One of the (many) things that displeases me about winter is how, right about the end of January, it starts to dawn on me that I no longer have any friends.
We moved to Asheville in sunshine and warm evenings and forged solid friendships with our neighbors on the sidewalk in front of our house. Talk of grilling in the yard floated in the air, but we didn't really need to eat together to create camaraderie. Here it was, right outside our front door, absent any reason to expend undue effort.
But now it's winter, and all I spot outside our front door are the fleeting forms of bundled-up dog owners racing through the arctic air with their pooches and, twice now, our neighbor's chickens fruitlessly scratching at the hard, grassless dirt of the front yards up and down the block.
It's not like we spent our warm California winters buddying up to our neighbors, but at least we had the option. To be honest, we were kind of surprised when Eric and Fernando, our Long Beach neighbors to the north, invited us to the party celebrating the completion of construction on their new, mustard-colored house. Hubby had engaged in a vigorous trash can dispute with them when we first moved in, consisting of silently pushing our shared can in front of their gate when they left it blocking ours and finding it back in front of ours the following morning. He finally locked it up securely inside our yard like a forbidden totem, desperately wished for, temptingly close, but denied. They acquired their own can from the city and thereafter we gave each other friendly waves and not much else in the way of social offering.
The warm Long Beach weather actually cut against any possibility of friendship with our neighbors in the apartment building to the south. Mild, beach-tinged nights allowed Apartment 4 to host frat-like parties that spilled out into the hallway on the other side of our wall throughout the year. The woman in Apartment 2 liked to have passionate 2:30 a.m. cell phone conversations under our bedroom window even in the dead of winter despite Hubby's repeated admonishments to "MOVE IT INSIDE!" I did become friendly with a young mother from the building whom I occasionally spotted as I sat in front of our house in the desperate days when The Boy was old enough to want entertainment but too young to provide it for himself and I was desperate to talk to someone -- anyone -- who could speak my adult language. But she lived on the far side of the building from us, and we weren't quite friendly enough to displace my certainty that every person making their way up or down the front steps was the evil sleep stealer driving us away from snow-less, ice-less climes.
So, too, I'm aware that one can get too much of a good neighbor and perhaps prefer a few months away from the glare of their scrutiny. A sort of detante period to keep relations friendly.
We had no such declared retreat in West Hollywood, where bare-chested Barry (if the thermometer dipped below 65 he covered up with a slumped bathrobe) passed out bon mots about the residents like free samples of Boca Burgers to the shoppers in Wild Oats. There was something truly comforting about having all the neighbors gather sympathetically around our home after the police apprehended the man who had climbed through our living room window at five in the morning by yelling, "Get down! Get down!" and cuffing him on our front lawn as he emerged from the vacant unit next door showered and wearing clothes he had stolen some days earlier from the next house down the block. But I used to grow anxious walking leisurely Roxanne home from the park for fear of being swooped down upon by the lonely guy who lay in wait for people to regale with stories of his wealth and business acumen.
One of the early joys of finding ourselves in Asheville was the neighborhood and, more specifically, the neighbors. We were reminded of how many potential friendships lay within a one-block radius at a Christmas Eve party from which we emerged certain we would be throwing dinner parties every weekend of 2008 and forging life-long friendships, the kind where your kids play with their kids so you don't end up the loser parents who still haven't found a sitter they'd leave their boy with five months after moving to their new home.
There have been, I need not say, no dinner parties.
Which is why I was so grateful for yesterday's brilliance of sun and temperatures in the fifties. This description aptly fits the California winter days of my childhood when we used to bundle ourselves in our down ski parkas, walk the dogs a couple of blocks, and hurry home to drink hot chocolate in front the fire my father had waiting for us. But now that I am a winter-hardy gal, I welcome fifty degrees as an invitation to take The Boy to the park, where other families are enjoying the break in winter.
Usually, my social interaction with other parents at the park consists of directing small smiles in their direction designed to convey the sense that I am not averse to conversation but don't presume to be one of the established members of their social circle. Generally, my smiles seem to have been received in this unfortunate manner, and I find myself talking only to The Boy. Such conversation consists of sparkling phrases like, "Don't put sand in your mouth," and "Yes, that's a dog!"
But yesterday brought a new revelation: Almost Walking. The Boy, so shy when traversing the playground safe in Mommy's arms, gamely tried some walking-while-holding-Mommy's-fingers-for-balance. He discovered this practice has multiple benefits. First, it allows one to make one's way, repeatedly, with no end in sight, back to the steps of the jungle gym where, after a little boost, one can crawl with the speed of a greyhound puppy to the top of the slide and force Mommy to push small children out of the way before one tries to go down head first without her. Second, after an exhilarating slide down the slide in Mommy's lap -- angled awkwardly to create enough clearance for us to pick up some speed -- one lands on one's feet, one's lungs unconstricted and thus primed to give a particularly hearty cry of excitement. One can also lead Mommy with hands clutched around her fingers in full exploration of the underside of the jungle gym because she has to bend over painfully to hold one's hands anyhow, and so needn't worry about head clearance.
Best of all, once The Boy was semi-independently ambulatory, he found himself in the midst of other kids. Kids who talked to him and then asked me why he didn't seem to understand what they were saying. "He's 13 months old," didn't satisfactorily answer the question for them, it seemed, but it helped me save face with the nearby parents who, based on The Boy's height, might have taken him for a two-year-old lagging sadly behind in his development.
While The Boy couldn't talk to the other kids, he could yell at them, often without their notice, but with great brio nonetheless. And when he yelled, touched, crawled past the other kids, it often prompted their parents to speak to me. Or me to speak to their parents, frequently in terms of apology -- on The Boy's behalf for crawling right through the line for the slide and on my own behalf for sliding down without first checking to make sure the 22-month-old had who went before us had cleared out from the bottom. Embarrassing, yes, especially when the child's mother calls to him in a panic to move out of the way. But it has been a long time since I had to observe slide etiquette.
