Monthly Archives: August 2010

The Mother-In-Law


She lives.

I know this for a fact because a) I check the obituaries near daily and she hasn’t turned up and b) Dee received a birthday card from her in the mail today.

My late husband’s mother surfaces less than a half-dozen times a year due to the fact that Hallmark insists on making cards available for public consumption. Despite my gentle suggestion that she actually write something in the cards, the woman just signs her name and as the cards are devoid of currency, Dee opens, looks and puts them aside without comment.

My daughter refers to her late father’s mother as “Daddy Will’s mom” not Grandma or Oma or Nana. They don’t have that kind of relationship.

In fact, they have no relationship. Something I am not responsible for because I did try to include her early on, but she made it clear that her preference was that Will and I drop Dee off, go off and have dinner or something and then pick the baby up after. She wasn’t the least interested in either of us and found our annoying insistence about being present during visits a turn-off where the “grandmother” experience was concerned.

Since we didn’t allow her unsupervised visits, she decided not to have a relationship with Dee and discovered that being a marginalized grandparent had its own perks. People were outraged on her behalf. Offered her sympathy. Willingly bought into her fantasy about how I was the root of all evil.

Will’s illness, long decline and eventual death did nothing to improve relations between us, and likely fueled my impression that she was unbalanced and that Dee needed to be sheltered from her influence.

Fast forward, I remarried and emigrated to Canada with my daughter.

I did not tell my in-laws. Anything.

They didn’t know about Rob, the whole getting married thing and I definitely didn’t leave a forwarding address.

In my more perverse moments, it amused me to wonder just how long it would take for any of them to realize I’d sold my house and decamped the area.

It was Rob who prevailed upon me to send them word. We’d been married a couple of months and I sent a letter to Will’s uncle, telling him about our move and marriage. I enclosed a letter for him to give to MIL because I didn’t have her address. Or her phone number.

No, really, I didn’t.

She’d moved a few months before Will died. Sold the house her late husband had built for them and downsized to a trailer. I found out about it by accident. She was in the hospital recovering from a hip break and told her family not to tell me.

After I found out, she’d instructed them not to give me her new address or phone number. I was to contact her via her best friend and her best friend’s mother should I need to get information to her.

This was where our relationship stood.

The hospice months did nothing to improve relations though it did occur to her and her family and friends as the end inched closer that I was likely to cut off all contact after Will was gone. Sugar was applied liberally in the last few days.

But now it’s late August of 2007 and the in-laws are a bit taken aback by the fact that I remarried (so quickly) and left the country without them noticing or telling them.

Digression over. Birthday cards.

They arrive sometime in mid to late August. Dee’s birthday is in July. Early on MIL declared bankruptcy to get herself out of sending Dee a couple of dollars and Dee, being a mercenary, has little use for birthday greetings that bear no cash.

Yesterday the card arrived. Inside it was a small white envelope. No name. This is how she sends me messages. So I knew it was for me, but it’s Dee’s birthday card and she -rightly – assumes it is for her.

A ten-dollar bill tumbles out.

Dee is pleased though not pleased enough to refer to MIL as her “grandmother” when she goes to tell Rob about the money. My mother is her grandmother as far as she is concerned. She has no room for anyone else.

Along with the money was a single sheet of paper that read “for pictures”.

She has tried to send me cash to cover the expense of printing photos and mailing them to her. I send photos about twice a year but I am haphazard about it because I mainly share photos with family and friends on Facebook anymore.

“You could send her a note inviting her to be your Facebook friend,” Rob suggested.*

Which in all honestly would be an easier way to do this because printing pictures and sending them through the post is time and money consuming, but keeping ahead of Facebook’s complete disregard for my right to limit access to my information would be close to impossible. So as there is no way to “friend” the MIL without granting her access to my life at will, Facebook is out.

I also don’t think she has a computer anymore. She did once. Got it during her aborted attempt to go back to college. For the most part, she reveled in her poor widow me identity but every once in a while, she made a grab for normal life. But the computer would be older than Dee, if it still existed.

So sometime this month pictures need to be culled from various cameras and computers and sent off to Costco. Rob usually does that. I sort and mail. I was going to do this soon anyway because the new school year presents a formal photo op and now that Dee is eight, we simply don’t take pictures of her like we did when she was small.

I resent the note though. I lied to Dee. Told her the money was for her even though it wasn’t. The money was a rebuke. I’ve told her not to send money. We don’t need it. And she stopped so this was a reminder that I hadn’t sent photos since February and that she is an abandoned old woman living on a fixed income.

She’s lucky to get pictures at all and she knows it, but she can’t help herself. When opportunities arise to make herself look victimized by my stance on Dee – it being that Dee will not be allowed contact with her until she is old enough to understand what a manipulative, less than truthful person she is**.

