Kind of a lame title, I know. Sorry.
But I don’t have a lot on my mind at the moment. So ya get what ya get.
Talked to Joe on the phone today. Was great to hear from him, even though for obvious reasons he didn’t sound like himself.
His throat, among other parts, has been through a lot.
One thing that emerged is that I may very well have saved his life. Turns out that in addition to lymphoma and an opportunistic lung infection, his kidneys were on the merge of shutting down ’cause they were clogged up with the calcium crystals that are the forerunner of actual kidney stones.
Oh, they also found out that his spleen was three times bigger than it should be. Apparently that can happen as a result of infection.
So um, yeah. Good thing he went to the ER when he did, at my insistence.
I may have saved someone’s life via nagging. How apropos.
He had a room to himself for the first couple of days because they didn’t know what he had ergo best to treat him as infectious until proven otherwise.
I can relate. During my last stay at the Hospital Hilton, I had the ER’s specialized eye room all to myself for a couple of days.
I was in there for my eye going kablam, after all.
But then they kick you out into the regular ER and wow was that a nasty transition. Went from having a nice quiet little box of a room to myself to being right behind the big doors between the waiting room and the ER, and got to listen to the intake lady ask the same questions to patient after patient.
Oh well. I at least got to spend my last day there in a very nice ward. I am pretty sure it is usually a sort of semi-ICU ward where they normally put patients who require a lot of monitoring and care but not to the point of taking up a regular ICU bed.
It was very quiet and comfortable there. Most of my fellow patients were quite old, which is something I’m getting strangely accustomed to.
No wonder I had a dream in which I was the newest and youngest resident of an old folks’ home. Don’t laugh…. I may end up in assisted living yet.
Apparently poor Joe did not have the best selection of roommates when he was languishing in the ER. He had a screamer (howler, actually) in a semi-comatose state and a non stop talker who ain’t exactly saying nice things.
That kind of thing fascinates me because it happens in a space between clear conscious thought and the animal mind. Clearly, we can continue to talk even when our ability to think is severely compromised, and then what comes out can be a total stream of consciousness speech pattern as the barrier between thought and speech breaks down completely.
Hence such phenomena as Tourette’s, pseudo-bulbar affect, and talking in your sleep.
Sorry. Had to brain nerd out there for a minute.
Compared to all that, my Helmut from when I was in there in 2022 seems like a pussycat. Sure, he was rude, demanding, and a prick, but he didn’t scream in incoherent pain all the time, or never stop talking.
Now Joe is back to his childhood home, with his parents and his sister looking after him, and the rest of his medical treatment will happen there.
Sounds quite lovely, honestly. I would be so happy to be able to go home to my birth family when I got out of the hospital.
I still miss Joe a lot. But it’s a lot easier to deal with now that I have heard his voice.
More after the break.
Anarchy and rage
By and large, I am a typical “peace, order, and good government” Canadian. I might advocate for some pretty radical ideas – like outlawing the stock market – but I am not an anarchist or a radical. I consider myself a reformer.
I want to repair the system, not tear it down.
But I get where that rage comes from. I have that rage too sometimes. There are times when watching the news makes me so mad I want to scream like an enraged monkey and throw a flaming brick through a window.
I just don’t let that side of me do the driving, so to speak. I will always be very passionate about my beliefs and my ideals and my principles, and that passion will always come out in my speech and mannerisms when I am aflame with inspiration.
Even though that tends to make my fellow Canadians very uncomfortable. We are not usually an impassioned people. Passionate people frighten us.
Oh well, I am what I am. A firebrand. Perhaps it is the French in me.
And yeah, I call myself a reformer, but even I have to admit that when you want reforms to the most basic levels of society and you would change nearly everything we do in the political sphere if you could, the difference between “reformer” and “anarchist” becomes somewhat academic.
And there is a hell of a lot I would change. Certainly enough to seem like anarchy to those people I would topple from their exalted but unwarranted perches way up high.
And make no mistake : if I was in charge, a hell of a lot of people would come crashing down to earth. The only penalty the rich and powerful fear is being made poor and ordinary, and that’s exactly what I would do to the one percent.
My government would take everything. Leave them right down here in the lower economic zone with the rest of us.
Have fun learning to cope, fuckers.
The difference is that I don’t jsut want to tear the system down, I want to replace it with something better. I still believe in government, I just want to make it better.
I guess that makes me a radical reformer.
I can live with that.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.