WWYD?

What would you do?

The back story:
It is the early 1960s, a time before “sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” ruled American youth, a time when the word “hippy” referred to your figure rather than your politics, and nice girls didn’t “do it,”—and if they did, it was a secret…and if they got pregnant, it was an even bigger secret that involved a long visit to a “sick aunt” in another state and hush-hush adoptions.

You are in your late 30s and have custody of your 17 year old daughter, Dana, who has recently graduated from high school. You and her father have been divorced for seven years and you have both remarried. You (Georgia) and your husband (Frank) own three apartment buildings, four houses, a small chain of figure salons and a small chain of laundromats. The three of you live in one of the one-bedroom apartments and you work outside the home as a bookkeeper. Your daughter has just announced to you that she is pregnant by her high school boyfriend, who is also 17. What would you do?

Scenario 1: your daughter tells you she intends to keep her baby, even if she remains unmarried.

What I would do if I was Georgia: I would counsel Dana as to the difficulty of her decision. If she remained unmoved, then I would rent her an apartment in my building and give her a job at one of the laundries so that she could earn a living and start on the road to independence. I would help her furnish her apartment, get set up with welfare so she would have medical coverage for her pregnancy and birth. I would tutor her on such things as budgeting and take her to flea markets and second hand shops to help her get things for the baby.

What actually happened: Georgia arranged for an abortion (illegal in the US at this time) in Mexico; Dana discovered the plan and refused to go, threatening to turn Georgia in to the authorities (and tell her father) if she was forced. Georgia then told Dana she could live at home during her pregnancy only if she agreed to give the baby up for adoption; if Dana was insistent on keeping the baby, Georgia had made arrangements for Dana to go to an institution for unwed mothers.

What would you do?

Scenario 2: the father of your daughter’s child has refused to take responsibility. In a time before DNA testing, this was not an uncommon situation. Your daughter, however, has been proposed to by a young man in the military, a young man who is not the child’s father and who did not meet your daughter until after she became pregnant. Because she is 17, however, she needs your permission to marry.

What I would do if I was Georgia: I would counsel her as to the likelihood of teen marriages ending in failure. I would also, however, counsel her on the social stigma of being illegitimate…something for which her innocent child would have to suffer. If she decided to accept his proposal, I would sign my consent, but ask them to continue living in the apartment next door so I would be available to help her once the baby came.

What actually happened: Georgia refused to give permission for Dana to marry. By this time, Dana is out of her house and living with her father and stepmother, but Georgia stubbornly retains custody. When asked why she would not give permission for Dana to marry, her response is “She made her bed, now she has to lie in it!” Dana eventually gets permission to marry from a judge who recognizes the value to the unborn child of being born legitimately.

What would you do?

Scenario 3: Her husband has gone AWOL from the military and Dana does not know where he is. The baby is 18 months old and Dana is pregnant with her second child. The military cuts off her support. With no income, no job, a toddler and another child on the way, Dana is desperate and decides to move in with her inlaws, in another state. She has just enough money for a train ticket…5 days and 4 nights on a train, heavily pregnant, and with a toddler in tow.

What I would do if I was Georgia: I would offer Dana to return to work at the laundry and provide a playyard for my grandchild so that she could bring the child to work with her. I would give her time off with pay when she has the second baby, and make arrangements for her to be able to bring the new baby to work with her when she is recovered from the birth and able to get on her feet again. If she is adamant about going to her inlaws, I would make sure she had money for food and incidentals, and drive her to the station (airfare was beyond the reach of the average middle class family back then).

What actually happened: Georgia told Dana, when she called, “You made your bed, you lay in it.” Dana made her own way to the train station and travelled for 5 days and 4 nights to the other side of the country and no one was there to greet her. She waiting at the train station, broke, pregnant, hungry, and with a hungry, tired toddler for several hours before her mother-in-law begrudgingly picked her up.

What would you do?

Scenario 4: Dana’s husband has been dishonourably discharged from the military for desertion. He comes to his mother’s house, collects Dana and the children, and moves them into a dilapidated slum. He has difficulty finding work because of his DD, and when he does find work, his belligerent attitude gets him fired. He develops a fondness for drink and often drinks half or more of his paycheck before he even gets home, making it difficult for Dana to even buy enough food for herself and the children. She leaves him and takes the bus across country, back to her home town, and arrives with two little kids, a couple of suitcases, and not even enough money to rent a cheap motel room for their first night back in town. She calls you…

What I would do if I was Georgia: Jump in the car and go collect her and the kids from the bus station. Move them into whatever empty apartment (they are furnished apartments) I have at the moment, and make plans to put her to work in the laundry until she is able to get herself together and find a better paying job.

What actually happened: Georgia hung up on Dana after saying something like “It’s your problem, you deal with it.” Georgia called her grandfather collect and begged to borrow $50 until she could get a job and get settled. After hearing what Georgia had done, grandfather wired the $50 by Western Union. Dana took the first job she could find: cocktail waitressing in a go-go bar where she later started dancing because it paid almost double what the waitressing jobs paid. When the club went topless several months later, Dana had the choice of going topless or losing her job. With two small children and no one but herself to take care of them, she couldn’t afford to lose the job...

What would you do?

