Sometimes, I  handle crises swiftly and well; sometimes not so well.  Yesterday, I was cleaning out a long-neglected, nasty, dank and dirty corner under the kitchen sink and countertop.  It had been used to store cleaning products, tools and hardware before I moved in.  I inherited some items under there from previous residents and added more of my own.  Finding anything under there was always a chore, and more and more so as the clutter grew.  It was a job of spelunking to get all the way back into the under-counter corner, and nobody had dared it for years, just pushing things farther back to make room for new stuff.

After I’d put on my headlamp, crawled in there, and pulled everything out, I noticed that I had 3 cans of WD40 aerosol penetrating oil.  One felt full, but had no spray nozzle on top (a good explanation for why it was so rusty on the outside but still full), of the other two, both of which were nearly empty, one had a nozzle that would fit the full can.  I pulled it off its empty can and stuck it down into the hole in the top of the full one.  It sprayed.  I took my finger off the nozzle and it kept on spraying, so I quickly removed the nozzle.  Before I could get my thumb over the hole to stop the spewing, I’d gotten a spray over my glasses and face.

By the time I’d located a small jar, taken it and the can outside, and let the can empty itself into the jar, I had WD40 on my hands, wrists, and shirt as well as my face.  I washed up and cleaned up the mess.  Then I started feeling nauseated, and read the cautions on the label:  avoid inhaling fumes and avoid contact with skin.  I could still smell the stuff on my hands, so I washed up again.  While I was cleaning my glasses, one of the nose pads came off and got lost.  Doug and I searched for it and failed to find it.  That’s something that’s going to need to be fixed, when I can get to town.

The nausea concerned me, so I went online to check out poison control, got the phone number for the poison control hotline, called and learned that the inhalation was more dangerous than the skin contact.  I was advised to go outside and get some fresh air, and to call 911 if I experienced any shortness of breath.  Amazingly, considering my chronic asthma and emphysema, I didn’t.  It was too cold out there to just stand around breathing the air.  I asked Doug to wipe down the area of the spill while I put on Koji’s head collar and leash, then I took him for a leisurely walk out to the mail box by the highway.

Along the way, reading tracks in the fresh snow, I made an interesting discovery.  I can recognize the distinctive tracks of three different neighborhood dogs.  Buddy, a beagle, and Rusty the chihuahua, always run together, and their tracks are unmistakable among those of bigger dogs.  One of the biggest dogs, Bear, always walks with his human, who uses a walking stick, making their tracks pretty easy to identify.  The thing that most distinguishes Koji’s trail from the others is that everyone else’s is relatively straight.  My dog likes to go from one side of the road to the other, checking his p-mail and smelling everything.

New snow last night, a couple of inches, and temps hanging right around freezing then and now, gray sky in all directions — maybe it will rain, maybe snow some more.  We had about three days of summer this year.  Anchorage set an all-time record for consecutive days of rain: 29.  Up here in the valley, I don’t know if anyone even keeps statistics like that.  It rained all the time, seemed like.  Doug and I found it convenient to catch rainwater for washing-up purposes, instead of hauling it from the spring.  Hauling only drinking water really cut down on the labor for us.  I used the same buckets we’d used last winter for melting snow and storing the meltwater, lined up under the eaves.

Last winter’s abundant snow and this summer’s unceasing rain had me all set up for snowfall.  But when fall came, we got windstorms (a rarity here until recently), bare trees, and days and days without any precip.  Now that there’s snow on the ground, I suppose it is time to cover the big east-facing window with poly sheet, the Alaskan trailer trash answer to storm windows.  The kid and I have been covering the other windows one by one, but that one faces the road (and that swift, sweet, dog team-in-training that passes several times a day), the muskeg, the sunrise… and each year I put off putting that distorting covering on it until it gets too chilly in here for comfort.

Another thing I’ve been putting off is making yet another followup call to the firewood guy.  Scotty told me first time I called that he’d get to me in a week or so.  I waited almost a month, and called him again.  He said that time that he’d make the first delivery “Thursday” and have all four cords here “by the weekend.”  That was supposed to be last Thursday, not today.  Gotta check in with Scotty, see if he’s okay, find out what’s up.

