On the Pros and Cons of Accidental Eavesdropping in Pre-Op

Let me say at the outset that the situation, while not totally out of my control, was somewhat beyond my ability to fix. Yes, I could have ripped the IV out of my hand and slid off the gurney and out of pre-op curtained cubicle #1, clothed in nothing but my cotton socks (apparently the only item of personal apparel allowed under Hospital Regulation #142-HUMIL-I-8) and well-laundered and remarkably soft hospital gown. I could have stomped back through the waiting room of day-surgery patients and out in to the parking lot, untied surgical gown flapping gently in my wake as I emerged blinking into the sunlight without a cab (or the means to pay for one) in sight. I could have. But the option seemed a bit daunting at the time, so I just lay there. The prevailing thought 'o the moment was, "Well, at least I'll have something to write about tomorrow on PFIFB."

The man in #2--so close I could see the shape of the attending nurse's butt in the curtain creating our personal spaces--had described himself 5 minutes earlier to the anesthesiologist as an oral surgeon. They had had quite the professional conversation regarding the best combination of drugs to a) get 'em under, quick and dirty, b) prevent post-op nausea, and c) deal with those radical surgeries (although he didn't do the much these days, being 68 and all...) where you have to reconstruct the whole face. Nina, the lovely nurse whose hands hadn't shaken too severely when "finding a nice vein for the IV" on me, had followed the Gas Queen in and was inquiring which knee was up for meniscus repair.

"The left one," he said.

"Will you please point to it?" she asked.

Maybe it's just me, but I found this disturbing.

I have often found these kinds of conversations confusing myself, albeit in completely non-urgent, non-surgical and (from my frame of reference) understandable circumstances. For instance, is "stage-right" from the perspective of the guy on the stage or the dude in the audience? I can never keep this straight. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone here. How many times every day across the planet do you think someone asks the question, "Is that my left or yours?" However, to hear it asked in the pre-op ward BY someone who was responsible not only for the welfare of his left knee but also all my own cherished body parts, and OF someone who was known in the ward to be "in the profession" was disconcerting, to say the least. If they don't understand each other in this arena, what hope was there for clear communication for me?

Apparently, she only asked so she was sure she was shaving the correct limb (which I also got to enjoy, auditorially speaking.) One hopes his surgeon had a slightly better grip on the job spec.
I wasn't done with the inadvertent eavesdropping yet, but this will wait as the fodder of tomorrow's post. For now, let me just say that I was most relieved to realize that regarding the object of my own surgical attention, I had only one.

Wind and Waves: Playing With My Camera

Trying the video feature again with a smaller file size. (Different video, for those of you who already enjoyed Paris on YouTube.)

While I wait for it to upload, thought we'd check back in for a few updates. First, let's check back in with the "My Son Is Dismantling My iPod" episode. For those of you wondering, the surgery a few weeks ago on all mobile wireless devices in our household by Third Child paid off. 1) He got them all put back together in working order. And 2) he signed with Apple today. We are now the proud parents of an employed (pending usual immigration hoopla, of course) Product Design Engineer. I have no idea what that means, but we are pickled tink!

I've had a few questions re: the new driving machine. Yes, it is an ultimate DM. Yes, it's a convertible. Yes, it's used (2003). And yes, it appears to be learning the routes to work and the beach in record time. I will be on auto-pilot to my regular haunts before you can say "Bye-bye, little red apple of my eye...."

Update to Travelling With a Buddy and Bonding With a Car

For my regular readers: I took the new driving machine for a training run down Highway 17 this afternoon. It growled appreciatively at just the right places, and sighed in harmony when nestling in to just the perfect parking space at Newbie Surfer beach on West Cliff Dr. The bonding has begun.

On a related but rather stretched note: I blathered a while back about the importance of women finding a great travel buddy, early. I just wish I had understood early on about the importance of finding the great car buddy then as well. Ah well, never too late to learn the important lessons of life.

