TToT: Just Passing Through – Relative Pitch, #FirstDayOfSpring #10Thankful

Spring has sprung!

What’s up everyone?

Ten Things of Thankful

I’m thankful for a spot on my local television channel.

What’s Up Oxford – Rogers TV

I’m still nervous to be on camera, saying “um” a lot, but I was happy overall.

I’m thankful my local newspaper gave my story a chance.

Woodstock resident hopes to help blind people enjoy the movies with better descriptive audio – Woodstock Sentinel Review

I made the front page. The Ontario premier was on the second page.

It’s frustrating that my own local theatre didn’t even respond to interview requests, either because they were busy or avoiding the whole thing, but I don’t intend to let them stay silent on this issue for much longer.

I’m thankful for a few recent opportunities from my irregular appearances on Twitter.

I hesitate to get into these really, yet, and what they actually are or might become, but I am feeling pretty good about it. At least, with this whole recent set of realities about the risks of Facebook, at least Twitter is a totally risk free platform, right?

Yeah, right. Sure. Still, I know the risks and they must be weighed rationally.

I’m thankful for modern medicine here in Canada.

I take all the modern hospital facilities and equipment for granted, as I’ve always had it available to me. Here in a country such as Canada we have so much. In 2018 I have no reason to believe my loved one won’t be safe and taken care of.

I’m thankful for universal healthcare…not free like some people like to say/think it is.

Like the great and powerful gun debate, the one over what universal healthcare system Canada has vs what the US has and how both countries compare to many others, this rages on and on and on.

Nothing’s perfect. Certainly Canada is not. Yet, I am glad I was born here and have no tough insurance choices to make, no mega medical bills or debts hanging over my head and neither do my loved ones.

I’m thankful my brother is doing better, that it wasn’t something more serious.

He had stomach pains, but it wasn’t on the side where his five-year-old transplanted kidney sits. That brought me relief when I heard, even though I wanted someone to find out why he was having pain otherwise.

They thought it was his appendix, but no sign that that is the case. Frustrating, the mystery of the whole thing. For now, he’s doing better, and I hope it will stay that way.

I’m thankful for a gathering of strong voices.

I do worry for all the pressure put on those who are still young, fighting and speaking for safety and an end to gun violence, but they are strong in spite of it all. I hope they can survive it, but I am glad the adults aren’t silencing the younger generation.

I’m thankful for an Easter egg hunt, with the kids, in the yard.

The sun was out, but it was still a bitterly cold wind blowing as they searched. Thankfully, it didn’t seem to bother them much.

I’m thankful for spring.

Even though I don’t agree with most about how horrid winter can be, I do admit when it’s a lovely feeling to sense the start of a new season in the air.

I love the birds and even the rain.

Speaking of Easter and spring…this one plastic egg got discovered by a wild creature, instead of a child; child proof and critter proof too.

I’m thankful for nature. (More to come on that as April draws nearer.)

What animal, would you guess, tried to make its way in for what treats were hiding inside?

Peeps! #TGIF #FTSF

I went for the slang for my title this week, for people, but because Easter is near, all I thought about was the boyfriend from my past who loved those marshmallow bunny treats. He got so excited when he found coloured ones, and there could have been strange flavours too. He bought many packs and some went stale in the pantry.

I never could stand the things, those Peeps. Not my choice for an Easter treat. Give me some good old Easter chocolate, thank you very much.

But I like the alternative word for people.

The people we meet change us. At least, they have me, but choosing only some felt like an impossible task. Otherwise, I knew this post had the frightening potential of going on far too long and losing its impact on any perspective readers.

I started with my Easter story to begin with, to fit one more of those people in, ever so briefly, but this post isn’t about that. I simply could not neglect the connection between Peeps and peeps while I had it, right there and ready to go.

Whether it’s a chance meeting, one that lasts only minutes or hours, or one that develops into something longer term I could spend this post thanking people, as I did for my one year of blogging here.

Kind and Generous

My brother met a friend by being in an Apple store. The friend saw two blind guys looking at technology and made the decision to approach them and introduce herself. These were three people that never would have met each other and just so happened to be in that store at the same time.

I previously mentioned the kind woman and her husband who helped me out, in the Dallas Airport, out of the goodness of their hearts.