I'm not saying that I walked home with my pockets full of new friends' phone numbers, or even that our conversations made it past "How old is s/he?" But for the first time I felt like I was part of the playground community. No longer must I huddle in desperate, dead-ended conversation with the other pariah-parents relegated to the sandbox. Somehow, on this sunny day warm enough for me to lumber up and down the slide in nothing more than a sweater and jeans, I discovered a place where people interact and belong and really live -- outside the cocoon of their heated homes -- in the winter.
With breaks like this, maybe I'll even find myself hosting a dinner party before the summer solstice.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Thursday, January 24, 2008
We Make the Most of Our Health Insurance
In the past 8 days, The Boy and I have been to doctors' offices 9 times. The Boy has had his temperature taken at least 14 times. I have been stuck with needles 8 times, and The Boy twice. Between the two of us, we have ingested 10 different medicinal substances.
And I'm not ready to call things normal.
It all began 11 days ago, when I found out that I would have to undergo out-patient surgery.
It's not that I'm squeamish. I've chatted away with phlebotomists filling vial after vial of my blood, discussed my work while doctors do what they do with speculums. I'm the one who never says it hurts when a physician pushing her hands into some tender part of my anatomy asks if it hurts.
It's just that the past several times I've casually trusted someone to perform a medical procedure on my body, I've come out of it feeling . . . invaded. And the surgery I was told I had to have feels particularly invasive. As if anything that involves strangers putting metal implements into your body isn't particularly invasive.
I had been avoiding the surgery for six weeks and felt more than a little bit defeated that I had run out of options. Acupuncture sure made me feel less gloomy, but it wasn't resolving the problem. I'm grateful I found my way back to regular yoga classes, but they didn't regularize my body. And, frankly, I was sure I had only a limited amount of time remaining before Hubby threw up his hands and told me to move back to California to feel sorry for myself.
So we scheduled the surgery for the following Tuesday, and I continued my week a marked woman.
Two days later, a Wednesday, I received the welcome distraction of a call from The Boy's school. "His temperature is fine, but he's kind of weepy and wants his Mommy," they told me.
What could be better than a child who just wants to be held by his Mommy, who, conveniently enough, really wanted to hold her boy?
I took him home and we played cheerfully and I pretended I didn't feel like I was walking around under a big, black, scheduled-surgery cloud. We had a little dinner, which, these days, consists of The Boy sticking his fingers into whatever dish I'm holding and eating his refried beans/yogurt/other viscous substance by hand. We both enjoy it greatly.
After his dinner, we stopped in the kitchen to feed the dogs their kibble and Mommy a few corn chips.
As I expertly held The Boy with one arm and reached for the chips with the other, The Boy's eyes bugged and his body jerked. About a gallon of vomit cascaded over the chip bag and onto the kitchen floor.
When you have been a mother for 13 months -- 6 of which involved a child with reflux so bad he seemed to spit up twice the amount of milk you had just poured down him at every single meal -- a little bit of vomit doesn't panic you. Even a lot of vomit.
In fact, a few months ago, I watched all of Superbad covered in The Boy's vomit. It was only the second time we'd been out to see a movie since his birth, and I really, really wanted to see it. It probably helped that the theater was dark enough that I didn't see just how much vomit I was sitting in until the lights came up and I had marginally dried out. Hubby claims he missed the vomit entirely and got to watch the movie blissfully unaware of just how groce his wife has become.
Now, as The Boy vomited his way down the hall to the bathroom, I calmly stripped off my chunked cashmere sweater and filled the bathtub. My excuse was to wash him off, but honestly The Boy loves his bath, and, sure enough, it seemed to fix everything.
The next day was what we in Asheville like to call a "snow day" -- about an inch of white stuff on the ground and temperatures reaching the low 40's, so it's pretty much all gone by noon but everything closes down anyhow so no one has to risk driving mountain roads in "weather."
In this case, the "weather" meant the cancellation of the "pre-op" appointment I didn't want to have. Hmm. Maybe there is something to this winter weather.
Furthermore, much as I look at every school closing as a personal affront to my efforts to locate something called a life in the mess of my days doing nothing of permanence, I had to admit it was just as well The Boy's school closed as well or we might have caused an epidemic. Not that I knew anything much was wrong until the afternoon, when I took the first of The Boy's temperature readings and discovered that he would have been sent home from school if he had been there.
Out came the trusty Tylenol. I remember vaguely the days when Hubby and I resisted putting any sort of evil drug into The Boy's perfect system and how I would cry every time I gave in and dosed him at 2:30 in the morning to ease his teething pain. By now, however, we recognize Tylenol for what it is -- our drug of choice to make our boy smile again. I should be embarrassed to admit that when he catches sight of the bottle he reaches for it with great urgency, begging for a squirt of its cherry-flavored goodness.
This time, however, Tylenol let us down. I held him in bed, rather relishing the chance to just read a book and let everything else go to hell. Until I took his temperature again. It had climbed to 103.8. Definitely high enough to justify a call to the on-call pediatrician.
"Try Motrin," she suggested.
Out went Hubby to CVS and back he came armed with substantial bottles of both berry-flavored Motrin and some back-up Tylenol. The Boy and I cuddled up for a night together, banished Hubby to the daybed in the office, and, with him well dosed, we had a peaceful night.
Until Friday morning hit me and I realized that -- much as I would have liked to let the pre-op appointment slip away unnoticed by all but myself -- I had to be responsible and reschedule it.
Which is why I found myself at 1:15 sitting in the waiting room of the satellite office. The last time I had been here, the receptionist had kept me waiting 45 minutes past my appointment time, blandly assuring me that I was signed in and everyone knew I was waiting . Until I huffed out and told her to cancel my appointment because I had a child to pick up from daycare. Only then did she mention that she was waiting for my records to be faxed over from the other office and thus had not even put me in the queue.
