Falling Apart and Getting Together

I am lucky that I don’t have a major health issue but that’s not going to stop me from writing a whiny post about all the little stuff that’s keeping me from popping out of bed each morning with a great attitude and my arms outstretched and singing Sound of Music style. Why can’t I be like that? Maybe if I could throw open the windows and listen to the sounds of spring it would be different. But the furnace still runs, my winter coat is still needed and we’ve even got a chance of snow back in the weather forecast! The Canadian Geese haven’t even been by yet on their way up north. Skip the robins, honking geese is my signal that spring is on the way. Come to think about it, I haven’t seen a robin either. They’d have to have microwaves to defrost worms for their dinners. I want spring and if it doesn’t show up soon I’m going to have a hissy fit!

I have so much to be grateful for yadda, yadda, yadda and yet it’s a collection of petty stuff that’s dragging me down. Remember the Popeye’s Elbow (Olecranon Bursitis) I wrote about a month ago? It didn’t go away on its own like Dr. Google predicted happens in most cases. It got bigger and redder and I called the doctor’s office. They got me in the same afternoon to see the nurse practitioner. I’m allergic to some of the (shotgun type) antibiotics commonly prescribed and the one she put me on has this written in all caps on the bottle: IT’S COMMON TO HAVE DIARRHEA WITH THIS DRUG! Yippy I oh, won’t that be fun! I also have to use heat on my elbow four times a day and go back next week to get it aspirated if it’s not gone. It’s not going to be gone. My Lucky Human Being Card is expired.

Then there are the hives I’m starting to wake up with again. This has happens like clockwork every 4-5 years my entire life. So I’m taking Zyrtec to limp through until I see my internist in April. I blame him this time for messing with my thyroid meds. It’s a balancing act. According to an autoimmune specialist I saw a few years ago, thyroid antibodies are causing the chronic hives aka I’m allergic to myself. Also going on: I broke off the side of a tooth and I’ll probably need a cap. Thankfully, that doesn’t hurt because I don’t dare to make an appointment with the dentist until after I’m finished with the round of antibiotics for my elbow. Same goes for the foot doctor that I need to see about two different issues going on that interferes with me falling asleep. And speaking of sleep, when I wake up in the morning I have an eye that’s getting crusted over and doesn’t want to open without a warm compress. I feel like a one-eyed minion from Despicable Me. And if anyone brings up the fact that a year ago I was preening about going to the gym and losing the weight I gained back over this past winter, I’m going pitch a probiotic Activia cup at their head. On the good side, a split fingernail I’ve been trying to grow out for over a year is nearly to the point where I’ll no longer need to put a nylon patch on it every Sunday. See, I can still appreciate my first world blessings. 

The complaint department is closed. Now on to some fun I had this week at an Irish Pub with four of my Gathering Girls friends where I had a great corn beef sandwich and a decadent chocolate dessert. They still had green beer but I’m not a beer kind of person. Though I miss the days of having a designated driver because I would have loved having a grasshopper, if people even make those crème de menthe drinks anymore. We laughed as if we’d been drinking, though. Boy did we laugh and I managed to dig out my rusty flirting skills and practice on a couple guys who were going by our booth on the way to being seated near-by. One of the guys paused and said, “We could just sit with these ladies. Their food looks pretty good.” “I’ll slide over and share,” I said, “I can’t eat it all.” He bantered back, “You’re not shy. I like that.” I took a little teasing from one of the ladies about talking with strangers. “Quiet Jean! Who would have ever guessed you had that in you?” Answer: Almost anyone who knew me in my twenties.