Seeya later.  Still have a lot of catching up to do after my lengthy blogging hiatus.  I haven’t yet told the story of the complicated bunk bed, but here’s a picture anyway:

My next photo upload will probably be the shots of the trailing climbing nasturtiums in hanging baskets on the porch last summer, unless something new and more appropriate to the current season comes up before I get that done. 

It might be accurate to say I “totaled” my car, since all 3 mechanics I have consulted declined even to look at it after I described its condition.  But “totaled” implies, to most people, a wreck, a collision, or something of that sort.  All I did to total my car was drive over a bump.

Blur, shown above at the spring, now up on blocks in my yard, is the successor to Streak, another silver 1987 Subaru wagon, identical except that Streak had a roof rack.  Streak was replaced by Blur when Greyfox learned that it would cost more to fix the drive axle than it would cost to buy another old rustbucket used car.  Streak had been okay before that axle went bad, a reasonably adequate, somewhat reliable set of wheels.  Blur turned out to be something special because his former owner was a mechanic.  He had installed a manual choke that made the car easy to start in cold weather, and had made some modifications to the engine that made me need to pay attention to my speed.  I’d be cruising along, glance down, and discover to my chagrin that I was going 85 MPH in a 65 zone.  One night, around 2 AM, I was passing through Willow when an oncoming State Trooper flashed his headlights at me.  That time I was doing 75 in a 45.  Nice trooper.

Anyhow, I loved driving Blur despite his tendency to overreact to my leadfootedness.  The only cars I’ve liked any better than him were my MGB and the X1/9.  Blur’s advantage over either of them was his cargo capacity.  I could haul about 60 gallons of water in jugs and buckets in that hatch.  I wasn’t hauling water when I hit the bump that killed Blur.  That time, the hatch was full of clean laundry in baskets, a bunch of groceries and other supplies, and some dumpster score that Greyfox had been accumulating for us since the last trip to town.

On the previous trip back from Wasilla, going over some rough road in a construction zone, my muffler had been knocked loose and had to be replaced.  A series of trips back and forth across those bumpy miles of gravel might have contributed to the damage that ultimately killed Blur.  There was a loud thud from the back when I went over a barely noticeable bump at a bridge approach, and a few miles later, concerned about continued thumps, bumps and dragging sounds, I pulled over and called AAA.  After the disabled wagon was deposited in my driveway and we started unloading the cargo, I noticed that a big, dirty, rusty coil spring was protruding into the cargo area through a huge jagged tear in the left rear wheel well. 

I distinctly remembered having loaded a bag of grapes and bananas on top of that wheel well.  When we couldn’t find them, I assumed that they had fallen out the hole somewhere along the way.  Next day, in daylight, I found the bruised fruit about 5 feet away, on the other side of the car, where it had been flung by the spring.

I made some phone calls.  The consensus of my mechanically inclined friends was that Blur was a hopeless case.  I made a few more calls, hoping to find an old Subaru body into which I could have somebody bolt Blur’s oh-so-special engine.  A couple of the guys actually laughed at me.  Ray said Subies just keep going until they fall apart, and Morg talked about something he called, “tin bugs,” that like to eat Subaru bodies.

Greyfox got all stressed out over the necessity of (a) buying me a “new” vehicle, or (b) ferrying supplies the 50 miles up the valley every month or two.  I tried to reassure him that I didn’t expect him to rush to the rescue.  I had been living out here without a vehicle for 5 years when he gave me his old X1/9 after it had been rear-ended while parked, the frame was bent, and his insurance company paid off on it as a total loss.  That was in Pennsylvania, and that (totally wrecked, uninsured) car got me (at the time, an unlicensed driver) back to Alaska, then on a 28,000-mile road trip around the Southwest one winter and back to Alaska again, but turned out not to be suited to the weather and road conditions here.  Greyfox and I shared a series of vehicles until he decided I needed one of my own and bought Streak for me.  As much as I enjoy having wheels, I can’t afford to buy myself even the cheapest old rustbucket and I’d rather resign myself to hitchhiking, as I have done for most of my life, than stress out over car ownership.