This time, I had Hubby sitting next to me missing work and holding a baby who, it was becoming increasingly clear, was not just tired from being rudely pulled away from his nap, but who was feeling really lousy. I sat in my seat brooding and fighting the urge to walk away from not only the pre-op appointment but the op as well.
Forty-five minutes later The Boy was feeling even lousier and the receptionist was blandly assuring me "they haven't forgotten you."
Fifty minutes later, Hubby sprang into action.
There's nothing like watching an angry man clutching a sick baby telling off the receptionist for rolling her eyes at him. "I want to talk to someone who can tell us what's going on," he stormed.
Wouldn't you know it, within minutes we were ushered into a private waiting room by a nurse plainly trained in sweetly handling irate patients. She explained that the doctor had arrived late from the hospital and wouldn't have time to see us for 45 more minutes.
Now, I don't know what kind of world the receptionist lives in, but I tend to think it's only polite to inform someone that she won't be seen until TWO HOURS after her appointment time, oh, when she checks in. "They haven't forgotten you" is just not an adequate substitute.
Happily, the nurse gave us the option of seeing a different doctor, as the one we were scheduled to see wasn't the one scheduled to do the surgery anyhow. Since, remember, my appointment was supposed to be the day before at a different office. Damn winter.
The doctor who did see us was perfectly nice, but what she did just didn't seem like something a doctor was needed for. Or an office visit, for that matter. All she did was ask me some questions that we in the law business like to call CYA. Because lawyers are both painfully unhip and overconfident of their own importance, I'm willing to bet that it doesn't take a law degree to know that CYA means Cover Your Ass and that the waste of three hours of my day was nothing more than a requirement of the insurance companies. Maybe they imagined that if allowed to, say, answer a few questions over the phone, I would lie about not smoking and they therefore needed me within sniffing distance of the person doing the asking. And maybe -- I don't know, I don't have medical training -- but maybe doctors are better able to smell the lingering odor of tobacco on a lying surgery-patient's clothing than, say, a nurse who wouldn't have arrived late from the hospital and hence have a backlog of patients. We live in North Carolina, where people smoke, so this is entirely possible.
At any rate, by the time I got The Boy home his eyes were glazed, his mouth hung down in the corners like an upside-down slice of mandarin orange, and he had a cough that hurt to hear. His temperature 20 minutes after a dose of our savior the Motrin was 104.
This merited a call to the doctor's office. Which, of course, was closing. The doctor told me to bring him in to the Saturday sick clinic in the morning and go to the hospital if anything at all changed in the middle of the night.
These are words that can make a mother already freaked out and frustrated about impending invasive surgery cry.
"I think he has pneumonia," I sobbed to Hubby. "And we're going to have to go to the emergency room."
"I think he's just fine," Hubby said in that way of his that treads the line between soothing and dismissive. He might have even smirked just a little bit at the doctor's the next morning when their thermometer suggested that That Boy was, in fact, Just Fine. (Okay, that was for effect. Hubby would never smirk at me in a doctor's office with our sick boy. In fact, he is not a smirker at all. But, in these circumstances, he could have been.)
Ah, but there is a reason we see doctors instead of merely thermometers. Doctors can do things like look into ears and announce that The Boy has a nasty ear infection. They can validate mothers by saying that The Boy's cough does sound bad, even if they can hear nothing in his lungs. And they can prescribe cherry-flavored antibiotics with just the right amount of apologia for giving him antibiotics to make you feel like a good parent who wouldn't resort to antibiotics if it weren't really, really necessary.
And so we spent a weekend fever-free. The Boy continued to sleep with me, and Hubby continued to sleep on the daybed in the office. In all honesty, he probably preferred it that way, as I spent much of my time shuffling through the house moaning about not wanting surgery. It gets to be a drag after a while, I know.
By Monday morning, we were discussing why we should still take our on-the-mend boy to the doctor because, even though the antibiotics seemed to be working, that cough was worrisome.
"Remember she said it sounded like pneumonia," I said as I wiped The Boy's bare bottom and grabbed a clean diaper. He laughed and wiggled his legs.
"What's that?" Hubby demanded. By "that" he meant a sugar-coating of red spots all over The Boy's chest and back.
As is apparent by now, we are not fans of medical intervention. So, naturally, we blamed the antibiotics.
Off we went to the doctor's office. She examined him, growing more speckled by the minute. She quizzed me on what medications we'd given him -- none since a bedtime dose of Motrin the night before. She listened to his lungs. She spoke to him instead of me, perhaps to remind me that I was holding my baby and not to do anything sudden or violent.
"You're going to have to get a chest x-ray, buddy," she said.
There are any number of good reasons the radiology technicians might prefer to have the father stand in the room wearing a metal apron and holding the baby's arms over his head as he is fitted into a plastic sheath and made to sit still and scream while his chest is x-rayed. It could be because fathers tend to be taller. Or stronger. They are definitely, one hundred percent certainly not pregnant. And -- and I think this is the deciding factor -- they are less likely to grab their screaming baby and flee from the room.
Back we went to the pediatrician's office. It was a long wait, but at least Hubby and I could take turns watching the DVD of Spiderman playing on the flat screen t.v. Until he had to go back to work and I got to hear the news that, yes, The Boy had viral pneumonia, and a bad case of it at that. He got two shots of antibiotics -- my friend at this point, I will never deride them again -- and nestled blearily into my lap while we waited half an hour longer to make sure he didn't have an adverse reaction to the antibiotics -- in which case I wouldn't have such good things to say about modern medicine.
When we settled back in the waiting room I was disappointed to discover that Spiderman had started over again, subjecting me to exactly the same scenes I had already watched. Finally, a mother complained that her three-year-old girl might be, say, frightened by such fare in the doctor's office, and they put in The Incredibles instead.
