In The Early Evening Pain

 

Author's Note: This turned out to be the last time we enjoyed an evening with Gordon. I'm so glad he traveled to Peoria while we were in town.

           What a lucky happenstance, my favorite performer making a stop just minutes from our summer home near Peoria, Illinois. How could I pass it up? I pleaded for it to be a birthday gift and was granted the company of my wife and old-soul daughter to the September 27^th Gordon Lightfoot show at the Civic Center.

            We waited through a very capable opening act, something new to us as a Lightfoot audience. Nashville’s Jack Schneider sang a handful of original songs, demonstrated his guitar chops and even strapped on a harmonica a few times. I wondered if perhaps Gordon found him slightly reminiscent of his old friend Bob Dylan. It was quite enjoyable.

            Finally, the frail looking legend himself strolled confidently out on stage, settled quickly in behind the mic and began to strum and sing Sweet Guinevere. After the initial shock at the raspy remnants of his once beautiful voice, our expectations were adjusted for the evening. 

            At age sixty-eight, my knees complained after we walked up to the second balcony. But I don’t have to perform with my knees. Gord’s voice seems to be going into retirement against his will. After all, Paul McCartney is eighty years old, and Tony Bennett released an album at ninety-five.

            But literally “with an achin’ in his heart” – a triple aortic aneurysm nearly took his life in 2002, leaving him to recover from a six-week coma and a tracheotomy that would have sidelined most mortals. That he is alive is amazing, touring twenty years later, astounding. He subsequently suffered a stroke, and most recently a broken arm. The man is no stranger to pain.

            His faithful fans are in love with this troubadour, a songwriter with no equal, and a band that could perform with a cardboard cutout of the Canadian national treasure and still hold a crowd’s interest in tribute to their hero. 

            And then it happened. Just as some random drunk at another show started shouting at the top of his lungs, one dimwit felt the need to yell “GORDON” during every song. Dude, he knows his name, and no matter how many times you yell, “RAINY DAY PEOPLE,” he is not taking requests. The raucous idiot should have been thrown out like the one at the Pabst Theater in 2013. If you’re reading this, you embarrassing asshat, you’re not a fan, stop pretending. Fans don’t do that.

            As the show proceeded, Gord’s voice warmed up a bit. At one point he paused to use a nasal spray, then got a laugh when he offered it to lead guitarist Carter Lancaster. It made a noticeable difference, but by that time we were used to his limits and I was openly crying during If You Could Read My Mind. I looked over at the face of my thirty-year-old daughter, a Speech Language Pathologist sitting in rapt attention to the haunting melody written in 1970. We danced to Inspiration Lady at her wedding. Sadly, that song wasn’t included in the evening’s set list, but perhaps more crying would have just been excessive.

            She commented that Gordon had difficulty clearing saliva from his vocal-chords and lacked the necessary lung power to propel sounds without difficulty. But far from having pockets full of sand, he continued to pull out hit after hit, some shortened a bit to “tighten up the show.” He spoke of the band performing nine shows in twelve days and the desire to sleep in their own beds. Perhaps after the show he jumped a jet plane, and to thunderous applause was eventually on his way – in the early evening pain.

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Family Feud

 

            There are few houses on Cook Road, but the two at Numbers 23 and 25 are unusually close to each other and oddly situated. Relations between neighbors at these two homes have varied depending on the occupants. The shared boundary tests the better natures of those who dwell on either side.

            A fence might seem to be in order. But a wall of any design along the dovetailed property line would be a mutually detrimental eyesore to both owners, and has thus been avoided.

            Sarah and Jerry’s dog Rusty at Number 23 is a former farmyard mongrel adopted out of sympathy for its plight, and relentless requests by eight-year-old Bekka. Rusty routinely loitered by the back door, awaiting a breach in security by the normally vigilant family. The shaggy little opportunist was an escape artist who seemed to love being chased.

            In remote or less populated areas, sewage is often disposed of by septic systems that must be regularly pumped out. One late April day several years earlier, the septic tank cover was removed for pumping at Number 25 and remained open while the tanker truck went to unload its contents. The back yard was perfumed with the yearly crop of blue perennials that only partially masked the stench emanating from the open system.