And now to weave it all together: in celebration of one (and there were several!) great trip this year, I am attempting to include a new feature offered by blogspot.com (God love Google!): the video link. For those of you subscribing by email or RSS feed, you will have to visit the actual website to click on this to see my offering for today, I think. (There is a link in the end bits of the email update notice.) It is a short video created from still shots taken while my Travel Buddy and I were in Paris this February. Enjoy!

September 27: Update from my first un-conference

Rats. I loved this video. I love the photos, I love my travelling buddy, and I loved the beautiful haunting solo by Andre Bocelli that I had included as the sound track. And I hate that I have just been convinced that even on my piddly little 12-subscriber blog, this constitutes a copy-right violation.

My alternatives: re-render with cheesy synthesized stock music, pay thousands of dollars in royalty fees to Mr. B to leave the sound track in place, recording three minutes of the lovely melody on a kazoo myself, silence, or remove the video.

Realities: hate cheesy stock music, no budget, kazoo soundtrack will lose everyone in my subscriber list except those who haven't yet figured out how to turn on their computer speakers yet, and I've never been good with silence,... ever. So, I'm removing the video until I can figure out how to have my video and post it, too. Sorry. And sad. And a little frustrated.

I'm Back! and Ruminating On Bonding With a Car

I can walk and chew gum at the same time, but I pee my pants.
It turns out that trying to run AND blog while on vacation has the same effect. And since I pride myself on exemplary personal hygiene, not to mention my well-honed sensibilities on how to be a polite house guest, I elected to alternate between the two, with running taking the lead by a nose towards the end of the last few weeks. I can't tell you how satisfying it has been, therefore, to have not one but several comments from those with my actual email address saying they missed hearing from PFIFB. Ahhh.... I'm having a Sally Field moment even as we speak...

So, I'm back. And luckily for my readers, I'm in a right snarky mood, ready to comment willy-nilly on every darned thing that irks, interests, or elevates. (I can hear you from the front porch: "Oh Boy!!") Fortunately for my readers, the blahg-worth epiphany of the day translates into an elevating observation rather than a cranky rant, and it is this: I have learned what it means to bond with a car.

This comes as a great shock to me. Until now, car bonding has been right up there with public mucus snorking, throat or nose, take your pick. (HA! I confess I love it when a pun appears unbidden from around the corner, like the Cheshire cat grinning unashamedly in mid-air. What was I saying?...) Ah yes... machine affinity and sinus clearing maneuvers. To sum up: in my mind they have always been relegated to the testosterone enhanced end of the human gender spectrum. In my more cranky moments, referring to a collection of inanimate mechanically connected gears, pistons, and what-have-yous as a "she" and snot snorking pretty much cover the "Men!" explanation. That and the complete comfort one might experience in appearing dripping wet and half-naked, grunting one's way down on to a narrow cedar plank in a public sauna with unwilling conversation partners hunkered down by the door. But I digress.

Three years ago I became the proud owner of a bright red 1994 Honda Del Sol. Over the intervening years, that little machine and I have come to an enviably robust set of agreements. For my part, I provided overnight sheltered covering, oil changes and tire pressure checks. Okay, so not me personally--a big public thanks to my live-in mechanics, one and all. I did, personally, ensure spa-like dashboard Armor All treatments, strategic parking arrangements at grocery stores, and regular words of encouragement and endearment. In return, the car never once abandoned me on the side of the road or failed to make it up the steep bits on Highway 17. In fact, we came to a most important understanding: any sunny Saturday that I happened to fill up the tank, it would switch on the factory-installed auto-pilot and whisk me down Highway 85 and over the mountains for a wonderful (every single one) walk on West Cliff Dr. in Santa Cruz. I wouldn't even have to ask.

