ed_rex

If there's one thing that must be characteristic of all child-carers (if not necessarily all parents; some have nannies), it must be exhaustion.

Now, I feel I have to rush to equivocate: Raven and I have been extremely fortunate compared to many so far. Nevermind that our Baobao seems healthy (if not exactly rushing to hit her developmental milestones; for instance, nearly nine months old, she has yet to sit up by herself or start to pull herself to her feet by holding on to the walls of her crib or playpen; if my parents are to be (independently) believed, I was ,walking at nine months, three weeks), but since she was about two months old, she has slept through the night more of than not.

Magister Domum, with Child: When she was sweet, she was very, very sweet ...

Mind you, a baby's night is not necessarily a grown-ups. My baby is currently awake and demanding between 07:03 and 07:18, not matter if (like Wednesday) she went down for good around 22:30 or if, like yesterday, she went down (after a rough bedtime!) around 22:30, then awoke just before midnight for a feed, and then again around 02:30. And she cares "not a whit" for what time poor Young Papa Geoffrey went to bed.

And because of that, I tried to hit the sack around 23:00 last night, and would have managed 00:00, had she not chosen to demand more food around 23:50. Raven took care of that feed, but I was still awake for it and after it.

Anyway, since I stopped working for a paycheck (which usually saw me home after midnight and lucky to be in bed by 04:00) it has been Young Geoffrey on the morning shift. Which means I am very lucky to finish a night with even a full seven hours of sleep. Usually it's more like five or six.

Again, I'm not complaining, just noting the fact: babies are a lot of work!

But no regrets. The moment Raven squeezed her out, I felt a flood of hormones washing through my system that declared, She [the baby, sorry Raven] is the Chosen One, the most important thing in your life from now on!, and those have not washed away.

Not everyone wants to be a parent, and more power to you! But some are built for the job, and I seem to be one of them.

Post-scriptum: Hivemind! The photo above reminds me strongly of a famous painting; does anyone recognize it and, if so, could you point me to a copy of it? If I could accidentally participate in that art reproduction during quarantine meme, I would do it.

It seemed a standard thrown out back, if a little long in the healing. But still, eight days in, Young Geoffrey felt well enough on Sunday afternoon to engage in gardening. Gently, carefully, bending only from a seated pose upon a stoop, he nevertheless pulled weeds, dug earth, planted bulbs.

And felt ... optimistic, as to bed he went on Sunday night, more flexible than he had been for eight full days.

Young Geoffrey awoke up on Monday morning early, bladder bursting, back more stiff and sore than it had been since the first day of his attack, now nine days prior. Five minutes he strove (ten, if his sweetie has the better timer) to exit his bed and — grunting painfully with every step — make his way to the toilet to void his bladder.

The pain was now not only in his back, but lanced like permanent lightning, from base of spine to right buttock, then along the back of his thigh to the knee. Agony beyond any he had known before ...

Ahem. Enough of poetry and rhythm.

Raven said we We're going to the ER, and I didn't argue for a moment. I've had back pain before, I've torn my hamstring, I've broken a leg (yes, I've had my right orbital bone shattered, too, but that didn't actually hurt much at all), but I've never felt such agony, at least none that lasted.

Raven called a cab, and I managed to make my way out to it unaided. Made the mistake of sitting in the back seat, no way to recline or ease the jolts from Ottawa's austerity-riddled roads.

By the time we reached the hospital, I let five month pregnant Raven heft the over-night bag I'd packed in case ER refused to let me go home that night.

Thank god, and as I'd hoped, the 8:00 AM Monday Emergency waiting room was sparsely populated. We waited no more than a couple of hours before we found ourselves assigned an examination room. Thank god it was a short wait for the ER doctor to appear, because my pain only got worse and worse.

He checked me out, tested me (lying on my back on the table) for strength in foot and leg and determined that, I had sciatica, a nerve problem in my right leg. But when I tried to turn and sit up, I ended up on my knees on the floor. I needed the MD's help, and Raven's, to get back up onto the table.

