What A Life! #FTSF #SoCS

“What a life!” my oma would always say with a sigh.

She was right. I say it now, that line, in exasperation, and in my memory of her, to honour her unique brand of wisdom and her straightforward ability to speak the truth.

I just had a checkup with a nurse practitioner. She was very thorough and we talked for what felt like a very long time. No rush to see me briefly and get me out the door. No neglect of what I needed. I told her my entire history, as fast as I possibly could, but she did not want me to hurry through the details. She was wonderful.

It takes me a little while to get through my somewhat complex medical history. I had her curious and eager to look up my eye condition

and the rare syndrome I share with my brother.

This took me back, which it can most often do, and required that I look back over the years.

Mostly I spoke of how sick I was before my then gp finally diagnosed my end-stage kidney failure at age twelve. That sure took me back, into the bad and the worse in terms of memories and recollections. I told her how hard it becomes to remember to include all necessary details, with every retelling I give a doctor or nurse. She was very understanding.

I see how far I’ve come when I look back, using my medical story as the example. I reflect on the girl I was and the struggles in the following years. I want to think I am doing alright considering. I think of my oma and I leave my medical checkup and I sigh.

When it comes to the years, I do so much looking back that it is sometimes a heavy weight on my shoulders.

I like the romantic notion of the days of yore. I read such fairy tales, but life is never like those stories in literature in reality. People reminisce about how it used to be, but perhaps, just perhaps they are remembering a time that never actually existed.

That may come across, to you, if you’re only just hearing me for the first time, as a highly pessimistic slant to life. Perhaps. Your take on, say the last twenty years of your own life, it could very well be all rosy coloured and tinted through different glasses. I haven’t worn glasses since 1996 I’m afraid.

No self pity here, but my life isn’t now or never has been a fairy tale anyway. Just the sort of telling it like it is/was, just like my oma used to like to do. That’s about as stream of consciousness as I can get today.

There is thankfulness to be had here, (which will for sure include that wonderful nurse), of course, but that is still to come in my next post.

🙂

I’m doing a double linkup this weekend, starting with

Finding Ninee’s Finish The Sentence Friday,

followed by

Linda G Hill’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Trypanophobia

Last Friday I wrote about those creepy, crawly critters that so many find so frightening:

Arachnophobia.

In this week’s post I tackle a fear that is so real for so many: the fear of needles.

I used to be afraid of these sharp little things myself, until I received so many that my arms, (baring witness to hundreds upon hundreds of medical tests and required blood work) gave me little choice in the matter. I had to face my fear and accept that the anticipation is usually the worst part. Not in the spooky tale below however.

***

3.
Needles. We hate sitting in the doctor’s office. Tapping our foot and waiting for a nurse to register our flu shot. Just before the needle goes in, we grow anxious. We wait for the sting, knowing it’s coming and knowing it’s not worth the stress. We torture ourselves in the final seconds as anticipation has become one of our most agonizing experiences.

***

The room is dim and shadowy. These shadows play tricks, dancing shapes on the wall in the early morning light.

Suddenly I jump when I realize there is someone else in the room with me. What room is this? I don’t even remember where I am or how I got here.

“Who are you?” I see the shape, this time of a nurse in a cap and white uniform. She looks like she does not belong in this decade, or even this century. “What year is this?”

“Please just give me your arm,” this stranger, this supposed nurse demands. “You will feel much better, very soon.” Something in her voice makes me doubt her promise.

“Where am I?”

“You are in the best place for you. That’s all you need know.” She doesn’t say it, but she seems to be hiding some piece of information I should have been given. Why would this woman keep something from me?

I want to rise from this…bed, was it? This room smells of disinfectant. I hear a low murmur just outside the door. I have the urge, then, to scream. Maybe someone out there could answer my questions.

“Just relax. Stay still. I need to give you your medicine.”

“Medicine? What medicine?” I feel like this situation calls for some questioning, some resistance, but before I can find it in me for either of these, I feel that sharp sting and the damage is done.

“It’s just something to make you feel better,” was all this mysterious elderly lady will say. She appears, even in this fading light, to be more frail than I am, as if she’s barely even there at all. Maybe she isn’t.

If only I could find the strength to sit up. I am sure I could take her on. If only I could get past her and out into the hall. Now it’s too late. The fog that rolled away just moments ago, to reveal my surroundings, comes roaring back with such ferocity that I can not push it off of me.

The woman remains, staring at me, but soon her shape becomes fuzzy to me and a blur with the shadows returning to their dance routines on the walls of my prison.

All that remains of reality: the stinging, burning sensation in the spot where I was stuck and now I am stuck for good, in a land of shapes and shadows. Each time I feel my control and consciousness begin to return she appears with that sharp tool in her hand and I feel the familiar stabbing pain once more.

***

check out the post responsible for the Fiction Friday Halloween-themed posts here on KKHerHeadache this month:

5 Fears And What They Say About Us.

Thank you Young and Twenty, for this. For your Halloween writing prompts and I shall be back next week with the second-last instalment in this series: fear of heights.

Do you have some level of Trypanophobia or do you find needles, like me, to be no big deal?

Day in the Museum: Part Three, Keep Calm and Carry On

This is the final segment in my week-long posts of my day at The Stratford Perth Museum last weekend.

Part One explored my relationship with museums, through

The Four Senses

and then I spoke about the whole reason for visiting the museum in the first place in Part Two,

Shakespeare’s First Folio.