I want to write about the people I met at the writing workshop in Mexico in January. Each of them are fondly known to me now, all those I will never forget, for the things they taught me that week.

That, too, would take more than this here post. I am still working on the brevity thing. They all deserve their thanks and time. Perhaps this should be a “The People We Meet” series.

I like to sit and think, when I can’t decide which of them to write about first, on the people I’m still to meet in my life. It’s those I am not yet aware of that fascinate me, nearly as much as those I already know, because we are all unknown to one another until we’re not. Maybe that’s a sign of never being satisfied with what I have, with all those connections I’ve already been lucky to have made, but my curious mind can’t help it.

Every time a car passes I wonder who’s in it, what they like or dislike, or what they value in life. Though I may likely never know the answer to my questions about those currently passing my house in their vehicles, I will never stop wandering through life, open to any people, just as those I’ve already met were once unknown to me and me them.

So much of what is going on in the world is us all being scared, by perceived fears of terrorism or mass human migrations or whatever, but mostly by the fear of the unknown and the unfamiliar. We need to familiarize ourselves with other people. You just never know when a person you randomly meet could become one of your favourite peeps one day. This means I can capitalize the word, as mine in my own life certainly deserve that – a position to be in, so sweet, sweeter than any marshmallow.

They could eventually become someone who makes you laugh, makes you think, or makes you want to become a better human being yourself. I know all this is and has been true for me, with Mexico only one of the more recent prime examples.

For the sake of choosing one, I will focus this time on my writing mentor.

We met over social media and here online, developed a respect for each other and our writing, with a mentorship coming from that.

But it wasn’t until we met in person, were able to hug each other, and feel the physical presence of one another in the same place did I truly appreciate it all for what it was and what it could be. I will always have the greatest respect and admiration for her, with everything she does, no matter what else may happen or where life may take us.

Again, I resort to wanting to thank people, and so I wish I could lay out precisely how meeting so many of the people I’ve been privileged to meet has affected my life and the woman I am.

Most recently it’s neighbours. I am not the best neighbour, but I don’t play loud music – anymore.

I am not a bad person to live next to, especially if you like your peace and quiet. In fact, you might hardly even believe anyone (myself) even lived there.

I find it difficult, without seeing, to make first contact. It’s funny how you can be in the right place at the right time, one small window of it, and meet someone, but you could also live next door to people for years and never really speak to or know them. This time, my new neighbour introduced herself and seems to be looking out for me, before we’ve gotten to speak more than a handful of times. I take this to be a positive sign of things to come.

I may have blown it this time, with my Finish the Sentence Friday post being all over the place, but I blame that on a stomach ache and brain so full of swirling thought and a neurotic mind that thought I needed to write my FTSF post on a Friday, instead of giving it a day or two, in the hopes that I could ever possibly narrow down my stories of the people I’ve met to one lone blog post.

Plus, I had a violin lesson today and that always affects me. If it was a lesson where I couldn’t focus and nothing seemed to be working, I would feel dejected. In today’s case though, I felt it working and now I am feeling exhilarated, which both ways means I am all over the map.

While speaking of violin lessons, my violin teacher is another one of those cases of the people I am lucky to have met. Today we had a long talk about a lot, half deep violin discussion/related and assorted subject matter and half actual practicing.

I’m just glad I at least wrote something this week. I guess it’s easier sometimes to write about other people, while avoiding myself, but in the process I hope I show a glimpse of me in there somewhere too.

Thanks Kristi.

Finding Ninee is one of those peeps I have not yet met in person, but whom I feel a special bit of a bond with, just through this blogging thing and such, for the fighting she does for her son, as any parent should. I really need to write an article, one where I interview my own mother, Kristi, and other parents of children with disabilities or special needs. They are good peeps…some of the best out there.

Joining Kristi for this week’s FTSF is
Marda Sikora
who also writes about this subject.

TToT: Created, Creative, Creation – Boourns, #10Thankful

“The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

–Sylvia Plath

I’m spending my Easter Sunday under the weather, so I will be making this list uncharacteristically short and abbreviated, but I’ve been thinking a lot this week about creativity.

TEN THINGS OF THANKFUL

For drumming.

Our creation “Don’t Look Back” is all done. My brother has a friend who is a brilliant drummer and he agreed to play on it.

He wanted to be a part of this project so much he even took the morning off work to record his drum part for the song.

