Waiting time for doctor a blessing

Attack!

If there are any of you out there who started following me on a daily basis, I apologize for my lack of creative insight and correspondence for the past two + weeks.  There are times when I just plain run out of energy. This has been one of those times. I guess I let it go on longer than i really should. My brain turns to mush so quickly.

Last week I finally gave in and stopped trying to treat myself with OTC medications and homeopathic brews. I knew what my problem was since it happens sometimes two to three times a year. Sometimes those methods of treatment work, some times they don’t. I’d been messing around trying to treat myself for about two weeks or more because I hate to take antibiotics unless I really have to. I don’t want to build up any kind of resistance to them and end up treating a superbug of some type.

I gave up. I just didn’t feel well enough to fight any longer. I quit my hospital volunteering around 10:30. My job wasn’t quite done, but I was. I called my doctor. There was a cancellation at 1:30 and I was told to come in. I left my home at 1:10 and was in the office on time. Within ten minutes I was taken back to an exam room and my vitals were taken. Another five to ten minutes later my doctor came in. He is a family practitioner but I think he is the best gate keeper i could ever find for my numerous problems. I dread the day he retires. He claims it won’t be any time soon, but I’m not certain.

We talked about the medical stuff and he ordered the blood tests he wanted. I was proud that I had made it six months without an appointment. I try not to see him any more often than  absolutely needed. He faxed the prescriptions I needed to my pharmacy. I left his exam room and sat in the waiting room for another five minutes. My blood was drawn and as I left the office for the pharmacy, I noticed that 1 1/2 hours had elapsed since I had left home.

The pharmacy had received my prescriptions but had not filled them yet. I waited another ten minutes before they were filled. By the time I entered my door again at home, I had spent a total of two hours or, counting time from the first call, 4 1/2 hours. I felt completely blessed that I had received the treatment I needed in such a record amount of time. The next morning the results of the tests were in and his office assistant was calling me with the game plan.

Working at the county hospital has taught me how fortunate I am to have my own insurance. The entire staff at that hospital works as hard as they can, but I don’t know how they can possibly do it day after day like they do. It’s like swimming against the tide. People arrive 24/7 for the urgent care clinic. The following day as I was waiting for the elevator, I couldn’t help but hear this young woman and her friend asking at the information desk about the emergency room. They had been waiting in urgent care already for six hours. I don’t know what her problem was, but she was in pain. She didn’t know what to do. Unfortunately she was told the bare truth. If she went to the emergency room, her waiting time would start all over again. Then, after that, she would have to wait the three to four (or more) hours at the pharmacy for any medications she might be prescribed. These people sometimes spend more than twelve hours in the hospital just waiting for care. Sometimes they are sent home, sometimes they are admitted to the hospital which may take many hours more before being assigned a room.

It is not because all of them are lazy or spend all their money on frivolous things that those who are insured think they don’t need. Yes, that occasionally is the case. Sometimes, however, like the woman who was discovered to have a large abdominal tumor a few weeks ago, it’s just because they can’t afford the insurance. Her husband was working as much and as hard as he could to provide for his family but, in this economy, he was doing it by himself rather than having the luxury of working for a company that provided benefits.

Instead of looking down our noses at these people, at least we could try to walk a few steps in their shoes and at least try not to judge them. Namaste. Attic Annie

Mammograms…living in the land of de Nile.

Even though to myself there are a myriad of things that I am only mediocre at doing, there are a few things at which I excel. Avoiding mammograms is among those few things at the top of my list. I just don’t like to deal with unpleasantries.

About two and a half years ago I had a questionable x ray. I put off having a more detailed examination for about a year. I then had a diagnostic mammogram and it was recommended that I see a surgeon. I had what is known as cancer-in-situ or stage 0. I again put off doing anything about it for another six months. I had a European trip to take first. I think I was finally “guilted” into having a lumpectomy.

Before they did the lumpectomy, they did a needle biopsy. The radiologist showed me the place on the xray. It looked so small and insignificant but, because of my mother, I decided to go ahead with the surgery.

