Something's Missing

 

The Husband has no fingerprints.

He used to have them; they must have fallen off at some point and he didn’t notice. Either that, or aliens stole them during the night when they took him up to their flying-saucer laboratory, then wiped his memory clean of that experience. I wouldn’t have noticed, because the Husband sleeps so noisily that the sound a flying saucer and its suck-‘em-up ray make would almost certainly be quieter than the shouting, yelling, singing, screaming, talking, thumping, whumping, banging noises he makes pretty much all night long – which Is why I sleep in another room, because it’s the only way I can actually get some sleep.

Amazingly, when the super secret re-badging process at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard uncovered this new and curious fact when the Husband was recently there to re-up his super secret creds so he can take super secret photos of the Shipyard’s super secret on-going projects ---all of which you can observe from Portsmouth, if you have a pair of binoculars and look across the water (because the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard is actually in Maine, not in Portsmouth), the super secret powers that be decided it didn’t really matter. They’ve seen his fingerprints before and don’t seem to care that they’ve since disappeared.

Which I find odd. I’m slowly developing a conspiracy theory about this, but don’t hold your breath waiting for me to reveal it, because I’m really, really tired so it could take awhile.

In the meantime, it’s now officially autumn.  And raining. The leaves are slowly turning, on my island of a world, stuff in the garden is slowing, slowing down, the late-planted sunflowers are tall and newly in bloom, the hummers are long gone, I hear owls every night now the air conditioner is out of my bedroom window, and the cats are back to spending all day outside except on rainy ones. It will soon be time to plant garlic, when it’s more reliably cold out. The gladiola flowers this year are beyond beautiful, but are mostly done and soon I’ll be pulling them up and drying out their new bulbs for planting next year. I’m always surprised, every year, when I discover the bulbs I planted are totally spent, but they’ve grown a new bulb atop the old one, that I get to pull off and dry, and toss the old one into the compost to feed the next generation.

Rasta Furian contemplating making trouble

There is something living in the compost bins; I haven’t seen it, but it’s dug a pretty large hole down near the bottom, which was hidden all summer by a volunteer squash plant vine and a lot of volunteer catnip and summer-blooming weeds. I can’t smell it, so it’s not a mink. The cats are fascinated and spend a lot of time atop the compost walls, trying to terrify the thing into running out and revealing itself. So far it hasn’t.

We ‘ve had too much fun this summer with Chemo-Man: two emergency trips to the hospital, one resulting in an un-needed antibiotic that produced nothing but hives, the other that resulted in a colonoscopy which, while it should be reversible, in the meantime comes with its own set of sometimes ridiculous, other times eventually funny, unexpected situations. Just let me say that you’ve not really experienced your mate’s colostomy gear until you’re eye to eye with his stoma trying to line up the new poop-balloon-holding gear, when it decides to shoot diarrhea out at you.

Since I wrote the paragraphs above this one, we’ve had another emergency run to the hospital which didn’t result in a new hospital adventure, though the ARNP in charge did ask me whether I wanted him home or should they keep him there overnight; and again on a Friday, so I had to cancel patients again. And I’ve had another close encounter with the poop balloon, when one decided to fall apart. Yay.

Since the last time I went to F’ing Florida, to move my F’ing FL Friend (was that really only a year and a half ago?), I’ve read something like 250 books; most of which got passed on to friends or left on the Free Bench for other readers.  In the past several months, things with Chemo Boy have gotten more complicated, I’ve gotten more tired, and there hasn’t been enough time to do much reading – unless you count the nights I read in bed ‘til the book falls onto my nose and wakes  me up. 

The lady in the garden, back in July

But I’ve met an author who is new to me and who, honestly, wrote books I wish I’d written. The man was my age and died of a brain tumor just a few years ago; and his books are sometimes hard to find, but thriftbooks.com seems to have them, or most of them, usually. His name was Brian Doyle (not the same Brian Doyle who lives in Canada and writes pretty good kids’ books). He lived on the west coast; and his writing is so infused with love and joy for what he’s writing about, and wonder at the people and critters and land that he writes about, that I’ve fallen deeply in love and am very sorry that I didn’t meet him while he was still living. If you decide to look his books up, try to start with Mink River or Chicago or one  of his other novels; or his book of essays which I’m joyously allowing myself just one or two of, per day, in order not to run out too soon: Eight Whopping Lies and other tales of bruised grace. That last is a collection of essays he wrote for publication in magazines, collected and printed as a book after his death.