He told me I'd be getting a shot for immediate pain relief, and wrote out a prescription for a Naproxen/muscle relaxant combination (Vimovo 500&20MG, according to the label), and for not 5, not 10, but 15 god-damned 1 mg doses of hydromorphone, a full-blown narcotic. Yes, serious pain relief.

Meanwhile, before the initial shot took hold, I really had to pee. I mean, I really had to pee. I managed to get to my feet on my own, but the pain was so severe I couldn't take a step, and finally a saintly orderly found a pee-bottle and Raven held it for me so that I wouldn't piss my pants. First time for that indignity, but I guess it won't be my last. #GettingOldSucks

Anyway, to make a long story short, when the shot finally kicked in, I exited the room and soon enough the ER doctor (a youngish, middle-Eastern, or East-Indian looking man who was super sweet, he shook our hands three different times) sent us off with my prescriptions, and we limped towards a cab and home. Grabbed some breakfast, then Raven (who had called in to work and used one of her Family Days) went down to our local pharmacy (one of whose owners was on my soccer team this winter, strictly by the by) and filled the prescription.

When she came home, I gobbled my pills and limped up to my office. They hit hard, they hit fast and the rest of Monday was a blur.

Tuesday, I took two more doses (as prescribed), worked on the exercises the ER MDeity provided, and Wednesday, I only had one of the Naproxen/muscle relaxant combos, along with more reps of the exercises.

Thursday, though (as I had Wednesday) I awoke with a viscious "hangover" from one of the drugs, I felt well enough that I cycled close to 8 kilometres to my family doctor's office, for an unrelated appointment, sans any medication at all.

Friday, same. No drugs, no pain. Knocking the proverbial wood as I type this on Sunday, it's over.

And if I take any lesson from the whole ordeal (other than that I need to strengthen my core), it is this. I remember a close friend who has also had back problems, telling me that he had to take to the streets to find pain relief. No Emergency room would dose him. But I imagine that when he visited an emergency room, he was alone. Me? I was well-dressed, and accompanied not just by my doting wife, but by my pregnant doting wife.

Would I have received the scrip for fucking narcotics without her prescense? No way to know for sure, of course, but I have my doubts.

And that's the story. If you're ever in need of serious pain relief again, dress well and, if you can, bring a respectable-looking woman with you.

Or, Spam Folder Fun Times

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Notes on my health, and the state of the Emergency Department at the Ottawa Civic Hospital (also some footie)

Health-wise, 2018 has not been kind to me. To start, following a long evening sitting in a bad chair at my father's, and my first soccer game of the year, following three weeks off (one actual missed game — about which more, perhaps, in another entry — and two bye weeks for Christmas and New Year's eves), I woke up on Monday the 8th in an agony of lower back pain, something with which I have by this point had far too much familiarity. Used to be, my back went out about every 11 years; nowadays, it's more like every two, with a minor episode between the big ones.

I called in sick, then the next day, and the one after that and the one after that. When I called in the next Monday, my boss suggested I just let him know when I was ready to go again.

Good call; I ended up missing a full two weeks of work along with two more soccer games.

(Allow me a digression. We lost the first of those missed games, and a team-mate texted me the following (I quote verbatim).

We needed you today lol our
dé was all messed up

Lost 4-2 I got the two line goals

(Needless to say, I chose and choose to read the lol in a completely non-ironic way. Onwards.)

At the same time that my back decided to treat me to another round of I dare you to get out of bed without screaming, just try it!, another, perhaps more serious, health issue blossomed suddenly into crisis after what was, in retrospect, a pretty long and gradual gestation period.

Briefly, for some time — maybe as many as two or three months, I've been finding it increasingly difficult — and uncomfortable — to pee. My once-powerful, Niagara-like flow was coming more and more often to resemble the final stretches of the modern Colorado River: slow and inconstant. And suddenly, also painful.

Finally moved to action, I called my GP's office and, using the magic words, It really hurts when I pee, managed to get an appointment on the day of the call, the 11th of January. There I produced a clean urine sample. The Good Doctor prescribed an ultrasound and blood tests, telling me she thought I probably had a bladder infection, adding that she also hoped that was the issue.

