A Deflating Experience with Three Christmas Visitors

I was travelling on Christmas Day with two of my kids, literally driving to a stable, when my daughter's car got a flat tire. We tried to figure out the jack and how to get the tire off to put the donut tire on, but it was more complicated that I could have imagined. 

Anything to do with fixing cars kind of scares me a bit. It's the same with computers. I'm even more embarrassed to say, it's the same experience with my flippin' bicycle too, which I bring in yearly for a simple tune up because I still don't quite know how to oil my chain. I have all the tools to change a flat, but that doesn't stop me from just walking miles to a shop instead of ever even trying to fix it myself. There's something about mechanical things that shuts my brain down. It's a strong aversion as if I don't want to know how things work. I think part of me thinks that if I try anything, I'll somehow make it worse - I have actually broken a computer by trying to plug in a cable before by bending the little sticky-out thingies. I can build a website no problem, but I'm still a bit weird about using apps on my phone. I've watched as people helped me change a tire on my car twice before in my life, and my son has helped with my computer and phone a ton, and I realized that once someone is there to take over and save the day, I just stare blankly at the process without actually learning anything. The previous tire-fixing steps didn't register at all. I was completely useless. At some point in my life I seem to have learned that this type of information is just not for me.  

It's yet another reason why I didn't buy my first car until I was flippin' 53! 

The Daycare Years

Many of our ideas of virus transmission haven't changed in decades, for better and worse.  

Almost 30 years ago, I ran a daycare out of my home for a little over three years. I wanted to have more time with my kids while they were small, but I also financially needed to stay home since the cost of daycare for two kids was almost my entire take-home salary ($300 vs $400/week) even though I'm a teacher, assumed to be rolling in piles and piles of money. I'm so pleased we have subsidized daycare now. 

If It's Not One Thing, It's Another

I had a very sick kid here on the night before the last day of the last quadmester. My little one felt shaky and dizzy and came downstairs to get the pulse oximeter because they felt so faint. They promptly barfed in the kitchen sink. Of course it was full of dishes. After they slumped to the floor, I gave them a bowl to clutch and slid them away from the cupboards. Then I donned PPE and cleaned the sink and dishes and everything with bleach. 

On Discovering Ourselves Through Choosing Others

Online dating, or, I suppose, regular dating (but I barely remember what that even is anymore) is a fascinating exercise in identity discovery. To take part in the game, we have to know who we are and what we want. Those are huge questions.

We carefully choose what to reveal in an attempt to surmise our most important vitals. Some go for the best portrait of themselves: casting a wide net by glorifying parts that will most likely entice the most people. I opted for the most necessary bits for connection: the parts that people need to like for anything to work. It's a process of weeding out rather than a sweeping in, which I prefer regardless how thin the weeds were to begin with. But even just this question is a struggle. How can we ever know the parts that are most important? I went for reading, cycling, and canoeing, but that's barely what I'm about. That's just what I like to do. It's so superficial and artificial. We find ways to pigeon-hole ourselves to be understood by others, whether we're funny or smart or adventurous. What an odd expectation that we can boil ourselves down to a list of adjectives.

And then there's the choice of the important traits of another unknowable human being. Everybody thinks they're nice and good listeners and all that jazz. Even with the most honest and authentic profiles, it's impossible to describe the self to another to determine compatibility. An attempt to even know the self, which is always in flux, may be a targetless exercise. And "common interests" is such a ruse, a red herring that can send us careening down the wrong path with expectations held high. I might find someone who loves canoeing as much as I do, but they might be just a bit too overbearing or chatty or serious or something that a fleet of Old Towns couldn't override in a cost-benefit analysis. 

But it's fascinating to me to observe myself making decisions about people based on scant information. What do my choices say about my own identity and where I think I fit in the world? And what do they say about my prejudices? And what's the difference? If I pass on the guys in suits, is that about attraction or an anti-corporate bias? I think biases are completely enmeshed in our preferences for another, and I don't think there's much we can do about that. I could date CEOs over and over, but I can't make myself like it. And I might find one that has a similar value system as I do. It's possible, but less likely that some guy in jeans, I think. But I only think that because of stereotypes based on previous experiences and media. But we need some way to decide.