~ * ~

Sometimes when we look at someone and we judge them, we might have a different attitude if we knew their back story. Dana wanted to go to college, but scholarships for girls were few and far between in the days before Women’s Lib, and her parents had made no provision for paying for more education. Even with an infant, Dana could have gone to college and become a teacher (her dream at that time) if her family had been supportive and provided her some assistance. As it was, Dana was thrown on her own meagre resources and, young and fairly naïve, she was betrayed by the man she married and trusted, and left to fend for herself and her babies.

I often feel great compassion for young women in desperate circumstances for I know it is unlikely they freely chose their situations, that they may well be living the results of a series of “lesser of the evils” choices. Blaming them, haranguing them, harshly judging them does nothing to improve their situations nor the circumstances of their innocent children. Each road to ruin is a different path, each one as unique as the person whose life is in shambles around her. And until we know each person’s story, until we see what alternatives were available to the choices that were made, we cannot fairly judge.

Better to take a position of compassion, to remember that few choose lives of desperation if alternatives are available, and to be thankful that our own options were not so limited that our choices had to be made between which forms of desperation our lives would take.

How stupid are you?

OK, let’s just be out front with it…what is wrong with being gay? And what is wrong with gay people getting married? I pride myself on being a reasonably intelligent, rational, logical human being but I gotta tell ya, folks, this is something I just don't get it!

A friend of mine has just announced to the world that she proposed to her girlfriend, and her proposal was accepted. Everybody is over the moon…they just set a date and congratulations are flying thick and fast. It’s a champagne and confetti moment for us all…and yet, apparently my friend’s family is taking the news like she was announcing a funeral, not a wedding! They cannot be happy that their daughter is happy, that she has found someone to love and who loves her in return? Someone with whom she wants to spend the rest of her life? Someone who will care for her when she is sick, celebrate with her when she is happy, and just generally share her life and give it depth and meaning, colour and texture, and a rhythm to carry her through the rest of her days? What kind of parents are not ecstatic when their 35-year-old never-wed daughter finally finds “The One” and wants to settle down and make a life for herself with her beloved? I don’t get it.

In South Africa, gay marriage is legal, but much of the rest of the world lags behind in enfranchising all of their citizens in this regard. But despite the government having enfranchised us all, unfortunately not all of our citizens are so generous of spirit. It is somewhat more understandable in a place like America where homophobic hysteria is shared by government and citizen alike, but in a place sufficiently enlightened to recognize that equality under the law includes marriage, I find it rather sad that the faceless monolith that is government has more compassion and enlightenment than those whom we would expect to accept and embrace my friend and share her joy: her own family.

So what is wrong with being gay? The “it’s unnatural” argument no longer flies since intelligent vertebrates from bonobo chimps to dolphins have been observed engaging in what we would call “homosexual behaviour.” Somehow I doubt that the dolphins or the chimps (our nearest genetic relatives, BTW) find anything sinister in enjoying a sexual experience with members of either sex. I suspect they might find such concepts as marriage and monogamous, opposite-sex-only sexual relationships to be unnatural, truth be told.

You cannot argue that same-sex relationships are “against god” and expect to be taken seriously outside of the particular group with whom you share such a belief. Not only are there multiple gods worshipped on this planet, the interpretations of the pronouncements of those gods are almost as legion as our own numbers. The secular world may recognize and respect the existence of gods, their followers and their beliefs, but in no way is it beholden to them. The very act of a government adopting the tenets of one faith disenfranchises all those who do not share that faith, and with the exception of a theocracy, few governments can survive such an act: consider what would happen to America if the religious right got its way and the US government adopted a religious posture…but it adopted something other than Christianity as its touchstone. Whatever you believe your god(s) think about homosexuality, the rest of us are not beholden to it, and you simply cannot disenfranchise an entire class of people from the benefits and protections of law simply because of your personal belief. If you could, then I would have the same right to disenfranchise homophobes from certain protections of the law…say, the freedom of speech and the right to worship as they please. It is no less fair and makes no less sense.

What about the notion that some people “choose to be gay.” Well, aside from the complete ridiculousness of the whole idea…when, after all, did you “choose” to reject gayness and choose to be straight? (if you actually did, then I have some disconcerting news for you)…so what? So what if people do choose to be gay? What is wrong with that and why should people make choices about their lives according to your beliefs/attitudes/notions? You don’t have the right to tell me what job to choose, what car to choose, what colour to dye my hair, what politics to support, how many children to have, which god to worship…why on earth should you be able to dictate my choices regarding my sexuality? As long as some other person’s choice of partner is adult and consenting, what business is it of yours? (And yes, “other person” includes members of your family!) Suppose a bunch of people came to you with the demand that you give up your spouse because s/he belonged to the “wrong” religion or race or political party…wouldn’t you consider that intrusive and outrageous and completely beyond the pale? I imagine gay people have similar reactions when people of a different orientation make a similar demand. Your choice in partners is none of my business…and the choices that other people make for their partners are none of yours. So, even if people “choose” to be gay, so what?