Prepare to be awed, made to feel humble, and to be  infused with wonder and amazement.

 

For the blog: herondragonwrites. blogspot.com      28 September 2024

All photos Deb Marshall

 

Onions and garlic drying in the kitchen

Demon Week

 

Everyone should have some Dragons on hand

We had a week-long adventure, here in ChemoLand, two weeks ago: The Husband tanked out his white blood cells and a demon entered his body and could only speak in a harsh, spasmodic, not-to-be-heard-on-this-plane barking, violent cough; and then soon after spiked a fever of 104, briefly. The ER docs were excited, they got to take many vials of blood and transfuse many kinds of demon-chaser. They managed to cool the demon down sufficiently that what is left of The Husband’s brain didn’t melt, but the demon still continued to try to communicate with us, so first they popped The Husband and his demon into ICU for a couple of days, and then moved him out to a regular bed for another 3 days, while they tried, over and over, to identify the demon so they could remove it.

In the meantime, between attempted communications from  the demon, after he could catch his breath, The Husband was very happy to discover he had a captive audience for his stories, recitations, drama, exaggerations, and so on, and so he had a lovely time. Except at night, when the demon partly took over and wouldn’t let him sleep, but did give him hallucinations.

Unknown pink flower: looks like rare pink Meadowsweet; but how did it get into my garden?

 After 5 days, when they couldn’t figure out what demon it was, but the cool-down remained intact, they kicked him out of the hospital because he was having too much fun. They did first discover that the demon – or maybe they – had caused a small blood clot to reside on the corner of The Husband’s chemo port, so they put him on a blood thinner, and also put him on a couple of antibiotics as a last-gasp attempt to rid The Husband of the demon. The antibiotics didn’t work, but the demon liked one and used it to give The Husband an interesting set of hives; and in a demon-like fashion, the hives would come and go – going, as a rule, within a few minutes of us trying to show them to a doctor, and returning soon after we went home again. Demons are tricky like that.

And the demon continued to attempt to communicate, causing all sorts of trouble to The Husband, who couldn’t breathe when the demon was trying to communicate – and the demon, of course, also figured out that the nasty ER docs, who we went to see again, would attempt to identify him and  try to kill him when The Husband arrived – this was not a stupid demon - so when docs were around, it stopped trying to communicate. And The Husband could sleep in the ER. This was a very tricksy demon.

What the demon didn’t realize is that I’m a Chinese medicine practitioner, which is an ancient type of medicine that is, as we all know, mysterious and comes from The Time When Demons Walked The Earth…or was that Dragons? Anyway, I finally got sick of it and gave The Husband  Dragon Pearls, which eliminates the fire, and The Demon stopped trying to communicate and left  The Husband’s body, because a demon and a dragon can’t co-exist and a demon without fire can’t communicate. The Husband’s ugly yellow-coated tongue turned into a normal tongue and he could breathe again. No more hives, no more fungus, but he still can’t sleep, because that’s what The Husband does, anyway.. 

This is a carrot flower; they're biennials and a few didn't get picked last year. This is what happens...

 He can , however play tennis and go for short bike rides, so I have decreed that The Time of Not Washing Dishes is over for him, because, really! My foot hurts, and he only had a demon stuck in him briefly, part of which time was highly entertaining, and maybe medically useful, so I feel sorrier for myself than for him, again.

He’ll be back on the dread chemo again after the Craftsmen’s Fair, because he takes photos of all the non-demon’s and possible-we’re-not-sure artistic demon’s stuff that they sell to humans (and possibly the kind of demons that look like humans and still Walk The Earth), and this time Dr. Chemo has decreed that The Husband will receive the Shot That Makes The Body Produce White Blood Cells, so demon’s shouldn’t have a way in, again.