It definitely has a different sound to it with drums added. It fills it out and it is so beautiful.

Once my brother presents it in class I hope to be able to share all the hard work we all put into it. After all, what else is making music for but to share it with people?

For now and then.

I spent time this week hanging out with my youngest nephew, sitting in his favourite spot on the couch, while we watched a movie.

As we sat there, I couldn’t help thinking back to the first time the two of us sat in that corner of that particular couch. I held him in my arms when he was only days old, while he slept, nearly three years ago.

For family fish and chip dinners.

A lot of fun is had when you get a family, people all the way from two to sixty, around a dinner table.

We all crowded into one van, on a rainy Wednesday, and off we went.

For humour.

With all the crap going on around the world, sometimes it’s nice to just laugh a lot. My brother, father, and myself did just that, for a few hours the other night. It felt good.

We watched the Jerry Seinfeld series “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” and if you have not seen it yet, you really should check it out.

It’s available online, on YouTube and on a free streaming website:

http://www.crackle.com/about

Basically, Seinfeld goes out and rents a car, fitting to the comedian he is about to have coffee with. He then spends the first few minutes explaining what kind of car it is and why he chose it. Then he picks up his coffee companion and they go for a ride in the car to the coffee shop, discussing everything from show business and comedy, to family and hobbies, and cars of course.

We watched episodes with people like Jim Carrey, Stephen Colbert, David Letterman, Will Ferrell, President Obama (one of the best episodes in my opinion, but they couldn’t acquire the proper security clearance to leave White House grounds), a few of Seinfeld’s former co-stars, and Howard Stern.

For literacy, education, and the grandpa there to pick up his granddaughter from school.

When I read about all the young girls around the world not allowed to receive a proper education and so many people who’ve never been given the chance for literacy I am particularly thrilled to know my niece is getting the opposite of all of that.

She’s learning to read and she has a good school to go to every day, with teachers who happily teach her, help her develop her own gifts and creativity.

And she has a grandpa who can pick her up after the day has finished.

For rain.

Okay, so I wasn’t really prepared to consider this one as a positive at the time.

I love to go for a nice long drive, but if rain is falling hard on the windshield I can’t quite relax in the same way.

This was our drive home the other night, in semi heavy traffic, but on reflection I realize I was lucky to make it home safe and even hard pouring drops of rain are something of beauty.

For another Friday up on Good Men Project.

For the second Friday in a row I had my writing featured on the site:.

Where Are We Since International Women’s Day Last Year?

Sure, being that the subject again involved the issues surrounding feminism, I received a few more somewhat angry comments from those who took my writing to mean I don’t think men around the world suffer at the hands of oppression and discrimination, or that I don’t believe men and boys deserve the same attention as women and girls and the issues we face.

I should expect a little backlash when writing about something that seems to divide many of us. I am still thankful I got my message out there and I know in my heart that I believe in fair treatment of both genders. You can’t possibly make everybody happy, all of the time anyway.

For date night.

I am thankful one couple in particular could have one night away, in a beautiful spot, as they truly deserve that.

I am happy that others can enjoy Niagara Falls like I do and they deserved some time to themselves now and then.

For inside jokes, group texts with brothers.

It’s nice to have a Friday evening group text with myself and my brothers, about a cherished eighties band (Duran Duran) and that we can share an inside joke that most people would be utterly confused about if they heard it.

For mendacity.

Feeling unwell of late has given me a lot of time to watch some films I’ve never gotten around to watching before.

This included one, based on a play, I’ve always wanted to see. I was aware of the main character, but I was unclear on just exactly what the storyline was for “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”.

Well, I like returning to those films that are mostly all dialogue. Of course, I was watching one with descriptive narration, but it would have been unnecessary really.

Well, I enjoy old movies, with dialogue so different from the films of today, and so many issues of the day, late 50s were interesting to me.

I also learned a new word. I’d heard of “menacing” but “mendacity” was a new one, repeated multiple times throughout. It means deception. I love learning new words.

It’s funny I started off the week watching “Ray”, one Jamie Foxx film and I ended it watching “Django Unchained”, which I’d heard was harsh and raw but to be expected when having to do with slavery, but Fox was so good, not to mention all the other actors.

It did really show how cruel we humans have been to one another. I’m sure this could lead directly into the themes of redemption surrounding Easter, but unfortunately I am far too tired now to explore those any further this year.