            This was one of the days Rusty got away from Jerry. Not an athletic man, he nevertheless took off like Hermes after the bounding dog. Around the side of the house they ran, leaping the flowering blue boundary without regard for a minor trespass. Relations had been good since Susan and Frank had moved in. In fact, Susan was outside, her face toward the sun until a somewhat surreal event turned her attention.

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Days of Our Lives

           They pulled into a choice spot at the drive-in, central but with easy egress for when the movie ended and a mad dash began to empty the lot.

            “Let them wait in line to go home,” said Ray. “What’s the hurry, baby?”

            It was summer, they were twenty and it was the weekend. She couldn’t disagree. There was no hurry. How could she know about time at an age when life stretches ahead like an endless highway, when wasted moments are always replaced by a new supply of moments to be wasted?

            Momma dragged her to the nursing home a week ago to visit great Uncle Otto.

            “Vicky, you never know when it might be the last time. He’s 93, honey. I know he must be awful lonely.”

            “I know, I know, he’s so sweet, it’s just,”

            “Just what?”

            “It smells kinda bad Momma. And it makes me sad.”

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Bad Behavior

            Folks in Brimfield, Massachusetts talk much of the year about little other than their legendary summer flea markets. When a quarter of a million people leave the area, returning the local population to under 4000, the general state of exhaustion and silence is akin to that following the end of Woodstock, only more so.

            And then winter sets in and Emma Walther goes ice fishing. She becomes the subject of frequent conversations as she walks by the local diner. Imagine, a girl.

            Emma works on weekends in nearby Sturbridge Village as an actress in a living history museum. It is generally frowned upon to express frustration with tourists and their occasionally bad behavior, but bumper stickers that state, “We’re not on your vacation” can be seen on the outskirts of town. Eyes secretly roll at the sound of a Chicagoan asking how to get to Wore-Chester. Emma has been told not to make corrections, but finds it difficult to let it go. “Oh, Woostah, here, let me get you a map.”

            “Dad, I’m goin’ fishing!” Emma yells on her way out the back door.

            The garage stores too much stuff to also fit a car, and she struggles around collections of treasures for next summer’s flea, trying not to upset anything breakable. A bucket, makeshift pole and small tackle box are wedged between tables and trinkets, lanterns and pewter milk jugs. Tourists just love milk jugs.

            Emma slides down the icy driveway with her gear, turns toward town and then down Brookfield Road to the Lake Sherman conservation area. The small lake is one of several in the area, stocked with trout and bass in the spring, and fishable during the short, frigid ice fishing season. She passes the police department, the cemetery and her old elementary school.

            “Hey, school,” she says, her frosty breath trailing behind her, and then yells “Hey Stube!” to a friend across the street.

            “McKay!” shouts Doug Stuben. Eliza McKay is the fictional character Emma plays in Sturbridge, churning imaginary butter and sweeping floors in the refurbished “original” home of the town pastor. The hourly rate is decent, but the work is pure drudgery. Sitting on a frozen lake with a line in the water is more to her liking.

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Ocean View

Mary Lindwahl put her husband Kurt in charge of researching their summer vacation. This abandonment of logic reflected her desperation to be anywhere but “here.” In the days before the Internet, this meant phone calls to resorts featured in glossy magazines, or queries to addresses on matchbook covers.

            “The Ocean Vista Resort,” said Kurt. “That sounds lovely.”

 

            “Yes it does Kurt, but you should request a brochure.”

 

            “I already did, Mary. It should come in about a week.”

 

            When the much-anticipated trifold piece arrived, Kurt spread it out on the kitchen table.

 

            “Look, honey, there’s the ocean! Palm trees, sand and waves, right out in back. Let’s go there!”

 

            “I don’t know Kurt, that looks kind of like a drawing,” said Mary

 

            “It’s what they call an artist’s rendering, Mary,” said Kurt with the expert tone of a travel agent.