*Rob is a tiny bit puzzled by my continued bad feelings toward MIL, but he has always had wonderful MILs who’ve adored him – that one incident where Shelley’s mother and older sister tried to talk her out of marrying him due to his outsider position in the community and his sketchy family aside.

** Like some of Will’s friends, MIL maintains that I was ultimately responsible for Will’s death because I refused to let him have a bone marrow transfer. The truth – which I got tired of repeating – was that Will was too old and his illness too advanced for BMT. It was an experimental thing at best and he didn’t qualify at any rate. All it would have done was kill him sooner. There really are no treatment options for what he had. BMT is actually one of those “cures” that works really well in children and teens but by the time a person is grown, the odds fall off a cliff.

Tales from a Canadian ER


They call it “emerge” here. It’s Canada-speak for “emergency room”, and it confuses me in the same way that “ah” sounds are “aaaa”. Paaaasta versus pahsta. Just off enough to make me pause for a moment so my brain can catch up to my ears.

But whatever. When medical situations arise, Canadians go to the “Emerge”. And so went Rob and I on Friday just shortly before noon because he’d slept late and woke feeling light-headed and slightly heart-attacky again.

“I hope we don’t have to wait long,” he said as we walked in the front entrance of the Fort Saskatchewan Health Centre. Not hospital. It’s not big enough to warrant the title and that’s not my opinion only but the provincial health system’s too.

“Just mention the chest pains and follow it up with the fact that you had a heart attack three weeks ago,” I suggested. “I’m pretty sure that will warrant queue jumping.”

If there is one thing that Canadians pride themselves on it’s queuing up for health care. No one jumps the line. No. One.

Incoming patients are evaluated and served according to the seriousness of their condition but for the most part, everybody waits.

And waits.

I have yet to go to the doctor for any reason and not sit for at least two hours before actually being seen.

And absolutely everyone gets the same slightly understated care.

“Hi,” Rob greeted the admissions clerk, a big haired woman with that “another one” look on her face that they all have.

“Alberta health card please,” she asks even before inquiring what brings Rob to the centre that day because not having that card means that the next question is “and how will you be paying today? Cash or credit?”.

“I was here three weeks ago and had an angioplasty,” Rob tells her when she finally asks the nature of his visit.

Rob still has trouble with voicing the heart attack thing.

“And you’re here today…?” Because “angioplasty” doesn’t clue her.

“I’ve had chest pains …”

To her credit, he doesn’t get any farther. She directs him to the ER intake and asks me to come back for his paperwork.

Chest pains opens doors and makes hospital folk look attentive and even behave in a way that makes one feel as though perhaps their attention has been adequately captured.

That’s just an fyi.

We walked through the packed waiting room. I noted with interest the young punk-ish woman sitting between two RCMP officers manically chatting away for the alarming edification of all. A mother gathering her brood ever closer as the girl babbled.

“I told the operator that they could come get me and bring me to the emerge or send someone for my corpse.”

More on her later.

To gain admittance to the emerge wing, you go through triage which is manned by an EMT trainee – always – no exception that I have ever seen. You don’t see a nurse or a doctor until the trainee has practiced on you.

Rob assumes the position in one of two chairs they’ve set up for patient triage and the young man glances about with a slightly vacant but confused enough to convince me he is tracking mentally look on his face.

“Do you have paperwork?”

Protocol, people, it’s all about the proper paperwork.

“He’s having chest pains,” I explain, “the woman at admitting told me to bring him here and then come back for his paperwork.”

Big eyes. Falters slightly and then he begins intake while I head back for Rob’s passport to health.

At the desk the clerk has finished admitting Rob. She and her co-worker express horror at the fact that Rob is just 48. I am calm. That’s how it goes. Your spouse suffers from something that most people cringe away from and you are calm. Like there is another option, but people, by and large, find it hard to wrap their minds around. Been here before but forgot to get the t-shirt.

Meanwhile, the wild-eyed looking punk girl in the lobby is regaling the officers with her manic tales of suicidal intentions. As I listen, I gather that mental health services here are no better than in the States. The girl had been trying to get help for some time but units are full and the only way in is to suicide or state an intention to do so. She’d called the police, threatened to kill herself and they sent officers around to pick her up and get her admitted. She reminded me a bit of my brother when he is in one of his demonic up periods. I didn’t blame the others in the waiting area for seeking seats far away from her.

It took less than ten minutes to get Rob checked in and into a room. Chest pains rate a room as opposed to sitting in chairs that line the hallway. Which turned out to be good because an hour or so later, they brought a young man in on a stretcher and left him in the hallway – just across from the chairs – and he spent a good 30 minutes violently retching into a basin. Followed by another 15 or 20 minutes hacking up phlegm. I never did discover what happened to him though I knew that when Rob hit the 5 hour mark, the young man was still there. He’d been put in one of the cubicles and was no longer vomiting but they wouldn’t give him so much as a glass of water to rinse his mouth out because they were still waiting on test results. Canadian health care is big on assuming that anything could lead to surgery and therefore, no food or liquids.