I have heard it said that allowing gay people to marry harms the institution of marriage. Unfortunately, nobody ever seems to explain that silly notion and I, who can usually come up with good arguments for anything (I know the value of understanding the position of the opposition) am simply blank on the subject. In an era in which large numbers of people cohabit before marriage…indeed, some cohabit serially without marrying while others simply cohabit in what would once have been called a “common law marriage”... it seems peculiar that a group of people clamouring for the right to marry would be perceived as potentially destroying the institution. An objective view of the present social mores might indicate that heterosexual couples are chipping away at the institution with their willingness to forego certain legal benefits of marriage in exchange for the freedom to simply walk away from the relationship without being put through the meat grinder of divorce. By the same token, homosexual couples look more like the saviours of the institution rather than its destroyers, championing marriage in a time when their heterosexual brethren are abstaining from or abandoning it.

What is destructive about two people who marry, establish a home together and join “the system” rather than live outside it? In addition to demonstrating the desirability of marriage, gay couples gain the legal protections marriage offers without taking one thing away from heterosexual couples, from the government or the society. Indeed, their very insistence on being enfranchised points up the benefits of marriage that numerous heterosexual couples may be overlooking. What happens if an unmarried woman (straight or gay) falls desperately ill and her long-term partner and her parents are at odds over treatment options? The partner may know what she wants, but has no standing in the face of her parents, her legal next-of-kin. And suppose she dies—intestate—leaving a sizeable estate? Inheritance laws do not include unmarried partners: a spouse of just two days has more rights than a partner of twenty years. By demanding the right to marry, gay people champion the institution by demonstrating its desirability and protest their being excluded from participating in a favourable enterprise that the rest of us can freely enter at will.

I have heard a few people opine that the fundamental purpose of marriage is for the production and protection of children. This makes me laugh…loudly. First of all, given modern technology, there is no reason gay couples cannot have children if they so desire. But more importantly, this is a ridiculous definition of marriage that, if taken to heart, disenfranchises a lot more than gay couples. Infertile couples…when the infertility is confirmed as being irredeemable, should they be forced to divorce? Older couples…should my grandmother have been denied the right to marry in her 70s, after a 52 year marriage to my grandfather and subsequent widowhood? Couples who do not want children: should they be denied marriage because their love for and commitment to each other is simply not sufficient to warrant the white veil and pastel tux? Without even going into how poorly marriage protects children in a society in which 50% or more of marriages end in divorce, even if there are no other viable reasons for marriage than the production of children, gay people are perfectly capable of doing that. The “reason” just doesn’t fly.

Frankly, I cannot find a single reason…well, valid reason…to deny gay people the right to wed. And I think people who object not only to gay marriage, but homosexuality, are being exceedingly selfish in their views, attempting to force their sensibilities onto people who simply do not share them. The bottom line is that, once I am an adult, nobody has the right to dictate the choices I make in my life and nobody has the power to change who attracts me.

If I am to be true to myself, I must be myself, and in my case I was attracted to a man who, not too many years ago, I would have been prohibited by law from marrying for no other reason than his skin colour. My family would have been horrified (and possibly even hoped it was a phase I would grow out of) and they might even have boycotted my wedding. The multitude of objections that would have been offered then are echoed today in the arguments against gay marriage, but they are just as specious today as they were in the days of miscegenation and apartheid.

And they hurt. It hurts your child, your sibling, your grandchild, that your prejudices and beliefs mean more to you than their happiness. Is the happiness of your family member important to you? Will you rejoice that she has found the love of her life…or be a killjoy because the partner was not who…or what…you wanted? How selfish can you be, to spoil her happiness because she…an adult…doesn’t put your happiness ahead of her own in falling in love with the person with whom she intends to spend the rest of her days? Shame on you!

This whole issue about rights for gay people is just stupid…not because gay people do not deserve full enfranchisement but because there simply is no valid excuse to deny them. How stupid are you?

Lamentations

My husband and I have been landlords for nearly five years. We have gone to great effort…and expense…to provide our tenants with a decent place to live at a reasonable rent. We spray for insects regularly, have a professional builder on call for maintenance, have installed solar water heating, new carpeting, and were honest with them about the property and its advantages and disadvantages at the time we showed it for rental. We have a “code of conduct” for our tenants so that they know what we…and their neighbours…expect from them in terms of behaviour (and actually evicted a tenant who was making life miserable for the others) and a nice, tight lease that is written to fairly spell out the legal obligations of all parties involved.

When general maintenance and repairs are needed, we always let the tenants know. The last thing we want is a tenant to die of fright upon seeing a stranger climbing up onto her roof, or a maintenance worker shot as he begins taking out a cracked window! We generally put the maintenance person directly in touch with the tenant who needs work and allow them to schedule work at their mutual convenience…then there is no concern for anyone’s safety or peace of mind.

For the past five months we have been tenants and, sadly, our experience has been one that illustrates the old saw “no good deed goes unpunished.” For as good a landlord as we have been, so our landlord is as bad.

As you all know, I am laid up with a broken foot. I saw the doctor two days ago and she declined the cortisone shot and told me “more anti-inflammatories, more pain meds, more elevating that foot.” The good news is that I am allowed to walk around some…the bad news is that I still have to spend the lion’s share of my time in bed with my foot propped up. It was from this position this morning that I heard a lot of strange mechanical noises outside my window and, when I went to check…at the insistence of my barking Yorkchop…that I discovered a man propping a tall ladder against the side of my house!!