When I got home and crawled into bed with The Boy, Hubby suggested that at least this day had taken my mind off the surgery scheduled for the morrow.
"No," I assured him. "It just made me more miserable."
How miserable? Consider the odds that your child will be diagnosed with pneumonia the day before you are scheduled for surgery you would cut off your right arm to avoid. Add to this the unlikelihood that the appointment time the pediatrician has available to check on his progress is the very hour you are under edict to appear at the hospital for surgery prep. Make it even more special -- the day of The Boy's diagnosis, the day before your scheduled surgery, is Martin Luther King Day and your doctor's office is closed so you can't call the surgery scheduler and re-schedule.
It was touch and go Tuesday morning whether Hubby would successfully talk me into going through with the surgery. It must have been the combination of the surgery scheduler still not picking up her phone and The Boy's rash fading that found me entering out-patient admissions alone.
I mumbled to everyone I saw that my husband would be coming and must be allowed to come find me. They promised he would as they stripped my clothes, made me sit on a gurney, and tried four times to get an IV going without "blowing a vein." In case you were wondering, it is not fun to be fitted with an IV four times while your veins blow. Especially when you are grudgingly willing to even sit in the room, waiting for your husband to call to tell you the baby is fine and envisioning how you will rip the painfully inserted IV out of your arm and walk to the pediatrician's office if you find out that he is, say, having another chest x-ray.
Finally, Hubby called as I stubbornly sat up on the gurney, refusing to be a lazy body remaining inert for convenience's sake.
"He's doing much better," he assured me. "She's going to give him a breathing treatment to open up his lungs. I'm going to be here another half an hour."
"You probably won't make it here before my surgery," someone mumbled in a deep, toneless, I'm-not-really-here-but-sitting-on-a-beach-in-Hawaii voice.
"Probably not," Hubby admitted. "I love you."
I cried. Until the orderly came to transport me to the pre-op room in a wheelchair and I bitched at her about hating being wheeled around in a wheelchair because it makes me feel less human. She was kind of confused by me and unfortunately had no choice but to make my transport even more humiliating by loading me down with the white plastic shopping bags of my belongings that, by all rights, Hubby should have been holding.
It's only fair to say that everyone was really nice to me. In the case of the pre-op nurse, maybe a little too nice, as I promised her I didn't care whether the plastic glasses case we used was blue or purple. "Oh, the blue matches your eyes," she simpered. I wondered it she had ever had any luck at all making a single grown person about to undergo surgery smile.
Security came and took my things, the doctor had an honest and respectful talk with me, the anesthesiology nurse offered me something for my nerves which I heartily refused, and pretty soon after that it was over.
Plainly those drugs they gave me were good, because I woke up apologizing for my rotten mood and even smiled at the nurse in the recovery room.
It wasn't until a couple hours after I'd been home, when I'd lulled Hubby into thinking it was all over and my insanity had subsided and I was competent to take care of my child that the drugs wore off. "I'm depressed," I announced and dragged myself into the office to sleep on the daybed.
The Boy and I are both on the mend -- his cough subsides as my depression does. But the flurries outside my window don't bode well for our futures. Hubby must agree, as he recently purchased a light machine designed to combat Seasonal Affective Disorder.
Personally, I think living somewhere where winter doesn't exist would be a better solution. But since everything else about Asheville is pretty okay, I'm willing to give the SAD machine a try.
And I'm not ready to call things normal.
It all began 11 days ago, when I found out that I would have to undergo out-patient surgery.
It's not that I'm squeamish. I've chatted away with phlebotomists filling vial after vial of my blood, discussed my work while doctors do what they do with speculums. I'm the one who never says it hurts when a physician pushing her hands into some tender part of my anatomy asks if it hurts.
It's just that the past several times I've casually trusted someone to perform a medical procedure on my body, I've come out of it feeling . . . invaded. And the surgery I was told I had to have feels particularly invasive. As if anything that involves strangers putting metal implements into your body isn't particularly invasive.
I had been avoiding the surgery for six weeks and felt more than a little bit defeated that I had run out of options. Acupuncture sure made me feel less gloomy, but it wasn't resolving the problem. I'm grateful I found my way back to regular yoga classes, but they didn't regularize my body. And, frankly, I was sure I had only a limited amount of time remaining before Hubby threw up his hands and told me to move back to California to feel sorry for myself.
So we scheduled the surgery for the following Tuesday, and I continued my week a marked woman.
Two days later, a Wednesday, I received the welcome distraction of a call from The Boy's school. "His temperature is fine, but he's kind of weepy and wants his Mommy," they told me.
What could be better than a child who just wants to be held by his Mommy, who, conveniently enough, really wanted to hold her boy?
I took him home and we played cheerfully and I pretended I didn't feel like I was walking around under a big, black, scheduled-surgery cloud. We had a little dinner, which, these days, consists of The Boy sticking his fingers into whatever dish I'm holding and eating his refried beans/yogurt/other viscous substance by hand. We both enjoy it greatly.
After his dinner, we stopped in the kitchen to feed the dogs their kibble and Mommy a few corn chips.
As I expertly held The Boy with one arm and reached for the chips with the other, The Boy's eyes bugged and his body jerked. About a gallon of vomit cascaded over the chip bag and onto the kitchen floor.
When you have been a mother for 13 months -- 6 of which involved a child with reflux so bad he seemed to spit up twice the amount of milk you had just poured down him at every single meal -- a little bit of vomit doesn't panic you. Even a lot of vomit.
In fact, a few months ago, I watched all of Superbad covered in The Boy's vomit. It was only the second time we'd been out to see a movie since his birth, and I really, really wanted to see it. It probably helped that the theater was dark enough that I didn't see just how much vomit I was sitting in until the lights came up and I had marginally dried out. Hubby claims he missed the vomit entirely and got to watch the movie blissfully unaware of just how groce his wife has become.