 

            The Ocean Vista Resort was in California, home to movie stars and perfect “beachy” weather. Mary dreamed of lounging on the sand.

 

            “There’s a swimming pool too, Mary!”

 

            “We’ll go to the beach,” she said.

 

            A taxi dropped them in the secluded driveway of the Ocean Vista. More of an alley really. Kurt breathed in the moist, warm Los Angeles air.

 

            “You smell that, Mary?” asked Kurt. I can almost hear the waves.

 

            “Mary glanced at the hotel dumpster and out at the street. The odor and noise she perceived were decidedly less magical.

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Carved in Stone

A recent visit to the Louvre got me thinking about my own attempts at stone sculpture in an adult education class long ago. The plethora of statuary in France and Rome gives one the impression that marble is like clay, easily shaped by artists with a talent for sculpture.

It is not.

 

Unless you’ve lived your life under a rock (haha) and without a television, you’ve no doubt heard of names like Michelangelo, Raphael, Donatello and Leonardo da Vinci. And if you were a kid growing up in the 1990s, you at least know these fellows as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, named after a handful of the greatest Renaissance artists. There are so many more. The mostly forgotten fifth turtle was named Venus de Milo, the only character in the franchise named for a work of art rather than an artist, and the only female until much later.

 

A comedian once quipped, “How long is it polite to stand and stare at the Grand Canyon? It looks just like every postcard I’ve ever seen.” My experience in the Louvre, and later the Vatican Museum was similarly mind-numbing. Museums can be like that. As impressive as I found the armless Venus de Milo, prominently displayed by herself at the Louvre Museum, I was more amazed that I had traveled eight miles up in the sky at 600 miles per hour, reaching my destination in France in about seven hours. And there I stood, reading that not only is it unsure if the statue is a representation of Venus or Aphrodite, but that it is uncertain who sculpted her. But still, at night, when the lights in the Louvre are turned off, she stands alone in the dark, her marble likeness cold, hard, unable to speak and unappreciated for hours, every day for the foreseeable future. It was kind of sad. But that attributes human feelings to a lump of rock. That’s how good the sculpture is, and it was undoubtedly better when she had arms.

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Side Effects

Harry reached the age at which his blood cholesterol level was no longer manageable through diet alone. He hated taking pills, their expense, remembering to take them, refilling hassles and the feeling that his survival was dependent upon Western medicine and frequent visits with the doctor. But his elevated readings were consistent and trending upward. Well established research shows that taking a statin greatly reduces the chances of death by stroke or heart attack. Was one little pill really that much of an inconvenience? He called the pharmacy.

 

Meeting up with his old friend Pete over lunch generally devolved into conversations about aches and pains.

 

            “Did you hear about Tom?” asked Harry

            “Is it true, he dropped dead playing golf?” said Pete.

            “A heart attack. No family history. His cholesterol was really high. Guess he should have taken a statin. I just started.”

            “Oh man, you have to be careful with those. I wound up in the hospital, so messed up I couldn’t think straight. All of a sudden, I had dementia caused by my statin. I was really tired, had leg cramps, usually at night, that woke me up, digestive problems and…”

            “Wait, back up, leg cramps?”

            “Yeah, I went on a different medication and now I’m ok, but you have to take CoQ10 to prevent the cramping.”

            “I wish my doctor had mentioned that.”

 

On the way home from lunch, Harry stopped at a Walgreens and picked up some CoQ10. His night time leg cramps vanished within a few days. Lunch with a friend had proved more useful than a visit to the doctor.

 

Use of C0Q10 may cause headaches and dizziness, insomnia, fatigue, skin itching or rashes, irritability or agitation.

 

Within a week or so Harry noticed an increase in his energy level, almost to the point of feeling jittery. 

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Practicing Medicine

I was not feeling well. Actually, I had a sudden screaming pain in my right side under my ribs. Is it a gallbladder attack? My lungs? Liver? Pancreas (e gads), or perhaps a misanthropic appendix taking revenge for all of that Dairy Queen of late? Note: I’ve always wanted to use the word “misanthropic.” I learned it from Charles Dickens and it’s fun to say.