After a moment of panic…the maid has the day off and she has gone shopping and my husband is out of town until tomorrow night…I looked down to see a drop cloth spread across the grass with a paint roller on it. In the grass nearby, however, was a hammer…why do you need a hammer to paint?? No arrangements were made with me or my husband for maintenance work to be done on the house and when the man with the ladder moved into my line of sight, I did not recognize him. He might have been the regular maintenance guy from next door, but from my angle on the second floor, I could not really tell.

Our landlord lives in Cape Town but this is a reasonably modern country and there are both conventional and cell telephonic communication between here and there. Even in the best of circumstances, I expect to be notified when people who do not live here are coming onto the property…I don’t live in an apartment building with a maintenance crew, I live in a private house with elaborate security systems…should I not be alarmed when a man I don’t recognize and am not expecting, props a ladder against my house?

So I called the landlord and said “Who is this person outside in my garden with a ladder propped up against the house near my bedroom?”

And he said “I don’t know.”

Which just freaked me out even more. Obviously the gardener let the guy in, but nobody knocked on the door, called me on the phone or even hollered up through the window to let me know there was work going on. Nope…my Yorkie starts barking like a loon, I go to check out what is fretting her, and find a ladder propped against my house where someone can peer in through the bedroom window and see me, in my skimpy nightie (I am still running my A/C during the day) with my foot propped up on the bed. And my landlord didn’t send the guy??

“I have a broken foot and I am laid up in bed,” I tell the landlord. “I am here alone…the maid has the day off. And this ladder is propped right where someone can see through the only uncurtained window in the bedroom and look right in at the bed. Nobody called me, nobody told me there was going to be work going on today!”

“Maybe it is Leo,” the landlord says, mentioning the handyman from next door.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t tell from up here. But if it IS Leo, he needs to make an appointment with us to come over to do work, and when he does, he needs to keep the appointments he makes. We kissed off an entire Saturday a few weeks back waiting for him and he didn’t show.” What I didn’t tell the landlord is that Leo told me that he works for our cantankerous neighbour as a man-of-all-work from Monday through Friday and can only do maintenance work here on Saturdays…and today ain’t Saturday.

The landlord tries to call Leo but there is no answer. He calls me back. “Try the gardener,” I suggest. “He’s here today.” The gardener is here on alternate Thursdays at the landlord’s behest, since our maid does the gardening for us and we refused to pay two people to do the yard work or to reduce the maid’s wages by cutting her gardening day. I wait a while, but the landlord does not call me back…I don’t know what is happening, if the guy outside is Leo or not, if he is authorized by the landlord to be here or not, if my growing fear for my safety is groundless or not.

Finally, Hubby calls me. He has called the landlord on my behalf and the news is 1) the guy with the ladder is Leo, 2) the landlord did not send him over here today, 3) the landlord has told him to leave, and 4) I, gimpy foot, nightgown and all, am supposed to go down the stairs and make an appointment with Leo to return to do the work, whatever it is (even the landlord doesn’t know!). I decline this last bit because 1) I am in my night clothes (I am in bed, after all), 2) my foot hurts and I have just taken a pain pill, 3) the last time I did this, Leo simply didn’t show up at the appointed time, and 4) I am not even sure he understands my American-accented English…or if he is particularly sharp with any brand of English at all.

I don’t want to deal with all this confusion. I barely slept last night and this insomnia and its aftermath are very new to me…I have never EVER had trouble sleeping before this foot thing and in the past two months I’ve had only two or three nights of more than 4 hours sleep at a pop. I’m tired, I’m getting cranky, and the last thing I need is strange men climbing up ladders to my bedroom window and scaring the willies out of me! I just want to sit here with my foot propped up and wait for my pain pill to work, and not have to worry about strangers propping ladders up against my house and climbing in through a window or over the balcony railing.

Most of all, however, I want my landlord to get his act together and behave responsibly and with concern for something more than having the rent arrive in a timely manner (which it always does). We were mislead about this house from the beginning: it is smaller than we were told (sorry, but the patio, balcony, and garage are not part of the square footage of the house), it was infested with vermin when we moved in and the landlord knew it, the front security gate malfunctions regularly, something else the landlord was aware of (revealed to us by the gate repairman on one of his many, many visits). The landlord knew that the electricity supply to this street was unreliable…the neighbour across the road told us it was notoriously unreliable and the landlord lived in this very house until just this last December. We’ve had the exterminators out here more than once but we continue to have evidence of rats, I’ve seen fat, happy cockroaches gambolling in my cupboards, and if you want to have meat in this house, get out the Raid and lock all the doors and windows because the minute so much as a piece of lunch meat comes out of the refrigerator, the flies show up in swarms…even after the house and grounds were sprayed.

I would not allow my tenants to live this way, and I go out of my way to make sure their homes are comfortable, clean, safe places to live. When our hot water heater went on the fritz, the landlord would not even take our phone calls after the first one! Steaming water poured down the chandelier in the stairway and cascaded down the stairs like a water fall, a sheet of hot water poured out of the eaves and blocked access to the front door , scalding the plants on either side of the door, and our landlord would not respond to our SMSs or voicemails. We had to call his mother , who authorized a plumber to come out.