Now, as The Boy vomited his way down the hall to the bathroom, I calmly stripped off my chunked cashmere sweater and filled the bathtub. My excuse was to wash him off, but honestly The Boy loves his bath, and, sure enough, it seemed to fix everything.
The next day was what we in Asheville like to call a "snow day" -- about an inch of white stuff on the ground and temperatures reaching the low 40's, so it's pretty much all gone by noon but everything closes down anyhow so no one has to risk driving mountain roads in "weather."
In this case, the "weather" meant the cancellation of the "pre-op" appointment I didn't want to have. Hmm. Maybe there is something to this winter weather.
Furthermore, much as I look at every school closing as a personal affront to my efforts to locate something called a life in the mess of my days doing nothing of permanence, I had to admit it was just as well The Boy's school closed as well or we might have caused an epidemic. Not that I knew anything much was wrong until the afternoon, when I took the first of The Boy's temperature readings and discovered that he would have been sent home from school if he had been there.
Out came the trusty Tylenol. I remember vaguely the days when Hubby and I resisted putting any sort of evil drug into The Boy's perfect system and how I would cry every time I gave in and dosed him at 2:30 in the morning to ease his teething pain. By now, however, we recognize Tylenol for what it is -- our drug of choice to make our boy smile again. I should be embarrassed to admit that when he catches sight of the bottle he reaches for it with great urgency, begging for a squirt of its cherry-flavored goodness.
This time, however, Tylenol let us down. I held him in bed, rather relishing the chance to just read a book and let everything else go to hell. Until I took his temperature again. It had climbed to 103.8. Definitely high enough to justify a call to the on-call pediatrician.
"Try Motrin," she suggested.
Out went Hubby to CVS and back he came armed with substantial bottles of both berry-flavored Motrin and some back-up Tylenol. The Boy and I cuddled up for a night together, banished Hubby to the daybed in the office, and, with him well dosed, we had a peaceful night.
Until Friday morning hit me and I realized that -- much as I would have liked to let the pre-op appointment slip away unnoticed by all but myself -- I had to be responsible and reschedule it.
Which is why I found myself at 1:15 sitting in the waiting room of the satellite office. The last time I had been here, the receptionist had kept me waiting 45 minutes past my appointment time, blandly assuring me that I was signed in and everyone knew I was waiting . Until I huffed out and told her to cancel my appointment because I had a child to pick up from daycare. Only then did she mention that she was waiting for my records to be faxed over from the other office and thus had not even put me in the queue.
This time, I had Hubby sitting next to me missing work and holding a baby who, it was becoming increasingly clear, was not just tired from being rudely pulled away from his nap, but who was feeling really lousy. I sat in my seat brooding and fighting the urge to walk away from not only the pre-op appointment but the op as well.
Forty-five minutes later The Boy was feeling even lousier and the receptionist was blandly assuring me "they haven't forgotten you."
Fifty minutes later, Hubby sprang into action.
There's nothing like watching an angry man clutching a sick baby telling off the receptionist for rolling her eyes at him. "I want to talk to someone who can tell us what's going on," he stormed.
Wouldn't you know it, within minutes we were ushered into a private waiting room by a nurse plainly trained in sweetly handling irate patients. She explained that the doctor had arrived late from the hospital and wouldn't have time to see us for 45 more minutes.
Now, I don't know what kind of world the receptionist lives in, but I tend to think it's only polite to inform someone that she won't be seen until TWO HOURS after her appointment time, oh, when she checks in. "They haven't forgotten you" is just not an adequate substitute.
Happily, the nurse gave us the option of seeing a different doctor, as the one we were scheduled to see wasn't the one scheduled to do the surgery anyhow. Since, remember, my appointment was supposed to be the day before at a different office. Damn winter.
The doctor who did see us was perfectly nice, but what she did just didn't seem like something a doctor was needed for. Or an office visit, for that matter. All she did was ask me some questions that we in the law business like to call CYA. Because lawyers are both painfully unhip and overconfident of their own importance, I'm willing to bet that it doesn't take a law degree to know that CYA means Cover Your Ass and that the waste of three hours of my day was nothing more than a requirement of the insurance companies. Maybe they imagined that if allowed to, say, answer a few questions over the phone, I would lie about not smoking and they therefore needed me within sniffing distance of the person doing the asking. And maybe -- I don't know, I don't have medical training -- but maybe doctors are better able to smell the lingering odor of tobacco on a lying surgery-patient's clothing than, say, a nurse who wouldn't have arrived late from the hospital and hence have a backlog of patients. We live in North Carolina, where people smoke, so this is entirely possible.
At any rate, by the time I got The Boy home his eyes were glazed, his mouth hung down in the corners like an upside-down slice of mandarin orange, and he had a cough that hurt to hear. His temperature 20 minutes after a dose of our savior the Motrin was 104.
This merited a call to the doctor's office. Which, of course, was closing. The doctor told me to bring him in to the Saturday sick clinic in the morning and go to the hospital if anything at all changed in the middle of the night.
These are words that can make a mother already freaked out and frustrated about impending invasive surgery cry.
"I think he has pneumonia," I sobbed to Hubby. "And we're going to have to go to the emergency room."
"I think he's just fine," Hubby said in that way of his that treads the line between soothing and dismissive. He might have even smirked just a little bit at the doctor's the next morning when their thermometer suggested that That Boy was, in fact, Just Fine. (Okay, that was for effect. Hubby would never smirk at me in a doctor's office with our sick boy. In fact, he is not a smirker at all. But, in these circumstances, he could have been.)
Ah, but there is a reason we see doctors instead of merely thermometers. Doctors can do things like look into ears and announce that The Boy has a nasty ear infection. They can validate mothers by saying that The Boy's cough does sound bad, even if they can hear nothing in his lungs. And they can prescribe cherry-flavored antibiotics with just the right amount of apologia for giving him antibiotics to make you feel like a good parent who wouldn't resort to antibiotics if it weren't really, really necessary.