This is all so very unsavoury and dehumanizing.

Is the guy in the suit with the expensive watch in front of the fancy car just adding that pic because he thinks it will impress girls because our culture provokes us towards that image, or is this a reflection of what he actually values in life? I'm not sure which is better or worse.

Does sense of humour matter more than interests? Does hamming it for the camera even correlate to being funny in person? Doesn't everyone have a sense of humour, but just of a different type - like having a taste in food? And is a similar sense of humour important only because I hope to be entertained? I tend toward people who have different interests or abilities so I can learn from them. We look down on people who light up at the prospect of a partner with wealth, the golddiggers, but is coveting a wealth of ideas that different? Isn't it still just looking to get something rather than to share in something? In the back of my mind through it all, I have Aristotle looking down his nose at relationships of utility over the infinitely more laudable relationships of virtue. But we can't easily assess morality from a self-description. Everyone thinks they're virtuous.

Should I just ignore the too formal living room in the background, the ratio of photos of their face to their vehicle, or the number of sports they list as interests? These things seem to warrant a quick pass, yet I've been happy in the past with a hockey playing motorcycle enthusiast with a more formal aesthetic than my hippy decor. When I ignore education levels, is it because I really see no correlation between intelligence and education or because I just want to believe that about myself? I'm fully aware that it doesn't really matter. I might do as well if I threw a dart at my computer screen. But we have to whittle down the numbers. And we need an in, a starting point for conversation that isn't necessary in a more natural meeting where spontaneously disagreeing with someone else's comment or randomly having the same shoes could be a point of connection. Or sometimes there's just a smile that makes us weak in the knees and renders those details superfluous.

That one was too difficult to navigate realistically. But that sudden overwhelming electric surge flooding my body when our eyes connected reminded me of the painful nature of desire. It's easy to pick and choose when it's a matter of interest. It's so much harder when suddenly there's a longing that you didn't expect. But where would we be if we lived life with a surge protector!

On top of being near impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff, the whole enterprise is also fraught with emotional turmoil. It kills me not to respond to someone who seems a poor match, but any comment, even, "Thanks but I don't think we're a good fit," is often met with a defensive hostility. There's a raw vulnerability in revealing a desire for connection, in displaying a wanting, in making overt that there's a missing piece in our lives otherwise outwardly illuminated as a perfectly content. Mid-conversation with several prospects at once (something that goes against my monogamous nature in the first place), I went into the woods for a time without access to wifi and returned to an onslaught of "arrogant cunt" and the like. I've narrowed my search to people old enough to have spent the majority of their adult lives before cellphones, yet many nevertheless have fallen into the expectation of immediate responses. I'm too thin-skinned for some of the fear-induced hatred coming my way. I can tolerate it when people react heatedly to a perspective I hold, but not to my silence threatening their self-esteem. The message boards are rife with a sense of feeling completely misunderstood by one another. Instead of helping us connect, this tawdry process can eat away at our belief in our worthiness of connection.

Many demand "no baggage," but who among us is that untouched by the world? Who would want to be? Relationships are never about not having any flaws or issues, but about being able to overlook or forgive or understand the more difficult idiosyncrasies of the other. I'm fond of poet David Whyte's discussion of the purpose of relationships, that it's not about improvement or growth:

"the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone."

And then, of course, there are the booty calls. Yuck.

It takes time to meet people and really get to know them in order to weed out the crooked ones, time I could be actually weeding my garden or my pile of books to read. And from time to time I think I'm less interested in a partner than in a people. I grew up in a large family where there was always someone who had time to play a game with me. I still idealize communal living or intentional communities as they're now known. We can't expect one person to cover all the bases, the reading AND the canoeing. It makes sense to have a wider base. My most content moments were never because of a partner, but because of a group affiliation, typically when I was living in a house full of friends. But once people couple up, that form of relationship sits at the top of the hierarchy. It's seen as better, an improvement over communal formations. As Fredrick Engels explained in Origins of the Family:

"[Monogamy] develops out of the pairing family, as previously shown, in the transitional period between the upper and middle stages of barbarism; its decisive victory is one of the signs that civilization is beginning. It is based on the supremacy of the man, the express purpose being to produce children of undisputed paternity; such paternity is demanded because these children are later to come into their father’s property as his natural heirs. . . . We meet this new form of the family in all its severity among the Greeks. While the position of the goddesses in their mythology, as Marx points out, brings before us an earlier period when the position of women was freer and more respected, in the heroic age we find the woman already being humiliated by the domination of the man and by competition from girl slaves."

