Wind Tunnel Ear and other Entertaining Things

Another one of my doctors bit the dust. You get to a certain age when your list of doctors and specialists seems to grow by the minute and even though I picked mine out by age, hoping they’d be around until after I die, the pandemic came along and upset my carefully packed apple cart. I’ve lost a dentist, a dermatologist, an eye doctor, a foot doctor and now I’ve got a new ear, nose and throat doctor and an audiologist. My bone doctor and internist better stick around another ten years or you’re going to see me pitch a royal fit in this, the dowager era of my life. Look at me, adding a new word to my vocabulary since I’ve started binge watching Downton Abbey. I may not be from an aristocratic family like Mrs. Crawley but the definition of ‘dowager’ in this century has eroded enough to include me. At least on the days when I get all dressed up and pretend in my head that I’m a woman of decorum who could easily stare down a lion and win or better yet be a modern day, slightly less notorious version of Lady Whistledown. Have I mentioned I'm also binge watching Bridgerton?

All winter long I’ve felt like there was a wind tunnel in my ear and I thought for sure I’d blown out an ear drum. Both my ear and my hearing aid are also clicking in and out and since it’s been four years since I’ve had an appointment at the ear, nose and throat clinic, I finally got myself into the office. My ear drum is perfectly fine and the wind tunnel feeling, the doctor thinks, is allergies. If it had been my old doctor telling me this, I might have believed him but it’s hard to trust someone you just met when I've had allergies since birth and don't remember ever this feeling like I want to wear ear muffs 24/7. Dr. Google thinks it could be Pulsatile Tinnitus caused by the TMJ that I’ve had for years on that side of my face. 

After the checkup, the doctor passed me off to his audiologist who gave me a hearing test. I’ve lost some hearing in the lower frequencies but after cleaning my old hearing aids and reprograming them, I can actually hear better. I’ve been missing bits of conversations lately and nothing says OLD faster than a person who mistakes words and can’t process sentences because things like a ‘hat that farts’ doesn’t make as much sense as a ‘cat that farts.’ I misheard 20% of the words on the test.

My old hearing aids are eight years old and in addition to wind tunnel weirdness going on in my head, one of my hearing aids was clicking on and off when the audiologist tested it but rather than send it back to the factory for repairs I decided to buy a new set. I’m just getting an entry level set for $2,800 which comes with a four years worth of insurance, cleanings and checkups and free batteries. I have a $2,400 income tax refund due any day so it was an easy decision money wise. The money won’t be in my account long enough to miss it when its gone. I didn’t want rechargeable aids because I already have too many devices to plug at night. I asked the audiologist if the battery hearing aids are heading the way of the buggy whip and will I have trouble getting batteries in the future. He said about 40% of people still buy them because they are campers or hikers or they travel a lot or they are like me, a person who wears one of mine to bed at night so I don’t have to have my TV on so loud it disturbs the neighbors.

We had some excitement at dinner this week. The last day of the month brings a lot of people down to the restaurant for dinner because some people have a hard time using up all their food allowance and they want to spend some before they loss it. They’ll buy several dinners to take back to their apartments to freeze or they load up on pop or ice cream bars. Me, I keep a pretty close watch on my food allowance and budget myself so I’m don’t go over or under more than a dollar or two.

Anyway, while a bigger crowd than usual was gathered for dinner we experienced a surprise flash mob put on by our line dancing class. These 10-12 ladies have been meeting three days a week for a couple of months now. I should have signed up for that class, I’ve sat and watched them a few times. In the beginning I might have had a chance of keeping up with them and while I wouldn't have wanted to dance in public like that, they put on a good show and we all had fun watching. If anyone is bored living in this continuum care complex it's their own fault, and I suspect that's true of all the CCCs now. They're a lot of competition out there for the Baby Boomers' dollars. And so dear readers, as Mrs. Whistledown would end her scandal sheet, I leave you to wonder what my next blog post will bring.  ©

Headstones and Anniversaries

 

I don’t have a clue what I’m about to write.  Sometimes when I’m at my computer I know I did X, Y and Z this past week so I’ll be writing about X, Y or Z or a combination of said activities. And for a while the activities around here had been coming at me so fast and furious that I had as many as four posts in my scheduler at one time. Now, I have none. The activities offered hasn’t changed. We still get 4-5 things a day I could be doing, but I don’t. I still haven’t, for example, made it to the morning Coffee and Conversation group or played cards in the evenings after dinner. For a minute or two I thought about going to one of the pastor’s 15 Minute Morning Meditations but I quickly burned that idea out of my brain. If I’m ever going to have a Come-to-Jesus moment I want it to be ten seconds before I die and I want to have it in front of my nieces so it will shock the youngest and amuse the oldest. 