Maybe. I’m ordering more Dragon Pearls, just in case.

 

For the blog, 23 July 2024. All photos Deb Marshall

 

This is last year's strange plant, come to live in my garden again. Note the stem grows through the leaves...

Blue is a lovely, airy color.

 

As It Goes...

 

Hangin' Out

 This is the season of stiff cloth: towels and pillowcases, undies and sheets; socks and face cloths. On sunny days, windy days, warm days, we hang the laundry on the clothesline; one sharp snap as one takes the dry items off the line will loosen and soften some of the pieces – and this is an important action because it removes stray bugs that have landed on the hanging clothes – but it won’t soten up facecloths, for example, and we’ll wash our faces with  extra-rough cloths all summer and fall.

It’s also the season of damp pants pockets, because one inevitably forgets to turn the pockets inside out when hanging them on the line. No problem ; they’ll air dry or body dry in half an hour.

Do, however, be sure to check that the hummingbirds didn’t poop on your pillowcases on their way to their feeder. They do often use the empty line to perch and sing, after all.

This is a perennial I planted last year and lost the tag; does anyone know what it is? It's about 5 feet tall now and going wild...out of control like everything in my life at the moment!

 

This is also the season of critter experiences. There has been a fox or two regularly hanging out in our yard; sometimes near the wood stacks and last night, we watched one greedily chomping down the unripe small peaches the Husband has been dropping on the ground when he thins them from the still-young trees. This spring, apparently, produced an amazing number of peach blooms, which makes up for last year when there was late frost killing them all. My trees, however, are still only a few years old and small; they won’t be able to hold up so many large ripening peaches, so the peaches must be thinned or we risk broken branches later in the summer.

I can’t imagine what flavor or nutritious interest hard green peaches provide, but I’m not a fox. Maybe they gave it a sick tummy; around midnight  what I assume was the fox was racing about our house, especially in the heather in the front, then to the back, then towards the marsh across the street, back to our house, front and back and then, rapidly, away in the back woods, heading towards Eddie Bear’s house and towards the house of the Polish Poet Witch on the Hill. My cats were very agitated, racing from window to window to get a look.

I peered out and couldn’t see; putting the front door light on didn’t help, alas. The night before, I heard the hoo-hoo  hoo hoo hoo of the barred owls that live somewhere nearby; and I’m pretty sure I’ve also heard the screech of the rehabilitated barn owls that were released in our back yard a few weeks ago. Our back yard is actually one end of the old cow pasture our house sits in the middle of, with a dirt road and many acres of lightly housed woods behind.

Born wild -- Lynxie Bob

 

Today is July 4; I was surprised, last night, not to be serenaded by firecrackers or small fireworks, which usually light up the night in my small village; but no neighbors were celebrating early this year, apparently. Tonight we’ll likely be able to glimpse the display put on by the next town over, if we stand outside and peer above the trees.

This summer, like last, my orchids are having a vacation out on the porch, all but the one that’s currently in bloom – the wind has been to brisk, too often, to risk losing those lovely  and rare flowers to the weather’s strange vagaries.This summer, because my injured foot and leg (6 months now, and counting, and only seemingly getting worse) won’t allow me to plant the big vegetable garden I usually plant,  the major part of the garden is going wild: it’s a jungle of daisies and California poppies and milkweed and strange weeds I don’t know, and large weeds I do know; it’s rather lovely in an irritating way. 

Gone Wild

 

Before my injury got too bad, I managed to plant the two raised beds just behind the house with leeks, onions, shallots, beets, parsnips and a row each of peas and fava beans, all of which are being challenged by self-seeded calendula, mats of purslane, yellow-flowered wood sorrel, and other weeds. I can’t easily weed things out – it hurts to stand out there and I’m putting my weight mostly on my left  side, so when I bend over to pull weeds and reach too far, I often lose my balance; twice I’ve fallen into the potato-growing bags, once in  a way I had to shout for The Husband to come help me get up.