There's lots to unpack there! But I'm just going to move on and leave this little Wagoner poem here. It feels entirely relevant, even though I can't quite explain why:

From here.

ETA - and it's just bizarre that horoscope counts as ethnicity!

ETA - This study suggests we're all looking for someone out of our league, but for women over 40, that's pretty much everyone.

More Doctors and Nurses, Less Waiting

I went to the CCAC yesterday after my surgery on Tuesday - the Community Care Access Centre - an agency I only heard about when they had a local whistleblowing scandal a couple years ago questioning the decision to reduce case managers instead of front line therapists, and then more recently, when they spent money to send employees to a conference, which turned out to be largely funded by donors. It's a very necessary agency that cares for people after surgery among many other things, and it's a concern if funding is mismanaged.

It's also a concern if funding is reduced.

It's a complicated system to an outsider. After my surgery, I felt fine and declined homecare, but changed my mind once the drugs wore off, and it took many phone calls to relay that decision because homecare is under a different umbrella than the regular CCAC on-site work staff. This article says the system in Ontario is, "plagued by inconsistent standards of care, byzantine processes and a troubling lack of transparency for both patients and family caregivers." And apparently they're all going to be shut down soon anyway to be replaced by LHINs: Local Health Integration Networks.

Whatever they're called or do, I haven't really followed it all, but they are ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY.

Or something is necessary.  I don't really care how they operate so long as they exist - so long as something's in place when you leave the hospital. It would be kinda nice if it was your own surgeon who could answer questions, but their costs are too high and their time too valuable. Or something like that.

I got my drainage tubes out this morning. When we got there, the cab driver questioned my intentions: "Carpenters?! Is this a union office? Are you part of a union??" No, silly, Care Partners. Well, yes, actually, but that's a longer story, and what's it to you, bub!?

Anyway.

The CCAC nurse warned me that I might faint because the drain was "right up in there." I didn't, but it was significantly worse than with my mastectomy. The armpit has a bevy of nerve endings. My surgeon was right: boobs are just blobs of fat - easy peasy. Lymph nodes are much more integrated and involved in things. The nurse had concerns. I was reporting more pain that I should have at this stage, but maybe I'm just sensitive. But the blood in the drain was more thick and dark than is typical, so she expected a clot, but couldn't find one, and I had way too much bruising way too far from the site, and it shouldn't be swollen right down to my wrist! She removed the tube anyway (thank God), but told me to see my doctor immediately.

Before I left, I asked her about aftercare. Shouldn't I be doing exercises of some sort? I had a booklet to take home after my mastectomy. She thought the surgeon should have given me something, but the day surgery staff was pretty sure CCAC should have something for me. There are too many cooks stirring this soup!! Thank god for Google (and here too). We're on our own, here, kids.

I called my surgeon, but he, as with most of the doctors I try to see, lives behind a protective wall of receptionists or assistants or a "care team" of some sort. They told me I don't see him for that kind of thing, and that I couldn't see him anyway because he's not in on Fridays. It's my family doctor from here on in. So I called her, but she also doesn't see patients on Fridays. Okey dokey. I know her well enough to know that she wouldn't know what to do with my engorged black and blue arm anyway. So, her receptionist suggested emerg was my best option. Middle of the afternoon, how bad could it be, right??

I went to work in the afternoon because I'm out of fully paid sick days from my surgery in the fall - yes, I've got a strong union, but the public perception of being allowed to carry over sick days was deadly to that clause of our contract. God forbid we piss off the public. That fear also ensures every PD day is spent in useless meetings rather than being allowed time to prep classes and mark work in a timely fashion. That part of our job is to be done on weekends and evenings. But I digress.