We were still there laughing and talking when the guys left after their lunch and the friendly one told us to “behave yourselves, ladies.” He got ten paces away, then turned back to say, “No, don’t do that. Have fun!” We always do. The funny part is that “behavior yourself, ladies” line is one I often use on young service people---at the hair salon and in restaurants---but it’s the first time someone used it on me. Ohmygod, it was a match made in heaven and I let the old guy walk out of my life without a second thought. Just kidding. I caught up with him in the parking lot and slipped him my phone number and if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. But sixty years ago? ….well, I might have done that. It's fun to remember what it was like to be young. I just can't be it anymore. More's the pity and disappointment in that admission. ©

The Medical Examiner

If you’re a fan of CSI type TV shows you would have liked the lecture I went to this week titled, Tales of a Medical Examiner. It was given by a guy who has literally done thousands of autopsies for the county. By law they have to be done whenever a death is unexpected, suspicious, accidental, violent, or no attending physician was present. He views forensic medicine as a way of seeing past the tragedy and focusing on giving answers to families and the community and he went into that branch of medicine, he jokingly said, because they don’t have emergencies in the morgue. We must have a bunch of morbid people down at the senior hall because 165 signed up to see this presentation. The room doesn’t hold that many and it’s rare that we have a waiting list for our Life Appreciation Lecture Series. 

He did a question and answer session before bringing on the slide show. Ohmygod! There was nothing remotely shown like you’d see on TV. The first case he talked about was of a guy who’d called the local funeral director and told him to come to his house with a body bag because he was going to kill himself. The funeral director called the police who had a long stand-off with the guy who was waving a gun around, finally it ended with the guy having two bullets in his head. It’s impossible to put two bullets in your own head if the first one goes through brain matter and the forensic examiner had to make sure the bullets were from his own gun and not from the police’s. Imagine a 12 foot wide movie screen filled with close-up pictures of his bloody head. Imagine pictures of his skull cap cut off so they could retrieve the bullets. One bullet went through his chin upward and out his forehead, missing his brain. I couldn’t even tell it was a face for the longest time until I finally located his ear. The next bullet went from the top of his head downward. No one lost their stomach contents viewing those gruesome slides but the mood of the room sure changed as he walked us through the powder burns, suet, various colors of blood and the shapes of entry and exist wounds. If anyone thinking of offing themselves with a gun could see those slides they’d change their mind.

The second case he showed us slides of was a woman, also with a gun shot in the head, but her mouth was duck taped shut. They treated it like a homicide, ran a rape kit, and looked for signs of a struggle---the whole ball of wax. Finding none, it was a true mystery until her diary was discovered where they learned she taped her own mouth shut because she planned on taking a bunch of pills and didn’t want to vomit them back up. The gun was her back up plan. The medical examiner, a guy almost retirement age, said it still amazes him the things people do to themselves and others. Another interesting fact he told was that only 20% of suicides come with notes of explanation.  

The third case he talked about was of a woman, found in a bath tub full of water. He said no adult drowns in a bath tub unless something else is going on---drugs, murder, health issues or suicide. It’s never an accident unless it’s a small child who can’t push themselves above the water line. He showed us the autopsy slides of her heart, proving she had a disease that made her heart rhythm beat erratically, long enough for her to slide down in the water and drown. And the moral of that story is never take a bath naked again unless you want to end up with a dozen people coming and going in a potential crime scene. Her bloated naked body was quite a shocking sight. 

But the case that was the most shocking in more ways than one was of a 21 year old guy who was high on fentanyl patches. He thought he girlfriend was a zombie and he was going around a neighborhood, punching windows out with his fists, and begging people to get a gun and shoot him. He took a dive off the top of a balcony head first on the cement parking lot below. We got “treated” to a dozen slides of his entire body including three slides of various views of his penis and balls. Up close, full screen. And in case you’re wondering why it’s because they were covered in pinky fingernail sized fentanyl patches. The speaker said people hooked on fentanyl patches get very creative in ways to get the most kick out of their patches. They’ll even soak them in water to get the last drop of drugs out of them, then they’ll draw the water into a syringe and shoot themselves up with it. Fentanyl overdoses drive people to do crazy, crazy things and we’re in the middle of a fentanyl overdose epidemic because it’s coming in cheap from China and it's cut into heroin.  