Add to this the local infrastructure problems: five water main breaks in four months, each one leaving us without water; two trash collector’s strikes; weekly power outages; and last Friday night someone set the vacant lot behind my street afire, menacing the entire neighbourhood, and the fire brigade, when my husband tried to call to report the fire, put him on hold!

Joburg is no fun. Aside from movies, one casino, and malls, there’s pretty much nothing to do here, and the infrastructure is totally unworthy of a city that thinks it is the be-all and end-all of Western civilization on the continent of Africa. There are pot holes in the posh sections of town you could easily lose a wheel in (no exaggeration!), the traffic lights are so notorious for not functioning that one of our car insurance companies has hired and trained “pointsmen” (non-police traffic directors) to put in intersections when the lights aren’t working to reduce traffic accidents…apparently it is cheaper to train and pay these pointsmen than to pay for collision damage! Street lights don’t work, malls shut down at 5 or 6 pm on weeknights, and few are open after 2 on Sundays or at all on public holidays.

I still don’t like it here…it is a crappy place to live…but it would be improved if I wasn’t stuck with a landlord who is barely one cut above a slumlord. This guy cares about the property looking good, but seems not to give a fig for its functionality or the well-being of those of us who must live here.

I want to go back to Cape Town. I really, really, do.

I am feeling a bit down today

I don’t know if it is chemical…a result of the meds I’ve been taking for what seems like forever…or I’m finally succumbing to the boredom and restlessness of being so immobile for so long, or if I’m starting to miss my husband who, as a result of a temporary promotion and a control-freak boss who has no perspective, has barely had the time to say two words to me in a whole week. Earlier in the week he had to go to Polokwane, which is about a four-hour drive into desolation, attend a meeting, then drive back home. He got up at 4 am, left here at 4:30 to go pick up the three colleagues who were also attending the meeting (he took my large, comfortable SUV because it was a trip out into the bundu), did not return home until after 6 pm and before he could get settled for a meal and some rest, got embroiled in a patently ridiculous (as in, a little common sense on the part of his boss would have prevented the entire problem) brouhaha that kept him on the phone and working until 10. I’m sorry, but that is just not acceptable to me…not only is that kind of a work day…18 freaking hours!...unacceptable, the man has a life outside of work and I have not given his boss permission to usurp my time with him!

I suppose the fact that he is going to Cape Town next week…and I am staying here…doesn’t help. I miss Cape Town, I miss my home there, I miss my friends, especially Sally. I’ve been up here for four months now, and so far nothing has happened to recommend it. I don’t like the weather, the crap infrastructure that keeps putting the power out, the water not running, the roads full of holes, the traffic lights that never seem to work, the continual public worker’s strikes…and I hate this house. Hate it, hate it, hate it. I haven’t detested a place this much since I lived in a tenement in Boston…even the old adobe out in the desert with no hot water and no refrigerator didn’t try my patience as much as this place does! Out there you expect vermin and trying conditions, especially since the place was practically free…here, we pay a premium rent for what we expected was premium digs, only to find it vermin infested and owned by someone who can’t be bothered to make sure the place was free of such nasties as roaches and rats before his tenants moved in. And who, after all, expects to pay high rents in a “posh” neighbourhood and share the premises with rats and roaches and find their lights and water cut off on an irregular but frequent basis? Not me, I can tell you that!

I am still having trouble sleeping…that could be a factor in my present melancholy. It has been getting better, but last night I woke up at 1 am to take my meds and couldn’t get back to sleep for an hour. An improvement over waking up at 3 and being unable to go back to sleep for the pain, of course, but still…what I wouldn’t give for six hours of uninterrupted sleep! It would have to improve my mood, wouldn’t it?

I have barely cooked in the last month and takeaways and prepared meals from the freezer section of the market are getting tiresome. My diet has changed dramatically…much less fruit and veggies simply because I can’t stand up long enough to prepare a full meal. Give me more than 15 minutes standing up and the foot starts to throb, especially in the three swollen spots that I assume are the places my tendons are inflamed. Sitting helps, but we had to leave a child’s birthday party early last week, even though I was sitting and my foot was propped up on a stool. Being unable to cook much…and the fact that the kitchen is down a daunting flight of stairs…has had a positive effect on my waistline, but I’m thinking the dearth of veggies and minimal fruit consumption probably has not had an equally salubrious effect on my nutrition and digestion.

The Yorkchop has been a terrific distraction and companion, but as cute and sweet and engaging as she is, she’s still just a dog and her attention span is limited as is her ability to engage in two-way interaction. Once she gets tired of playing tug or fetch, it’s over until she’s had enough of a snooze to recharge her batteries and refresh her attitude.

And so I’m bored and tired of being bored, I’m a little down because…well, I’m just wanting to have/do/get/experience more than the four walls of this room and the occasional foray down the mountainous stairs to the kitchen. Pity party? Yah, probably. It could be a whole lot worse…Hubby’s cousin, who is only 45, sneezed and blew out a vertebra in his lower spine a few weeks back. The doctors at the hospital said it was too severe an injury for a simple sneeze in a man his age and ran additional tests: he has bone marrow cancer. Like me, he has been laid up in bed for a month, but he’s also had to deal with radiation and chemo, as well as surgery for the vertebra and now he, too, is stuck in bed and bored. So, I acknowledge that it could be worse…a lot worse…but somehow contemplating the misfortunes of others just doesn’t lead me to a more upbeat mood.

