I’m Number One!

As I have mentioned before, my blog stats show me what phrases people are searching when they find me. I have noticed a couple trends recently. One, there are a lot of people, and I mean a lot, who think they can find luck on the internet. Last summer, I wrote about my success in finding four-leaf clovers and that’s probably the most popular post I have now, even surpassing the ones in which I mention those evil Webkinz.

About once a week, someone leaves a comment on that post actually asking me for luck, like I can somehow dole it out, since I’m so four-leaf-clover rich. (Perhaps some of them should read some more recent posts, then they’d realize that I haven’t actually been that lucky lately, although I suppose the fact that I’m still here to ramble on like this could be considered lucky.) I let the first couple stay, but now I delete them all. But no wonder there are so many people out there trying to take advantage of the gullible and desperate, because it appears there are a great many gullible and desperate people out there.

So I googled the phrase I keep seeing - ‘need some luck.’ My post is second on the list. Oh, lucky me.

The other phrase that comes up all the time is ‘lumpy boobs.’ I had no idea so many women were worried about their lumpy boobs. (I’m assuming the searchers are worried women rather than interested men.) I had no idea so many boobs were lumpy. So I googled that phrase and I’m first! How can I be first when so many people seem concerned about this? All the rest of the links on the first page lead people to actual real answers, and yet people keep clicking on me.

Luck and boobs. That’s what it’s all about.

Pain

In my quest for alternative pain relief, I’ve recently had a couple massages. The first one was quite gentle and while it was enjoyable, the effects weren’t lasting beyond about an hour. So for the next one, I told the massage therapist to dig a little deeper, work on the muscles. The muscles in my back and neck are very, very tight, she admitted, but after working on them pretty hard, she said she felt they’d softened a little bit.

I felt okay during the day, but by early evening, the muscles in my back, neck and head were just screaming at me. Moving hurt. Breathing hurt. I was wishing for some bigtime pain meds, which don’t really exist. I have no idea if further massages are a good idea - if they can actually cause a more permenant softening of my hard and stubborn muscles, or if those muscles will just hurt more at the intrusion. Must do some research on that before the next scheduled appointment.

I was a bit nervous about my assessment for the pain clinic this morning, imagining this making my early-morning stiffness even more extreme. While you have to be in chronic pain to get into the program, you also have to have the stamina to hang out in their program all day.

I made it to my appointment on time, and it didn’t even feel hideously early. They asked me all kinds of questions about my pain and functioning, including one I hate. They asked me to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten, ten being the most unbearable pain you’ve experienced. This was a question I got in the hospital a lot, whenever I told them anything hurt.

The thing is, the ruptured colon totally reset the definition of number 10 for me. Compared to that, nothing else gets higher than maybe a 5 or 6. I figure the rupture probably occured around 9 pm, given that I suddenly felt a great deal more pain than before and ended up collapsing on the bathroom floor. But I didn’t get into surgery until 11 am. Add to that the dehydration caused profuse sweating from the pain and the fact that they wouldn’t allow me any liquids, and I felt really, really bad. I felt so bad that when the surgeon told me one possible outcome of the sugery was death, I didn’t care. I really didn’t. This is basically what I thought: “Okay, whatever. Just knock me out now.” During what could have been my last conscious moments on this earth, strapped down to the operating table, all I could do was complain that the mask put over my face to sedate me didn’t have a good enough seal and I wasn’t reaching unconscious fast enough. “Why am I still here?”

They say you can’t remember pain, and I’ve always found that to be crap. I remember my legs hurting when I was a child, remember how the pain felt. I can easily remember how badly my body aches when the FMS really flares, how migraines feel, how labour and delivery felt. But I cannot remember the pain of the rupture. I cannot bring it to mind at all. I only remember feeling miserable and moaning over and over, like a mantra, ”It hurts, it hurts, it hurts.” I felt badly about that, worrying that I was upsetting my mother, who was standing beside my bed helpless to do anything at all to make it better, but I could not stop the moaning. I remember begging for sedation, not understanding why they couldn’t just knock me out that moment, even if they weren’t ready to operate.