I really like the pastor who leads the meditations. She lives here but we ‘run in different circles' as the kids used to say. I was a fan of her religion columns in the Sunday newspaper years ago and we have at least one thing in common besides an interest in oil painting; neither one of us changed our names when we got married. She was already an established a writer and college professor when she got married. (I was older too.) She wanted to be an ordained pastor since she was a kid but like so many other women in past generations she was told a female couldn't do that. The dream never left her and after retiring from her day job she went back to school and fulfilled her dream. 

Like me, I’ll bet the pastor didn’t correct people who’d call her by her husband’s last name. And maybe I should have. To this day I still have a niece on both sides of my family who sends mail to me using the last name I never legally took. One time I was in the hospital and my youngest niece couldn’t find me because of the name thing. She seems to have a blind spot about married couples having the same name. I’m assuming that’s the issue, we’ve never had that conversation but I did make a notation in my estate papers to be sure my heirs don't go down the wrong rabbit hole while trying to close out my affairs. 

Do you know who gave me the most hassle over not changing my name? A saleslady at the monument company when I ordered a headstone. We have one grave for both our ashes thus we wanted both our names to appear on one stone. The lady at the monument company kept trying to talk me into not putting the last name I’ve used my entire life and instead replacing it with my husband’s last name. I couldn’t get through to the woman that the person she wanted memorialized in granite for all time never existed, that I never changed my name. But she kept saying words to the effect that, “It’s going to look like two unrelated people are in one grave!” 

Only after I came up with the idea of putting a heart in the center with “married April blab, blab, blab” did she finally agreed to take my stupid order. This was just a few days after Don died and she wanted me to go home and think about it. I ordered it so soon because my husband had wanted me to order that stone for a couple of years, since we bought the plot, but I kept dragging my feet and I felt guilty that I didn’t give him the peace of mind that having that stone in place apparently would have given him. With my husband’s severe language disorders it was a very difficult 'conversation' to have but that didn’t stop him from trying every time we’d drive by the cemetery. 

In a world where we’d get do-overs ordering that stone while Don could still see it would be one of my do-overs. Makes my eyes tear up just thinking about it. Oh, and it still creeps me out to see my own name on a stone with an open-ended date to be added later on, proof that I'm not immortal. I'm good at pretending otherwise.

We’re getting close to April so I expect having teary eyes will be happening often enough for it to be a thing. It’s always been a tough month. My mom died in April on Easter so it’s like I have two death dates to mark her traumatic passing. My husband and I both have birthdays in April and we got married in April. Way too many dates to stir up trouble in weak minded, sentimental cry babies. Okay, don’t get on me about characterizing myself as weak-minded; I know I’m not but I can be overly dramatic when I write, so that’s my excuse and warning not to take me too seriously when I ramble-write. 

In April, ever since my husband died I've taken a pilgrimage to the  Butterfly Exhibit where I swear to God---if I believed in one---that a huge blue butterfly landed on me the first year to tell me that my husband was pleased with the grave stone. He knew and liked that I planned to put “happy trails to you until we meet again” in the granite and I kept that promise. 

Moments after he died I said those words to him and there was a hospital chaplain standing near-by who lite up, delighted with what she took to mean that I believed in God and and an afterlife. Before that moment she had asked if she could say a prayer and I coldly replied, "It’s up to you, I don’t care one way or another." So she did, then stood watching me as I spoke my final words and kissed Don goodbye. Next think I knew she was walking me out of the hospital. What a job that would be…make sure the newly coined widows and widowers don’t over stay their welcome.  