That was a Thursday. I duly made an appointment for the ultrasound at a nearby clinic, despite the fact the appointment was eight days away, just this past Friday, the 19th.

Come that day, the clinic called me and left a message saying there was no technician available and, er, my appointment was cancelled. Would I please call them back, etc etc.

Thing is, by this point, the discomfort-verging-on-pain had become fucking agony. I was peeing every hour and a half — or rather, I was trying to pee. Forced to sit rather than stand, so that I need not fear should my mighty efforts to void my bladder also sent issue from my nether region, despite the pain I usually managed to get only a fitful dribble to come out.

Feeling kind of desperate I called the clinic back. They could give me an appointment only the following Thursday. I booked it, but started calling others, and found a place (The Bruyere, south of the Byward Market) that could see me next Tuesday. I took it and hoped I could hold on (as it were) til then.

Come Saturday, I decided I couldn't hold on. The quantity of urine I was able to pass was less than ever, while the amount of pain was entering into agony territory.

I marched myself off to the Ottawa Civic's Emergency Department, arriving around 14:30.

The waiting room in the Civic's Emergency Department is pretty small, seats for maybe 30 or 40 people, I'd guess. There were about a dozen people there when I stepped up to the triage nurse's station. There they took my OHIP card and told me to take a seat and wait to be called.

I settled in for what I thought would be a long while, but I heard my name no more than five or 10 minutes later. The Triage nurse took my particulars and sent me into another waiting area — this one frankly just a hallway lined with chairs — with a samble container for a urine sample. That took about three tries to fill only half-way, but I was told it was enough when I finally saw a doctor.

Finally was a couple of hours after I'd arrived at the hospital. The doctor was a young woman (you know you're getting old when doctors are probably young enough to be your daughter. Le sigh ...) who gave no sign of being rushed. She asked questions and answered them, and took note when I mentioned that the triage nurse had made a mistake: I was suffering from pain in the tip of my penis when I pee, not "abdominal" pain! She took an ultrasound of my abdomen and she even made the rectal probe of my prostate reasonably comfortable.

And then it was back into the waiting hall.

The second ultrasound came around 17:30, and the CT scan, complete with intravenous administration of some kind of dye took place around 19:15 and I was back in the main waiting area at around 21:00. Then another two hours or so to await my results. To wit, a probably bladder infection, no sign of enlarged prostate, but a slightly thickened bladder. At 23:20, I left the hospital with a couple of antibiotics swalled and prescriptions for a two-week course of same, and a 30 day course of Tamsulosin, a muscle relaxant meant to make it easier for me to pee.

All that, for an out-of-pocket cost of about nine hours of my time and $0.00 out-of-pocket. (Filling the prescriptions, on the other hand, did cost me, though happily not a lot.)

Raven declared, "Finally, after 9 hours!!" via text, but I wrote back, "I'm not complaining. No appointment, two ultrasounds and a CT scan, all for 'free', for everyone who needs it."

And indeed, that more included another ultrasound this week, and will include follow-ups with my GP, and then, well, who knows. But I suppose as I carry on growing improbably older, I'll have need of more, not less, medicare.

All in all, I was pretty impressed by what I found at the Civic. Yes, having patients wait in a hallway is far from ideal, sign of austerity, no doubt, but still a functioning system.

Pray we organize to keep it that way.

Finally, despite the fact that I missed two weeks of work, all credit to Raven! Despite earning barely more than the new minimum provincial wage and despite having just put two new pairs of glasses (one for driving/cycling &ct, the other a pair of bifocals for reading and computer work; and glass lenses, damnit, no more god damned plastic!), I am still in a position that will see me pay of the credit card before I carry any interest. Thanks to her lessons, the missed work and the extra expenses are drag, but not a problem, never mind a disaster.

Pics, of course, to come when the new specs are delivered. This coming week, I hope!

Thanks for bearing with me. If you read this far, you deserve a little break.

What have I become or, The Devolution of Young Geoffrey!

