Goodbye, Hello

 It’s that time of year…

Catching Up, and 21

Summer always seems so fast and frenetic.  Long (and hot) as the days are, I never have enough time to do all the things I want to do.  Though the list of things I want to get done expands daily, the heat takes all the wind out of my sails, and I spend way more time than I should sitting around being uncomfortable and peevish. 

So now that September is almost over with, I feel things slowing down and cooling off a bit...just the way I like it. 

And there are a bunch of random things rattling around in my head, that I figured I might as well commit to blog.  I considered a "10 things" entry.  I'll just start throwing them down here...don't know if I'll come up with 10, but here goes:

1.) There have been a couple of  somewhat major life events over the past year plus that I have not written about.  In April of 2023, the husband was diagnosed with prostate cancer.  It seems one in eight men will fall victim to this malady in their lifetimes.  Scary as the word "cancer" is when it is applied to yourself or a loved one, it was made more scary and ulcer-inducing by the way our current health "care" system deals with it.  It was basically treated like not a particularly emergent situation by the health professionals involved.  While we were told that his degree of cancer required "action within six months," it took slightly longer than that to line up all the tests, examinations and gobbledegook required to be able to start treatment.  Husband was recommended into a course of radiation treatments...45 days "in a row" (not) of 15-minute radiation blasts.  Which, after all the bullshit we had to go through to get him started on them, stretched out from a diagnosis in April to "treatment" starting in mid-November and--due to holidays and weekends being "no treatment" days--stretching through to mid-January.  Completely fucking up the holidays, of course, and casting a pall on everything for most of 2023 and into 2024. 

2.) Somewhat major life event #2--just as the husband was starting to recover from the physical and mental effects of the whole cancer thing, at the end of April this year, he mysteriously passed out in the kitchen one morning while fixing breakfast, crumpled down on to the kitchen floor and broke the shit out of his foot in the process.  As innocent as a broken foot might sound, this has been a hideous nightmare from minute one.  The foot he broke has been messed up since our days as restaurant owners.  It had pronated so far out that he had been basically walking on the end of his ankle bone for years.  He has worn a brace on that leg for 15 years just so he can walk without excruciating pain.  And then he broke 9 of the bones in his foot passing out on the floor of the kitchen.  We've gone through an impressive array of conveyances, ramps, and grab bars just to facilitate his ability to get around the house and the yard.  He couldn't drive for over two months, so it was up to me to get him and his latest mobility contraption into and out of the van to a myriad of medial appointments.  And I have to say, I just about lost it during this episode.  I just had the hardest time dealing with his incapacitation and my having to step into the role of "caregiver" so suddenly and completely.  I sucked at it. The fact that we had so abruptly turned into our parents (at the end of their lives) shook me to my core.  It was not a gradual loss of ability.  It was "Bang! You're old and decrepit! Deal with it!"  I am not proud of how I had/have handled it, but I seem not to have a whole lot of control over my reaction.  Ugh.

3.) Somewhat major life event #3--In February, one of my nieces--my late sister's middle daughter--died suddenly of untreated chronic illness.  You want to wonder how someone so "young" lets her health get so out of control.  Young.  She was 51 years old, as impossible as that is to believe.  But she and her sisters have all been beset by various degrees of psychological problems.  For which it is nigh unto impossible to receive treatment in our horrible excuse for a health "care" system.  And though my niece didn't die from suicide as many of those with untreated mental health issues do, I'm convinced our lack of health care contributed mightily to her sad quality of life and her ultimate death.  

Well. Hasn't this post been a day-brightener?!

I have more I want to write about.  Hopefully not as depressing/frustrating as these three bullet points.

Hope I can keep the ball rolling and crank out another slightly brighter post in the next few days.   

Oh, and...

By the way...,

If I had had a baby instead of starting a blog back in September of 2003, she would now be old enough to drink.