 

            “Hello, I’d like to make an appointment with my doctor,” I began.

 

            “What are your symptoms?”

 

            “I have a severe pain in my right side.”

 

            “Do you have a fever, chills, body aches, sore throat, cough or shortness of breath?”

 

I wanted to say that I almost always have body aches, but this wasn’t the time to be a smart aleck.

 

            “Well, yes, I’ve had a tickling cough for a couple of weeks, and I can’t breathe because of the pain in my side. It’s hard to catch my breath.”

 

            “Have you had a Covid test?”

 

            “Yes. It was negative.”

 

            “Where were you tested?”

 

            “CVS.”

 

            “Oh. You need to have both a rapid and PCR Covid test at our facility due to your symptoms.”

 

            “You mean the shortness of breath?” I asked.

 

            “Yes, that.”

 

            “But that’s because of the pain in my side.”

 

            “I’m scheduling you for the test, and also for a TeleHealth appointment.”

 

            “With my doctor? I can’t see him in person?”

 

            “You need to get the Covid test,” she said.

 

            “Ok, fine.”

            

            “Your TeleHealth appointment is with your doctor’s assistant, an APRN.”

 

What the Hell is an APRN? I look it up. Advanced Practice Registered Nurse. Great.

 

Fast forward. I endured two more Covid tests. The ones where they stick a swab up your nose way further than the way I did it myself at the CVS drive thru. I guess that’s the point. Cool, I must have Covid. At least I’ll know why I can’t breathe and why I’m in such pain.

 

            “Your rapid test is negative. Please log on to the link I sent you,” she says later that day.

 

            “But my appointment isn’t for two hours.”

 

            “Did you get the link I sent?”

 

            “Yeah, hold on, I need to get my laptop.”

 

Sadly, my biggest concern was that I wasn’t dressed for this. I planned to at least comb my hair and put on a t-shirt with sleeves. Instead, I looked like I just woke up and got back from shopping at a Florida Walmart.

 

            “What’s your blood pressure?” she asked.

            

            “I don’t know.”

 

            “Do you have a home blood pressure kit?”

 

            “Yeah, but…”

 

            “I’ll wait,” she said, and did.

 

            “Bzzzzzz, bump, bump, bump,” went the machine.

 

            “It says 145 over 92. That can’t be right. I always have really good blood pressure.”

 

            “145 over 92,” she wrote, “What’s your pulse?”

 

            “Oh, wait, I took off the cuff.” Had she mentioned this earlier I would have made note of the reading.

 

            “Bzzzzzz, bump, bump, bump,” went the machine again.  “It says 78. That can’t be right. My pulse runs around 62.” Both pulse and BP were no doubt elevated due to aggravation.

            

            “78. Please hold, he will be with you shortly. Are you taking the following medications?” (she rattles off a series of drugs, mispronouncing most of them)

 

            “No, I haven’t taken those in years. They were for different things at different times.”

 

            “No meds,” she stated.

 

            “Do you smoke?”

 

            I’m starting to. (I didn’t actually say that.) “No.”

 

The laptop screen comes to life. All I can see are thick eyebrows and a forehead with ceiling tiles in the background. An adjustment is made. Now I can see eyes as well. The APRN appears to be East Indian and quite young. Young people generally know how to use computers.

 

            “So you’re having shortness of breath and a cough,” he said.

            

            “Well, actually a pain in my side, but I do have a slight cough and I can’t breathe because it hurts.”

 

            “You probably have a virus other than Covid. I’m going to send two prescriptions to Walgreens. One will be a six-day steroid pack. The other will be an antibiotic.”

 

            “Should we get a chest X-ray?” I prompted.

 

            “Oh, yes, I was going to suggest that. (yeah, right) I’ll put an order in. You can walk into our imaging center any time.” 

I’m there within a couple of hours.