There are times when looking oneself in even a metaphorical mirror is a sobering thing indeed.

Jesus, god, two written apologies in eight days! What in the world has happened to Young Edifice? Did I somehow turn into that middle-aged white guy? The one whose idea of conversation is to "share" his opinions about this, that and especially the other thing, whether or not anyone has asked for it.

The first incident I might have just chalked up to social awkwardness born of my long hermatose years in Ottawa. Outside of Raven and family, and my weekly soccer games, I could count most years' social interactions on the fingers of one hand. So I suppose a gaffe or two might be in order.

The other two, though, were the sort of explosions of ego that I have always found appalling in others; hearing them in myself is frankly a little nauseating.

That first incident happened two Sundays ago, after a soccer game (we won, thank you very much) which featured a former team-mate as the opposing captain.

Robyn and I last played together two or three years ago, and our sole contact since has been a LinkedIn "friendship", and three or four email exchanges when I've been looking for a sub for one of my teams.

She is an athletic young woman, and one with whom I enjoyed talking when we played together and, yes, I liked the look of her as well. Had I been single, she was someone I might have pursued, if had she wasn't a vegetarian. (I know. Not as big a deal as politics or religion, but still ...) Whether any of that contributed to my behaviour a week-and-a-half ago I leave to the judgment of the reader; for me, I don't think so, but it's possible.

Anyway. As opposing captains we shook hands before the game and then, as fellow cyclists, afterwards we talked on the way to the bike rack, and rode off together, catching up as acquaintances will do.

And then, when there was a brief lull in the conversation, I leaned into my handlebars and said over my shoulder, "Well, and with that I will bid you adieu!" And I stepped hard on my peddles and pulled away as if I was being chased by the devil himself.

Why? Why ever would I be so rude to someone I liked? As best I can recall, I was worried that I was presuming too much, that she might feel I was pursuing her in some unseemly way. That, despite the fact she seemed for all the world happy to see me and to be enjoying our chat. And when I made my sudden departure, her "Okay," came with a distinctly confused tone of voice.

It's one thing to not be an aggressive prick, Young Edifice, but you are actually allowed to talk with women. You used to do it all the time. Hell, there have been long periods in your life when most of your friends were women!

Another incident came on a return trip from Montreal, when one of my passengers directed me to where he had parked his car. A 1970 Thunderbird, all bright red paint job and obviously one that had been lovably restored.

As, in fact, the pilot explained. And he asked for a few appreciative words about his classic automobile. His crew made the appropriate sounds but what I heard coming from my own mouth appalled me, even as I was unable to stop the words from spilling forth. "Well, if I was one who liked sports cars, I guess I'd like it."

Jesus. God. What a fucking ass. Did anybody, I asked myself, actually ask whether you liked sports cars, Young Edifice!?! Just say, "Nice car," would that be so hard?

Then there was this past Sunday, another soccer game. (We lost that one, and I was filling in as keeper. Ten balls got past me. It took me a while longer to process my behaviour because of that.)

One of my team-mates is a young journalist (since when are national magazine writers allowed to look like they're barely out of high school? When did Young Edifice get to be so old!) and when she arrived we got to talking, almost as if we were carrying on from a chat we'd had the previous game.

Anyway, she told me that she was covering the NAFTA negotiations — and I fucking cut her off.

Cut her off and — again, almost as if I were listening to some asshole who wasn't me, except that, y'know: it was my mouth that was flapping, my voice that was spouting off.

Because spouting off was what I was doing. "I haven't really been paying much attention to the negotiations," I started off by saying. And then, rather than asking her to fill me in — since she was, y'know, paying a lot of attention to the proceedings — I launched into a mini-rant on how I didn't trust Trudeau &ct &ct &ct.

For some strange reason, that kind of killed the "conversation", though I didn't really notice it in the moment, since we spoke at half-time and it was time to get back out onto the field.