My mother, according to what I have been able to piece together from snippets of conversation, discovered a lump in her breast while she was pregnant with me. Now supposedly it was predicted after she delivered my sister that she probably would not have any other children. I have no idea why. She walked into her doctor’s office five years later when she was thirty-nine and said, “Guess what?” From what I understand, there are some people still guessing what.

After I arrived, she went to the doctor and had a mastectomy. This is where things get a little fuzzy because getting my aunts to talk to me was a very iffy thing at best. At one point I think Aunt Bessie said she found the lump and thought it was nothing and waited. Another time she said she was always so angry at the doctor because he said it was nothing to worry about. Somewhere in there I decided to arrive on planet earth. I don’t know if the lump was evident before she got pregnant with me or not. I do know, obviously, that she waited for the surgery until after I was born. Had she had a masectomy while she was pregnant, i probably would not have been here. Surgery was pretty primitive back in the 40s for pregnant women.

Fast forward to January of 2009. I was in and out of surgery and home again before 2:00 pm the same afternoon. The biopsy, according to the pathology report, had removed all but about 2 mm. of cancerous cells. The surgeon basically just did a clean up job.

After a little bit of thinking, I decided to end the treatment right there. I opted not to have the radiology or the chemotherapy. I was told that there was a large area of clean borders removed from all around the site. When I visited my OB/GYN doc, he said I made a reasonable decision. He claimed it was no different than having a very small skin lesion excised. It wouldn’t have changed my mind, but it made me feel better knowing that at least one other person agreed with me about not putting myself through any extra medical care.

I was supposed to go back a year later for a diagnostic x ray. That was last January. I put it off until today. Why, you ask? I can’t give you an answer. I guess avoidance of the issue is the main reason. I simply refuse to think about it.

The place I go is a women’s health center. My appointment was at 1:30 pm. Within ten minutes to fill out paper work, I was escorted back to the dressing room where I put on a pink top. I was pleased that it tied securely in the front and was not your typical hospital gown. I then entered a room where six other similarly clad women sat reading magazines. No one was talking. I guess that is one area where everyone’s thoughts tend to stray to other topics.

I grabbed a magazine and began scanning some of the articles. One kind of gets a hint of getting older when there are more “stars” mentioned that you don’t know than those that you recognize.

I was called back and the mammogram expert did her thing. The plates weren’t as cold as I remember other places and she didn’t squeeze them together as much as they have been in the past. The instant images were clear. The five pictures were done in less than ten minutes.

I again waited in the waiting room and was again called back to the radiologist’s office. He sat there in the dark looking at my films. He reported he saw nothing but healthy tissue.

My mind strayed for a moment but I at least I bit my tongue. My immediate thought was, “What a job! Sitting in the dark looking a pictures of boobs all day long. Some men would kill for such luck.” I refrained from saying anything.

He said I should come back in six months again. I questioned that because I was told last year that I only needed to have diagnostic x rays once a year for five years. He replied, “Six months is what the current recommendation is post lumpectomy.” Then he added, “But if you were late by a couple of months, I don’t think the wait would be significant.” Gotcha, doc. I looked at my watch as I left the building. I had been in and out in one hour. That’s a pretty good record from beginning to knowing the results. I used to have to wait at least a week or more to hear anything.  Now I can put this topic back on the shelf for another year.

I guess I’m a traitor to my other breast cancer surviving relatives and friends. I don’t get out there to walk on annual walks. I don’t wear pink. My cousin says I count as a survivor, but I choose to just treat the whole time as an inconvenience rather than a medical problem. I can’t deal now or ever with losing my mother to cancer. I can’t deal with having the possibility of having it myself. So I don’t.  Namaste. Attic Annie

Gulf oil plus grass = clean water. Who wudda thunk it?

Some times the ingenuity of good ol’ boys really fascinates me. You know these guys are rednecks, and proud of it!

They looked at the situation and used some pretty basic knowledge of science to come up with an extremely simple solution to a major ecological problem. They know that oil is sticky. They know that bunches of grass contain an amazing amount of surface area on which the oil can cling. They even thought far enough to think of what to do with the collected grass once it washes up to the shore. What is more simple than using it as a fuel source?