 

Fast forward. Walgreens closes at 8 pm and doesn’t care if the orders that came in earlier in the day are complete. As a result, I have no medication for the pain in my side, and it is worsening by the hour. By 1:00 am, I cannot sleep. There is no position I can find that isn’t excruciating. I pace the floor, stretch, and attempt to breathe deeply but can’t. Eventually, I take a couple of extra strength Tylenol, then two more an hour later. At this point, I’m not concerned about my liver. I try to sleep sitting up, propping a pillow under my chin so my head won’t fall uncomfortably forward, resulting in an almost certain headache from neck strain. It is a very long night.

 

The next morning I am the first customer at Walgreens. After a short wait, I am handed three prescriptions. I expected two. The third is an Albuterol inhaler with no explanation of why I’ve been given this or how to use it. Whatever. I go home and swallow the first row of steroids in the six-day series of progressively shorter blister-packed rows. Within hours the pain begins to subside. I now understand how Oxycontin can so quickly become a problem, especially after day three, when my much shorter row of pills allows the pain to return. I need more of this.

 

            “Hello, I really need to have an actual visit with my doctor. The pain in my side is now extending from my shoulder to my waist. I had a slight fever last night and still can’t breathe because of the pain.”

 

“You have a fever?”

 

            “No, not anymore. Last night.” (I realized it was a mistake to admit this)

 

            “Are you using the inhaler?”

 

            “First of all, I didn’t know I was getting that, and I wasn’t told how to use it. But more importantly, I can’t use an inhaler when the pain in my side prevents me from inhaling. I feel like you’re not listening to me.”

 

            “I will schedule you with your doctor. But first, you need to get a Covid test.”

 

            “I had two of them a few days ago.”

 

            “That was before you had a fever. We have to make sure.”

 

Fast forward. The doctor refuses to see me in person, but at least he knows how to aim his laptop camera to capture his full face. He says the additional Covid test isn’t necessary. I don’t present like a huffing and puffing COVID-19 patient. Probably because I am sitting still.

 

He proceeds to tell me that I most likely strained my intercostal rib muscles while coughing. He prescribes me two weeks of Meloxicam. It has been five days since my chest x-ray. He mentions that I have fluid in my right lung, the one near the pain that was my original complaint. Whatever fluid was in that lung has now been there for five days, probably having fluid babies and growing a fluid family.

 

He puts my on a short course of Lasix (water-removing pill) and a potassium supplement to counter the electrolyte-depleting action of the Lasix.

 

            “Does that sound like a plan?” he asks.

 

            “Yes, but I should probably mention that I’ve been coughing up a little blood.”

 

            “Well, that’s alarming for sure. But small amounts are not a concern. They may be originating in your nasal passages and traveling down your throat.”

A pattern has emerged. Everything I say travels up the branches of a decision tree to a box that says, "That's nothing."

 

I now repeat the Walgreens experience, but this time I show up in the store before closing. They have had my order in their system all day and are clearly planning to make me wait until morning. I plan to refuse to leave until I get my meds. I envision police action, me carried off in cuffs demanding my rights and ending up a Florida law enforcement casualty on the Lester Holt evening news. Florida Man. They produce the prescriptions. No ruminated police were necessary. I gobble the new pills the minute I get home.

 

This is not the end of the story. I am still advocating for my care, demanding that tests be done properly and completely. You might recall that I ran blood tests in a hospital for eleven years. I know more than enough to be dangerous. Doctors find that to be a bit off-putting, though I am kind when I ask them to raise the bar on terminology and reveal my background. I don’t pretend to be a doctor. But if I were one, I would hopefully listen to my patient and attempt to find underlying causes instead of just treating the symptoms. At that point they are not practicing medicine, they’re practicing insurance.

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The First World Problem

Poor or developing nations are spoken of as “Third World.” We are fortunate to live in a wealthy First World country. Our challenges are typically not due to lack of sanitation, potable water, electricity or all of the various other infrastructure elements we take for granted, despite our government’s struggle to fund the much-needed maintenance of these critical items.