I’ll get over it…I always do. But for today, I am feeling a little bit down.

Old age ain’t for sissies

I have been in near-constant pain for almost two months…on bed rest for nearly half of that now, and it is really, really getting old!

It all started on 12 March...Hubby and I went out for dinner and while awaiting dessert, I decided to make a trip to the loo. It being a balmy night (March is the end of summer in South Africa), we were sitting outside on the patio; the loo, however, was inside and, from the server’s directions, apparently at the back of the dimly lit dining room.

The floors were tile; there was a raised dining area to the left, accessed by two or three steps, also tile. They were also the same colour of tile as the main floor, they had no edging to indicate that there were steps there, and in the dim light, they blended right into the floor. I hit the steps with my left foot…which had only the flimsiest of sandal on it…and fell up the steps…leave it to me to find a way to not only fail to see some steps, but to manage to fall up them!

I really didn’t think I was badly hurt. OK, I had two small scrapes where my ankle and the top of my foot impacted the leading edge of the steps, but I neither reported it to the restaurant nor told my husband. I felt foolish, after all, tripping over steps because I was more focussed on finding that elusive ladies room than looking for virtually invisible obstacles in my path.

When I first started feeling pain, it wasn’t in my foot or ankle. Two days after I managed to embarrass myself in the restaurant, I awakened with what I thought was a sciatica attack. I’d only had sciatica a couple of times before and it had always resolved within 24 hours, following a good sleep, so I was puzzled when I awakened the following morning and not only was the pain still there, it was moving down my leg. Sciatica is the inflammation of the sciatic nerve which goes from the lower spine through the buttocks and down the back of the thigh. Not only was the pain still burning from my back, through my bum and down my thigh, it was moving further down my leg than any sciatica attack had ever gone before, and the pain was more diffuse than I remembered it. But, true to form, I just assumed it would get better in a day or two, as my aches and pains generally do, and ignored it. That, as it turns out, was the wrong thing to do.

Pretty soon the pain had gone down my leg to my foot, and from there, into my big toe. I knew it wasn’t gout…I’d been tested for gout and DVT (deep vein thrombosis) only a few months back. The foot started to swell up…and before long I was having pain so acute I couldn’t stand even the weight of a sheet on the skin. It burned, my skin was tender to the touch and just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse and I had to see a doctor about it, I caught the flu and my entire body ached so badly I couldn’t isolate the leg pain from the flu pain. I was a mess!

Slowly, the flu symptoms subsided, leaving me with the pain from my lower spine down to my big toe, but with a new twist: it began to spasm at night. Now, even with OTC codeine-and-paracetamol, I couldn’t sleep more than two to three hours at a stretch. Then one night Hubby woke up and found me sitting in the big chair in the bedroom, quietly massaging my foot and ankle, where the pain was the most acute, and silently crying. The following morning, after learning that the doctor wasn’t able to see me, we walked…well, he walked, I hobbled…into the ER at our nearest hospital, ready to put my misery out of me.

It was the 9th of April, nearly a month since I lost the skirmish with the stairs…but we still had not made a connection between a pain that seemed to start in my spine, radiating down my leg, to my klutzy moment at the restaurant. During this month we had driven down to Durban and back, viewed a dozen or more houses, tramped through several malls, and generally lived our normal life, sore leg and all. Every night I had gone to bed, expecting the “sciatica” to have taken its leave while I slept, and each morning I would awaken to the burning pain running down my leg, now with the addition of hot splinters of pain throughout my foot, ankle and great toe. It was time to get a proper diagnosis.

I’ve always felt quite comfortable in South African hospitals. I have never received anything less than first rate care, and usually more promptly than in American hospitals, too. The ER doctor was a pretty young blonde who listened well and asked the right kinds of questions. When I pulled up my jeans so she could see my foot, I saw the healing wounds caused by the stairs and, on the spur of the moment, told her about my clumsy meeting with the stairs. She duly noted it but, like me, was focussed on the pain radiating from my lower spine. She ordered a series of hip and back x-rays and, as an afterthought, ordered a couple of x-rays of the foot, “just in case,” she said.

At this juncture, I have to warn you about those automated blood pressure cuffs…they kept trying to get a blood pressure on me and the readings were stroke level! Now, I’m 63 and I’m fat…nobody expects my BP to be 120/60 any more…but they were getting readings in the 240/190 range and I knew that had to be wrong…over the past five years of so, I have consistently had readings in the 135/80 to 145/85, depending on how stressed I was at the time of my doctor’s visit. I almost titled this entry “Near Death by Sphygmomanometer” because I swear to you, that machine was out to kill me!

The nurse wrapped that cuff around my arm, switched on the machine and I knew almost immediately that something was wrong because it didn’t stop inflating until I was holding my breath and squirming against the pain. It started deflating, automatically searching for the arterial pulse that would give it its first reading but apparently is couldn’t find it, and the thing began inflating again! My fingers began to turn purple, my hand started to swell up and I could feel my eyeballs start popping out of my head. I cried out a couple of times and when nobody seemed to think anything of a patient writhing in pain and turning blue and purple over a blood pressure reading, I began to yell “Take it off! Take it off me!” Tears spouted out of my eyes and just as I was about to frantically claw it off my arm, one of the nurses announced a reading of 240/190 and the doctor nearly stroked out! Once the feeling came back into my hand I suggested that the reading was that high because the machine had nearly amputated my arm and the doctor suggested that maybe we should let the pain shot she had given me take effect and we’d try again after the x-rays.