Garden behind the house

The Tall Man has planted some beds behind the garage and near the apple tree for me – I have to visit those by driving the car through the field because I can’t walk that far without great pain. The Husband put in a bed of sweet peppers, and a small bed of green beans. I’ve put basil, and  the gladiola bulbs, in pots near the porch stairs; ‘twill be pretty if all grows.  The Tall Man is watering the garden for me. If the garden gremlin/gnome leaves things alone, I’ll have some vegetables this summer, but  I won’t be able to fill the freezers as well as I do most summers.   

The Husband is having a CT scan tomorrow to see what his first 3 chemo sessions (and the Japanese tumor-reducing tinctures made of various mushrooms I prescribed) have accomplished; he’s a third of the way through chemo, which will be followed by one or more operations to remove tumors. He’s doing well, strong and busy, with some weird side-effects – things don’t taste like they should, touching cold things hurt – and sometimes he doesn’t sleep well, but he’s a famous insomniac so who knows if it’s chemo or just him.

 I’m almost embarrassed to say I feel sorrier for me, at this point, than for him: he can walk comfortably, he doesn’t lie awake night after night in great pain, he doesn’t topple over or lose his balance every few steps, and he can drive without his foot shrieking at him continually.  And he’s never had to have a foot wound debrided -  I held my foot up, I didn’t flinch, I didn’t ask for a break, I only shouted FUCK FUCK FUCK three times (I sound like the pet duck in Louise Penny’s books about Inspector Gamache a lot lately – the duck is carried around by the semi-insane old poet who lives in Three Pines, and says fuckfuckfuckfuck) because I’m a Warrior. And then I had excruciating pain for the next three hours. I’ll feel sorry for The Husband later.

Garden Guards

And so the summer goes. We’re surrounded by piles of leftovers from our yard sale, that go here and there slowly. I make endless lists and schedules, and then make them  all over again as schedules change and we juggle having only one car because the other’s still dead; and we build up gratefulness for friends who have been helping above and beyond.

And it’s summer; and Buzzy Boy, who must be a very old hummer, is back; and he still chases me out of the garden beds I can reach if I venture out  in the late part of the day.

The whole world feels like it’s coming apart at the seams; our personal world is barely hanging on. And yet there are owls, and foxes, and loving cats, and Buzzy Boy and his harem. And understanding patients; and generous friends.

The world goes on…      

 

For the blog:  herondragonwrites.blogspot.com     July 4, 2024

All photos Debra Marshall

Happy Roses

 

                         

Green Man overlooks the garden; looks a lot like The Tall Man

                                                                                                                                                

A Very Bad Month

 

Not from my garden!

 

Let’s do a quick review: As soon as most of the snow from the first big storm of the year, at the end of March, had mostly melted, we had the second biggest snow of the year on April 2 and 3 and…anyway, we couldn’t get out of our driveway until Friday. Granted, we only had one car to get out, because not only had the Husband’s snow tires been removed from his car just in time for the first big storm, but his car has been having a lengthy vacation at the garage. His transmission is dead, and the part that might fix it has to come from the dealer, and the dealer keeps sending the wrong part. If the part, which never arrives, doesn’t fix the transmission, then it’ll have to be rebuilt, which will cost something like $5000 and who knows how much time? Or where that money will come from? That’s what my second car cost, new.

This is when I started beating my head against the wall. Then we had an earthquake, which I felt – everything went side to side – and that was exciting. Oh, and 4 days later, a solar eclipse. The gods are having a field day this month.

In the meantime, my F’ing FL friend’s (F-FL F) PCP had posted something alarming about her health on his medical site after his April 1 appointment with her, which caught my attention and initiated a series of emails between him and me. Not with her, because she’s not been speaking to me since October, when I told her, after trying three times unsuccessfully, that  month, to get her to answer some simple questions about her daily activities so I could re-up her on the F-FL Medicaid wait list, that she seems to be unable, anymore, to follow simple directions; I pointed out some other simple things she’s been unable to follow instructions about, and told her I was worried about her and reiterated that she needs to communicate with her cousin and me before making decisions about important things, consequently. Her last communication to me, following that email: “Every time you write to me, Deb, every single time, you’re horrible and mean and say things to me that I’d never say to a friend, and I get IBS and have to take an extra pill then go sit on the toilet for four days in great pain, so I’m not going to read anything you send anymore,”

OK ! That cleared some time for me; I used to send her a pretty postcard 6 days a week and a chatty letter on the weekend. It didn’t take a lot of time, but added up over many years, it took a fair amount of time and money. No point in writing to someone who’s not going to read it, and it’s pretty darn hard to maintain a one-way relationship with someone who is, at best, uncommunicative, and at worst, never writes or calls. I’ll stick to the letters about health matters, which she’s not going to read but I need to send.