Needless to say, that experience really messes up the bell curve when it comes to rating my pain. Assigning a number to a feeling is difficult enough as it is. So when they asked me the question this morning, I decided to remove the rupture from the curve, since it was pulling everything out of wack. I decided that when the nurse says that number 10 is the worst pain ever, she really didn’t mean pain that makes you uncaring of your own death, perhaps even welcoming of it. I decided that unmedicated childbirth could be the worst pain, or maybe the vicious migraines I’ve had, which make me want to hide in a dark room and not move, but have never had me contemplating death - those could be the 10.

After the assessment, which included many questions about my life and how I handle my FMS, the doctor told me that she wasn’t sure how much their program could really do for me. A lot of what they do, she said, was help people come to terms with their conditions and then learn how to appropriately pace themselves, something the doctor thinks I have done long ago. (J disagreed when I told him, saying I don’t know how to pace myself at all). Despite that, she did think that maybe they could still help. She said knowing something (how to hande one’s illness, for example) and doing it are not the same thing, and perhaps having everything in one place and working thought it intensively would be of benefit to me. That was pretty much the conclusion I had come to as well (although I was secretly hoping they knew some stuff I don’t already, and this meeting kind of popped that bubble).

All that being said, they rejected me. Thanks to my Nap, I’m not at the point where I could handle the intensity of their course. That was what I feared would happen. However, she suggested re-evaluating me in September. She did say that it was just a matter of time. I just need to recover from, as she put it ‘this insult to your body’ and eventually they will accept me.

I consoled myself when I left by popping over to a large and marvelous garden centre near there and getting a couple little plants for the few gaps still in my front garden. Green things make everything better in spring. 

Two happys and a bad

I was up reasonably bright and early this morning because Asher had a play at school I had to attend first thing. The play was happy thing #1.

(Asher with two co-stars who are ‘on a bus.’ If he looks way taller than they are, well, that is because he is.)

We, the audience, got to experience the play three times in a row, as there were not nearly enough roles to go around. It was okay because the play wasn’t that long and the children were uber-cute, even the ones I wasn’t directly related to. As 8-turning-9 years old, they are right on the cusp of being too old for this sort of thing and yet not quite. They are still into it, and yet you can see hints of the grown-up people they are becoming, which I found utterly charming.

Asher was the narrator in the third play, sharing his duties with another kid. In the first two plays, the narrator was not a shared role. In fact, in the first play, the kid who narrated not only knew all his lines but every single line in the entire play. It was very entertaining watching him stand off to the side, lips moving silently as the other kids spoke their lines. It was like he was the puppet master.

Despite sharing the narrating duties, Asher still had a lot of lines, way more than I expected him to have in a play, especially a French play. He had about 10 lines, which is 9 more than I thought I’d hear out of him. It was the second-biggest role in the play. Needless to say, I love his French teacher. I always liked her, but now I love her.

I don’t actually just love her for seeing the potential to memorize that many lines in my space cadet of a son, but because she actually seems to be teaching them some French. That’s more than I ever got in my 11 years of French classes in the Ontario school system.

(Asher with the Other Asher (whose name also isn’t, in fact, Asher). They are buds, despite being dissimilar in practically every respect. Other Asher is, for example, extremely good at all sports. Except basketball. Asher is mediocre at all sports. Except basketball. But that is just because he’s so much closer to the net than the rest of them.)

The bad is that as a result of all of us rushing out in the morning, Jasper did not get enough of a chance to relieve himself in an appropriate spot (outside) and therefore did so in an inappropriate one (inside) - inside Maya’s room in particular. Thank goodness she’s at shul school and I got a chance to clean it up before she got to experience it first-hand. Her siblings will make certain she gets to experience it second-hand. They can’t wait to tell her.