Some weeks later, a friend of Greyfox’s told him he knew a woman whose mother was giving her a newer car, leaving her with an old Subaru station wagon for sale.  She said it needed a new CV joint, but she had been driving it that way for a year or two.  She also said she’d had the car for ten years and had replaced the engine three times.  Greyfox saw it, was impressed by the condition of the interior and the relative absence of rust on the outside.  He said that someone had screwed and bolted bumpers and bits of trim on, and he took that as a sign that someone cared for the car.  I thought he was probably right about that and didn’t mention my further surmise, that it was a sign the car was falling apart.

Greyfox paid $500 for it, a red 1985 Subaru wagon.  He kept it in Wasilla for a couple of weeks, got a friend with mechanical skills to look it over and grease the offending CV joint.  Meanwhile, he drove it several times and raved about what a sweet vehicle it was.  Right up until a day or two before he brought it to me, everything he told me about the car was positive:  it has a moon roof and a roof rack, clean upholstery, aftermarket fog lights (one of which is burned out), good heater… then he mentioned that it apparently needed an oil change because the oil was “awfully black,” and that oil was leaking onto a hot part of the engine, smoking and stinking.  The “CV joint” problem, he assumed, was related to the shimmy that occurred at around 55 MPH.

One day, he drove up here, presumably at under 55 MPH, to deliver the car, then hitched back to Wasilla, since we had jointly decided that I should get the shimmy fixed immediately, before driving it further.  I started looking the car over and determined that the suspension was in bad shape – bouncy, bouncy all ’round.  I called Ray, made an appointment, then started making a list of things I wanted him to do, beginning with the oil change and putting my snow tires on.  The car was over at Ray’s shop for a week or so before he finally got it in and looked it over.  He called one day and said he’d done the tire changeover, oil change, and installed a new oil filter.  The front drive axle was bad, the strut towers were so rusted out it would be futile to try and fix the suspension, and the oil leak was coming from the head gasket.  He said it wouldn’t be cost-effective to try to fix it, he wouldn’t even consider switching the engine out for Blur’s, and called my new red car a “money pit.”

I discussed with Ray the measures I could take to keep the rustbucket running as long as possible.  He recommended not loading it with more than 15 gallons of water at a time, keeping my speed down to avoid the shimmy, not driving on bumpy roads more than necessary to get from here to the highway and back, check the oil every time I go anywhere and keep it topped up.  I have made two little water runs to the spring, and one laundromat run to Wasilla.  I have no plans to go anywhere else until election day in a week, when I’ll drive up to Sunshine to vote and buy 40 pounds of kitty litter at Cubby’s so I can avoid overloading the car with it on my next trip home after the laundromat.

On the last laundry trip, I drove to Wasilla and back at about 40 MPH in third gear, to prevent the suspension-killing, axle-breaking shimmy.  I pulled over frequently to let cars get past.  I whimpered once, and Doug asked me what was wrong.  I moaned, “I’m driving like a little old lady.”  He replied, “at least you’re tall enough you don’t have to peer out through the space between the dash and the steering wheel.”  Ha ha.

Currently, sleet is falling noisily into the layer of dry leaves on the ground.  Leaves have been off the trees for weeks.  Snow is in the forecast.  These images are NOT showing current conditions, but those in my yard in July and August this year.

I am just now getting photos from last summer cropped, resized and uploaded because I am learning by baby steps to use our new photo processing software.  Doug downloaded this software because, he said, PhotoShop was too “bloated” in terms of system resources.  This, after he had originally sold me on PhotoShop because of its versatility (“bloat” in his current opinion).   At that time, I had been contentedly using the simple software that came with my old point-and-shoot Kodak, my first digital camera.  Ah, well, they say that learning new things will help keep Alzheimer’s at bay.

The photos below were captured with my Fuji FinePix S602Zoom, whose multifarious multiplex features I am still learning.  I now have yet another digital camera, a little Nikon CoolPix that Greyfox acquired at a yard sale for $5.00.  It had corroded batteries stuck in it, a situation I was able quickly to correct with tweezers, Q-tips and white vinegar.  Very soon, Greyfox determined that learning to use it was too much trouble, and gave it to me.  However, it has minuscule internal memory and I keep neglecting to order a new memory card for it.  When I do, I’ll have still more mental exercise for my anti-Alzheimer’s efforts.