We can joke that a delay in our mail, a flat tire, a problem connecting to WiFi, rising gas prices, a backorder on Amazon or an assortment of other inconveniences are “First World problems.” “Oh my gosh, Whole Foods is out of organic cranberries!” But have you ever experienced a power failure that lasted more than a few hours or days? How about a lengthy city-wide boil order for your tap water?” Perhaps a nationwide toilet paper shortage was enlightening. Suddenly your perspective changes, albeit temporarily. Some of us go camping to get back to basics. But have you ever traveled to a Third World destination where this is the norm?

 

We have gone to one such place. A trip to see our son while he was in the Peace Corps, stationed in Guatemala, was an eye opener. He lived for three years in villages where undrinkable water came in periodic “falls” – the opening of a village-wide pipeline on a few specific days during the week or month. From that the villagers filled concrete reservoirs in their homes. These were called “pilas” – dual compartment basins used for washing clothes, dishes, hands, and bucket by bucket, for manually flushing a toilet.

 

There was no cable TV, no sewers, no waste disposal or telephone lines. Interestingly, cell phone technology allowed for an infrastructure leapfrog in the traditional evolution of telecommunications. Everyone carried cell phones. It was much easier to install a few cell phone towers in remote locations than it would have been to string miles of wires along thousands of installed telephone poles.

 

We stayed with our son in his single room, a spartan cinderblock, windowless cube in a building that was similarly unglamorous. We toured the town, walking on mostly unpaved roads, meeting his friends, host families and coworkers. And on market day, he took us shopping at the local Costco, an open-air farmers market where he purchased a few onions, potatoes and rice, whatever he needed for the week.

 

Guatemalan people are generally quite small. They are mostly “Ladinos,” of mixed European (Spanish) and Amerindian descent. The men average about five foot four inches in height. The women are around four foot ten. Our family, at five foot nine to six foot one, was noticeably gigantic. As we strolled through the little marketplace, we routinely ducked under blue tarp tents that shaded the produce sellers.

 

Those who knew our son were aware of our visit. Others quickly noticed the obvious American outsiders and watched us pass by. It was as we passed by one tiny woman, dark brown and wrinkled from age and a difficult life, missing several teeth, but smiling broadly, that I became an object of fascination unlike at any other time in my life. Looking up into my eyes, with her radiant smile and quiet demeanor, she gently reached out and touched my arm. Was it to see if I was real? For good luck? As a gesture of kindness or honor? I’ll never know. Perhaps she spoke of her encounter to family at dinner that evening. I simply returned her smile and continued on through the market. Our culture and languages separated us, but we shared a moment. And then I went back to the comfort I take for granted in the United States and she continued to sell vegetables for the rest of her life.

 

Since then, whenever I go to the grocery store, or any store, not just Costco or Sam’s Club, I am struck by our bounty of choices, the immense quantity of food and other goods from which we can choose. Our trip to the Third World changed me forever. I frequently comment on how lucky we are and how little we struggle. Perhaps that’s our real First World problem.

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Evergreen

Wally held up a glass test tube, gazing with pride at its phosphorescent green contents. He turned off the lights in his basement laboratory to better view the effect. A gentle swirl between his thumb and forefinger stirred the fluid to greater brightness. Suspended sparkling motes pulsed with life, combined in twos and threes, grew and thrived.

 

            “Dinner is ready!” urged Alice from the top of the basement stairs.

 

            “I’ll be up shortly dear,” he replied for the second time without looking away, mesmerized by the glow of his creation.

 

If the results of his experiment were as hoped, eating food would never be quite the same. He took a deep breath, looked briefly to the top of the stairs, then back at the test tube. He threw back the contents like a shot of fine whiskey, expecting the swallowed rush and burn of a high proof liquor, but feeling none. The mild essence of chlorophyl, of a summer day rose up the back of his throat and into his nostrils. And then it hit.

 

Wally could not suppress the operatic scream he released as he doubled over from a sensation that was not entirely pain. It was metamorphic, gripping his diaphragm and radiating outward past his ribs and internal organs, down the nerves in his arms and legs, and upward to his skull in an optic light show that caused the room to color and spin, his stomach to clench and sweat to pour down his face. He sensed an upswelling loss of consciousness like a profound sleepiness and allowed his body to rather gracefully collapse upon the cement floor.

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