Check this out. Creativity and just lovely.

And Happy Easter everyone.

I’m starting to feel warm again so I think it’s off to bed with me. Have a good week.

Uneasy Me, #FTSF

“It’s not easy to be me.”

Superman’s Dead (It’s Not Easy) – Five For Fighting

Superman was always one of the last of the superhero stories I would choose. I was always more of a Batman girl. I don’t know how many Superman films I watched there for a while, but none of them stuck with me as being particularly interesting. I didn’t understand the whole backstory or even the definition or importance of kryptonite.

That’s why, when I read this week’s FTSF prompt, I froze in my tracks, unsure if I would write anything at all, have anything to link up with.

I looked up the meaning, refreshed my memory, but still drew a blank. Kryptonite meaning, basically, weakness and still I was coming up with nothing.

Come on, I nudged myself over the last few days. You’ve got to have a weakness. What is it? What would be the main one?

I am working on writing my memoir. It seemed like a perfect moment in time to start again, as I think back on the twenty years, exactly, that I was diagnosed with kidney disease as a frightened twelve-year-old.

Since that point I have been called brave and inspirational many many times. How did I do it? How was it that I managed to survive feeling so sick, dialysis, and surgery to have a transplanted kidney from my father?

I am not as strong as all those well-meaning family, friends, medical professionals, and acquaintances assumed. I don’t want what happened twenty years ago, what was only really a few years out of my whole life, to define me forever. I try to get past it, really, but I keep going back to it and writing my story down is a big part of that.

Sometimes I wonder if that’s even a good idea. Maybe I should just move on and look ahead. That’s what I am doing, but then I turn my head round and admit to myself that what happened during those rough months, all those years ago now, that stuff left its mark on me and I can’t honestly say I don’t look back in reflection.

My kryptonite is the past. It’s the affect a physical illness had on my body, my mind, the girl I was trying to grow into.

It influences my body image even now, as a grown woman.

When I was treated I was clearly under-weight and malnourished. I was lacking proper vitamins and minerals, things the kidneys are supposed to take care of.

I stayed stable on dialysis and I had the transplant. This got me back to a healthy state, but I went from being barely eighty pounds, maybe less, at age twelve. My puberty was hugely disrupted. I was not growing.

Once I had a working kidney, one being all you technically require, I began to gain weight. I gained weight as a side effect of more than one of the medications I had to go on.

I remember standing on our bathroom scale, realizing I was ninety-two pounds, and starting to panic. I wasn’t relieved I was gaining. I was horrified.

I was weighed every time I went on and off the dialysis machines. This was necessary, to monitor my fluid loss and gain, but it played havoc with my head. I was shown to focus on weight, at a time I shouldn’t have had to, when only months before I was pushed to put on the pounds.

Now, the weight was coming on abnormally quickly and I was visited by dieticians who went over the list of foods to stay away from if I didn’t want to gain even more weight.

So now I like my chocolate but I also like my fruit.

At Easter I love chocolate eggs, but come summer I go nuts eating strawberries, peas straight from the pod, peaches, and apples for weeks and weeks on end. They are really all I want to eat.

All in moderation. Diets don’t work. Or avoid some foods entirely?

I can list all the excuses in the book as to why exercise and weight loss hasn’t been easy for me, but I know I am not alone. I must keep plugging away at it, remaining mindful of it. I don’t want to make excuses, to use chronic pain or my blindness as reasons why I am now gradually gaining weight over time. I only get my kidney checked twice a year, but they still take my weight at the start of these appointments, and I am forced to look back and try to recall what the scale read six months before, to keep track, somewhat, of where I’m at. So although I don’t keep checking my weight on my bathroom scale every morning, I’m made to be accountable, every time November/April rolls around.

Yes, the meds have decreased, things are more moderate now, but the damage is done – floodgates have been wide open for twenty years. I deal with something so many people deal with, I know. Emotions also play a part and my psychological state becomes a factor.

Can I keep things under control? Can I not let the events of my past rule my present or influence the future?

My kryptonite are the stretch marks I’ve had (not from a pregnancy, like most women my age), but since I was on high doses of prednisone, when I was fourteen years old. I can feel the clear visible evidence of how it all began and I feel weak because I can’t keep things in balance as much of the time as I’d like, but that’s why I write about it all. I hope that part doesn’t make me weak. I don’t feel all that brave or inspirational and I don’t want the weaknesses I live with to bring me down. They do serve as reminders of the scars of my past and the toughness, as they’ve driven these bits of my past in deep.