I think these guys are geniuses. They don’t have PhDs from some petroleum engineering university. They just know their environment. I think they have come up with some pretty clever ideas. Like the guy says, in a couple of weeks the south will be covered with these grasses ready to be used.

Did you see the quality of the water when they finished their experiment? I doubt I would be willing to drink it before it was filtered, but then I don’t drink raw sea water anyway.

Just think of how quickly the job could be done once all the leaks are capped. Think how inexpensive this whole operation would be compared to the environmental costs of burning the fuel, or adding chemicals to the oil which will only cause the oil to sink.

We have known the downside of producing oil for years. We, the ordinary people, have been blocked at every turn from finding safer methods of producing energy by those is power. Even the president bought the line from the oil producers of how safe everything is now. We cannot assume that oil production is safe. Now or ever.

The result? A tragedy and an economic and environmental train wreck from which recovery might not happen in my son’s lifetime.

We are still suffering from the travesty of the PR spin that the oil companies have tried to foist on the public regarding the Exxon-Valdez spill that was twenty years ago. They announced publicly that all was again OK. Yet the environment has still not returned to normal. There is still oil that is trapped for, some say, centuries.

These guys have come up with an ingenious solution that is low tech, cost effective, and demonstrable that it does work. Maybe you could send this video to the right people to get them started. And when they are done, they can start in Alaska.

Her mother scares her….

I grew up without a mother. She died when I was three so I never really knew her. In many ways it was a tragedy. In others, it saved me the conflicts that so many other girls around me had to endure as they were growing up. It seemed they were embroiled in  constant love-hate relationships with their mothers as they traversed the mine fields of growing up. It saved me from becoming a care taker as my mother aged. She was forty when I was born. There could have been decades of increasing care for her had she lived as long as her sisters. My entire life would have been lived differently.

Mother’s Day has often been a troublesome day for me. My father asked his unmarried sister to come live with us. She was fifty years old when she moved into our home. I don’t think we understood each other a single day in our lives together, but, I guess she was better than not having any female influence in my life at all, as little as my aunt’s presence was.

I was reminded every Mother’s Day of my loss. In church one year we made some kind of flower memento and during a Mother’s Day program we were instructed to give these keepsakes to our mothers. I carried mine to my aunt. She was genuinely surprised by my gift. Her reaction told me so. She wasn’t expecting anything. When you think about it, though, what choice did I have? I could have stood by myself in front while the rest of the kids around me dispersed throughout the congregation, but that  would have been too painful. I had to give it to her, even though we never achieved a mother-daughter relationship.

Somehow I managed to grow up, marry, and have a son, so I became a mother myself. He decided to become a world wanderer so, except for his occasional trips home, and my two trips to visit him, we have not really been in each other’s lives all that much for the last ten years. We do Skype once in while but we really are not all that much involved with each other any more.

That’s the story of my life in that department. Growing up without a mother, growing older without a son (except for a a few days at a time.) I’m still trying to figure out the “whys” of that situation. It’s like the days when we traveled downtown and we paused to look into the windows of the department stores. Regardless of how great it looked on the other side of the windows, I knew I would never be allowed to climb inside. Life is sometimes like that.

I found a funny video to put everything into perspective. Comedienne Chondra Pierce shares with her audience episodes about her relationship with her mother. I can enjoy her story without having personally lived through it. I hope you enjoy it as well. Namaste. Attic Annie

The economy is so bad! (according to Maxine)

Welcome to my porch. It’s been a while since I remembered to say “howdy”! It is raining as I talk with you now but some times that is a favorite time for me to sit outside and watch the rain fall. OK. I’m easily entertained, what can I say?

I admit it. I’m a Maxine groupie. The same friend who sent me the video  yesterday also sent me the following Maxine cartoons. I’m afraid I don’t know that much about copyright laws. I guess if I’m going to have a blog for any length of time I’d better find out. I get cartoons in emails all the time. Is it OK for folks to send them in emails? Is it OK for me to use them in my blogs?