On the bear’s first visit to my yard last July, it chomped into a storage tub (above) that is filled with wood chips and pieces that I had picked up around the chopping block and saved for dry kindling.  I noticed the bite mark in the tub only later, my attention having been captured at first by the water jug below, which had been moved from the far side of the porch and left where I almost stumbled over it coming out my front door.

I don’t know whether the bear was a black or a grizzly.  A big sow griz with two or three cubs (or one with two and another with three) had been sighted in the area, and black bears had been seen around here as well.  By measuring the distance between fang holes in the purple tub, I estimated the width of the bear’s lower jaw at about 5 inches.

Around this time, I became attuned to night sounds.  Neighborhood dogs were barking a lot, and there were gunshots going off in several directions, late into the night.  Some of my neighbors have motion sensors on their yard lights, and I can picture some guy being awakened by dogs barking, grabbing his rifle or shotgun and blasting away, either at shadows or at actual bears.

Each morning for a while, I would find new signs that a bear or bears had come through my yard.  I had been propagating Siberian wild strawberries, training runners into ten to twelve-inch containers after discovering accidentally that they grew much larger that way than in the ground, and that the berries were not only bigger and more numerous, but also dangled high enough off the ground to escape being nibbled by snails and small rodents.  I don’t recall how many times — at least 4 or 5 — I righted overturned pots in the morning, tended flattened strawberry plants, and smoothed out paw prints in the pots (below).

The bear(s) apparently used my garden path at least some of the time.  It is entirely likely that the path, which existed before I moved in here, had been originally made by bears.  It meanders like a bear trail through the woods.  However, in some places the bear’s new trail diverged from the old path, off through tall stands of fireweed.  All the weeds and wildflowers around the compost heap in my back yard had been beaten flat by the first of August.

Besides browsing through the compost, the bear(s) tasted some of my potted bunching onions, but apparently did not like the flavor.  None of the onions was dug or pulled up, nor were they bitten off near ground level — just tasted and left.

I have no photos to show you the havoc and demolition of the bear’s final visit last August.  That morning, I went out, watered and groomed the hanging baskets of nasturtiums on my front porch (photos another day, probably – they have not been saved from my camera yet) then went back in and rested before following the path out to the strawberries and beyond, to the rhubarb.  When I finally did get as far as the strawbs, all was chaos:  pots tumbled every which way, including my only potato plant, which had been in its own big (5 gallon) pot perched up on a fallen log off the trail in a supposedly safe place.

Not even thinking about documenting the damage, I just started picking things up, straightening bent-over plants, righting upturned pots, as I followed the path toward the rhubarb garden.  Then, about midway along the path, I found the first bear dropping.  A bit farther on, I found a scattering of bear scat, then more, extending over a distance of about thirty feet along the path.  This was weird, highly unusual, to see bear shit dropped as if the bear was running and going at the same time.  Usually, it is found in piles, looking much like human excrement.

More shocks were waiting for me in the rhubarb area.  My ‘barb is in raised planters made of chicken wire lined with poly sheeting.  Every one of them had been dug into, roots exposed, wire bent down and soil scattered.  I had a small conifer in a big pot sitting atop one such raised planter, a huge spread of trailing nasturtium growing from another, and several potted clumps of Shasta daisies.  All those pots had been knocked about, scattered as if in a rage of destruction.

I had heard a lot of shooting and dogs barking the previous night, beginning somewhere southwest of here and ending up to the north.  The scenario I pieced together from the evidence was that the bear had been wounded and/or pursued by dogs, perhaps surprised in the act of digging up my rhubarb roots.  It was evidently fleeing through my yard.  Later on, talking to neighbors and reconstructing events, we more or less concluded that this had been the bear shot by Joe, who lives at the end of our block to the north.  Anyhow, that was the last evidence of bears in my yard this year.

  Where cats are concerned, I hesitate to make unqualified statements or predict their behavior.  For example, Jones, a black and white tomcat, disappeared years ago, and returned one day last winter, so sick and beat up we couldn’t save him, but alive nonetheless after we had long given up on ever seeing him again.  Several times lately, Granny Mousebreath has gone out… but let me back up and tell the front part of her story first.