The happy thing #2 is that a book I pre-ordered showed up today. Number 4 in the series Percy Jackson and the Olympians, The Battle of the Labyrinth, by Rick Riordan, is being released in the US today, but not until the 13th in Canada. And yet, the moment I pre-ordered it at the end of last week, Chapters happily mailed it out to me. Too bad Riordan doesn’t have the fame he deserves so I could sell it on ebay like people did with the rare early copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows.

Of course, we would have had to read it first anyway. It’s kind of killing me not to just read it without the kids, but they will kill me if I do.

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Here’s a bonus happy and bad, all in one. I have been on a waiting list for a pain clinic here that runs a 4-week intensive course to teach those of us afflicted with chronic pain to better deal with it. I had to fill out a form with pages and pages of questions about my condition and send it in, and the next step is to get an appointment with a doctor for assessment. I was led to understand it would be quite the wait for that appointment, but then I got a call yesterday telling me they had an opening this week. So yay for cancellations! But the appointment, at a hospital all the way across town, is at 8:15 am. AM! The 20 minute drive will be a good 40 minutes with the rush hour traffic and I have to be there at 8. 15. AM. I hurt just thinking about it.

the weekend

This weekend was kind of sucky. It rained, it was cold, I was tired. I don’t know how much of the tired can be blamed on my recent illness or how much of it should be blamed on my not-so-recent illness (ie, the FMS). I think I’ll blame some of the fatigue on the FMS and I’ll blame the fact that my legs got rubbery after walking for 10 minutes on my Big Nap.

Of course, when it comes right down to it, does it really matter which bit of how I felt can be blamed on what? Wait - yes it does. J kept pushing me to go for walks - long walks in the rainy weather - which I resisted, saying I was too tired. I don’t want to push myself too far. That makes sense if the fatigue is coma-related, but not if it is the FMS.

Anyway, I didn’t just sit around in bed all weekend - although that was a big part of my weekend, I admit. I did the birthday party routine. Asher had a party that started at 10 am on Sunday and Boo at 10:30, both at the other end of town (I suppose that is better than one at this end and one at that end). Asher’s ended at 11:30 and Boo’s at 12:30. Given that it takes 20 minutes to get home, there was no point in doing so between the end of one and the end of the other. Or in between, for that matter.

So Maya and I kicked around after dropping Boo off, wandering through an enormous pet store, for example, where I saw the coolest Betta (Siamese Fighting Fish) tank. I surfed around in search of a photo, but couldn’t find one. It was a small square tank that you hang on the wall. It was very elegant and zen-like and I wanted it. I love Bettas, but can’t put them in my fish tank because they get pissed off with the fish currently in residence. I have a tank full of little guppy-type fish called Endlers and their pretty tails get any Betta I’ve tried in the tank all riled up. They look like variations of this:

I coveted for a bit, then pictured in my head how annoyed J would be with both the money spent and another creature requiring care (especially as my current fish tank hasn’t been cleaned in about forever), and moved on.

We then headed back to pick up Asher, only to discover that party was running late. So I stood around and watched boys eat cake. When that was done, we went off to Boo’s party, arriving a bit early, just early enough to stand around and watch girls eat cake.

Just when I thought that party was over and I was free, the party chick handed each kid a bag of tokens and let them loose in a games area to play games for tickets, which can then be exchanged for small, crappy prizes.

The moment Boo was handed her bag, her two older siblings advanced on her and she clutched that bag to her chest in the way only a third child knows how. So I bought tokens for the older two. More standing around. That was my exercise. And it wore me out.

I think I might go clean the fish tank now. I’m inspired.

And now, we end with a cute picture of Maya and Jasper:

holes

I’m just dragging myself out of the hole I fell into thanks to Sting. Man, was I wiped yesterday. It was all worth it, though. It was lots of fun. The friend with the box had a great view - okay, Sting was kind of small, but there was a great big view screen right in front of us. The only people who got to see the performers close up were crazy enough to stand throughout the concert, so I was happy with the seat and the screen.