I wish I could think of a way to end this post on an upbeat note but I'm coming up blank so the meme below is the best I can do.  ©

Death Defying Acts Born out of Boredom

I thought I’d try a trick that Dawn over at Bohemian Valhalla likes to do. She plays with catchy post titles trying to draw people into reading her blog. Did it work? She’s good at it, and me? I’ve never been good at naming things---painting, poems, essays. It’s a wonder my dogs weren’t given letters in the alphabet instead of the names I would have given my babies had I had any. Sometimes it can take me longer to name a post than to write it. I generally start out with a working title but it changes as I work on the content. Death Defying Acts---spelled ‘death defining acts’---was the working title here. Can you tell I’ve run out of things to write about? I can’t wait until Easter is over and this continuum care campus gets back normal. They’re celebrating Easter here more than Christmas and not the fluffy bunnies and pastel colored eggs kind of Easter. Wafers for Lent are easy to come by here but not a a single marshmallow Peeps has made an appearance. I might preform a death defying act this afternoon and venture out to the dollar store to get some yellow Peeps. They were in short supply last year.

I finally made it over to the activities room to see the new jigsaw puzzle table and two hours later I was still there. It’s a pleasant room with widows on both sides, lots of light. They are waiting for a couple of round card tables to make their way across the ocean, but for now there are three oblong long tables set up which I hear tell is filled with some loud and serious card games going on. But in the time I was there not a soul came in or walked by. (It was after lunch and nap time for old people. I don’t do naps so I still have bragging rights to youth---age being relative around here, of course.) 

The jigsaw puzzle in progress is large and complicated and the edges were done. The pieces were all laid out but no attempt to sort them by color or subject or shape was made. That will bug the heck out of me if I make a habit of stopping by and I think I might. I got a 4” x 7” section done and sorted all the pieces with faces on them off to one area before I forced myself to leave. At home when I do puzzles I set a timer so I’m aware of how much time goes by. I suspect I’ll need to carry my timer over when I go to that room. Otherwise the night security guard/s will probably find me still there when doing their rounds at two in the morning.

Another afternoon was saved from death by boredom when I signed up to go to our Art Museum downtown, to see an exhibition of work by two black photographers of “great importance” in the field: Dawould Bey and Carrie Mae Weems. It covered work from over forty years of their careers and the pamphlet we were handed called them “today’s most important and influential photo-based artists.” They both worked entirely in black and white and his stuff, which was mostly portraits and candid stuff taken in Harlem, I liked but her work I hated. She was in every single picture she took and she called her stuff “performance art.” She sets up a still life of objects and/or people, sets a timer so can run around in front of the camera and be part of the photograph. Forty years of doing selfies would put me on the train to Crazyville and the bitch factor in me wondered if she is a recognized photographer for her endurance rather than for any artistic quality in the photos. Forty years is a long time to be shouting, "Look at me! Look at me!"

One set of 12 'kitchen table' photos told a story and viewers are supposed to guess what it is. We had one of those I’m-smarter-than-you-because-I-understand-this-stuff museum docents you get once in a while who asked questions trying to get us to see what she saw and she was Oh So impressed with the talent on display. In turn I was thinking I was Oh So not enjoying Ms. Weems’ photo-art. I didn’t just not like it, I had a physical reaction to it that felt like anger mixed with wanting to get out of Dodge as quick as possible. And the longer the docent made us sit there trying to get us to cough up answers the madder I got.

And it’s just now dawning on me that I was probably so uncomfortable because maybe I was flashing-back to when my husband was in speech therapy and they’d throw photos down in front of him and try to pull language out of him by pointing out stuff in the photos. On a good day a half hour session would yield 4-5 words. One time they showed Don a picture of a man with a gun pointing at a baby elephant and the entire yield of words that day was “BAD!” repeated over and over again while Don slammed his finger down on the photo. I was sitting behind a one-way mirror and I explained to the professor in the room with her students watching the session that Don was a very ethical hunter and the hunter in the photo obviously was not. The poor student therapist working with Don that day didn’t have a chance of getting a good grade that session. Instead of the student therapist trying to pull words out of him he turned the tables on her and had her doing the word search work. A common error for the students (and families) to make.

I was Don's aphasia interpreter for 12 1/2 years and for six year of that time I helped him with homework using photos of random scenes. It wasn't art. It wasn't performance. At the museum Weems' photos became tools that the gloating docent used to give me a look at my past and my future, should I ever have a stroke and can't talk. If art is about evoking an emotional response then her kitchen table series was a huge success. But somehow I don't think 'my emotions' were what she was going for, do you?  ©

Photo from Carrie Mae Weems' kitchen table series.