Time moves on, backs age, and tires wear out. Such is life. So last week-end when we realized we were on the threshold of new Michelins and the cusp of "old cars all of a sudden need a ton of really expensive work," and the realization that for as long as I kept the car, I would be heaving the removable roof on and off at the passing of every cloud, I got a new car. The make, model and year of the new beast are irrelevant. It's just a machine.... so far. But my little red buddy is sitting in the garage, detailed and ready to hit the dating scene again. One potential buyer has already been by. They went for coffee and a danish. He's coming back in the morning with the cash. I can't be here when he comes.

And so now I get it, at least a little. While I never got to the place where I knew its gender, I connected. I care. I'll miss it. Whoa.... I'll be snorking and scratching and grunting in public next!

On Public Saunas and Women's Gardens

Yesterday I joined my mom for a morning swim at the lovely Comox Valley Aquatic Center. Not only did I really enjoy the sun-drenched, chlorine-free and uncrowded ambiance, but I learned something brand new. I discovered I don't like sharing a dry sauna with a man to whom I have not been formally introduced.

I had been sitting quietly by myself in the dry sauna, red-faced and dripping with cathartic toxin run-off, when a half-naked man yanked open the door, waddled in and plunked himself at the other end of the room with a grunt. It was a quiet room, and there were now two human beings sharing the small space. In the absence of any reading material or a big screen TV, I found myself feeling an increasing pressure to chat. This made me cranky. I found myself thinking, "I'm sweating here in clothing not much bigger than respectable Christian underwear and it seems a somewhat private enterprise to share. Why can'tcha find another sauna to grunt in? Isn't there a men's sauna somewhere?" Within a minute, I had left the sauna and headed back to the pool for a few more laps.

I didn't think about the sauna encounter until about an hour later. I was finished my swim before Mom's Aqua Motion class was done, so I showered and dressed and went to the lounge with my book to wait. Cruising through "A Thousand Splendid Suns," by Khaled Hosseini, I read this: "Herat [a city in Afghanistan] was visible from here, spread below her like a child's board game: the Women's Garden to the north of the city, Char-suq Bazaar and the ruins of Alexander the Great's old citadel to the south."

I hit "the Women's Garden" and stopped. As far as I can remember, I have always been just a little offended when I read about areas that were/are set aside for women only: the women's court in the Temple, the women's side in a synagogue, the women's this or that. All of this segregation of public places/spaces, intentional or otherwise, had only ever struck me as a way to keep women out of where the real action takes place. (Think burkhas, the British House of Lords (Spiritual), Hooters Restaurant, etc.) And I had thought this way until I hit the phrase "... the Women's Garden..." in my book and a new possibility occured to me.

Maybe women in various cultures and times in history have actually cherished having these "women only" sides of synagogues, gardens, and yes, even saunas to themselves as a gender. Women talk about different things when it's just other women present. We relax in ways not possible when high levels of testosterone are in the air. We are okay with sweating together in small rooms without knowing each other's names. We bond quickly, able to laugh with total strangers in changing rooms over ridiculously sized/priced/marketed clothing. We actually ask AND answer the question "Does this make me look fat?" of women we've never met before, and trust her to tell us the truth. Come to think of it, the amazing success of the women-only gym franchise, "Curves," should have been my first clue.

Maybe I have been remotely and mildly indignant over "women only" practices on behalf of a group of people who, had they known, might have reacted with puzzlement and even perhaps pity. I think I'll go check out my local Curves. If nothing else, they might have a sauna.

On The Urge To Share

I flew to Calgary yesterday and had been assigned the emergency exit second row, window seat with no seat in front of me, middle seat empty. Score!! Before the plane had even taxied to the runway, the gentleman in the aisle seat had told me that while his 17-year old college-bound daughter didn’t have a drug problem, he was concerned about her drinking. This was, evidently, a big worry, because while he and his wife had at first not wanted any children at all, after nine years of marriage they changed their mind but then had only been able to conceive the once.