What weighs more, the earth or just-under-infinity houses? This is the question the boy just came in and asked me. How does he come up with these things?

We’ve been digging weeds in the back yard. I’ve been planting clover everywhere for the past couple of years, but there’s one spot where the clover didn’t take last year and these huge annoying weeds are taking over. Boo monkeyed around the swing set while Asher, Maya and I dug. We were doing really well, making a nice clear patch to scatter clover seeds when Jasper decided to help. We now have several sizeable holes there too. I know I should have stopped him, but he looks like such a madman, lunging around in the dirt, that we can’t bring ourselves to even try. It makes him so happy. I care deeply about my front garden, babying it and yelling at children who step in the wrong spot, but the back yard is all about function and if it makes the dog happy to dig a few holes - or children, for that matter - I’m not going to get too upset about it.

Sting!

Tonight, J and I are going to see the Police in concert, thanks to a good friend with a box. I love Sting. I’ve loved Sting for years, Not only do I like his music, but he sure is purty. It kind of kills me, though, that he’s been purty the entire 20 years I’ve been a fan, while I’ve gotten distinctly less so.

Unfortunately, I’ve lost my glasses, so I won’t be able to truly appreciate how cute he is, but I can still appreciate the music. And the fact that I’m sitting in a box and can go to the bathroom without tripping past rows of feet and then walking for miles.

I think I’ll bring my knitting.

Here she goes again…

Wrote this yesterday, didn’t get around to posting it until today. What can you do …

You know what I just realized? Today is my 2-month anniversary of waking up from the coma. That’s it - just two short months. I woke up on February 29th, which is kind of cool. Also, I woke up on day 18 of my coma. Eighteen is a very significant number in Judaism. The letters all have number values, and the word ‘chai,’ which means ‘life,’ has the number value of 18. So coming to life again on the 18th day is also pretty cool.

It is very, very hard to imagine that it has only been two months.

I remember how helpless I felt. The rehab nurses would come in every day to work on my muscles and would try to get me to move my legs - just lift the knee, lift the ankle - and my traitorous legs refused to move.

My hands were in claws, curled up. The times I was awake and no one was in fussing with something medical, I would go over the physio exercises I had been given for my hands and arms, over and over again. I wanted to be able to write again, to feed myself.

I remember the first time I fed myself all alone. The nurse poured my box of cereal into a bowl and put a cloth on my chest to serve as a bib. I dragged the bowl onto my chest and, ham-fisted, spooned the cereal in. A fair amount only made it onto the bib. I still got tired of eating it before it was finished. I hadn’t the energy or strength to put the bowl back on the table, though, and had to wait for the nurse, bowl on my chest.

When I got a little stronger, I would insist on eating dinner myself, slowly cutting off a small peice of meat and manovering it to my mouth. J and my SIL admitted later that it drove them both crazy to watch how slow and awkward I was, that they wanted to just grab the cutlery and feed me.

I remember that I always felt as thought I could not breathe properly, and that was partly because I couldn’t. For at least the first week, they’d put me back on oxygen for nights, and randomly throughout the day when my oxygen fell low. They tested me constantly, checking my oxygen level, blood sugar level, blood pressure. Four times a day, they stuck a needle in my fingers for the blood sugar. Three times a day, they stuck a needle in my belly to give me heprin ( blood thinner to prevent clots). Those burned like a match being held to my skin and the bruising lasted so long the last of them has only just faded.

I insisted on having a fan blowing at me all the time, because then I felt like I could breathe. My family quickly learned to stay out of its path. After a while, it didn’t have to blow directly at me, and then I graduated to not needing it at all. I still can’t breathe properly, though. I still have pleurisy, which means the lining of my lungs is inflamed. I cannot take a deep breath, but I can take a deeper one than I could a week ago. Hiccups feel exactly like a hard punch in the chest, so when I have the misfortune to get them, I sound like this: “Hic! OW! Hic! OW!”