And on the field, I let in another four goals (for a grand total of 10 — not my most shining hour as keeper!), so it wasn't until I was home and recovered from the defeat that I replayed my words and voice in my mind and realized what I must have sounded like: That Guy. That middle-aged white guy whose idea of conversation is to opine, to lecture, and god knows, not to listen — especially not to a younger woman even if she is actually involved in the topic at hand.

Yuck.

I wrote both women letters of apology (the pilot? Well, I don't have his email address anyway), and both graciously said it was fine, but I still don't feel like it's fine. I can only hope that I'll be given the chance to behave better in the future.

I don't think I've always been like this, so what happened? When did I turn into That Guy? Will I soon by loudly proclaiming that all modern music — everything made since I turned 20 or so — is crap? God knows, I keep running into men (and they are usually men, no question) who make such statements with no apparent sense of irony, or awareness that they are surely channelling their own parents, who doubtless said the same about the music they now idolize as The Best of All Time.

Please, Lord: I do not want this to be a taste of my future self. Self-monitoring — intense self-monitoring! — must become the order of the day from now until at last I slide from this mortal coil into eternal darkness.

Emmy the Great describes the type (I don't want to become) with a wonderfully acerbic wit.

You say you're looking for the truth,
Like you got rifles in your books,
But up above your parents' roof
I saw no star tonight,
Only the black from whence you came,
And where they'll send you back again,
And no blue plaque will keep your name
From falling out of sight.

And you can wage this war of one,
And I am still the only one
Who will remember you when you are gone.

It's pretty hard to believe it's been 13 and a half years since I joined Livejournal. Paradoxically, it's also pretty hard to believe it's only been 13 and a half years since I joined Livejournal.

What's even harder to believe, is that I've been on Dreamwidth since May of 2009, just shy of eight years, – more than half the time I've been on Livejournal – during which I have made DW my home, cross-posting to LJ from here.

14 years. 8 years. Either way, the mind boggles.

Anyway, over the years, LJ/DW (but especially) it has at times been a central part of my online life, if recent years have seen its importance diminish (almost the only posts I've made directly to LJ since moving to DW have been an automated record of my tweets). And now, the movement away from LJ to DW, which started fitfully back in 2009, seems to have really taken off. Last I checked (two or three days ago) there were a half-dozen dead journals listed on my LJ Friends List; there might be more now).

I'm not closing my LJ. Not yet, anyway. Nostalgia and inertia are powerful forces, and the Doctor Who community over there is still pretty strong. More importantly, I'm not much more concerned about servers being located in Russia than I am about DW's being located in the United States. Indeed, a case could be made that, as a Canadian, I am more likely to be targeted by nefarious forces in the USA than I am by the powers-that-be in Russia.

But regardless, as a wannabe writer and sometime publisher, the vast majority of my on-line life is conducted in public. And I harbor no illusions that anything I post on someone else's server is not accessible to government forces should they happen to put me in their cross-hairs.

So here I am; and there I will stay. And a happy anniversary to me, and to Livejournal.

#mylivejournal #lj18 #happybirthday

Not my popularity, but Dreamwidth's.

A whole bunch of my Livejournal Friends (well, maybe a half-dozen) have gone and done what I did a few years back - duplicated their journals here. Worse, they're now cross-posting new entries. Er, as I do.

So, my heretofore almost-moribund DW Reading page is suddenly a lot busier. But (which two exceptions so far), busier with people whose words I will also see on LJ.

It's not nearly as onerous as scrolling through Facebook, but the duplication isn't actually welcome.

Aw well. First-world problems, I guess.

A New Year's post-mortem

Image from the cover of Self-Loathing Comics #1, by R. Crumb. Published by Fantagraphics Books. Click image for full cover.

It's a sobering fact that Neil Young manages to make records faster than I can absorb them, and that Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes books faster than I can fucking read them.

As John Lennon put it, "And so happy Christmas, and what have you done? Another year over ..."

Am I going to manage to do something with the new year just begun?

( A look at what Young Geoffrey has left undone. If you're not interested, just skip to the video below. Emmy the Great is exactly what Emma-Lee Moss wrote on the tin when she was young and un-selfconscious. )

"You say you love me like a sister
Then you walk me to the cafe
where the drinks cost more than music ..."

