. Left the rest of the space open.

So now...I have a great gaping space on the one side of my mouth. Nothing they can fix permanently for three months, because that's how long it will take the jaw to heal enough for him to work on it. And since I was already there I mentioned that I had been about to call him anyway, as the side the surgery had been on was hurting just as much as it did - and in the same way - when I went to see him in the first place. The surgery likely fixed a problem, but it didn't fix the problem. The problem of not being able to bite down on that side. And with the other side now swollen and painful (and partially toothless) I can't bite down on that side either. I guess I'm lucky I like scrambled eggs.