It’s obvious I am not the creative artist who produces Maxine. If I use any of his images in my blogs, am I supposed to credit him even if I do this free of charge? No one has given me a penny for my thoughts as of yet.

If I am to credit him then here is his credit. There, hopefully that will take care of that issue.

Everybody knows the economy is bad. Actually, we are told so many times a day in so many ways, I think perhaps it is time to get some comic relief going in this situation. I can say that because I haven’t lost my home, I managed to bail out of the stock market with my IRA not completely wiped out…seriously wounded, I will admit. I am managing to still live rather frugally on my teacher’s pension. (I am not a high maintenance person. If you knew me you would readily acclaim that is an understatement.)So therefore, in spite of the misery around me, I can see some humor in our situation.

The artist also sees humor…and unvarnished truth. I appreciate people who tell it like it is. And, thanks to Maxine, he does.

For those of you who haven’t been following my blog, the neighbor who lives across the street is the spitting image of Maxine. I talk about her every so often in my blog. She also tells it like it is. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I love her dearly. She is like the sister I wish I had. If I could, I would take a picture of her and post it on my blog. It would be difficult for you to tell which picture was the real one.

The economy is so bad. It will remain bad for quite some time. But at least there are some around who specialize in helping us discover for a few moments that if we are unable to laugh at this time in our lives, at least we might be able to smile a little. Did you know the economy is THIS bad?

I hope Maxine makes your day. Sometimes it  is the artists, writers, and poets among us who help us see situations like they really are. They can make true statements (generally) and it is protected under the Constitution…at least if the artist lives in America.

I see a lot happening in America that I feel needs to change, but using humor to help us get through the day is not one of them. Namaste. Attic Annie

Flash mobs…entertainment or threat?

I am a long time Julie Andrews fan. When my friend sent me this video I knew I would have to watch it. I have no idea when this event occurred.

It struck my how wonderful people can be when we all can take the time to “smell the roses”. I guess spontaneous occurrences are happening all over the world. This event happened in Belgium, but they seem to be happening all over the world. I believe these events are being called spontaneous performance acts.

However, in many cases they are not exactly spontaneous. The performers have had at least a couple of practices. I believe it all started with twitter and email calls sent out to meet at a particular place to do a particular action. There were several events of singing and dancing and people riding commuter trains without pants.

These acts are sometimes called flash mobs and are not exactly welcomed in all areas of the world. The “mob” in this link was intent on doing something frivolous, but the security guards took the whole episode entirely the wrong way.

Unfortunately, teenagers being what they are, the concept of flash mob was soon turned into a much more serious matter. In Philadelphia, hundreds of teenagers have been converging downtown for a ritual that is part bullying, part running of the bulls: sprinting down the block, the teenagers sometimes pause to brawl with one another, assault pedestrians or vandalize property.

The man credited with starting flash mobs, Bill Wasik, is a senior editor at Harper’s magazine. He started these gatherings seven years ago as kind of a social experiment to show that large groups could be summoned in a matter of minutes or hours to do whatever. At first it was playful. Then, as sometimes happens to unsupervised children, the bullies stepped in and things started getting violent. It was not limited to teenagers. There were preteens involved as well.

As a result, the FBI was called in. The city governments, especially in  Philadelphia, were not going to mess around. The FBI has been asked to start monitoring social networks.

Not everybody agrees that what happened in Philadelphia is the result of flash mobs assembling. Supposedly, Team Nike, a boys’ break dancing crew was on South Street. It was not assembled as a result of Twitter. They were looking for a place to dance.  This blogger said that CNN blew everything out of proportion.

If Bill Wasik was creating a social experiment, I think he proved his point. People, especially teenagers, can be mobilized very quickly to do all sorts of things. He proved that large gatherings can be unpredictable, that city governments don’t trust large gatherings of teenagers, that the news media is prone to blow the importance of events up for the sake of being able to report “news”.