And so we spent a weekend fever-free. The Boy continued to sleep with me, and Hubby continued to sleep on the daybed in the office. In all honesty, he probably preferred it that way, as I spent much of my time shuffling through the house moaning about not wanting surgery. It gets to be a drag after a while, I know.
By Monday morning, we were discussing why we should still take our on-the-mend boy to the doctor because, even though the antibiotics seemed to be working, that cough was worrisome.
"Remember she said it sounded like pneumonia," I said as I wiped The Boy's bare bottom and grabbed a clean diaper. He laughed and wiggled his legs.
"What's that?" Hubby demanded. By "that" he meant a sugar-coating of red spots all over The Boy's chest and back.
As is apparent by now, we are not fans of medical intervention. So, naturally, we blamed the antibiotics.
Off we went to the doctor's office. She examined him, growing more speckled by the minute. She quizzed me on what medications we'd given him -- none since a bedtime dose of Motrin the night before. She listened to his lungs. She spoke to him instead of me, perhaps to remind me that I was holding my baby and not to do anything sudden or violent.
"You're going to have to get a chest x-ray, buddy," she said.
There are any number of good reasons the radiology technicians might prefer to have the father stand in the room wearing a metal apron and holding the baby's arms over his head as he is fitted into a plastic sheath and made to sit still and scream while his chest is x-rayed. It could be because fathers tend to be taller. Or stronger. They are definitely, one hundred percent certainly not pregnant. And -- and I think this is the deciding factor -- they are less likely to grab their screaming baby and flee from the room.
Back we went to the pediatrician's office. It was a long wait, but at least Hubby and I could take turns watching the DVD of Spiderman playing on the flat screen t.v. Until he had to go back to work and I got to hear the news that, yes, The Boy had viral pneumonia, and a bad case of it at that. He got two shots of antibiotics -- my friend at this point, I will never deride them again -- and nestled blearily into my lap while we waited half an hour longer to make sure he didn't have an adverse reaction to the antibiotics -- in which case I wouldn't have such good things to say about modern medicine.
When we settled back in the waiting room I was disappointed to discover that Spiderman had started over again, subjecting me to exactly the same scenes I had already watched. Finally, a mother complained that her three-year-old girl might be, say, frightened by such fare in the doctor's office, and they put in The Incredibles instead.
When I got home and crawled into bed with The Boy, Hubby suggested that at least this day had taken my mind off the surgery scheduled for the morrow.
"No," I assured him. "It just made me more miserable."
How miserable? Consider the odds that your child will be diagnosed with pneumonia the day before you are scheduled for surgery you would cut off your right arm to avoid. Add to this the unlikelihood that the appointment time the pediatrician has available to check on his progress is the very hour you are under edict to appear at the hospital for surgery prep. Make it even more special -- the day of The Boy's diagnosis, the day before your scheduled surgery, is Martin Luther King Day and your doctor's office is closed so you can't call the surgery scheduler and re-schedule.
It was touch and go Tuesday morning whether Hubby would successfully talk me into going through with the surgery. It must have been the combination of the surgery scheduler still not picking up her phone and The Boy's rash fading that found me entering out-patient admissions alone.
I mumbled to everyone I saw that my husband would be coming and must be allowed to come find me. They promised he would as they stripped my clothes, made me sit on a gurney, and tried four times to get an IV going without "blowing a vein." In case you were wondering, it is not fun to be fitted with an IV four times while your veins blow. Especially when you are grudgingly willing to even sit in the room, waiting for your husband to call to tell you the baby is fine and envisioning how you will rip the painfully inserted IV out of your arm and walk to the pediatrician's office if you find out that he is, say, having another chest x-ray.
Finally, Hubby called as I stubbornly sat up on the gurney, refusing to be a lazy body remaining inert for convenience's sake.
"He's doing much better," he assured me. "She's going to give him a breathing treatment to open up his lungs. I'm going to be here another half an hour."
"You probably won't make it here before my surgery," someone mumbled in a deep, toneless, I'm-not-really-here-but-sitting-on-a-beach-in-Hawaii voice.
"Probably not," Hubby admitted. "I love you."
I cried. Until the orderly came to transport me to the pre-op room in a wheelchair and I bitched at her about hating being wheeled around in a wheelchair because it makes me feel less human. She was kind of confused by me and unfortunately had no choice but to make my transport even more humiliating by loading me down with the white plastic shopping bags of my belongings that, by all rights, Hubby should have been holding.
It's only fair to say that everyone was really nice to me. In the case of the pre-op nurse, maybe a little too nice, as I promised her I didn't care whether the plastic glasses case we used was blue or purple. "Oh, the blue matches your eyes," she simpered. I wondered it she had ever had any luck at all making a single grown person about to undergo surgery smile.
Security came and took my things, the doctor had an honest and respectful talk with me, the anesthesiology nurse offered me something for my nerves which I heartily refused, and pretty soon after that it was over.
Plainly those drugs they gave me were good, because I woke up apologizing for my rotten mood and even smiled at the nurse in the recovery room.
It wasn't until a couple hours after I'd been home, when I'd lulled Hubby into thinking it was all over and my insanity had subsided and I was competent to take care of my child that the drugs wore off. "I'm depressed," I announced and dragged myself into the office to sleep on the daybed.
The Boy and I are both on the mend -- his cough subsides as my depression does. But the flurries outside my window don't bode well for our futures. Hubby must agree, as he recently purchased a light machine designed to combat Seasonal Affective Disorder.
Personally, I think living somewhere where winter doesn't exist would be a better solution. But since everything else about Asheville is pretty okay, I'm willing to give the SAD machine a try.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
The Year of the Normal
On our first day back to school after the holidays, Hubby's birthday, an in-law visit, and an inch of snow that shut down all of Asheville (a very good sign, I told myself, that such weather is not the norm, disproven, alas, by the blanket of snow outside my window right now), one of The Boy's teachers said to me, "I'm ready for normal."