The first time the nurses tried to get me to sit, they pulled me up into sitting position on the side of my bed, three of them surrounding me. I put my fists on the bed to steady myself and they let go. And, just like a small baby, I began to topple over even as I tried to hold myself up.

So they sat me in a chair instead. They took a harness, the kind one would use on a small whale and, rolling me to one side, they put in on the bed. Rolling me to the other side, they had it completely under me. The hooked the loops on each corner up to a machine hanging from the ceiling and lifted me off the bed, swung me over to the chair and lowered me. The first time I sat in the chair I stayed half an hour before I was exhausted, and was lifted back.

As soon as I got comfortable in the chair, the nurses insisted I get there myself. They were always upping the ante. They placed a walker in front of me and hauled me to my feet. As I stood, feeling excruciating pain in my calves and feet, I looked down. My feet were slightly curled under and looked exactly like my grandmother’s feet had and in that moment, I believed I would never again walk normally.

Once I got used to the two-step shuffle it took to get from bed to chair, the nurses handed me the walker, pointed to the hall and said, “Go.” I made it 25 steps the first time. They counted. I was as delighted as a small child and celebrated by buzzing around the ICU in my wheelchair, with the nurses cheering.

I made it 50 steps the next day.

Today, I walked the regular loop with Jasper at the dog park. I walked for half an hour, which means that loop took me about twice as long as it used to, but still, I made it through the whole loop. And that was after getting a few groceries and before picking up the kids and taking Asher to get a new fiddle.

Look at me - you’ll see no hint of what I’ve gone through. It’s all written on my body underneath my clothes, the deep red scars on my belly, my torso, under my left arm. They are my constant reminder of much I’ve gone through to get back here. That, and the looks I sometimes see on the faces of my parents and J. Two months clearly is not as long for them as it is for me.

fun meme

I stole this from pluckymama, because it seemed fun.

i am: alive, which is more impressive than it initially sounds
i think: far too much
i know: a lot of useless stuff
i want: to go back to Israel
i have: everything I need
i wish: for my children will grow up and be happy
i hate: feeling like I haven’t done enough with my life
i miss: the intensity of grad school
i fear: something happening to my family
i feel: tired
i hear: my boy practicing on his new fiddle
i smell: nothing, because allergies have stuffed up my nose
i crave: coca cola
i search: online for more useless information, every day
i wonder: what the future holds
i regret: not having more of a career
i love: my family
i ache: always
i care: that my children become good and caring people
i always: sleep too much
i am not: a bad mother
i believe: converting to Judaism was one of the smartest things I ever did
i dance: to make my kids laugh
i sing: whenever I want, even though I can’t carry a tune
i cry: a lot more than I did before I had kids
i don’t always: take the easy way out
i fight: with Maya more than I want, which is not at all
i write: all the time
i win: at Scrabble when J is really tired.
i lose: my keys, bank card, my sunglasses, my jack-knife, my VISA card …
i never: do as much as I should
i confuse: need with want
i listen: to public radio, almost exclusively, on my ipod
i can usually be found: in front of the computer
i am scared: of failing
i need:a job
i am happy about: how many good friends I have

Teachers

My kids went back to school today, despite Maya’s current professed desire to end her schooling at grade 6. It prompted this reminiscence: 

When I went to university, I admit I started off quite confidently. I had graduated high school at the very top of my class, walking away with a handful of awards for the highest mark in various classes. I decided to do a combined English/History degree. 

My first essay was in English, on Great Expectations. I got a B. It was a bit of a shock.

Obviously, I wasn’t the only kid used to acing everything who received a cold wake-up call when starting university, and in fact, there were those whose shock was significantly larger. One of those was my cousin, who was taking some of the same courses I was. Her English essay was utterly dismantled and the professor wrote that at good start for her would be to learn how to write an essay. This was her first inkling that her high school education had failed her on a basic level, and my first inkling that I owed a great debt to someone I thought I hated.