Okay, one more thing. When I had surgery last semester, I went part time for a week. I had all my classes in the morning and my prep in the afternoon. So I taught A, B, C, 3/3 of my courses, then went home to fall into a mild coma. That counted as half time because I was only in the building for half the day. This time, new semester, I have two classes in the morning, and one in the afternoon. I decided I'd come for the afternoons and teach that one class and stay for my prep. But that doesn't count as a half day. This time it counts as 1/3 day because I'm only teaching one out of three classes. Hmmm.  Doesn't that seem a little fishy to count by day portion or number of class, whichever is less? . . .  Whatevs.

So I went to the hospital right after my class instead of staying for my prep period, because I'm going to do all my marking at home anyway. I half expect to be docked 1/6th pay for publicly acknowledging leaving early - that's fair, teach one of three classes for 1/6 of your pay. And I'll be spending my weekend prepping for the supply teacher and marking even though I'm on sick leave because supply teachers aren't mandated to mark or prep anything. IF I PUNCHED A CLOCK.... Blarg!!

So I got to the hospital at 1:40. It was packed. I finally met with the triage nurse at 3:00. He said I should be seen within an hour because the section I needed to go to was moving pretty quickly. I asked about my meds, which I was scheduled to take at 3:30. A different nurse insisted that the hospital needed to dispense all that rather than my kids coming to deliver them. After an hour of figuring that out, and being given only an Advil because they can't actually dispense Tylenol 3s or any of the other nerve repair drugs and aromatase inhibitors I'm on despite insisting they must be the only dispensing physicians while I'm in their care, I called my daughter to bring me my plethora of pills.

At 6:00, I won the lottery and got called on to move TO A BED, which was very exciting. I thought it meant I'd be seeing a doctor!! But hold yer horses. All in good time. I hadn't had anything to eat or drink since 11 in the morning  - I was terrified to leave the waiting room in case I missed my turn, and the water from the sinks in the hospital tasted horrible. I work right next door and drink the tap water there all the time. I'm not sure what makes the difference, but I tried to force down a few sips out of the tap while I waited. At 7:30 the doctor came to check me out. He said I have a hematoma, blood collecting under the skin, which was causing the extra special pain this time round. This called for an ultrasound to check for clots in the veins which could cause all sorts of problems. His turn was over for now, and he left.

At 8:40, I saw the ultrasound technician in a dark and creepy part of the hospital. We were the only ones there. After tracing all my veins with her gooey magic wand, she told me someone would come to take me back up, and I was left all alone in a hospital gown, open at the back, and my jeans. A thin coating of goo remained down my left side despite attempts at cleaning it all off. It's tenacious stuff. While I waited, I tried to wipe a bit more with a kleenex, and it was quickly saturated with thick, dark red globs. The sticky dampness I felt was pretty much all blood. My escort arrived and told me a nurse would redress that wound. Back in my curtained room, I scrubbed the blood from my jeans with the paper towel eroding as I rubbed, leaving traces behind in a bigger mess.

A nurse came and cleaned me up. She tried valiantly to find a pamphlet of exercises for me, but had no luck. The day surgery staff was long gone. She told me to call my surgeon on Monday, even though that first week after surgery is most important for aftercare, and I already know the surgeon doesn't take my calls. But don't worry - Google's got my back.

While I waited for the results of the ultrasound, I read every word of every poster in the room. One in particular warned people that they might get a call asking them about their experiences. They want to know what would make the emerge experience better. I'll tell you. It's one thing. There is one answer to that question: We need more doctors and nurses available. Just MORE. That's it. It's not complicated and doesn't require a survey. We need more money to pay for more staff so we have shorter wait times. No matter how it's organized and where little bits of money are misspent or where there's an overlap of services or cracks between them, those are all important issues and all, but nothing will get better until we have more staff to be able to take on more patients. But not just in emerge. We need more staff everywhere. It took me months to get in to each surgeon to find out I should have had surgery months ago. Take money from education if you need to. Cut my salary in half if that's the only place we can find a buck. I mean God forbid we raise the marginal tax rate or anything. I don't even care right now. I just want the Ontario health care system to be swimming in cash, at least enough for some quality water fountains so we're not so monopolized by Timmys to quench our thirst. This level of care is ridiculous. I feel like I live in the states!

Anyway, at 9:50, the doctor came back with the results. No clots in the veins! Hurray! I just have that hematoma that needs regular surveillance. Come back if it doubles in size or the swelling gets significantly worse (what does significantly look like??), or if it gets hot or I get a fever. All that jazz.