Amen.
There was a time, not so long ago, that my desire for the normal would have alarmed me greatly. Life as the single mother of a velvet-eared basset hound was about motion. My calendars were adorned with notations in different colored pens to give me something to which I could count down. "Okay, it's Monday today, but tomorrow I teach a yoga class at 5:45, and Wednesday is trash day, and Thursday I'll watch Tivo, and Friday is Friday and I've made it through another week." Hair appointments, therapy appointments, acupuncture appointments, an appointment with an astrologer (just one, and it was pretty cool), lunches with colleagues, and even a date or two made my life run.
Even worse, I pulled out one of my old journals from the mid-90's the other day and found myself gasping for breath as if on a very long and very frenzied run. From the gym to the law firm (black leather book bag crammed full of gym clothes, shampoo, and, yes, hair dryer because the ones in the locker rooms at the gym made my hair frizzy and doll-like) to drinks after work or a meeting for my volunteer work at the National Zoo or a movie or . . . No wonder I experienced panic attacks if I awakened on a Sunday with nothing to do. (The cure, if you should ever suffer the same illness: run 10 miles with a section of the New York Times in your pocket to read on the subway home.)
In those days, normal was bad. Normal was safe. Normal was slow. Normal was . . . normal.
Now my panic attacks are brought on by the fact that I want life to be normal. I want to be the mom riding the slide with my boy on a Saturday afternoon. I want to be the person who eats dinner watching a half hour at a time of The Return of the Jedi or Chinatown (we aren't too picky as long as we can Tivo it for free) before washing the dishes and getting ready for bed at 9:00. I wish I knew that I would be sitting down to the same desk, the same work every day.
What could bring on such a misplaced desire to be boring?
Maybe it's moving into a house on which I actually put a 30-year mortgage. Although I owned a lovely house in St. Louis, I went for the better rate on the 7-year balloon because I just couldn't fathom living in the same place for more than seven years. (I made it a whopping four, a record for me.)
Maybe it's having a husband who's my best friend. Although in the past my best friends and I did more than look forward to watching new episodes of The Wire and driving to sleepy little towns for lunch on the weekends.
Many would say it's a Welcome to Motherhood moment. But I vowed to be a Hip Mama when I was trying to get pregnant (see "At 39, I Want the Baby Without the Blame," Newsweek, 10/10/05; don't see a google search I did on myself to see if I could include a link to a copy of the article because I found some weird comments about it out there and now it's bugging me).
I think the reason I want 2008 to be the Year of the Normal is because I can't remember the last time life was.
Certainly there's been no normal since our move to Asheville. There was that month trying to find child care for The Boy so I could get back to my work. Those few weeks with the sitter who didn't seem to do much with him except take him to Wendy's and didn't free up too much of my time because whenever I walked through the room I had to hold him until he stopped crying. And those endless weeks when his adjustment to school was delayed by: a cold; an ear infection; the antibiotics he took to kick the ear infection; a visit by my parents when he was just getting over the ear infection; a visit to his aunt and uncle's house in West Virgina followed by a visit here by his grandmother by which time he felt he should rightly be the center of all attention and not have to share toys with a bunch of other kids; and the stomach bug.
And then . . . he started liking school. I started working at my desk instead of staring at the school's phone number posted right over my computer and wondering how often I could call to check up on him and whether I'd get the bills paid before they called and told me he'd been crying for 45 minutes straight and would really like to go home now.
In fact, by early December there were even a few days he didn't cry when I left him in the mornings. When he, dare I say it, looked forward to school. I started yoga again. I found time to write.
Until the holidays came. Before I knew it, life was all about being a mother instead of a writer. Imagine the time spent shopping when you have not only a boy's first Christmas gifts, but his first birthday gifts as well. But, wait, there's more -- how about planning Hubby's Christmas gift and making it a surprise party with his out-of-town family members? There just isn't time for normal.
By the time January 2 rolled around and brought with it the start of The Boy's school again I was dead set on normal.
Which is plainly why January 2 was a snow day.
They tell me things shut down here at the merest whisper of snow because of the mountain roads, but I'm pretty sure it's just because everyone else needs a break from normal and no one cares that I am still trying to find my way back to it.
So it's now January 20 and I'm sitting in my office with the sheer brown curtains I bought in September and just put up this morning and I still have holiday cards to send out (unapologetically, I've decided) and I'm figuring that even 20 days in, 2008 has a chance of being The Year of the Normal.
Of course, not this week, because I have too much to do.
Amen.
There was a time, not so long ago, that my desire for the normal would have alarmed me greatly. Life as the single mother of a velvet-eared basset hound was about motion. My calendars were adorned with notations in different colored pens to give me something to which I could count down. "Okay, it's Monday today, but tomorrow I teach a yoga class at 5:45, and Wednesday is trash day, and Thursday I'll watch Tivo, and Friday is Friday and I've made it through another week." Hair appointments, therapy appointments, acupuncture appointments, an appointment with an astrologer (just one, and it was pretty cool), lunches with colleagues, and even a date or two made my life run.
Even worse, I pulled out one of my old journals from the mid-90's the other day and found myself gasping for breath as if on a very long and very frenzied run. From the gym to the law firm (black leather book bag crammed full of gym clothes, shampoo, and, yes, hair dryer because the ones in the locker rooms at the gym made my hair frizzy and doll-like) to drinks after work or a meeting for my volunteer work at the National Zoo or a movie or . . . No wonder I experienced panic attacks if I awakened on a Sunday with nothing to do. (The cure, if you should ever suffer the same illness: run 10 miles with a section of the New York Times in your pocket to read on the subway home.)
In those days, normal was bad. Normal was safe. Normal was slow. Normal was . . . normal.
