Conditions and Diseases

Choked


 

Shadow, canola, and sky

Image by Chris & Lara Pawluk via Flickr

 

The fields surrounding the hamlet we live in are hard to see these days. Dust kicked up by the harvest as combines the size of houses roam with manic purpose, desperate to finish a harvest thwarted by a wetter than usual autumn that followed on the heels of a soggy summer.

Being allergic to the produce is only half my problem. I am reactive to dirty air in general as my lungs take issue with being required to perform the simple filtering task for which they were designed in the first place.  Gritty air plus allergens means my lungs burn even as the muscles of my chest, upper back and side knot in anticipation of the histamine onslaught.

Yesterday, it felt like my bottom ribs were riddled with cracks like an antique glaze on ceramic. Today is a tad better as there seem to be fewer farmers dusting the breeze.

The worst thing about my asthma, aside from having it at all, is the confinement. Even the windows hold me in as I strive to keep the particle saturation to a minimum indoors.

I saw the Doctor again today to follow-up on my lung function test – which they didn’t have – but she and I agree that it is my allergies that are ground-zero. Asthma is merely a by-product. Identify and control the allergies and the asthma will be subdued as a side-effect.

Allergy testing won’t commence until just before Christmas. That’s the first available appointment.

In the meantime, I am – uncharacteristically and well aware of the irony – hoping for a good rain.

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Take Two on The Facebook Bra Status Meme


 

Drinking and/or working.

Image by parislemon via Flickr

 

Do you recall the cutesy coy Breast Cancer Awareness meme that swept Facebook last October during the annual “save the boobies” month that the Pink People Awareness brigade foist on us year after year?

The idea was that only women (‘cuz we have 3D breasts is my understanding and men don’t) would know the meaning of the mysterious status updates that ran along the lines of “mine is polka-dotted and lacy” or “I have a sea-foam green one”.

Though the women who participated were referring to the colors of their bras, the updates were meant to titillate and confuse men. Because that’s what women do best, right and why God bothered to create us (as an afterthought, I might add) in the first place.

I didn’t participate for two reasons. The first is that I don’t wear a bra. I didn’t burn it or anything, and it’s got nothing to do with any of my feminist tendencies. I just don’t like them. The other reason is that it was stupid.

Why does breast cancer awareness have to be titillating (well aware of the pun – move along)? Or pink-tinged? Or based in lament about the loss of diseased flesh that happens to fit inside the totally male invention of the bra?

And while I am here, why are my breasts more important than my lungs or my ovaries or my colon?

I ranted a bit about it at the time. Was dismissed as an old lady feminist killjoy and moved on … to this year when I received this message:

Really? This is the path to female domination of the world? Facebook meme’s that are the social media equivalent of those grade school “girls’ only” clubs we once thought would secure us a little control in a boys’ only world?

Power and influence. Dare to dream.

Maybe someone will blog it for the Huff’po and it will become a trending topic in the Twitsphere. If that happens then Jon Stewart is sure to make snide comments about it in his opening and Fox news will toss it to those morons on their morning show, which means that the ladies on The View will have to cackle over it for a few minutes, pondering the social influence and reach of women today.

Because as we all know conquering web space is … exactly nothing.

Will it give us parity in Congress? Abolish the double standard? Free us from the tyranny of photo-shopped female images or frozen foreheads?

I think not. Though I could be wrong even as I doubt that highly.

The reason this type of schoolgirl nonsense isn’t power is best illustrated by the fact that men don’t similarly engage in fluffy social media attention-drawing antics – unless they are Ashton Kutcher.

Would men pass around a super double-secret FB message instructing each other to leave a cryptic status update?

Hey Guyfriends! We’re going to play a girls’ not allowed status update meme where we name our favorite place to ogle women (or men if you orient that way). Just update your status with something like: I only do it at the grocery store. And don’t add anything more.  It will drive those out of the loop (the loop being men and really, does anyone else truly need to be “in the loop”?) crazy. Most importantly – don’t tell. We’ll wait until the MSM picks up on this and then only our most important members of the brotherhood (not you Ashton Kutcher!) can stand spokesmen for us all.

This is a way to demonstrate what a force to be acknowledged even more than the force we are. So get that update active!

And then it would sweep the Internet until President Obama updated with “I only do it in The White House” and Glenn Beck – who only does it in the sanctity of his own married bed – outs the meme by wondering which intern Obama was referring to and then it’s a blue dress hunt circa 1997 all over again.

If women wanted to flex a rusty muscle, why don’t they simply stop shopping for a week? Or even a day.  Say the day after Thanksgiving. They could just stay home.

