In my previous post, I noted that “my” spring, what I call PolySpring, takes place on April 24th. You know, dun dun dun…today!
It’s the day by which I feel all the snow is guaranteed to be gone from my front-yard, and I’m ready for real spring. Normally, I would have already used the BBQ quite a few times…so far this year? Thrice. Pretty basic stuff so far.
But I wouldn’t say I’m feeling like Spring. My body hates me right now, really feeling bloated and slow and tired.
We are also doing a home reno right now, three bathrooms (which started as two bathrooms and grew), so things are a bit chaotic. Electricians are coming today so a bit of cleanup to get things ready for them.
And I have about 8 active files at work, with three taking nose dives on Friday. They just didn’t go as planned, after I was feeling things were working pretty well with my team. There’s a national strike but it doesn’t really affect my team.
I have some stuff to do in the basement that I thought I would get done this weekend, and I don’t feel like I accomplished hardly ANYTHING. I moved a desk. Woohoo! Sigh.
So I am sooo not feeling great about anything right now. I’m not even feeling like faking it, you know? I have to, for work, for the team, but it’ll be a struggle this week. Maybe I can fake trying to fake it?
Why am I blogging at 3 in the morning on a late Saturday night / early Sunday morning? Because blogging often helps me organize my thoughts and get them “out of my head” so I can focus on other things. It’s not a long post, don’t worry. The last month has been interesting for progress and pauses on progress on various projects, so maybe it’s more that the month has been a roller coaster and this week just accentuated the variability. I’ll talk more about the month later, but this week was enough on it’s own.
I started off sick. The previous week, I seemed to be fighting something. I had a bit of a scratchy throat at times, a bit of a headache, I was more tired than usual, often sleeping after supper, even though my stomach and other stuff seemed fine. I wasn’t sure what it was as I generally felt “okay”, but the sleep was more unusual in style/form than incidence.
Friday afternoon, I started to crash and all weekend I was sick. The only thing that helped was sleeping. Some bit of flu, no COVID result, all good. I was off Monday and Tuesday from work, which was part of the coaster ride, trying to keep some big projects going that my team is leading, while trying to make sure that my being off wasn’t going to delay them. I worked a couple of hours each day, but was otherwise down for the count.
On Wednesday, I was back to work and we had some good news to celebrate at home. Andrea’s latest bone marrow results are in, and while there are three elements for her type of cancer to indicate “status”, she previously had already passed two of them with flying colours. The last test / element was to see if her bone marrow was cancer-free or not. TBH, most of the time, people with her type of cancer do NOT get an “all clear” sign for this element. There’s almost always SOME residual signs of the cancer in the bone marrow. Andrea’s results? All clear. Which means three green lights = full remission. We were expecting “ALMOST full remission”, but there was no caveat on the results. She hasn’t heard “FULL” from her doctor yet, but as her sister said, “Be the unicorn!”. The one that gets a full remission diagnosis. She still has some pills to take as part of the protocol, and three more tests in the next five months, but then she’s “done” everything for now with the hope of a very long wait to potentially have to have another round when it comes back. We’d like to dream “IF it comes back”, but well, that’s not a realistic dream for this type of cancer. It is generally “ALMOST always” coming back at some point, anywhere from 3 to 10+ years. We’re obviously hoping for a new record. Go Unicorn, go!
Unfortunately, our excitement was tempered by the news that Andrea’s aunt had been taken to the hospital with abdominal pain that ended up being quite serious. Extreme surgery later, she was in an ICU; more complications, back to surgery, back to ICU. And then the reality that she was not going to recover from this experience. She passed away on Thursday around lunch our time. We did not see that one coming. She was 73, and far too young for us to lose her. I know, cuz my dad was only 69 when he passed. Hey! There’s a thought! Maybe her and my Dad can play some card games. That would be a hoot. 🙂
And just for fun, I’m still sick, Andrea has gone off to Peterborough for the night, there’s other stuff going on around us in the family for nursing homes and things, we had a leak in our dishwasher that dripped into our basement onto the freshly patched drywall area we just had done, we’re planning for a large bathroom renovation project, etc.