Now I’m off to go eat a mango and some chocolate.

🙂

The brains behind this week’s FTSF is

Lisa Crisp Witherspoon

of The Golden Spoons.

Kryptonite – 3 Doors Down

And, as always, Kristi of

Finding Ninee.

SoCS: Departed and Demented

***

You were so wanted and would have been showered with love.

On a day you should have remained safe where you were to keep growing, you came into this world.

No! Stop! Stay right where you are!

NO! NO! NO!

What kind of a God would bring you here now?

What demented one could let this happen?

What kind of a world is this?

Life’s not fair. So sorry for the loss of you.

Sorry must be the most over-used word there is.

Sorry. Sorry. So sorry.

We must find it inside to look past the grief of the kind that all of the sorry’s in the world can’t make up for, but oh how the sentiment is genuine.

They care. They mean all the best.

That poor child departed this life, on entering it so soon. Too soon.

Departed this life. What a demented joke life is sometimes.

Nope. Don’t go there. Wipe that thought away from my mind.

Departed, so demented, yet this precious child existed and graced the world with his presence. What kind of a wonderful place it was for his life, cut short as it was.

***

This was my April 4th contribution to the Stream of Consciousness Saturday blogging prompt.

I needed to get my feelings out and this seemed to fit the parameters.

For more SoCS contributions, visit:

http://lindaghill.com/2015/04/03/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-april-415/

Happy Easter.

Contagious

Welcome to April!
Okay, so maybe a joke or prank of some kind is expected at this juncture. Perhaps I should claim I just can’t handle the pressure or I have run out of things to say here, as my little contribution to today’s occasion, but I just can’t do it.
🙂
April Fool’s Day and I don’t understand. It’s fun for some and more power to them.
I don’t ono what it is in me that, even for a split second, I believe whatever someone says on this day of High Jinks and mayhem.
I will be the first to admit that I am highly gullible. Perhaps I have more of an autistic tendency in myself than I thought, as I am the first to believe something when someone says it, but on closer inspection I pick up on the irony, sarcasm, or total implausibility of a certain situation I know couldn’t possibly be true.
Laughter is important and I applaud anyone who can make a joke today, but we should all see it coming and I am surprised this day hasn’t lost its allure.

It’s funny how the term “going viral” has become the new thing, as far as things catching on.
There’s no rhyme or reason why one story goes viral and why so many do not.
It feels like a strange term to me though, as if the virus that travels is such a good and positive thing.
Since when is viral a thing to be sought out?
In today’s age of social media it is the thing to strive for.
I still want to wash my hands of it all, as a germophobe, and avoid catching the fever.

Today is also the start of a new month, just so happening to be April, and there are three pretty widely talked-about things going on in the blogging/writing world over the next thirty days.

NaPoWriMo/About
Following World Poetry Day last week, April is National Poetry Writing Month, an extension of National Novel Writing Month. I struggle to write one poem, let alone one for every day of an entire month. I love to follow along.

November has passed and until it comes around again there’s:
Camp NaNoWriMo/About
This happens again, as camp should be, in July.

And last but certainly not least, there’s:
A to Z April Blogging Challenge
I don’t know how I missed hearing about this one, not until over the past few months I heard about it all at once.
I am not participating. I have a lot of other things I should be focused on. I do hope to try it next year at this time. I already have a topic picked out, although I am sure if I Googled it I would find that I was not the first to think of it.
Shall leave that for now.

As for the viral stuff, so many things catch on and travel all over the Web and from blog to blog. It’s crazy that these bloggers are taking part in something that makes it a point to blog every day, except Sundays, for the entire month of April, but it really is, in a lot of ways, a bigger deal than NaNoWriMo.
As if there weren’t already enough blogs.
Not that I am complaining or anything.
🙂
I love to blog and would be a hypocrite if I were to say otherwise and I can’t wait to see what is produced.
As for my own stuff…I must make it a point to stay as authentically me as possible, to do what’s right for me and not to be tempted to follow what everyone else might be doing, in blogging and in life.
My first day of April I will not be playing a prank, but if any of you think you can get me with one, you are probably correct.