Before he could enlighten me further (and I have to assume that was the direction we were heading), the flight attendant came by to discuss with the Emergency Exit Rows Commandos our moral and legally binding duties in case the pilot had been drinking and hit a curb on take-off. When the question came up (and isn’t there always one of those guys?) on precisely how to remove the cover blocking the handle, we were informed that it was basically a velcro-type system and therefore the adrenaline rush would be enough to guarantee that any technique would suffice. The woman in the middle seat in front emergency exit row took this as her cue to lean around the back of her seat and let me in on the personal factoid that she actually didn’t have adrenal glands.

This second disclosure became even more intriguing when the woman’s adult daughter, sitting beside her, exclaimed, “You don’t?! Why not?” Mom informed us all together that they had taken it out when they had removed her tumor.

What is it about commercial air travel that incites people to share these kinds of intimate personal details with total strangers? The woman hadn’t seen fit to inform even a closes relative of her adrenal-gland free condition, yet she risks dislocating her spine to fill me in with the very same insight. And who knows where the man in 17D would have wound up without the intervention of the "In The Event Of An Emergency" lecture, after which I opened my book so quickly that I nicked my nose on the corner. Does some kind of “seat buddy” social bonding kick in? Or is it as simple as the protection of anonymity converging with the opportunity to vent? If that’s the case, it’s much cheaper to just start a blahg.

Transplanting Your Teen, Part Two

Note to readers: my July 29 posting, "Transplanting Your Teen into a California High School, Part One" is on the recommended summer reading list for this class, er.... posting.

I was having a staff off-site meeting on my front porch today. (I love California.) Around 3 p.m., what sounded like fourteen tubas and an off-key trombone filled the air, warming up with what Third Child informs me are arpeggios. This reminded me that we have entered "Band Camp" season, and I owed PFIFB Lesson #2 in the "Transplanting Your Teen" series.

Lesson #2: Public schools in California are heavily subsidized from the parental coffers. This reality dwarfed by an order of magnitude my previous experience of “Waddya mean, you need $7.00 and a dozen cupcakes for the field trip to the National Art Gallery tomorrow?!” That had been chicken feed, compared to the experience that awaited us here.

Two weeks after school began, TC came home with a note saying that his marching band fees of $650.00 were due the next day (surprise!) , and could he go to Italy in March with the band? If so, he would need to take in his $1300 deposit for that tomorrow, too. Apparently, the first school-to-parent missive on the subject had come during--you guessed it--band camp.

Morale of the story: When deciding between alternatives presented in the syllabus, create an excel spreadsheet. Create a column embedded with the off-planet math formula that will be necessary to determine whether, in addition to the transfer credits from your previous school system, the class under scrutiny will eventually map to the prerequisites for the eventual courses that will suffice to get the kid a diploma. Then (and here's the part they don't tell you) add a column that tallies the eventual layout that will be necessary for each option. Book an appointment with the guidance counselor, your accountant and estate lawyers, your kid and that really scary smart guy down the hall from you at work who gets the math to hammer out your options, and voila! BTW: it helps to make it to band camp.

These extra costs don’t seem to surprise or disturb the natives. I’m not sure if all American parents share this unspoken “no sacrifice is too high to gild Johnnie’s high school experience,” or if this is a localized cultural phenomenon. However, if you come from the land of socialized (free) almost everything except beer and other "sin taxable" consumables, I can tell you this: public school fees significantly add to an immigrant's first year "sticker shock" experience of living in, and loving, Silicon Valley.

Can The World Come Out To Play?

I was going to write today about why I am unsettled when I upload a new posting and hear nothing back from the void: no comment on the site, no "reply" email, nada. But no matter how hard I tried, the result came off as a whiny "please... somebody comment!" and that is just so pathetic that I have given up. Don't comment. In fact, I have shut off the ability for anyone to comment until I figure you all (all 11 of you) will have forgotten this posting.