Not my favorite week by a long shot. And I keep expecting to break a rib every time I cough. I don’t even REMEMBER buying a ticket for the roller coaster, I don’t even like rides. How’s your week been?
Ottawa was part of a big storm that swept through the area yesterday. Lots of property damage and five people died. One was killed in a trailer when a tree fell on it, two more were killed while out walking and got hit by trees, and then there were two that people are claiming were obvious morons and hence worthy of a Darwin Award. I’m not so sure I would cast a vote for them for such an award.
The logic seems almost unassailable at first blush. The risk of thunderstorms was forecast, and then in late afternoon, an emergency alert went out to all phones. Severe storm watch with risks of funnel clouds. So if you were out in it and died doing something stupid to do in a storm, you must have been a moron.
The two supposed nominees were on a golf course (man) and on the river in a boat (woman).
I’m far from being a strong knowledgeable boater, but I spent the first 20 years of my life around lakes and boats. And I didn’t have that same reaction to the boater death at all. And not just because I don’t like the idea of mocking someone who died and suggesting they deserved it.
Rapid onset
I was out shopping, saw the alert, but I never once thought, “Oh, I should seek shelter immediately”. I was in my car, which conveys a false sense of security to many of us. Literally, thousands of other people were out in their cars and got the same warnings. Most would do what I did. Assume that there will be a graduated ramp-up, some darker clouds, some early rain, distant thunder and lightning.
I’m 54 years old, I’ve lived through a few bad storms in my life, many of them in far less urban surroundings and shelter. But I confess I have never seen a storm hit so hard or so fast in my life.
I was at Greenbank plaza, with no real signs of rain or storm other than some darker skies off to the NW. I went into a store, picked up my shopping in about 10 minutes, came out, got in the car, and there was still nothing to say the storm was about to start. I moved my car about 200m to park beside a grocery store to wait for Andrea and Jacob to come out. And then everything changed.
It went from “yeah, it looks like it will rain before we get home” to “holy crap, I feel like I am in a car wash that is out of control” in less than 90 seconds. It was super intense and lasted about 2 minutes.
I’ve never experienced anything like it, not at the lake, not at the house, not in other countries, nada.
Boater safety
When I heard about the boater, my thought was the complete opposite of most people. If it had been a normal storm, sure, I probably would have thought, “What kind of idiot stays on the water during a THUNDERSTORM?”.
But, as I said, I saw how fast it hit. From nothing to chaos with no ramp-up. I bet a lot of experienced boaters got the crap scared out of them too.
As I mentioned, I grew up around water, with lots of time with small boats. At the lake, we would normally have a good 30-45 minute warning that a storm was coming just from reading the water or the white line on opposite shores. We’d wander around tents or trailers shutting windows, moving loose stuff inside, etc. Once in a while, we would have to rush to shut windows, but usually just because we procrastinated, not because we didn’t see it coming. If you were on the lake, and lots of people would be as fish confuse the darker skies for early night and start feeding, you headed in when the darker clouds started appearing on the horizon. With small runabouts, that could still be a 15-30 minute run home, depending on distance and the size of your motor. On the way, you would be watching the horizon, often hugging the shoreline. But your primary worry would be lightning, or getting soaked, not that your boat was going to capsize and you might drown. Which is what happened to the woman who died.
That literally never happened on our lake unless you were in a sailboat, and then you didn’t even really need a big storm. The tall mast was likely enough. Sure, if you’re on an ocean or the Great Lakes, you’re always at risk of capsizing, but very hard to do in simple lakes and rivers unless you’re in a kayak or canoe. Most small pleasure craft have flatter bottoms and low profiles for wind, and the waves themselves don’t get so high compared with the sides of the boat…a lower centre of mass generally keeps them righted. If you were driving like a bat out of hell in big waves, you could flip a boat, but it wouldn’t be “expected” just from a storm.