No. I am going to speak, as it is Wednesday, on a few news stories that have me thinking and pondering why people do what it is that they do.
I had a list of topics for Wednesday’s In The News And On My Mind posts, but I have not been sticking to that original schedule.
Oh well.

First there is the terrible story from last week about the plane crash in the French Alps.
This adds to my fear of flying, however remote the chances that it could be me on one of those doomed flights.
Everyone has been speculating and demanding to know what was going through that co-pilot’s head when he made that choice to end so many people’s lives and his own.
Innocent babies and young students with their whole lives ahead of them were taken way too soon and nobody can dispute that.
Mental illness has been pushed back out into the forefront of our consciousness. Why did he do something so cruel and senseless?
What could have been done to prevent this, in the chain-of-command?
We can dig and dig into this disturbed man’s past and life as far back as we want, but it won’t bring those people back and it won’t explain it all away.
All we can do is keep talking about how mental illness affects us all.
Of course, do what we can and put as many safe-guards in place for more screening of pilots. Of course.
Just don’t obsess over the why’s and the what-the-Hell’s and forget to focus on remembering the victims, while allowing anger and hatred to overwhelm.
The pilot, right now, is probably feeling like he could have or should have done more to break into that cockpit. The powers that be must be under a whole lot of scrutiny. There is a way to take preventative steps in future, without losing sight of the fact that anyone so desperate and fatalistic as this guy must have been in a whole lot of pain.
Why should we care you say? Because we are all humans and anyone can suffer. Compassion must be muster, somehow.
Were I one of the members of the lost passenger’s families, I would probably be writing some very different words, but perhaps not.

Secondly, on a slightly less serious note, there is the resignation of one of the members of a popular boy band.
This, on the surface seems much less important, but I took a second look at the situation.
“Kids these days!”
I find myself thinking that, if not saying it, at the ripe old age of thirty-one.
In the 60s there were The Beatles. In the 80s it was New Kids on the Block.
I just missed that craze myself.
Then the whole hype of The Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees, and others in the early 2000s.
I never screamed uncontrollably at a concert or had these band’s posters plastered all over my bedroom walls like other girls.
I listened to other music that wasn’t,perhaps, so clamorous.
This kid, from One Direction, he is young and may have gotten lost in the madness of fame and celebrity. He may just need a breather. He may soon realize he made a big mistake. He may soon realize he misses the attention and the spectacle. OR he may not.
I heard such things as a cry to cut on Twitter.
Personally, I hope this is some sort of early April Fool joke because the idea that a bunch of girls cutting themselves, as is the serious mental illness that exists, is utterly ridiculous.
Cutting, as brutal as it sounds, won’t bring this guy back into the group.
I am not so old. I know how important music can be.
How it speaks to your soul and soothes a broken heart.
Nothing is worth hurting yourself.
Girls will be girls and they certainly love their boy bands, but there are other ways of better expressing oneself and always another song to speak to your soul.
It’s important, however, not to downplay the importance this one band might play in even one girls’ life, if she feels she is understood nowhere else.

And finally…

There’s the existence of the shirt made entirely out of hair.
This is disturbing to me on many levels, but none of them have anything to do with the fact that the hair comes from the heads of gay people.
Sometimes people try so hard to make a statement, their statement, that they end up losing all hope of sensibility and the message becomes lost in the mix.
I don’t want to think of a sweater made out of hair from anyone.
The fact that one “lucky” person can now walk down the street, sporting a sweater made entirely out of gay people’s hair is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard of in a while.
I am not one of those people who walks around calling everything “so gay”. I have never had the urge. I can see how that might grow tiresome to hear.
Yet, sometimes, as with things contagious, the cure winds up being just as radical as the disease.

And that’s my somewhat random, welcome to April, In The News and On My Mind, contagious themed post for your mid-week reading/scanning pleasure.
Any virus can and will catch on and latch on. How many of us will catch it?
I try to remain immune to the pressures and writing this blog helps a lot.
If I haven’t yet gotten my point across, it’s to A:
find compassion
and B:
to listen to what you like, to not be afraid to live because every day might be our last, to watch what we say and how it affects others,
but to please…oh please, never make a sweater out of human hair.