However, the reason I was heading in that direction was as a result of reading just a few chapters into an epiphanal book, The Cluetrain Manifest: The End of Business as Usual. (BTW, that link will allow you to read the entire book online, for free, which is itself a clue as to why this is such an important book. If you are in business and care about staying there, read it.)

The book is about the social implications of the Web and how it, at a most fundamental level, is re-introducing the concept of the conversation at the public market and why it is so important to businesses today. This really resonates with me, since I have been talking to women in my circles for the past twenty years about how isolating it is that we no longer have to visit a village well for daily water, and how women in particular have suffered from the loss of community that necessity used to bring. (And yes, I am very grateful to have running water in my house. Living with conflicting emotions is one of my core competencies.)

The book extends that "village well" idea to include men and women as previous frequenters of the public market, and of the impact the Web has had on re-introducing the idea of "conversation between individuals" to the marketplace.

"Though corporations insist on seeing it as one, the new marketplace is not necessarily a market at all. To its inhabitants, it is primarily a place in which all participants are audience to each other. The entertainment is not packaged; it is intrinsic. Unlike the lockstep conformity imposed by television, advertising, and corporate propaganda, the Net has given new legitimacy -- and free rein -- to play. Many of those drawn into this world find themselves exploring a freedom never before imagined: to indulge their curiosity, to debate, to disagree, to laugh at themselves, to compare visions, to learn, to create new art, new knowledge."

To play, to debate, to disagree, to laugh at themselves, to compare visions, to learn... That's why I am unsettled when no one comments: it feels like I called, but no one came out to play.

What Canadians Look Like From Here, Part 2

I was in my local California Safeway this morning, zipping along head down, with ten thousand little tweety birds vying for top spot on my "to do" list. The Chief Bird at this particular moment was "What the heck will I write about in my blog today?" when this helpful stranger served as my muse. In my distracted state, I must have wandered a little over the yellow line and we gently bumped shoulders. Before I could say a word, she huffed, "Well! Excuse you!" and voila! I knew today would be What Canadians Look Like From Here, Part 2. For WCLLFH, Part 1, please see my July 17 posting in "Older Posts" (link at bottom of this page.)

A short history lesson is necessary here to explain what was so profound about Ms. Safeway Sunshine's response to an accidental bump. As a nation, Canada had our kick-off dinner in 1867 [1]. With only 11 or so (about the same number subscribe to this blog, so I know I'm off to a great start!) people spread over the second largest country in the world, we knew that without a spirit of community reliance, we would surely die. Ice and vast geographic distance, plus some very weird accents in Newfoundland and the Ottawa Valley, made the support of the community essential to the preservation of life, not to mention personal advancement and the ability to talk and be understood. You depended on your neighbour (and that is how it's spelled for them) for help with the harvest and the emotional companionship to make it through winter.

To disrupt the peace of the community was to put everyone at risk. Expressing strong opinions on emotionally-charged subjects (politics, religion, and whether or not it is arrogant to park diagonally so you take up two parking spaces) became a subversive activity in Canada. In fact, any really enthusiastically-expressed outlook, even a positive one, is now regarded with suspicion and ends up in awkward lulls in the conversation with much shuffling of feet and gentle coughing until someone announces with relief that it's time for American Idol.

To be overtly patriotic is perceived as being vaguely disloyal. On the surface it seems okay but there is just something fishy about it. So we aren’t an excessively expressively patriotic people since Canadians defer to the group. Try this little experiment on your next visit to Regina: get on a bus at rush hour and stomp solidly on a commuter’s foot. Don’t worry: they won’t feel much through the snowmobile boots. I’ll bet one Tim Horton’s apple fritter to your Applebee’s corn biscuit that they apologize to you. With a fresh wound on their corn, they’ll coo, “Oh, I’m so sorry, are you okay?” Why? Because the very person you elbow in a crowded elevator could find themselves asking you for a car boost in the frozen parking lot. Survival, man. We are fed "order for the sake of survival" with our baby cereal.