Well, the x-rays were a revelation…they indicated I had some damage to some spinal joints…fairly common at my age…and there was narrowing in a couple of nerve channels in my lower spine, which surely explained my occasional bouts of sciatica. But the surprise came when they looked at the x-rays of my foot…not only did I have a seriously arthritic big toe, I had broken a bone in my foot, and that was likely the primary source of all my pain!

Well, as it turns out later, that was only part of the problem…the ER put a “backslab” half cast on my foot, told me to keep it elevated, and gave me a referral to an orthopaedist. Before they would let me go, however, they had to assure themselves that my blood pressure wasn’t going to make me keel over from a stroke in their hospital, so one of the nursing sisters began to wheel that monster machine over me and I felt myself go all balky. Shaking my head, I told the doctor I wasn’t going to submit to its not-so-tender-ministrations again. “I’m kind of afraid of it, after what it did to me earlier!” I told her. “Don’t you have an old fashioned hand pump one somewhere?” That send the staff scurrying around but sure enough, a manual sphygmomanometer was scrounged up and everyone heaved a sigh of relief when the doc gave my reading as being only slightly elevated, most likely because of the continuing pain, the shot they had given me having had no appreciable effect.

By the time I was able to get in to see the ortho, another two weeks had passed, weeks in which the pain in my leg and hip had pretty much subsided, but during which the pain in my foot and ankle had intensified. I was now unable to sleep more than a couple of hours at a stretch, despite the pain meds the ER doc had prescribed, and was in some degree of pain 24/7. The ortho said the bone was healing well…it was now about six weeks after I had had my losing altercation with those steps…and he took the back slab off, ordering me to buy a pair of athletic shoes with a sturdy arch support and to wear them when I was out and about. He further told me that I should be walking around…not too much…but to start exercising my foot and ankle with mild walking so that I didn’t develop thinning bones. And he gave me what he said was a stronger pain prescription and told me to come back in two weeks if I was still having pain.

OK, this guy is a specialist…a very expensive, Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh kind of specialist, who charges significantly more than our medical covers. When the two weeks was almost up and 1) the pain meds were essentially useless and 2) my foot hurt even worse and 3) I figured out for myself what was wrong with me and now knew what my course of treatment needed to be, we made an appointment with our new GP and took my aching foot and ankle for her to take a look at.

On 3 May I hobbled into her office, gave a brief rundown of my condition to date, then told her I thought I had a bad tendinitis, something I had suffered before…but not in my foot. My symptoms…including the “worse at night” phenomenon…were consistent with tendinitis and, when she saw and probed my foot, she agreed. But, before I could ask for the magic bullet that cures tendinitis in a matter of days…a cortisone shot into the affected area…she announced that, because my foot was still tender over the broken bone, cortisone was out of the question at this point in time. Cortisone, apparently, retards bone growth, as does aging, and so the bone needed a little more time to heal. But she seemed to have an idea of what had caused my various…and seemingly unconnected…pain experiences. She felt I really did have a form of sciatica, but one caused from the trauma of slamming my foot into those steps…the wounds, after all, were still visible six weeks later! The shock of connecting, full force, with those immovable steps (and tile over concrete is very unforgiving) probably sent a shock up my leg, causing some kind of trauma to the nerve, which explains why the sciatica didn’t go away overnight as usual. The way my foot connected with the steps caused it to violently snap back into an exaggerated ballerina’s “en pointe” position, aggravating the tendons in the ankle and top of the foot. One of those tendons anchors near the base of the big toe, which is already inflamed from arthritis, causing even more pain. Don’t ya just love hindsight? Three more weeks, she told me. Three weeks of anti-inflammatories, pain meds, and “keep that foot elevated!”

That was two weeks ago. My next appointment is 25 May, and I’m keeping that foot elevated. Unfortunately, however, either I’m resistant to the pain meds that have been prescribed for me or I’m just a wuss because the best I get is a dull throb and the other night it was so bad that it the pain woke me from a sound sleep and I sat up for over an hour, massaging the sore tendons, waiting for the next dose of the pain meds to throttle it back down to that dull throb, and trying to cry quietly so that I didn’t wake Hubby…it’s not his foot, it’s not his pain, and he has to go to work in the morning!

So, that’s what I have been up to for the last few weeks…hope you have been doing better!

Ridding ourselves of abominations

I hate liver. I mean, I really detest the stuff. It is ugly to look at, disgusting to handle, foul-smelling when being cooked, and has a nasty taste and vile texture on the tongue. It would be safe to say that I consider it an abomination.