Okay, so it’s Wednesday and I am a bit all-over-the-place, and that is exactly why I’m not adding my own brand of madness, by attempting any of the above blogging/writing challenges. It just wouldn’t be the best idea right now.
Goodbye April fools’ and hurry up Easter weekend.
Chocolate is the only cure I need.
Here’s hoping the Easter Bunny will bring my nephew a tricycle and my niece and other nephew lots of treats.

The Haze

        Slowly, as consciousness crept over me, I heard the rough raspy voice of Steven Tyler and a twangy guitar solo. I had never heard this duet from the lead singer of Aerosmith and guitar legend Santana, but it was the first thing I heard as I awoke.
Just feel better…

I felt lost and afraid. I felt the surrealism of waking up in that hotel room that winter morning; the song had a sadness and an uncertainty in Tyler’s lyrics that I myself was feeling.
As I lay there pondering what my next move should be, the song ended and Gwen Stefani of No Doubt came on the radio: Sweet Escape. I couldn’t escape my reality and the decisions I had to make, but this song felt more upbeat and cheery than the one that had preceded it.

Croche and I were a team. Everyone could see it. People continuously commented on how we seemed to work perfectly together, a match made in Heaven. I couldn’t have asked for a better guide dog than her.
For eight years we were pretty much inseparable.
It was only that winter that things started to go wrong.

        For years it had been my own health that got in the way, but Croche began to walk funny, having paw problems. I was taking a counselling course over the winter and she only accompanied me there a few times, soon unable to walk and do her job.

        Now here I was, in a hotel room, having decided to stay overnight while Croche was monitored at a veterinary hospital nearby. I hadn’t wanted to leave her there, in the care of total strangers overnight, but the vet assured me she was resting comfortably, only after being given pain medication to ease the suffering she was clearly in.

        It wasn’t good. I think I already knew that, on some level, but the vet confirmed the worst; Croche had cancer and she was in pain. My regular vet had not wanted to say the words and instead referred me to this specialist. Dog chemo, these human cancer treatments were available, but at a high price.

        This was the end and my mom tried, gently and kindly, to help me to see it.
I felt in a haze of disbelief, at how this was ending for my favourite furry companion.
The vet talked of tests they could do to pinpoint the cancer and its severity, just doing her job, yet the pressure she piled on felt mountainous. Should we do more? Could we do more? Croche was suffering and probably had been for a while. I felt like I had let her down somehow.

        They were giving her medication to help with the pain and they convinced me to let them keep her overnight, but now it was the light of a new day, the previous one having been full of self-doubt and contemplation. Now we were taking her home, to keep her comfortable and to say goodbye.

        She lasted about a month, on medication to keep her as pain-free as possible. She slowly grew worse as the weeks went on.
My bedroom became the living room couch, where I could be only a short arm’s reach away from her on her doggy bed on the floor. They had shaved a patch on her back during her stay at the animal hospital, a clear reminder of the harsh reality of the situation.

        The decision had been looming, whether to have her put down or just keep waiting it out. It grew harder and harder to take care of her. She needed help walking, her back end slowly becoming paralyzed. Taking her down the steps to the bathroom became impossible for me to handle alone.
My sister’s foot surgery made her immobile and unable to assist, so her boyfriend or my mother were left with the job. Croche’s harness, now without its usual purpose, became a way of holding her up to get her outside.

        I suppose I got off easy, that Good Friday morning in early April. I’d been wrestling with the obvious for days and I knew in my heart what I had to do, but I was spared the heart-wrenching experience when, after relieving her that morning, Mom helped Croche to settle back down on her bed next to my couch.
Croche lay there, exhausted from the simple act, she had a seizure and was forever still and silent.

        I would never again here her barking or feel her ears perk up at a knock or the ring of a doorbell.
It seemed strangely meaningful that on this Good Friday she had let go, unable to reach her eleventh birthday.
I bent down and laid my head against her rigid body, stroking her soft fur. I hoped she passed away knowing I was right there beside her and that I would never forget what she brought to my life.

        This Easter I remember her, like I always do, with fond memories and a smile. I still miss her soft fur and her bark. I know her devotion to me was strong and we were a team. She was my pal. She died that Easter and I had to go on without her companionship. I felt lost without her next to me, like a part of me was missing. This feeling would eventually fade from my every thought, but Easter brings all that up once more, the feelings I couldn’t escape, that morning in that hotel room.