Now my panic attacks are brought on by the fact that I want life to be normal. I want to be the mom riding the slide with my boy on a Saturday afternoon. I want to be the person who eats dinner watching a half hour at a time of The Return of the Jedi or Chinatown (we aren't too picky as long as we can Tivo it for free) before washing the dishes and getting ready for bed at 9:00. I wish I knew that I would be sitting down to the same desk, the same work every day.
What could bring on such a misplaced desire to be boring?
Maybe it's moving into a house on which I actually put a 30-year mortgage. Although I owned a lovely house in St. Louis, I went for the better rate on the 7-year balloon because I just couldn't fathom living in the same place for more than seven years. (I made it a whopping four, a record for me.)
Maybe it's having a husband who's my best friend. Although in the past my best friends and I did more than look forward to watching new episodes of The Wire and driving to sleepy little towns for lunch on the weekends.
Many would say it's a Welcome to Motherhood moment. But I vowed to be a Hip Mama when I was trying to get pregnant (see "At 39, I Want the Baby Without the Blame," Newsweek, 10/10/05; don't see a google search I did on myself to see if I could include a link to a copy of the article because I found some weird comments about it out there and now it's bugging me).
I think the reason I want 2008 to be the Year of the Normal is because I can't remember the last time life was.
Certainly there's been no normal since our move to Asheville. There was that month trying to find child care for The Boy so I could get back to my work. Those few weeks with the sitter who didn't seem to do much with him except take him to Wendy's and didn't free up too much of my time because whenever I walked through the room I had to hold him until he stopped crying. And those endless weeks when his adjustment to school was delayed by: a cold; an ear infection; the antibiotics he took to kick the ear infection; a visit by my parents when he was just getting over the ear infection; a visit to his aunt and uncle's house in West Virgina followed by a visit here by his grandmother by which time he felt he should rightly be the center of all attention and not have to share toys with a bunch of other kids; and the stomach bug.
And then . . . he started liking school. I started working at my desk instead of staring at the school's phone number posted right over my computer and wondering how often I could call to check up on him and whether I'd get the bills paid before they called and told me he'd been crying for 45 minutes straight and would really like to go home now.
In fact, by early December there were even a few days he didn't cry when I left him in the mornings. When he, dare I say it, looked forward to school. I started yoga again. I found time to write.
Until the holidays came. Before I knew it, life was all about being a mother instead of a writer. Imagine the time spent shopping when you have not only a boy's first Christmas gifts, but his first birthday gifts as well. But, wait, there's more -- how about planning Hubby's Christmas gift and making it a surprise party with his out-of-town family members? There just isn't time for normal.
By the time January 2 rolled around and brought with it the start of The Boy's school again I was dead set on normal.
Which is plainly why January 2 was a snow day.
They tell me things shut down here at the merest whisper of snow because of the mountain roads, but I'm pretty sure it's just because everyone else needs a break from normal and no one cares that I am still trying to find my way back to it.
So it's now January 20 and I'm sitting in my office with the sheer brown curtains I bought in September and just put up this morning and I still have holiday cards to send out (unapologetically, I've decided) and I'm figuring that even 20 days in, 2008 has a chance of being The Year of the Normal.
Of course, not this week, because I have too much to do.
We Interrupt Our Regular Programming
Chances are if you read this blog this is old news to you.
But as I am now groveling for votes in an American Idol-style new novel competition, I'll risk repeating myself in the hopes of catching some lovely person who has stumbled onto my blog or one of you equally lovely friends (or friends of friends) whose email account spit my email into spam because the "To" line includes my entire address book.
My novel, Long Beach Baby, cruelly still unpublished, has been selected as a semi-finalist in Amazon.com's Breakthrough Novel contest. And you can read a whole 5,000 words of it by going to http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00121WEUK/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top and clicking on the Download (for free!) button in the upper right corner of your screen.
More importantly -- and here comes the pandering -- you can write a comment or review and help me catch the attention of the folks at Penguin Books who are deciding which excerpts they will review and consider for a spot as finalist.
May I repeat this in grossly clear terms? PLEASE WRITE SOMETHING (hopefully nice) ABOUT MY EXCERPT (and maybe, while you're at it, say how the not-so-great-reviews are written by crazy people who wouldn't know a good novel if they actually sat down and read one) SO I CAN ADVANCE TO THE NEXT ROUND.
Plus, it might make up for the fact that I have posted NOTHING on this blog for the entirety of 2008.
Of that, a posting very, very soon, I promise. Just know that I am spending all my baby-free and sleep-free time right now tracking down every last person who was ever nice to me and begging them to review my piece.
In the meantime, enjoy, I hope . . .
But as I am now groveling for votes in an American Idol-style new novel competition, I'll risk repeating myself in the hopes of catching some lovely person who has stumbled onto my blog or one of you equally lovely friends (or friends of friends) whose email account spit my email into spam because the "To" line includes my entire address book.
My novel, Long Beach Baby, cruelly still unpublished, has been selected as a semi-finalist in Amazon.com's Breakthrough Novel contest. And you can read a whole 5,000 words of it by going to http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00121WEUK/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top and clicking on the Download (for free!) button in the upper right corner of your screen.
More importantly -- and here comes the pandering -- you can write a comment or review and help me catch the attention of the folks at Penguin Books who are deciding which excerpts they will review and consider for a spot as finalist.
May I repeat this in grossly clear terms? PLEASE WRITE SOMETHING (hopefully nice) ABOUT MY EXCERPT (and maybe, while you're at it, say how the not-so-great-reviews are written by crazy people who wouldn't know a good novel if they actually sat down and read one) SO I CAN ADVANCE TO THE NEXT ROUND.
Plus, it might make up for the fact that I have posted NOTHING on this blog for the entirety of 2008.
Of that, a posting very, very soon, I promise. Just know that I am spending all my baby-free and sleep-free time right now tracking down every last person who was ever nice to me and begging them to review my piece.
In the meantime, enjoy, I hope . . .
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