I have no trouble believing that a lot of experienced boaters got caught off-guard by the atypical rate of onset. I was in a CAR and felt like it came out of nowhere.
Alerts
Some people are pointing out, “Well, yeah, sure, but there were ALERTS on phones.”
Uh-huh. And an alert on your phone doesn’t do you much good if it comes 10 minutes before the storm hits and your 30 minutes from base. Or, more likely, if you follow all the pop advice out there about disconnecting from the digital life and turning your devices off while you embrace nature. Which a lot of experienced boaters do. Many deliberately don’t take their phones out on the lake. That’s the reason they’re out there. They’re not partying and needing a selfie every two minutes or Instagramming their flip flops, they’re disconnecting.
But I saw the alert. And if I had been on a boat? I would have headed into shore, heading back to our campsite. Yet with the speed of onset from normal “we’re going to get wet” to “we’re actually in serious danger” chaos, even being along the shore? I doubt I would have had time to pull all the way in, find a place to tie-off, and get under better shelter. I’ve seen nothing in any of the articles talking about how far she was out in the river or how far from her base, or if she was headed back. I am betting there will be several articles this summer in boating magazines about what to do if you do get caught in a sudden storm that comes up too rapidly to get to shore. Maybe she was within five feet of shore, maybe the capsizing caused her to hit her head, maybe she was trapped in the boat. I don’t know, but I’m not willing to write her off as a moron.
The other evidence we do see
My reaction to the golfer isn’t too far off that. I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they were too far out from the clubhouse when it hit to get all the way back. I’m betting literally dozens across Ottawa alone were in the same situation, but you didn’t hear about them, cuz they didn’t die. If they were walking and far enough out, even if they started back with the alert, they may not have made it to the clubhouse in time.
But while people want to nominate either of them, it is the evidence of the two who died while walking that seems the most compelling to me. They were both seemingly walking in their own neighbourhoods. Before the storm hit, or even when it first started, they were likely within 100-200 feet of a house. They could easily have stepped up on someone’s porch and said, “Hey, let me in, I need help, I’m caught in a storm.” But before either could actually do that, before they felt they were unsafe and needed to get out of the storm RIGHT now, the storm intensified enough to knock two trees over on them.
If two people out walking in their own neighbourhood couldn’t get to shelter in time, likely because of the rapid onset of the storm from dark skies to Holy Hannah, I doubt a golfer or a boater would have been able to either.
Of course, if someone finds their phones and sees him or her taking selfies in the middle of the lake or golf course while the storm raged around them, I’m willing to vote. Until then, it’s just sad.
I have diabetic issues, which is a fancy way of saying that my bloodwork bounces around between not-diabetic, pre-diabetic, and diabetic. I have trouble saying I’m diabetic at times because I feel like a bit of an imposter saying it. Like I’m over-claiming my issues. But what it means is that I should be doing regular bloodwork to check my A1C numbers.
When COVID hit, I was a bit behind on my bloodwork and was due for a new “update”, partly as the resident doctor I was normally dealing with at the family centre was no longer available, and I’d be getting someone new. We postponed until her arrival, but by the time I was set to do an appointment, COVID had hit, and my bloodwork got pushed. I did basic stuff over the calendar year, but nothing for my bloodwork. TBH, I didn’t really want to … the idea of going to a lab when I didn’t “have” to seemed almost scary risky.
Then I had all my leg issues in January, we agreed we should do some new labwork, but they wanted me to be off all my antibiotics and other related stuff so it would be clean, and my mental load was already high enough at the time. So I was going to go in March, just in time to have complications with my leg wound and another round of antibiotics. Fast-forward to April, and the doctor wanted me to do a totally different set of labs anyway, as she wanted to screen for mental health stuff too.
