remarriage of widowed people

No One Tells Me Nothing


Animated sagittal MRI slice of my beating heart

Image via Wikipedia

The Canadian health saga continues with Rob’s first cardiac rehab meeting yesterday. His cardiologist – the one I’ve yet to even lay eyes on and who he saw just once during his procedure (which the doctor didn’t perform but merely supervised in any case) – referred Rob to a five week program designed to assess his fitness to return to work and get him back on the healthy heart road via an exercise program and fun little classes on weight control or sexual function.

Oh, that last wasn’t an either/or, but examples.

The cardiac rehab is located in Edmonton. Per usual the parking options were limited. So hard to come by in fact that a portion of the orientation is devoted to parking issues.

Rob was probably one of the youngest participants. Certainly no one else showed up with an eight year-old in tow. There was perhaps one gentleman in his late 30’s or early 40’s, everyone else was qualified for the discount menu at Humpty’s.

As we walked in, each patient receives a personal packet of info containing his/her appointment schedules and a menu of rehab class options in addition to the ones pre-selected to match his/her “event”.

No one has heart attacks. There are “cardiac events” only. It’s a pc thing.

The nurse who conducted the session tried hard to be brief and witty and was neither, but she told a little story at the onset which neatly sums up the health experience here from my perspective.

The operator at the hospital received a call one afternoon from an elderly woman wanting to inquire about the status of a patient.

“Who is the patient?” asked the operator.

“Helen Finley,” the old woman replied.

“Well,” the operator said, “I’ll be happy to get an update for you. Let me put you on hold and I will contact the nurse on the ward for information.”

A few minutes go by and the operator returns with good news.

“The nurse tells me that Helen is doing quite well. Her blood work came back normal and her blood pressure and other vital signs are good. In fact, she’s doing so well, that her doctor is planning to release her this evening.”

“Oh,” the old woman’s voice shook, “that is good to hear.”

“I’m glad I could help, ” the operator said. “Is Helen your daughter?”

“Oh no,” the old woman said, “I’m Helen and no one tells me nothing.”

Of course no one laughed. I suspect that any of the other people in the room could tell stories that mirror our experience. But the nurse didn’t mean to highlight one of the chief problems with the system here; she was trying to make a point about asking questions. The assumption being that patients are in the dark because they don’t ask questions rather than the fact that often there is no one to ask questions of.

After the presentation, which could have been mailed to Rob and lost nothing by way of information, we hung around until the auditorium cleared. Rob’s goal for the afternoon being to arm wrestle someone into giving him return to work clearance.

“After your stress test tomorrow and a couple of monitored exercise sessions,” the nurse explained, “you will meet with the occupational therapist, who will give you her recommendations to take to your family doctor. He will give you clearance.”

“Um, that’s not what I’ve been told, ” Rob said and went on to inform her of the buck-passing he’s encountered ever since he first asked “when can I go back to work.”

He had hopes of heading off to work on Monday when Dee returns to school. I kinda had hopes in that direction myself, but it could be another week or so.

Provided nothing goes wrong at the stress test.

That thought just won’t completely go away, and it’s silly because Rob hiked six miles not two weeks after he got home from the hospital. He’s installed air conditioners, and this last weekend, we were up and down the stairs at the Shaw Conference Centre from the river to Jasper Avenue more times than my legs care to recall. If he was going to drop, he’d have done it by now.

And his job is, frankly, physically more restful than any of his hobbies are.

A Stress Test


Stress at a plane with an arbitrary orientatio...

Image via Wikipedia

Our entire summer could easily qualify as pushing the emotional boundaries, but aside from a few ER trips and a two nighter at the hospital, it hasn’t pushed me physically over the edge.

During the years I took care of my late husband, solo-parented and held a full-time job as a middle school teacher, I regularly broke physical stress limits.

I averaged 5 hours of sleep a night, worked out sporadically and ate just as haphazardly. When the body protested – and it manifested its displeasure vehemently – I ignored it.

“Suck it up, Buttercup.” Was my response. And for the most part it did and gave me what I wanted.

Today the old bag of bones is not so willing.

Less than 7 hours of sleep?

I don’t think so, says the body. We will now be sick.

Seriously, my body goes on strike if it is asked to do anything even remotely reminding it of days of yore.

So, this summer’s events have really only pushed my emotional buttons and redirected my thoughts to dark places I remember but have no real interest in revisiting.

This morning the phone rang. And rang. And rang.

Not quite 9:30 and I was still in bed.

Vaguely I recalled Rob getting up earlier and wondered why he wasn’t picking up, so I scrambled across to his side and grabbed the receiver from the nightstand.

“Hello,” I wheezed.

“May I speak with Robert?”

Robert is official. Someone who has business with him calls him “Robert” whereas telemarketers ask for him with a “Mr” followed by a rather East Indian pronunciation of our last name.

“Hang on,” I tell the woman as I scramble into my robe and head down the stairs to hunt up my husband.

He is nowhere but Dee is in the kitchen getting her breakfast.

“Where are the waffles?” she asks.

“Where’s Dad?” I reply.

“Oh, I haven’t seen him,” she tells me.

I have sent her out to the garage to look for him before I remember he had a doctor appointment in town.

“May I take a message,” I ask.

“This is a reminder about his stress test tomorrow with Dr. La at the crack of dawn,” and she begins to ramble off instructions for preparation.

“What?” I interrupt. “He has an appointment tomorrow? I thought it was this afternoon. No one told us about tomorrow.”

“Yes, ” clearly she is annoyed. She is a robo-receptionist and I am asking questions that prevent her from merely vomiting information and moving on to the next patient call on her list. “well, today is the rehab intake and tomorrow is the stress test.”

Which tells me all of nothing and it par for the Canadian medical experience course. In fact, I think the motto of Alberta Health is “information is for the professionals; just listen and obey”.

“He should take all his medication as usual, eat a light breakfast, dress appropriately as he will be on the treadmill and refrain from smoking prior to the test.”

Smoking?

When Rob got home, I told him about the appointment.

“Oh, it’s probably about my back to work release,” he said. “What time do I have to be there?”

“Dawn, more or less.”

“Really?”

We live outside of the city, an early morning appointment – factoring the rush hour means everybody up and ready with the sun – or there ’bouts.

“That’s pretty early for you and Dee,” he remarked. “Assuming you are coming along.”

“I was planning to. Don’t you want me there?”

“Well, yeah, just in case I drop dead it would probably be a good idea.”

“I wish, ” I replied, ” I could say that it hadn’t occurred to me that you might die, but it totally did.”

Why? I mean people take stress tests every day and mainly survive. My near 80 year-old mother just had one in the spring and emerged just tired.

Rob’s late brother-in-law, however, dropped dead after his.

I suppose that’s what they mean by “context”.

I reminded again by all this that I haven’t cried. Teared up once at the hospital the day of the angioplasty when they “lost” Rob for about an hour, but haven’t cried.

It’s like I am waiting for something to cry about because, as it’s been pointed out to me, nothing awful has happened to me.

And the point has been taken. So I suck it up like the Buttercup I am.

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.