I remember sitting in the hallway in our residence after that essay, teaching my cousin the mechanics of writing an essay. Thesis statement, topic sentences - she hadn’t a clue. I had a clue because of Mrs. MacDonald, who I had for grades nine and eleven English. Mrs. MacDonald didn’t just say, “Here’s a topic, go write an essay.” Oh no, she made us do outlines and come up with a thesis statement and put topic sentences on cue cards and do rough drafts, and hand each stage in to her to be marked. I hated that. I thought she was so very anal retentive and annoying and fussy. Now I think the woman was a saint, dragging all those ungrateful students through the mechanics of writing a proper essay. By the time I realized the debt I owed her, she was gone from the school and I never got to thank her. It’s too bad, because I don’t think she got thanked too often.

I also wish I could go back and thank Mr. Shepard, my fourth grade teacher. He made made stay after school shortly after the year had begun and said he noticed I sucked my thumb when I was concentrating and was being teased, and offered to help me stop. We made a deal. Every time he caught me sucking my thumb, he’d tell me to do ten push-ups or sit-ups, his standard punishment for small transgressions like talking to a neighbour when you should be working. He never embarrassed me by saying why I had to do this and the equation of thumb = physical exercise quickly broke me of the habit.

There was Mr. Penton, who taught me that history wasn’t about boring dead people after all, triggering a life-long obsession with the subject. He was followed by a woman who was not only a favourite teacher, but one of my favourite people, Professor Catherine Brown. When I entered her first year history class, I thought they stuck the decrepit old lady with the first years, so the first lesson she taught me was not to judge someone by her looks, as she was sharp as a tack. I switched to a full History major thanks to her and she guided my university career after that. I loved her.

University was where I met most of the teachers who had a profound effect on me. There was Gary Watson, who treated me like an adult and and equal, and Bronwen Wallace, a brilliant writer, who taught me to appreciate poetry and Lionel Lumb, who made me feel like I was good enough to do anything I wanted to. 

It was good to have all those people build me up before I went and had children to tear me back down again. Oh, kidding. Sometimes they are nice to me. Not as often as the dog is, but still.

boring bloggyness

I feel like I should post something, but don’t have anything interesting to write about. And I’m on my laptop, which makes showing you pretty pictures harder.

I’ve been spending this week slowly cleaning up my front garden, clearing away old leaves to discover what interesting plant is growing underneath. I frequently forget what I’ve planted, so I’m constantly being surprised by unexpected growing things.

I get tired easily, but I’ve given up on the back yard, so I have less to do.

I successfully took the kids swimming yesterday, in a very nice warm pool. Swimming was initially problematic for me, thanks to the colostomy. That makes for strange bulges in bathing suits, because I have a bag glued to my abdomen. Fortunately, swim shorts are in, so I bought a pair and wear it over my bathing suit. They don’t match at all, but it hides the bulges successfully.

I confess, used to think mildly negative thoughts about people who took their stuff and went into change rooms to change in locker rooms. How prudish, I thought. We all have bulges and floppy boobs. But we don’t all have colostomy bags and huge angry red scars running half way up our bellies and now I go into the change room to change, so as not to scare the other people there. And mentally apologize to all those of whom I thought ill.

In case you think I’m exaggerating, I’ll mention that as a family, we tend to be a fairly unconcerned about nakedness, but now when I walk out of my bathroom to get dressed, should a child be in my room, I get to hear, “Ugh!” before they make a run for it. The other day, I was still towelling off and as Maya hightailed it out of my room, I heard her say, “Note to self: never use that towel.”

My kids are not allowed to watch TV after school on a week day, but a few moments ago, Asher came up to tattle on his sister. I told him he could go down and tell her I was ordering her to turn it off. He disappeared and has not returned, so I fear he too has been caught in the seductive orbit of Hannah Montana. I must go rescue them both …