He probably proved a lot more than he ever intended. The idea has taken hold and participants will probably be treated much worse in many areas than they ever intended.

If Philadelphia enacts the proposition of denying free transportation to teenagers after 4:00 rather than 7:00, it is going to hurt a lot more students than those who were participants.

Government officials have a hot issue on their hands. Where does freedom to assemble end and “mob” control and public security begin?

It is sad how quickly innocent fun can be turned into violence. I hope that solutions are found soon. I like do re mi. Namaste. Attic Annie

Happy May Day, Mrs. Goetze!

Happy May Day Mrs. Goetze!

Once I left my neighborhood to attend college, I revisited my childhood neighbors fewer and fewer times. I was gone three years before I returned home to finish my college undergraduate work my senior year at a local college.

Some time during those three years I think I can remember someone mentioning that Mrs. Goetze had died, but I can’t remember exactly when. At that time she was really no longer in my life.

Mrs. Goetze and her husband lived across the street from me. From a child’s point of view she was always “old”. Mrs. Goetze loved little children. I think she had children of her own, but if she did, they were already gone from the house by the time I was old enough to remember them. I vaguely remember her husband, but he passed away when I was pretty young. She continued to live there by herself.

From time to time I try to think about what I remember about this woman. I remember several Halloweens when hers was the best house to visit. She invited us into her kitchen for her homemade goodies. One year it was taffy apples. Another year it was popcorn balls.I think I remember cookies. She exuded love and caring.To a motherless little girl, she meant a lot to me.

I remember spending time with her. I visited with her in her home while she did her daily chores.  She hung her wash on lines behind her house. I helped her gather in the dried clothes. She had one of those pull-down ironing boards in her kitchen. I sat at the table, and she talked to me while she ironed.

I can’t remember how many years my school allowed us in art class to make May Day baskets. I think I remember at least two somewhere between second and fourth grade. We folded construction paper into a cone and attached a handle. The teachers told us to take them home and fill them with flowers. Then we were to hang them on the door of someone we loved, ring the doorbell, and run away.

The origin of my flowers has faded. I do remember that in my yard we had lily-of-the valley, lilacs, bleeding hearts, and…dandelions. I think there may have also been violets, but I’m not certain. I came home after school, picked my flowers and crossed the street to Mrs. Goetze’s front door.

It was so much fun. I remember running away, but not so far that I couldn’t see or hear anyone at the door.

She opened the door and looked around, saying things like, “Oh my! There is no one here. Who rang the bell? ” Then she would spy the “basket” hanging on the door handle. “Now who could have left these on my door? I have no idea. Thank you, whoever you are!” At least in my memories that is something like the way the script ran. I remember how good it felt to have my love recognized by somebody.

During my high school junior and senior years, Mrs. Goetze became bedridden. I don’t think I actually ever knew what happened. She had a live-in caretaker by the name of Clara. Clara took one evening a week off work. I was asked to stay with Mrs. Goetze until Clara returned. Mrs. Goetze was already in bed for the night when I started that job.

To my shame, I remember avoiding going into her room to talk with her. I  looked in the door from time to time, but I never entered the room to even check whether she was still breathing. I think I remember most of those times that I did think she was sleeping. She slept a lot by that time.

To my memory, at this point she now scared me. Actually, she didn’t scare me. The thought of having to deal with death scared me. I had no idea what I would have done if I had been more involved and she had actually taken her last breath while I was there. By the time I was in high school, I had experienced enough death in my family that I knew I didn’t want to lose anyone else. I purposely distanced myself from people I thought would die.

The woman who I loved was the woman of my early elementary school days, not this old body in the bed. I tried to hold on to that earlier Mrs. Goetze, but it became harder and harder. I remember feeling relieved when I no longer had to spend Wednesday evenings in her home.

Now I am approaching the time of my life when little children consider me very old. There are no little children across the street in my neighborhood who make May Day baskets. I don’t even know if there are still any teachers in America who allow children in art classes to make them. I hope so. Little acts of love like that can make memories which last a life time. Happy May Day. Namaste. Attic Annie