My incredible, beautiful, precious children had dinner ready for me when I walked in the door, eleven hours after leaving for a half day at work - ahem, a one third day at work. It's questionable for me to be back at work at all. I was advised to take two weeks off; I should be spending my days resting. I decided I could manage one class that's presenting seminars to me. But I should have been resting those other nine hours today instead of sitting upright in a hard chair lacking arm supports, in a crowded, noisy room full of contagious germs, with no access to food or water or necessary meds, and no accurate timeline of events - not even a reasonable guess - on offer.

My kids took pics of the hematoma so we could document any changes. You don't want to see that. [ETA - it's here, for the morbidly curious.]

Okay, it's amazing that I had access to an ultrasound tech immediately (relatively immediately). And of course there were a few patients screaming and growling in the triage area and an old guy too drunk to understand why his police escort wouldn't let him have a cigarette. We need more money in mental health services and addiction treatment. Absolutely. And whenever I felt impatient, I watched the number of people there with little ones. Sitting for hours in pain is nothing compared to sitting for hours with a child in pain. They should always get bumped to to the front of the line.

No. Scratch that. There shouldn't BE a flippin' line!

And the Saga Continues

Ok, so, after getting a preventative bi-lateral mastectomy, performed shortly after both a mammogram and MRI both showed zero cancer, of course they found cancer in the breast tissue sent to the lab. The good news is it's all out, but...

They found two non-invasive tumours about a centimetre each. The surgeon isn't worried about that at all, but I'm baffled that they went completely undetected by either the mammogram or the MRI. That's pretty disconcerting. Both procedures are horrible to go through, and apparently mammograms have a false negative rate of 20% and MRIs aren't much better! Back when I had them done, the geneticist told me the idea is to do both, and then they cancel out the false negatives, but it looks like there are still some exceptions!

But the lab also found one micro-invasive tumour that is more of a concern because it's invasive, but it's not too much of a concern because it's micro. They could only see it under a microscope. It's officially stage zero cancer.

And on Recovery in All its Glory

Mom-ishly waiting for the kids to get their shoes on!

I walked into the O.R. for a three-hour surgery just yesterday, and I feel fine. I'm taking half the pain meds that I'm allowed to take because the pain is minimal. Weirdly minimal for all that's been done to me. The worst of it is in my shoulders from gas settling there. I have an ice-pack on the top half of me and a hot-water bottle on the bottom half. It should be raining on my rib cage.

Liam thinks I'm a badass for walking there!

Pre-surgery fashion show.

When we first got to the hospital, the place was completely deserted. We were just five minutes early to register, but it took a while working through the maze of darkened hallways to find an actual staff member. It reminded me of The Kingdom, but, listening to me complain of nausea, my kids recited Wayne's World instead: "If you're going to spew, spew into this." Foreshadowing!

Once begun, the day started with a whole lot of hurry-up-and-wait. We were shuffled from room to room, closer and closer to the O.R. We were stuck in one room for an hour and regretted not bringing the crokinole board along for a few games; I was too restless for cards. I was glad my kids were allowed to hang out with me during that time to help relieve the boredom and anxiety. But when nurses tried and failed to get an IV going, jabbing each hand before giving up, my daughter got a little pale and exhaled audibly, and all the attention shifted to her: "Take off your coat; you're going to faint!" "Put your head down!" "Are you going to be okay?" I had to remind them that I was the patient lying here with two bloody hands. But she has good reason to be stressed watching it all. She inherited my mutant genes, so she'll be next. That'll be an even harder day for me, I'm guessing.

Trying to be Zen about it all.

Staff kept remarking on the fact that I was getting two procedures at once, but I'd much rather one long surgery than two shorter ones. It's the anesthesia that scares the bejeebers outta me. It's like I'm a sickly animal being put down only to be magically awakened again. I don't trust that waking up part. I told the anesthesiologist as much and he offered to do it the old fashioned way with a bullet to bite on. I was totally up for that, but, alas, he was kidding. Bugger.