Enter the scheduling problem
I went online to book an appointment at a lab near me, and the first available date was almost 4w away. This was just after the most recent lockdown happened. I searched around, found another lab in the same group which has really good online results that I like, and I booked for about 2w later. All good. Way over in Gloucester somewhere, but whatever, it was the earliest available anywhere in the group of labs.
Fast-forward again to the day of the labwork and I woke up feeling a bit off, almost feverish. It didn’t seem like a great risk, and I was still having a bit of anxiety about going. Sure, I don’t like bloodwork normally, but this was more just about going for a health appointment to a general lab. I assumed, 14m into the pandemic and everything being appointment booking, that it would be relatively painless to go, but still.
I cancelled and rebooked, and my new appointment was this past week on Thursday. I prefer to do these types of appointment first thing in the morning if I can, but the available times were at 1:00 p.m. so would go over lunch. Great.
The appointment
I needed to head out about 12:30, and about 12:15, I grabbed the requisition that I had printed weeks ago, and my phone which had the address. I had never been to the lab before, so I wanted to look it up on my phone app to see the best route. Checked the address. Huh.
I mentioned above that the lab was in Gloucester, which is about 20m away. Well, the FIRST lab was there. Apparently when I rebooked, I had decided that going all the way to Gloucester was overkill, and I would have to wait longer in the booking system but I rebooked in my neighbourhood. I had absolutely no memory that I had done that.
Don’t get me wrong, once I saw where it was, I remembered thinking that I might as well go to the one close to me, but if you had asked me that morning on pain of death, I would have said I was booked in Gloucester. No doubt in my mind AT ALL. In fact, if I had known already where the lab was, I would have hopped in the car and driven straight there without checking anything. It was just that it was my first time going to that location, so I had to look at my phone to see what address I had saved in my calendar. If I had printed out the instructions the first time, I would have just grabbed them and drove. All that way for nothing. Huh.
Okay, moving on, I had a bit more time to kill, went over and entered the building. I was expecting some sort of “new procedure” to get registered but I wasn’t expecting chaos. There was a woman standing in the doorway, with her back foot kind of holding the door open while she took people’s forms and health cards. There was a pseudo line up of about 5 people waiting to hand her stuff, and another 10 people or so around the large hallway just hanging out, obviously waiting. I had thought, and I even thought I had read this on their site, that they weren’t doing “walk-ins”, only appointments. Nope, they were fully open for business. The only real difference from before to now was that they weren’t letting people wait in the same waiting room inside. They had to be “outside” the lab. Umm, okay.
I wasn’t really thrilled, I had expected extremely limited contact with people, and here was a 15-person queue with no indication where to sit/stand/wait, etc. Some were standing too close for my comfort, and I moved farther away. But that’s a lot of people hanging out in a hallway for extended periods of time.
Now, yes, I had an appointment, and after the woman went back in to register all these people and hand over the forms and health cards, I was the first person she called when she came back out. My appointment was at 1:10, I got there about 1:05, through the line about 1:11, and they called me into the waiting room (where about 3 other people were, all the other chairs removed) around 1:18, and then called me back to the cubicle about 1:25 or so.
One of the tests the doctor asked for is not covered by OHIP apparently, so I had to pay $13.00 for something, which is a bit unusual I guess, but whatever. When I got to the cubicle, there was nobody there, just me, and one person basically doing all the blood work. She was going from cubicle 1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4, 4 back to 1. When I got there, she was doing blood with someone in cubicle 3, so I had to wait for her to do 4, 1 and 2 before she got to me. Not long, maybe another 15m or so, but the whole time I was thinking, “What the heck am I doing in a small enclosed space for 15 extra minutes when I don’t need to be here?”.
My anxiety level went up the whole time I was waiting. The initial COVID screening amounted to the equivalent of “Do you feel sick or have you travelled?” and that was about it, so it’s not like I was feeling “safe” or that someone else might not have been sick and in the same airspace before me.