Because of his history – Rob has a “history” now and it’s still something we are adjusting to – they followed the standard protocol.

Protocol demands two sets of bloodwork six hours apart and ecgs periodically over the span. In all, with the heart in play, expect to spend a minimum of 8 hours and as long as 12 being “observed”. And be advised that you could be in “emerge” for the duration.

There is nothing to do but wait.

We read and I occasionally broke the monotony by eavesdropping on the EMT as he admitted people.

One guy was quite interesting because it revealed something about the system here that in all ways but one is exactly the same as the plight of the un or underinsured in the U.S.*

He’d broken his arm.

A year ago.

He was in the Fort visiting his in-laws and his mother-in-law made him come to emerge because the arm was bothering him to the point where he couldn’t lift anything.

The nurse, and I, listened to his story and I suspect this is the norm for working poor.

He lived several hours away from the nearest health centre/hospital. He waited until the next day to go in because of the distance and he couldn’t miss a day of work. The x-rays revealed two hair-line fractures and he needed a cast but they wanted him to come back the next day for it. He couldn’t. A trip to the hospital cost him a whole day.

“It would’ve been seven hours,” he told the nurse. “I don’t have that kind of time to waste and the bus service ain’t that good. I wouldn’t have been able to get back until the day after.”

But as he was on vacation and in Alberta, health care works the same in Fort Saskatchewan as it does in Calgary, he let himself be talked into coming.

“i just need you to put a cast on it.”

Of course after a year it wasn’t that simple and the nurse finally gave up trying to explain it. She sent him to x-ray. Let the doctor deal with him – when he got the chance.

There was just one doctor on call. There is only one. There are five rooms and at least ten chairs plus a waiting room full of chairs. So in theory, the doctor can be responsible for over a dozen patients in varying stages of diagnosis and severity over the course of a shift.

The doctor this time – at least – discussed the situation with us and I actually got to listen in.

In the end, it wasn’t another heart attack. It turns out that the Lipitor is a hard drug and it could be that Rob won’t be able to tolerate the muscle pain it causes. Some people can’t. Some people are even debilitated by Lipitor as it breaks down muscle tissue in addition to scouring the veins of cholesterol. Lipitor actually triggered ALS in my cousin’s father within months of his starting it. He died a horrible death.

So it’s the Lipitor. The heart is okay. I am a tiny bit less worried about Rob dying on me anytime soon, but the ghost snuggled up to me in bed last night. Really. So things are apparently dicier than they appear.

*Universal health care sounds nice. You don’t have to worry about not being able to pay for the doctor visit or the trip to the hospital. But … isn’t there always? Drugs are covered. The time off work isn’t covered. And in a country where there are few big cities, many people live hours away from care. Getting to and from is arduous to impossible and that’s if they can afford to take time away from work or children. For the poor and working poor, the obstacles to care will always be. Just having access to care isn’t the end of the problem.

The Haunting in Josephburg


How does one politely tell the spirits to bugger off?

They mean well. I know this. Our dead family only has our best interests at the center of their wispy insubstantial hearts, but my personal preference is to live in psychically deaf ignorance of any coming catastrophes or even minor bumps. And I am not talking “bumps” in the night.

Or the early morning light.

I haven’t been able to get a full night’s uninterrupted sleep since Rob’s heart attack. Some of it, I will concede, is the reactivation of my caregiver’s spidey sense, but the physical presence(s) in our room are not helping.

For some reason, I am able to tune in to the frequency of the departed with nerve jangling clarity in the early morning hours. I wake nearly every night to the powerful sense of someone standing by the windows.

Thursday morning I was awakened by footsteps that started at the door and ended at the foot of the bed. I started because they were loud and opened my eyes to spy a human shape heading towards Rob’s side of the bed.

Sunrise filtered illuminated the shape and I assumed it was Rob. He is often up to use the bathroom on the main floor. I heard him ask,

“What’s wrong?”

“I heard footsteps,” I told him and thinking now that they were his, I went back to sleep.

Only it wasn’t Rob.

Later as I thought about it more – while sitting in the ER as the doctor tried to determine if Rob had suffered another heart attack – I realized that the figure was clad in light coloured clothing. Rob’s robe is dark and even when he shuns it – which he isn’t at the moment with my mother visiting – he is dark.

The chest pains turned out to be a reaction to the Lipitor, which is another kettle of fish for another day, but as I headed into town to spring Rob from the Fort Hospital – also a tale for a day soon – Metallica came on the radio.

Metallica is hardly in popular radio rotation anymore. When the rare song turns up, it usually comes at “interesting” moments in my life. As they were my late husband’s favorite band, I have to wonder at the timing.

“These are definitely messages for you, ” Rob remarked when I told him about it later.

Perhaps I should pay more attention than he did.