So when her PCP noted that F-FL F had informed him that she no longer had any interest in having appointments with outside practitioners, and that her pain levels had increased in the past two months so she is taking more of her opioids. So he’d told her she needed to see a pain specialist, and needed to explore with her psych whether her psych meds needed adjusting.  This is a red flag: I had to find out what was going on. My job, in taking care of her, is to deal with medical matters, since that’s my expertise; Cousin Paula deals with finances, as that’s her expertise.

Lots of back and forth and in effect, PCP can’t write a prescription for the level of opioids F-FL F now needs, and he’s noticed a distinct slow cognitive decline, and he thinks her psych meds/treatment (or lack of it) may be part of the problem. Besides that, she’s refused to see the dental specialist the dentist referred her to, or to make an app’t with a pain specialist, or see an ophthalmologist to keep an eye on her cataracts and developing macular degeneration; and her PCP was unaware of the hoard of hundreds of opioid pills F-FL F has hidden away in her room at the assisted living facility.

The nursing director, who left there in December, knew about the hoard and was supposed to have found and destroyed it, but didn’t; and the new nursing director didn’t know about it because the gone nursing director didn’t pass on the info; and no one knows whether F-FL F has actually had more than a phone call with her psych in more than a year because she can’t get there in person and has not been able to figure out zoom, which the gone nursing director was going to facilitate, but we doubt did.

PCP told me it was time for me to get involved in F-FL F’s health care again whether she liked it or not. So I spent about 30 hours writing a detailed letter to her asking for an explanation and warning her that cognitive decline has been noted by several people, and if she couldn’t explain her decision not to see specialists reasonably, I wanted to know if she understood that meant she was risking blindness, and that her pain meds were going to go away, and did she then intend to start using her hoard? I explained that I didn’t know what would happen but she’d need to be protected from herself, if necessary – and got no reply of course. Then there were many emails and phone calls to the new nursing director and the new facility director, and a letter to the psych, and copies of  my letter to her to all of the above and Cousin Paula and the PCP, and Cousin P and I gave  permission for the facility to do a search and destroy of the opioid hoard and put F-FL F, at her PCP’s request, on medication management, which means the facility will hold onto her prescriptions and deliver doses to her to take at proper times.

And I warned them all that F-FL F would throw a major hissy fit when she found out about all of this.

Let’s leave F-FL for a moment and go back north to NH on the day before the latest huge snowstorm. History: I badly hurt my back, leg and foot in mid-January (a cat was involved), and no one can figure out what’s going on and why it’s still not healed; but it was horrible, involving swelling and calf pain and aching back and xrays and ultrasounds and cramping and shooting pain and too much hurting to sleep, and on and on, but slowly slowly with Chinese medicinals and lots of acupuncture and times of ibu+Tylenol, it’s been changing weekly and was bad but not horrible before the storm.  

April porch furniture - expect another storm!

I’d not finished pulling the over-wintered parsnips from my raised beds, and decided I should really pull the rest of the patch of them before they got covered in feet of snow, again. Out in the wind in the cold was I, bent over, pulling huge long parsnip roots out of the ground and filling a large basket, from time to time standing up and saying, Ow! Ow! Ow! about my aching back and foot. Suddenly, I was flying through the air, arms and legs flailing, unable to touch down or catch my balance, and eventually landed, face down, 9 feet away between the two garden beds on the gravel path, sore leg in the bed, other leg half buried in gravel, and thank god for boobs because otherwise my face would have been buried, too!