Literally, my skin was crawling. I wanted to just leave. I need the bloodwork, and my brain was likely over-reacting, but I kept thinking, “And this is what it is like when I made an APPOINTMENT?”. I noted when I was leaving that the waiting list (a digital one nobody in the queue can see because it’s in the old waiting room, not the hall) showed intake waiting period of 72 minutes, which was definitely NOT shared with anyone registering anew. If I had waited 72 minutes + another 20-25 to get through the bloodwork, I would have been unhinged.
Plus, there was something odd with my regular bloodletting. Because of my size and fatty arms, they can’t do blood in the crook of my arm, it’s just easier to do it on the back of my hand. Lots of people can’t do that, it hurts, but it’s minor compared to multiple stabbings in the arm. So we do the right hand, she needs 5 vials, and normally after the initial needle is inserted, it doesn’t hurt. This time, it hurt the entire time the needle was in. At the end of vial 3, my vein said “Okay, I’m done”, and closed up. It clotted fast. It’s never done that before.
She switched to my left hand, started in, got another vial, and that vein closed up too. She was puzzled, I could tell.
And it makes me wonder if it could somehow be related to the AZ vaccine…there are risks of people having blood clotting problems. Is it possible that even without bigger issues it causes faster clotting generally? I have felt more sluggish since I got the vaccine too, 3w ago. Who knows? I’ll mention it to the doctor when we review my bloodwork results. I have my results, my A1C is a bit higher than I would like, back a little in the actual diabetes range, but still lower than my highest and I’m surprised considering my eating and exercise habits of the last year.
When I was leaving, I thought about taking a picture of the waiting list and then letting people outside in the hall know their status, a “nice” shared group experience and instead I just bolted. I just wanted to go. We had all bonded briefly in the hallway when new people showed up and wondered “what do I do? where do I stand?” when the greeter wasn’t actually there. But nobody was looking to make friends, we were just helping out because there was no signage and nobody wanted others being stressed as we compensated for the poor setup.
Understanding my reaction
I’ve been thinking about my reaction since I left. I was in such a rush getting out, I paid for my parking and then tried to throw the stub to get out of the lot into the garbage can and just take the receipt. I wasn’t in a fog so much as I just felt “icky”. Like I needed to go home and take a shower.
But as I reviewed the experience, it wasn’t simply the chaos. Or the waiting. Or the blood-letting. Or the time.
I think what bothered me most was that after 14m of a pandemic, THIS is what they have in place? Really?
I was expecting streamlined, organized, something resembling intelligent delivery design.
Instead, I had a greeter holding the door open with her foot while she took forms from whoever happened to step up next. Every other medical thing I have done in the last 14m was handled better for COVID. This was a shit-show.
My blog is often my creative outlet, a way of making sense of the world. Taking an issue, wrestling with the details, framing it a certain way, putting a personal stamp on it. It is also stress relief. I talk through some of the things that are bothering me, a monologue with myself that I share publicly. Sometimes they provoke reactions, likes on FB or a comment or two. Many times they don’t. While I would love to have thousands of people hanging on my every written word, I write most of the time for me. A diary of sorts. Maybe a legacy that my son will some day read, wondering, “What did Dad think about that?”.
Yet because I write for me, sometimes as potentially the only one who will read the post, I also cannot hide in sophistry or metaphor. I believe strongly in as much transparency in relationships as they can handle, sometimes more than is comfortable, and that transparency has to apply to my relationship with myself. But even though it is sometimes hard, I know that my writing is good for me. An outlet of release.
Which is why I am posting something when I really don’t feel like posting or doing anything. I want to curl up in a ball and shut out the world. If it wasn’t for COVID, I’d probably want to go somewhere for a week, turn off my phone, and just shut down. To simply “be”, find my centre, and let my body and mind recharge. A form of CTRL-ALT-DELETE for my internal software and external hardware.