We learn to reign ourselves in, not rock the boat or make waves. Our unspoken national vision statement has developed into, “Be Nice or Perish.” In fact, we’re uncomfortably baffled when we see New England license plates that read, “Live Free or Die.” Do they really mean this? If that’s how old ladies in New England feel, what on earth does a Texan rancher put on her plate: “Pass Me and You're Dead”? Truth be told, Quebec has their own unique version of license-plate propaganda, which reads, “Je me souviens.” (I believe this translates loosely to “Live French or Pout.”)

So now you understand why this morning, despite the fact that I was in a Safeway store, with a yellow box of Cheerios and some fine Canadian bacon in my basket, I knew I wasn't in Kanata anymore, Toto.

[1] In reality, there were a few other folk here well before our European grand-pappies flung themselves ashore. They were already sort of a nation, but if there is one thing I've learned from my seven years in the US, it's that without the proper paperwork, fuggedaboudit. No ticket? No country. The early inhabitants of Canada didn't even pretend to be documented. Technically, I think that made them "illegal indigens," and that sounds pretty darn uppity to me. Well, anyways...

Thank You God, For Dr. Mary and My MBTs

I can run again.

Two years ago last January, I went out for a walk and got as far as my neighbor's lawn before the pain in my hip was so bad that I sat down on her front lawn and cried in frustration. A colleague at work had been suggesting I go see her chiropractor, Dr. Mary Reimer. The word "chiropractic treatment"' had previously been synonymous with the words "hooey," "mumbo-jumbo," and "horse pucky" in the various circles in which I travel, but desperation and hope have an odd way of trumping skepticism, so I went.

On an intellectual level, I tip-toed through the first few appointments. There was indeed much about the whole experience that explained why my more Descartes-inclined acquaintances shunned the possibility that chiropractic healing had any ground in science. The words "touchy-feely" hardly begin to cover it, from the first phone interaction ("It's a Fantastic Friday! Athena speaking...") through the "healing hug" at the conclusion of the treatment. The language used to describe what was happening to my spine and other joints was suspicious as well: "Let's release that healing energy!" just didn't fit in my framework of what counted as legitimate medical intervention. Even the nomenclature jangled my nerves. "Dr. Mary can see you in Well Being [the name of one of the treatment rooms]" made me feel like I was in a hair salon: "Mr. Larry to the front, please." And there were times along the way when the whole process when I seemed to be getting worse, not better, as I would find one joint or location in my back on the mend at the expense of another bit going out of whack.

However, I started to get better. I still don't understand how it works, and I don't need to. It feels touchy-feely because it is exactly that: healing through well-informed and skillful touching, with feeling. Chiropractic treatment doesn't need to conform to my paradigm of medical intervention because it isn't medical intervention. As far as I do understand it, both through conversation with Dr. Reimer, my own research, but most importantly, through witnessing what happened in my own body, the chiropractic approach aims to remind your body of what it already knows: that it is "fearfully and wonderfully made," and that in many (not all, I know) situations, it already contains all the knowledge necessary to put itself at right. And apparently, that "putting to right" process is just that: a process that ebbs and flows as all the bits get themselves sorted out. It can take time and appear to be three steps forward, two steps back at times. But two years later, I am running again.

Yes, I have to do it in shoes that "real" runners insist can't be run in. But my MBTs ("Masai Barefoot Technology") permit my wonky ankles to rotate fully just like normal folk. They are ugly as mud and have all the sex appeal of orthopedic ski boots, but in the words of my dear Mom, je ne give a shit pas. Anyway, I figure I look better lumbering down the street in my clod-hoppers with my hair blowing in the wind than I would 20 lbs heavier sitting on my couch in Manolo Blahniks, watching "What Not To Wear." They work with my body, so thank you, God, for my ugly shoes.

And thank you for Athena, and for Morgan, the massage therapist with the miracle hands, and for Dr. Mary. As long as I can keep running, she can call herself whatever she darn well pleases.