Now here is my final post.

***

This year marks

One Hundred

years since the start of World War I and with the subsequent World War II and the huge influence and shaping they both had on the 20th century.

When I heard about the World War exhibit upstairs I had to make use of the ticket to see as much as I could.

We took an elevator up a floor and back in time, finding ourselves amongst the history, bravery, and heroism of war.

We stepped out through the elevator door to commemorative service medals, to pictures and names…searching for familiar names, as we have had family around the area and, although it was a long time ago, you never know.

There was a history of the area and a write-up on the creation of The Stratford Perth Regiment, beginning with the settlement of settlers in the area in the 1850s.
stratford brass company.
Felt shoe company.
Manufactured goods and services. A furniture company.

Shells and bullet casings. Buttons from some long gone soldier’s uniform.

An example of the sort of food provided. Biscuits were, I can imagine, cheap and easy to produce, but must not have provided much nutrients to soldiers fighting in the trenches. I guess it was better than starting. I simply can not imagine it.

Again, seeing as we were in a museum, most of these things were untouchable for me, for whatever reason. a drum was one of the few things I could reach out and feel. I could imagine the sound of a drum beat, some chant in war.

A piece of trench art from a shell casing, a cross engraving.

What looked like a bit of rock, removed shrapnel from someone fighting in one of these mostly forgotten battles.

A diary and address book from 1916, France and the battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917 – a bayonet and an oil lamp. Some medical badges.

***

Above are some of the items from these wars and below are just a few of the stories:

I enlisted because I wanted to travel. I lied about my age.”

The D-Day Dodgers

we are the D-Day Dodgers
in sunny Italy.
Showed us the sites and gave us tea, Sang us songs. The beer was free.

More on The DDay Dodgers here.

just names,
an ironic take on the italian campaign, a brutal campaign. It was actually considered to be the cowardly mission in comparison to what was going on in France. They did not receive the same recognition as D-Day soldiers in Normandy did.

A female nurse during World War II:

She enlisted. That was her second attempt. She was told the war would be over by Christmas so they did not need more nurses.
She landed in Sicily with the troops,
at the casualty station.

“We went to see MASH and my aunt was upset by the way the docs and nurses in the OR acted.
My mom explained, you had to do that or you would end up losing it.”

(Daughter speaking on behalf of her mother)

The most interesting part of this whole exhibit to me was the part devoted to the subject of propaganda. Being a fan of words I am amazed at how they can uplift and inspire, both in good ways and bad, how words have the power to sway and to mobilize. During times of war the propaganda machine can be used for good and for evil’s means.

The simplest of slogans can have the greatest effect:

DIG FOR VICTORY
To help with the war effort, Britain and Canada grew 1 million tuns of vegetables.

Dig dig dig,
Your muscles will grow big.
Do not mind the spade…

On display there was an extremely controversial text: Mein Kampf (My Struggle).

Adolf Hitler wrote this manifesto while incarcerated in the 1920s and in it he details his vision and his feelings concerning those he deemed to have caused him and his country the problems they were facing at the time of The Depression, post World War I.

– Ten million copies distributed throughout Germany
– This copy Had been handed out to Hitler’s Youth

The Swastika
– The crooked cross, an omni-present symbol
– a symbol present on everything from flags to match boxes, to inspire pride and loyalty in National Socialism.

It’s funny how I don’t have a clear image in my mind of what one of these looks like. I may have seen it. I seem to remember seeing it as a thick dark outline, in the Tom Cruise film Valkyrie, but as my vision has decreased, over time, I am unfamiliar with such a well-known symbol of cruelty and destruction.

However, symbols could be just as vocal for the other side:
– A hammer smashing the swastika.
– british Canadian propaganda posters in circulation
KAPUT!
Give us the tools.

In thirty-nine and after outbreak of war the british designed posters with bold coloured backgrounds, a symbolic crown of King George the sixth.

To add a more modern and a contemporary touch, perhaps hoping to reach younger visitors such as myself, in and amongst the other examples of propaganda and symbolism there was even a movie premier poster from a few years ago. I don’t know which movie in the series it was for, but Rupert Grint was included, in one of the Harry Potter movie promotion posters, wearing a shirt with the infamous wartime slogan: KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON. I suppose he could be playing his role of Ron Weasley. Lord Voldemort was often compared to Adolf Hitler in many ways.

I have heard variations of this slogan myself, but this one in particular must be common enough in Britain still today. I find that slogan, in particular, rather interesting. Words even as simple as those are able to influence morale and mood, even in the toughest of times and those words still “carry on” to apply to any of us today.

This slogan did not have a chance to take off as a slogan for war, remaining on only a few of these posters on the walls of military and recruitment offices. So how did it manage to remain in the peoples’ consciousness for all these years?

Some bookstore owner came across one of these posters mixed in with a dusty old pile of books from an auction.

A true nostalgia item.

One more variation on this slogan was one spoken to warn soldiers against spilling privileged wartime secret information to any beautiful woman they might come across: KEEP MUM, SHE’S NOT SO DUMB!

And those are the words I will leave you with.

🙂

***

I left the museum and was left to ponder the power and potency of words, either written or spoken aloud. I learned a lot over one simple afternoon at a local museum.

Have you ever been to a museum and learned something you hadn’t known before? What effect did it have on you?