My considered opinion is that the garden gremlins or gnomes were mad because I was removing the last of their winter food stores, so they picked me up, and tossed me; I have no other reasonable explanation. What I know for sure is that the skin on the sore leg had road rash on the knee, and I discovered a couple of days later that I also had a big lump on the heel of that foot, which was very sore to touch. I expect I knocked that heel on the concrete wall of the raised bed either when I first went flying or when I landed. And I twisted my back all over again. But at the time I was in the midst of a round of prednisone to try to fix the damned sore leg, so except for some blood, and back pain that ibu and hot packs eased, I didn’t think much more of it. Except when I had to help shovel the heavy wet feet of snow several days later and my back started aching like crazy.

Gremlin food?

Hop back forward to mid-April, in NH. The Husband was due to have a colonoscopy, first ever, and he’d carefully followed the pre-colonoscopy routine, took the pills, drank the nasty stuff – and nothing happened. No diarrhea. No pooping. But a lot of cramping and gas and bloating.

Next day, I heard afterwards, the surgeon who was doing the colonoscopy found 2 large tumors and some polyps in his sigmoid colon (close to the rectum), which so blocked the opening she couldn’t even get a pediatric scope past them. And his large intestine was still full of poop. Is still full of poop.

I got a phone call from the Husband an hour after he got home from the colonoscopy, because then the laxatives finally kicked in, and he spent hours sitting on the toilet, and has done for the whole past week. Next day he had the pleasure of having a dyed CT scan: there might be malignant spread to local lymph nodes, or to the outside of the colon, and there’s a suspicious something in the liver that needs to be checked. So he has cancer, we don’t know how much yet, but the next year is going to be a round of operations, chemo and possibly radiation, so a year from hell.

The very same day of his colonoscopy, I got home to discover lots of emails from F-FL nursing home people, PCP, and Cousin Paula (nothing from F-FL F, because what I’d written to her was another of the mean horrible letters I’m always writing to her, so I’m sure she never read it, but also sure she knows I’m responsible for the current commotion involving her. The nursing home people had gone to her room to do a search and destroy and take away her meds to put her on medication management, and F-FL F, as I’d warned them, threw a temper tantrum: they can’t take away her independence, she’s going to call an elder care attorney, she’s going to fire her PCP, she’s going to move, and apparently ranted and raged about many other things, no doubt me to a large extent.

In an email I had with her PCP later that evening, he said he might just fire himself – if she’s not going to co-operate, listen to his advice, and is going to cause this much work and furor, what’s the point in him trying to treat her? I had to tell him I really wasn’t sure and I understood.

Now Cousin Paula is taking over the F-FL whole situation while I’m wading through the NH medical situation.

Parsley's starting to grow

And yesterday, the lump on my heel returned and I have shooting pains and aching and the whole of the bottom of the foot around the heel is very sensitive to the touch and I can’t stand on it without a lot of pain. I can’t see it, but the Husband says it’s red and bruised. I can’t put it flat on the floor, so I’m gimping around on the ball of that foot, which is causing the leg muscles to go into spasm all over again. Did I fracture or crack a bone in the foot and somehow make it worse while I was beating my head against the wall in frustration this past week? The xray I’d had preceded the flying parsnip event by weeks, so who knows?

My seed potatoes, some of the onion sets, and shallot sets arrived in the mail last week; the rest of the onions, and leeks, and tarragon plants will be coming momentarily. These will all need to be planted soon, and the rest of the garden’s going to need to be started, too. And I’m hobbling. And the Husband will certainly be starting some kind of therapy or surgery by mid-May; and he won’t be able to do anything for a month (surgery) and will be feeling too crappy to do much (chemo) for weeks. And I’m hobbling. And we don’t know yet how many operations will be involved – partly because they still can’t see past the poop.

And we really, really need to have a yard sale this spring – stuff has been building up for several years, and my brain needs it gone. And I’m hobbling.

And beating my head against the wall. Maybe I should try kicking the wall, instead…I wonder if that would fix the foot?

 

For the blog April 21, 2024: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com

All photos Debra Marshall

Jonquils survived the storms. This is the raised bed that got me.