The strangeness of fear (or lack thereof)

December 11, 2016, OTTAWA — Fear — pure, irrational fear — is the damnedest thing.

I'm talking about the fears that don't make sense, or at least, that don't make sense when taken out of context. Fear of spiders that aren't poisonous, of rodents nott dangerous, of heights well-barricaded.

This last — heights — is my especial irrational bugaboo. Standing on a chair to reach a high shelf makes me uneasy. Getting onto the counter to change a light-bulb makes me nervous verging on frightened.

Hell, one of my earliest childhood memories comes from a terror near paralysis I experienced when I had to ride a down escalator at the old Eaton's in Montreal. In fact, it's only in the past five — maybe 10 — years, that I've learned to travel the moving staircases in more or less complete serenity.

But put me in an elevator or on an aeroplane, no matter that the latter, especially, is objectively much more dangerous than riding an escalator, and I feel no fear whatsoever.

At least, that's always been my experience on commercial airplanes. But I've wondered, ever since I first flew as a passenger in a Dash-8, how I would react were I to ride in the cockpit of a small aircraft, without the illusion of safety even a small passenger liner provides.

Would my fear of heights reassert itself in such a flimsy platform?

Last month, I finally found out whether I have any fear of flying.

_______

After dropping off passengers at the Trudeau International Airport in Dorval, I headed back to Ottawa driving an empty van, torn between the comforting inanities of the sports station on the radio (go Habs go!) and the distorted eco-rock of the eternally-rejuvenating Neil Young, playing with the much-younger men of Promise of the Real.

Anyway, though I'd make a quick stop at a nearby hotel to pee, about half-way back to Ottawa I began to feel that pressure again, the one that says, Really, Young Geoffrey! You do like your fluids, don't you! And it's true, I do.

After balancing the twin desires — the relief of a good pee vs the desire to get home as soon as possible — the urge to pee won out over a frankly pretty brief stop.

I flicked my turn signal on and pulled off the highway, stopping entirely off the paved shoulder, turned on my hazard lights (yes, as a cyclist, a driver and a pedestrian, I've become a bit of a signal-nazi; and no apologies), and got out from behind the wheel, walked around back to the passenger side and opened the front passenger door, in order to more discretely go about my business.

Job done, I zipped up, closed the door and started back around the vehicle again. Only to see, as I reached the driver's side, a car pulling up onto the shoulder behind me. One with flashing lights on the roof.

Oh my Christ! was my first thought, am I going to be busted for indecent exposure!?!

But surely not! There was no proof I'd exposed anything, was there? It was dark and I'd completed my ablutions before they were anywhere near me!

Still, I could only wait to find out. I turned to face them as an officer emerged from either side of the car. The driver carried a flashlight, but she didn't point it aggressively towards me, but rather just illuminated the ground between us. "Good evening!" I said, waving at them with my gloved right hand.

"Hi," said the cop, "are you all right?"

"Oh," I said, a little non-plussed. "Yes, yes, I'm fine thank you."

"Well good," she said, "we just stopped to make sure everything is okay."

"Yes, it is," I said, then added with completely unnecessary candour, "I just had to, y'know, empty my bladder." (Idiot! came a voice from the back of mind, never volunteer anything!) But no harm done. She smiled and said, "Well good night, then," and she and her partner turned back to their car.

"Okay, thanks," I said, waving. And I thought, making sure "everything is okay" is what cops should do!

But when I got back in the car, I had to wonder, would that have been the whole of the interaction if I'd been a brown or a black man?

And that — after she finished laughing — was just what Raven said when I told her the story after I got home" "Yeah, because you're white!"

I'd like to think that she (and I) are wrong about that, that those particular cops really were among those "good cops" we hear about every time a Sammy Yatim is gunned down like a made dog that's not even on the loose, but it's hard not to wonder if I was only benefiting from my white skin.

Anyway, here's Neil Young and Promise of the Real, to give you something else to be angry about. ("Monsanto").