I expected to be wheeled into the O.R. like it happens on TV, but I just walked on in and hopped up on the table. There were eight masked people in the room milling about talking to each other jovially with music playing. I felt like I was intruding on an oddly specific Hallowe'en party. The anesthesiologist asked me how much I drink, and when I told him a few beers most Friday nights, the nurse and I got talking about what beers we like. She prefers a dark ale. It was all very chummy. Everyone checked my wrist band and asked my name and what I was doing there. I'm not sure if that was for their sake or my own. They covered me in toasty warm blankets and got the IV going, and tried to put an oxygen mask on my face but were really good about taking it off and just holding it close when I got all claustrophobic about it. Geez, I didn't used to be so neurotic!

And then I woke up, and there was much rejoicing!  I felt totally fine and lucid, and well enough to be annoyed that they couldn't find which waiting room my kids were in and insisted they must have gone out for coffee. They wouldn't have both left, I told them. Wait a minute... they don't even drink coffee! Eventually they let me call their cell phones to get them to me.

Post-surgery: the calm before the storm.

But then I had some troubles breathing. When I'd doze off, it felt like I kept exhaling and not inhaling again for ages, then waking up in a panic: Anesthesia-induced sleep apnea. Waking to a row of nurses staring at me, and telling me I'm not imagining it, wasn't remotely reassuring. I was supposed to be out the door by 1:00, but they kept me until 6:00. I kept getting really confused and having mini nightmares - terrors, really - about things I had to do right away, but couldn't. I was glad to have taken drugs in my wayward youth so I was well-prepared to talk myself down from a bad trip. I was hoping to come out of the O.R. saying hilariously inappropriate things to people; no such luck. The oxygen mask made my face itch, and there was vaseline on my eyes (WTF?), and the inside of my mouth felt like it was coated with glue. And then came the puking. Each time the nurses told me, "Now you'll feel 100% better!" but they lied.

After a few hours of that mess, they taught my daughter how to drain my tubes and carefully measure the blood loss. That would make anyone ralph. They got me into a pressure camisole to keep the swelling down. The nurse called it a teddy, but not many Victoria's Secret products have handy drainage bag pockets like this one does! Then they got me in a cab with a jerky driver, and I barfed just once more as soon as I got home. By 8:00 at night, twelve hours after walking into the O.R., the fog miraculously lifted, and I was up and about and watching Star Wars with my kids. Piece of cake! I almost feel like I could go to work on Monday. Almost. But I did all that prep-work, so I may as well enjoy my time off.

I thought I would feel much more fragile and broken at this point. But I really don't. I feel like I'll have to remind myself not to do too much over the next few weeks. The main surgeon recommended two to three weeks off work, and I pictured going back worried about being bumped in the halls, or unable to write on the chalk board, or too tired to make it through the whole day, but it's nothing like that. It was just two globs of fat taken off my chest and my ovaries and fallopian tubes slipped out of a hole in my belly button. I've had worse hangovers.

The doctors and nurses were all really wonderful. Not a crabby one in the bunch! But I did get my daughter to ask one to keep her voice down, and I immediately felt like such a princess for doing that. She was at the desk in the recovery room and kept talking about her weekend and life in general really loudly to the other nurses around her, while I was trying to focus on basic survival. I'm a little sensitive to chatter at the best of times. I was exactly the same during labour, demanding that my midwives whisper to each other. People are so gosh darn accommodating of my idiosyncrasies!

And my kids. Whenever the nurses would check me over, they'd get my son to leave the room - well, to stand on the other side of the curtain - because he's a boy, and one would lower her voice to ask about bleeding "down there." But he helped me give birth years ago! Nurses kept remarking about how incredible my kids are, as they'd hold my hand and stroke my head and rub my feet and get me whatever I needed. They even held my hair back when I threw up! I felt badly for how gross it all was, but they were troupers. My son's the best masseur I've ever known, and my daughter is amazing at doctoring, and remembering all the many instructions thrown at us, and telling people off as necessary. She's got my back.

Classic composition - my boy snoozing at my feet. But why won't that washcloth stay on my forehead?

A friend commented that it's just like me to keep this all a secret until the last minute. But I didn't do that for any noble reasons. I was keeping it from myself. I could pretty effectively block it out of my mind so long as I didn't talk about it. And then it was realer than real. And then it was over.