Or they could declare October to be a ladies’ holiday.  No work.  No parenting.   No transporting, laundry or sex*.  Every day we’d met up for coffee and head off to free yoga classes before having dinner out with friends and coming home to nestle in our snuggies and watch whatever reality horror is masquerading as television.

Maybe we should refuse to vote for male candidates. We will only vote for the woman on the ballot and if there isn’t one, we’ll write one in.

That’s power.

But instead, we’re going to “tease” men with not so vague sexual innuendo, give ourselves a collective pat (on the head) and call ourselves “clever”.

The women of Stepford couldn’t have been trained any better than we are.

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*The sex strike thing is an old idea that dates back to a play from Ancient Greece called the Lysistrata. In it, women stage a martial bed boycott to try and force their husbands to give up on a war they have been waging. Though they initially stand together and nearly succeed, in the end, one of them breaks ranks and the rest soon follow and the men go back to being “men”. It’s interesting in that the men at first don’t take the women seriously and believe that they will give up their strike because – being women – they aren’t single-minded and focused enough and that they ultimately can’t put aside their individual wants for the good of the group – which proves to be true.

Terry Fox, My Old Nemesis, We Meet Again


Photo of Terry Fox, Canadian cancer fund-raise...

Image via Wikipedia

Terry Fox Day is a Canadian thing. During the month of September, communities all across the country organize run/walk events to raise money for cancer research in Terry’s name. This year marks the 30th anniversary and celebrates the $500 million that has been raised in his name since his attempt to run the length of Canada thirty years ago.

What made Terry’s run special and inspiring to Canadians was the fact that he’d lost part of his leg to a cancer that would go on to claim his life at the age of 21. His cancer returned after a three-year remission during his trek and he never saw the finish line, but his family was determined that the run become an annual event and it has.

I first heard of Terry as a high school student. We read about him in our Catholic high school back in Iowa. It was one of those grisly teachable moments that the nuns and priests were so fond of when I was a child. “See how lucky you are that you aren’t one-legged and being eaten away by cancer?” was the gist of the lesson.

As an American though, I didn’t know the run went on to become a yearly event.

Until I emigrated to Canada three years ago.

Terry Fox came back into my life via Dee, who discovered Terry in kindergarten and developed a morbid fixation that plagued us for months.

At the school assembly, where footage of Terry’s original run was shown and the children received morbid Terry tattoos, Dee met up with death too young – again.

She created a tiny little shrine for the tattoo in our dining room and all manner of death, cancer and why questions haunted Rob and I more than our own dead spouses do when they are feeling feisty.

Last year, Dee asked if she could skip school on Terry Fox Day. She didn’t want to see any more pictures of him. They made her feel sick.

“So you don’t want to take a toonie or go on the walk?” I asked.

The kids bring “toonies for Terry” and go on a 3km walk in the afternoon. She loves donating coin. We can’t walk past a street musician without tossing change, and she adores group walks, which is ironic because “walking” her father is the eye-rolling height of boring in her opinion.

“No, I want to bring a toonie and walk, ” she said. “I just don’t want to hear about him or see him anymore. He makes me sick.”

A quick flurry of emails between her teacher and I resulted in Dee being excused from the assembly after which she happily strolled hand in hand with her teacher.

This year? Same thing. Pictures of Terry give her “a sick feeling in my tummy” and she would rather stay home from school (she adores school so much that she can make weekends unbearable for Rob and I) than endure the sight of Terry.

More emails. A new, and fortunately equally sympathetic, teacher will handle distraction duty.

My own feelings about the cancer run/walks is predicated on the fact that my late husband died of something rare and unglamorous and, therefore, not worthy of fund-raising. The boobie bracelets for breast cancer and the fun-runs for cancer research in general distract from the fact that most people die of something other than cancer.

Rob’s heart attack is a stark reminder that cardio-vascular ends await more of us than cancer does and, between it and accidents, that’s how most of us who don’t die old and asleep in our beds will shuffle off this mortal coil.

Despite losing my father to lung cancer and Rob losing Shelley to melanoma, I feel removed from the whole cancer thing most of the time.  I have read too much to believe that there is a cure anywhere or ever, and I am a bit hesitant to cheer for treatments that mostly seem aimed at allowing death to whittle away at you at the expense of life’s quality and at the greater expense of the physical, spiritual and mental well-being of your loved ones.

Dee took a toonie. The school’s gym isn’t finished and so there will be no assembly, but her teacher will shield her from any reading material the class goes through. And she will walk. She does love to go on those walks, which I am grateful she is healthy and able to do.

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