The old catriarch’s original name was Sassy.  She belonged to Mark, who owned this old trailer before he gave it to me.  Sassy and her daughters, Prissy and Penny, were part of the house sitting job we took on that first winter that Mark was to have been vacationing in the sunny South, before he changed his mind about living in Alaska, came back for Leroy, his wolf-hybrid dog, and disappeared.

Sassy would dance around on her back legs, begging for food, and one of the names we had for her was, Sassafras the Dancing Cat.  Greyfox had a hard time distinguishing between her and her daughter, Prissy, despite the fact that Sassy had one tanto-bladed ear from a bit of frostbite, and her nose was tan and Prissy’s pink.  Greyfox took to calling the two of them Muffin and Meatloaf, indiscriminately.

Muffin’s name stuck even after Greyfox learned to tell them apart, and Meatloaf became Granny.  Mark’s three cats had all been spayed, and even after we brought new cats home and kittens were born, Granny asserted her status as Catriarch.  That situation continued until very recently, when she began showing her age — we guessed that she was about five years old when we moved in here in 1998.

A year or two ago, Granny began to slow down.  She slept more, and then occasionally she would roll off her place on the back or arm of the sofa in her sleep.  She would shake herself off, look around in consternation as if wondering how she came to be there, jump back up and go back to sleep.  Her appetite remained healthy and she kept herself groomed, expressing no pain or distress.  She still enjoyed going outdoors to participate in the food chain, and as she’d done for as long as we’ve known her, sometimes she would be gone for a few days.

The next development was that she would sometimes walk in circles, meowing.  It was worrisome, but since she still ate, groomed, was alert and responsive to attention, and we can’t afford a vet, we let her be.  One day she went out and was gone so long we began to wonder if she had died.  When she came back, it seemed that her health was much improved.  She no longer displayed any balance problems, no circling or meowing.  We marveled at the recovery and wondered where she had gone to attain it.

She was her old cantankerous self for a while, until one night she had a seizure.  Afterward, she seemed disoriented for only a moment before resuming her usual behavior.  In following weeks, seizures occurred every few days, then grew in frequency, until one day she went out again and had been gone three or four days when we got a call from a neighbor who had found her crying in their yard.  Doug went and brought her back, and upon her return home that time, there were no more seizures, and no other signs of illness but for some occasional muscle twitches.  Through it all, she had a normal appetite and kept herself well-groomed.

Like most of our cats, Granny could open the door and come and go at will.  She had always spent time outdoors each day in all sorts of weather, but recently she quit going out, and also stopped jumping up on the furniture, choosing to sleep on the carpet near the wood stove.  The seizures never recurred after that second long absence, but the walking in circles, always clockwise, to the right, continued, but this time without the meows.  She covered as much of the house as was accessible to her in those circular perambulations, and we would sometimes find her sleeping on a low shelf or with her head in a corner.

Last week, a few days ago, she went outside again.  I hesitate to try and guess whether we will ever see her again, or, if she does return, what her condition will be.

Part One, with all the drama and trauma, is HERE. 

I have long subscribed to the idea that a clean house is the sign of a wasted life, but I have also never been comfortable in total chaos.  Sometime last spring, when I could stand and move around without too much discomfort, I started cleaning house.  It was a process of working a little while and resting a while longer, then getting up to work until I needed to rest again.  Greyfox found a walker in a dumpster and brought it to me, but the house was too crowded and cluttered to use it in here, so I just leaned on furniture and stuff.  I needed a lot of rest, and the work went annoyingly slowly.

At first, the mess got worse as I pulled things out of the corners and crannies where they had been stuffed.  I’d been too sick for several years to go to the laundromat, so Greyfox (my soulmate, spouse, and partner in crime, in case you don’t already know) had been bringing me, along with groceries and other necessities, supplies of pajamas, sweats and lounge wear that he found in dumpsters and on the ten-cent table at his favorite thrift shop.  He also brought books, magazines and video, as well as assorted kitsch and schlock from the dumpsters… clutter, in other words, and it was everywhere.  I craved order and space, and knew only one way to get it.