I’ve been to other crime solving type lectures and one that walked us through the steps of how bodies are embalmed. I’m not squeamish but I can honestly say I couldn’t be a forensic pathologist nor would I want to be married to one. “Guess what I did at work today, honey,” is not something I’d like to hear over a dinner table. But what the heck, a free lecture is a free lecture and I rarely turn down an afternoon to learn something new. ©

Blame my Mom – Elephants, Rocking Chairs and Rolling Libraries

One of the bad things about being a widow is we have no one to stage an intervention when our crazy or self-indulgent obsessions get carried away. When something grabs us we’re free as the wind to pursue it. One of the good things about being a widow is we have no one to stage an intervention when our crazy or self-indulgent obsessions get carried away. When something grabs us we’re free as the wind to purse it. Is that a dichotomy or what? I really don’t know. Am I using the word right? Is there a better one to describe how something can be both bad and good at the same time?

My most recent self-indulgent obsession has been binge-reading about African forest elephants and if a herd of them comes wandering through my yard here in Michigan this summer I’ll be ready for them. If they raise their curled trunks high in the air and spread their ears out perpendicular to their heads I’ll be hiding under the bed, knowing they were about to charge me. But the most fascinating thing I’ve learned is that elephants communicate with low-frequency rumblings that are below the hearing range of people. They can communicate this way over a hundred square miles and their favorite time to send messages is during the night when the atmosphere helps their rumblings travel farther. A researcher with Cornell University’s Listening Project, who is compiling an elephant dictionary, says they have identified and defined seventy distinct messages they send each other. Some of their messages can be felt by humans as vibrations in our diaphragms if we’re in the area and paying attention to our bodies. We can, of course, hear some of their vocalizations and trumpeting but the vast majority of their communication is infra-sound that can only be heard using special equipment that can triangulate the exact location of the elephant sending a message and the location of the elephant that replies back. Simply amazing.

I realize it might seem odd that a blog categorized as a widow’s blog is going on and on about elephants and I’ll only share one more story about them before I move on: They mourn their dead. As many as 300 elephants will line up and walk by the body of a dead pachyderm, vocalizing and touching it with their trunks and this can go on for days in the rain forest of central Africa, the funeral procession only ending when the head matriarch breaks away. Even after nature has reduced the carcass to a pile of bones the immediate family unit of that dead elephant comes to visit whenever they are in the area and they’ll fondle the bones---one was even observed for over an hour rocking a skull back and forth in her trunk and tears were running down her face. And some of the stories I’ve read on how a family unit works together in a circle to try to save a dying newborn can’t help but break your heart and make you realize the largest land mammals on earth are very much just like us.

I blame my mom for my wanting to share my binging on subjects that catch my attention. When I was in grade school I’d get home from school, settle on her lap and she’d say, “What did you learn today?” It was such a well ingrained habit that by the time I got too big to sit in her lap she’d still be the first person I’d want to tell if something new and exciting crossed my path at school. To this day when I see one of her two rocking chairs still in the family, I get a warm fuzzy feeling. She loved her rocking chairs and when she wasn’t rocking me, one of her cats or dogs or grand-kids she was reading.

After I met Don, I learned that he was just as interested in whatever I might have read as my mom was and he got my “book reports” like the one I shared up above. On vacations, he loved talking to the people he met along the way and I was content to stay in the motor home reading. When he’d get back in to drive the next leg of our trips we’d give each other “reports” on what we’d both just learned. One time out west he went into a gas station and didn’t come back out for several hours. After the first hour I went inside to check on him and there he was sitting with a group of locals around a pot-belly stove swapping stories and drinking coffee---his two favorite things to do. We traveled well together and I didn’t mind Don being Don, storyteller extraordinaire, as long as I didn’t run out of reading material. He lived life, I read about living a life. (I'm experiencing deja vu. If I wrote about Mom's rocking chair and/or the rolling library before, I apologize for repeating myself.)

With age comes wisdom, or so they say. To me it’s more like watching a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle coming together. We can see how all our life experiences come together to form the unique human beings we each become. With age and widowhood we have the time to reflect and apply our memories to explain away our idiosyncrasies. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. ©

Elephants call Long-Distance After Hours 

The Elephant Listening Project 

The Elephant Whisperer: My Life with the Herd in the African Wild by Lawrence Anthony with Graham Spence