Except life doesn’t work like that, of course. You can’t run away from problems, and if they’re mental noise, they end up going anywhere you go too. I’ve often wondered if I’d be better off having an interest in alcohol occasionally. Something to just overwhelm the brain and shut it off for awhile. I tend to mute it through distraction instead, binge-watching something or a project. But I’m having trouble filtering the noise right now.
A good portion of it is COVID, of course. I feel like I want to go to a mall and just walk around. No shopping, no interactions with anyone, just go and walk around. Do something somewhat normal. I won’t, we are still a high-risk household, after all.
Some of it is the winter. I do tend to get squirrelly in February, although I’m barely noticing other than having to clear snow off the car. I barely even know it is winter or anything outside of the pod.
But my issues with my leg are getting to me. I can wrap my head around the compression socks, maybe not well, maybe not right away, but it’s noise. I did my fitting today for some custom socks, yay, and it’s not a big deal in the long run. Same shit, different day. Whatever.
I was able to wrap my head around the trips to wound care, constant wrapping, the extra hassles with showering, etc. Mostly because I could see a light at the end of the tunnel. My leg was improving, the wound was healing, the compression was helping.
And then last week blew that to hell in a handbasket.
My wound started to get angry and red again, I had multiple appointments by phone with my doctor to go back on the antibiotic horse pills for another 14d. I also had multiple “rush” appointments with the wound care people after I had to rip the compression off on Saturday and again today because the wound was starting to hurt like the Dickens. I think the bandage is somehow slipping under the compression over time, and it is “pulling” at the wound. My nurse thinks it is because I’m not keeping my legs elevated during the day, which while working at a desk for 8h isn’t a great combo.
So where does that leave me? Basically with a wound that is almost back to square one and the likelihood that my next stop is going to be an ER sometime. Who the f*** knows what they’ll actually do for me if I go, since I’m already receiving wound care and antibiotics. I suppose IV antibiotics is a possibility.
Yet when I look at that list, you know what I see?
Whining.
It’s not that serious in the end. There are people out there with real serious health problems and I’m not talking about simply COVID. I’m talking about chronic pain conditions. Things they deal with and live with, and I can’t help but wonder.
If I’m this much of a basket case with a simple leg wound, what will I be like when I get to a point with REAL problems to live with?
That is what is frying my mental bacon. The weakness, the face of the future, my comfort and ability to handle mental stress and emotional turmoil but which seems to fail me completely when dealing with physical discomfort.
With a slightly serious segue, it is made me think about the MAID legislation that is going through. Medical Assistance In Dying. And it makes me wonder. Is that me in the future? Am I going to be THAT guy? The one who is in some discomfort, isn’t dying anytime soon, is relatively mentally competent (or at least as I ever was) but simply cannot endure the day to day that is misery?
I already live in fear of mental decline. For someone who has always lived in his mind, has always used his mind to separate himself apart from others in school or work, who defines himself by his mind, the thought of that mind not being “there” to continue to define myself is relatively terrifying. If my fear of snakes was put in comparison with fear of dementia, snakes would be about a 2 compared to a 12 for dementia. Even while knowing that ironically, I won’t know if it does decline.
Anyway.
On the other hand, I’m not in distress, I’m not in crisis. It’s a setback, I’ll bounce back. I’ll write, I’ll do Lego, I’ll do some stuff on my website design. But first I’m going to take a mental health day on Wednesday, as I didn’t feel like I’d really accomplish anything at work anyway.
Oh, and I’ll take out the garbage and recycling. I’ve already cleared snow twice today (Tuesday) so I’m hoping I won’t need to do that on Wednesday too, if I can help it. More coming on Thursday. Yay.
At least I was outside for awhile, right?
In the meantime, I blog late at night, throwing my words out into the abyss. A week ago I reached 1500 posts, and I didn’t even notice. I probably need to celebrate that milestone somehow, just not sure what it is yet.