Upon reflection, I understood that I had earned my pancreas’s rebellious behavior, digesting itself with its own secretions (a pithy phrase from one of the diagnostic websites).  Insulin is produced in the pancreas and I had been fooling around with my insulin and glycogen metabolism ever since childhood when I had first become addicted to sugar.  Beginning in the mid-1970s, I had kicked that sugar addiction I-don’t-recall-how-many times.  However many times it had been, I had relapsed that many times, too.

Usually, during those three and a half decades, deteriorating energy levels from insulin resistance and hypoglycemia were enough to impel me to kick sugar again.  A couple of times, I’d grown so fat that it became a struggle to wipe my own ass, and that would finally repel me back toward saner eating habits.  Unless my dementia progresses to a point where I forget that episode of pancreatitis, I think my last relapse was truly my last.

After a few days of NPO (nothing by mouth) but water (I didn’t keep a journal and don’t recall the timing), sleeping only on my left side, the pain and nausea receded enough that I thought I could get away with eating something.  I started on the anti-Candida diet because experience has taught me that sugar binges end up in systemic yeast overgrowth.  There was some mild nausea and discomfort at first, so I naturally kept the portions small.  By small, I mean 2 or 3 pecan halves, one or two leaves of romaine, or a  handful of sprouts.  I didn’t have an appetite.  In the absence of cravings for forbidden gooey sweet indulgences, I was anorexic.

I stayed on the Candida diet for three weeks.  Then, as a natural appetite returned, I eased back onto my regular sugarless, gluten-free diet.  I stayed focused on healing and cleaning up the mess around here.  As weather warmed up, I expanded the scope of my housework into the little cabin beside our trailer.  It had been used to store all sorts of things, the main bulk of which turned out to be boxes in which knives and swords, stock for Greyfox’s business, had been shipped.  Most of the boxes were moldy and all were filled with various kinds of packing material.  I flattened boxes and filled our two garbage cans with rotting cardboard week after week, accumulating one 50 gallon garbage bag full of foam popcorn which Greyfox took to the UPS store for reuse, and nearly filling another bag.

As I worked on clearing out and organizing the storage cabin, I’ve also been working in the house, from one room to another, day to day, work-rest-work-rest.  Occasionally I’d venture into the bathroom, pull a few things from the pile in the tub, and decide which of them deserved to go back to the dumpsters, and which were good enough to stuff back into the bathtub to wash when I was again able to do it.  At first, I wasn’t really sure I’d ever be so fit again, but I had to work on the theory that I would recover.  No other theory was going to work for me. 

Somewhere along the way the housework became compulsive.  Last week, as I passed through the kitchen where Doug was washing dishes, on my way to rest in the front room, I said to him, “I need to sit down a while.”  A moment later, he turned and saw me up and doing, and scolded, “You’re cleaning again!”   I can’t help it.  I actually started blogging again to distract myself from compulsive housework.

In the last month or so, I’ve had a vivid indication that I was making progress.  At first, after the trash was picked up each Thursday, the cans would be full again on Friday and there was often a bag or two of overflow hiding behind the cabin waiting for the next pickup.  Sometime in September, I noticed that it took until Monday to fill both garbage cans.  For a couple of weeks now, the cans haven’t filled up until Wednesday night when we take out the household trash, and this week one of them wasn’t quite all the way full when the garbage truck came. 

Doug has gone to the laundromat with me three times.  On our way home after the second laundry trip, I broke my old car, Blur, but that’s another story.  Now the pile of dirty clothes that previously filled the bathtub-shower enclosure to above head height is reduced to just a stack of five full laundry baskets — only two more trips to the laundromat and we’ll be caught up.  My closets and drawers are almost full, and bag after bag of too-large clothes have gone to charities.  I don’t know exactly how much weight I’ve lost.  The scale at Sunshine clinic showed me at 240-something last winter, and my bathroom scale read 140 last time I looked.  Size 18 was tight on me when the pancreatic crisis occurred, and now size 12 is comfortable — that’s Gloria Vanderbilt jeans sizes, my personal standard of measure.

The cabin is substantially done now, with tools and hardware accessible and fairly well organized, orderly enough that we can find what we need.  I’ll have nuts, bolts, screws, etc. to sort and organize this winter, in here where it is warm, for storage out there eventually, just as I have stacks, piles and boxes of unsorted documents and publications picked up in here that still need to be sorted and filed or discarded.  Last time Greyfox was here, he commented charitably that the place looked, “almost fit for human habitation.”  Charley (my ex-, Doug’s dad) stepped through the door once a few weeks ago, looked around, did a  double-take and said, “What?  What’s this!?”  High praise from my best friend. 

I’m not sure which story to relate next… maybe the broken Subaru, or the complicated bunk bed… dunno — it’ll be something fairly trivial, fershure.

In nursing training, about half a century ago, I was taught, for purposes of accurate charting of my patients’ status, how to distinguish between pain and discomfort.  If the patient said he was in pain, we were instructed to chart, “patient reports discomfort.”  Repeated, whiny, grimacing reports were to be charted as, “patient complains of discomfort.”  If the patient was screaming, moaning, and/or writhing, we were to chart, “patient displays pain.”  A little over half a year ago, I had one of the most painful experiences in my long pain-filled life.  When it woke me in the middle of the night last winter, I knew immediately that it wasn’t merely discomfort.

When I was sufficiently wakeful to get my wits about me and control the moans and writhing, I used my old reliable painswitch technique to turn it into a neutral sensation, but I wasn’t able to get back to sleep that night.  Even the slightest movement would renew the pain and compel me to renew the remedy.   I birthed four children without any form of pain relief, and for decades I have had pain on a daily basis from M.E., but compared to this, it had all been relatively mild.  The new pain was accompanied by nausea and, at first, before I identified the cause, by fear.

It didn’t take long to diagnose myself.  I went online, to Google, and entered search terms: “diagnosis, severe abdominal pain, right upper quadrant tenderness, nausea.”  After refining terms and getting a second opinion, and then a third, I concluded that the problem was pancreatitis.  I was hurting enough to make me consider a trip to the hospital, but just hurting wasn’t enough to compel me to actually go there.  Dangerous places, hospitals are, and costly in more ways than one.  I was breathing okay, no seizures or paralysis, not bleeding from any orifices… I figured I might be able to handle it myself.

I searched for pancreatitis treatments.  With relief, I learned that there was no drug to treat it, no magic key for which I would need medical permission or intervention.  Whew!  If I was in the hospital with it, they would give me nothing by mouth and put me on IV fluids, plus morphine for pain.  I just stopped eating, drank enough of our pure, natural spring water to stay hydrated, and dealt with the pain in the usual way.  I soon noticed that some positions were more comfortable than others, so I avoided the painful positions.

Those first uncomfortable days with that new acute illness on top of the old chronic ones, before it became clear that my body was healing itself, I thought about death more than I usually do.  Ordinarily, I don’t try to avoid thinking about dying.  I know that death is part of life, that, “those not busy being born are busy dying.”  It just isn’t on my mind a lot, most of the time.  But during that bleak and tender time, I sat propped on pillows in my bed and looked around one night, at the chaos and clutter that had been growing in here since my major respiratory crisis a few years previously.  I thought, “I can’t die and leave such a mess.”

…to be continued.

For the past few weeks, ever since the weather turned cold enough for serious sled dog training, I have been seeing this one beautiful dog team passing by on the road in front of our place.  They are swift, smooth, and disciplined, working together silently and efficiently.  The musher is always wearing insulated, hooded coveralls and I have never gotten much of a look at her face, but just enough that I am fairly sure it is a woman:  a young, slender woman.

Each time I have gotten a chance to count, the team has numbered around 20 dogs, give or take a few.  This, and their performance, suggests that it is an Iditarod team.  Starting teams are limited to no more than 16 dogs, but mushers train more, and select the best team when the time comes.  There is no snow yet, so they are not pulling a sled.  The musher rides an idling 4-wheel ATV.  This morning, as they passed, she had one hand on the handlebar, and her other arm was wrapped around the child riding in front of her, a small one, toddler-sized or smaller, all bundled up with only a face showing, wearing a serious and interested expression, with bright, flashing eyes.