How anyone can eat that gross, repulsive substance is beyond me. Aside from being horrid to look at, an assault on the nostrils when being cooked, and revolting in the mouth, it’s not even healthy to eat! It is full of cholesterol and, if you consider what the purpose of the organ is in the body, eating it is like eating a filter full of toxic chemicals! Yes, I know it is high in iron, but so is just plain old red meat…not to mention modern science has come up with a host of ways to supplement your iron without ingesting lots of cholesterol along with a cocktail of toxins that are trapped by the liver but not excreted by the body, plus antibiotics, hormones and pesticides to which the animal was exposed. It is also very high in purines which can lead to gout, an exquisitely painful form of joint inflammation, and kidney stones.

One would think that, having such an aversion to liver, I would stay away from it. Believe me, I’ve tried. But I am forced to view its disgusting presence in the supermarket, pictures of it fried and plated on menus, and even watch people eating the disgusting stuff. I have had liver forced on me repeatedly as a child, and in adulthood, people have actually tried to seduce me into eating it through subterfuge and outright falsehood: “Oh, but it is pâté, not really liver. Here, try a bite! It doesn’t taste like liver at all!” (Yes it did!)

I don’t know what is wrong with these hepatophiles that they can’t keep their abominable predilections to themselves. Those of us who don’t share their penchant shouldn’t have to share it, not even by observing it or being seduced into participating. Not only is it patently disgusting, it is a health hazard to eat the stuff, and people simply should not be allowed to do that…especially in public!

Think about it this way…oleander is a lovely, hardy plant sold in nurseries all over the world. But its sap is highly toxic and it is not sold as a food or even as an herb or food additive. Just as the unhealthy qualities of oleander are known, so are the unhealthy qualities of liver…high cholesterol and purines, repository for toxins…well-known. So, why is one allowed to be sold for human consumption and the other is not? Why are parents allowed to force it on their children? Why is it sold and consumed openly, despite the disgust and revulsion it generates in a majority of people? If people are going to be allowed to compromise their health by eating this toxic stew, shouldn’t it be behind closed doors and without the explicit consent of the community? Are we not, after all, our brothers’ keepers?

I think the public sale and consumption of liver should be banned. It is for the good of the health of the community, good for us as a whole and good for the individuals who are merrily poisoning themselves with this noxious stuff: by making it unavailable in the market place it will be easier for them to abstain and to even convert to healthier choices in food. And that, after all, is the goal: a healthier community through healthier individuals. We cannot allow this small faction to indulge their aberrant gustatory fancies at the expense of others, and the health problems brought about by ingesting high cholesterol, high purines and retained toxins ultimately costs us all in lost man-hours in the workplace and higher medical costs.

What of individual freedom of choice? Well, there is plenty of precedent in law that prevents people from indulging themselves at the expense of others or even at the expense of common decency. There is no right to eat liver…you won’t find it in the Constitution anywhere. And if the government can ban other substances and behaviours under the banner of “for the common good,” then banning the sale and consumption of liver is well within the scope of the government’s rights. And if the government can prohibit people from walking around naked on city streets or having sexual relations on the courthouse steps or marrying their dogs, then it can prohibit them partaking of a substance that most of the rest of us find absolutely disgusting.

So, when the petition arrives asking you to support a bill banning the display, sale, preparation and consumption of liver, please sign it. It will benefit you not only in saving you from having to look at the repulsive stuff and having to watch people actually put it in their mouths, it will ultimately cut down on sick days taken from work and the cost of treating their self-induced ailments (which raises your health insurance premiums). It’s a win-win situation for all of us. We can’t let a small coterie of deviants continue to hold the rest of us captive to their ghastly tastes and practices!

[/sarcasm]

How to lose a long-term loyal customer in 2 brief emails…

I haven’t had my hair done since December, what with all the drama surrounding the move and all. It is now getting unmanageably long and the dark ribbon of dishwater blonde hair…my roots…is starting to become entirely too obvious. Monday was a public holiday, which meant that people with non-retail jobs were off work and the retailers had extra customers…or at least in theory that’s how it is supposed to work. It doesn't, but that's a tale for another time.

Before we left Cape Town, my hairdresser gave me a business card with the formula for my hair colour written on the back of it. My hair has a large amount of red in it (even though it is not visible to the naked eye) and requires an unusual amount of toner added to the colour to keep me from coming up with orange roots. Most hairdressers don’t believe me when I tell them this and, afraid of my turning up with purple hair (what you get when you use too much ash toner), they go conservative the first (and even subsequent) time they touch up my roots. The result is blonde hair with a brassy orange stripe along the hair line. My Cape Town hairdresser took about six months to come up with the right formula (which uses an unusual amount of ash toner) and for the past 5 ½ years we’ve rubbed along famously. My natural hair colour is not dramatically different from the blonde shade I ordinarily wear, so even having it grow out a month or so isn’t a problem. But it’s been more than three months and it is time to find a salon that can touch me up.

So, despite my feeling like hammered horse hockey (I was coming down with this flu), we trundled all over town looking for a hairdresser that carried the brand of hair colour I have used faithfully for nearly six years. It is a German brand and virtually every salon in Cape Town carries it…imagine my surprise at arriving home yesterday afternoon, still shaggy and two-tone. We went to several independent salons and three malls, and not a one of them carried the brand I was seeking! I was shocked, as I expected it to be as ubiquitous here in Joburg as it was in Cape Town!

When we got home, I got on the web, looking for a salon that used this brand…no luck. So, then I searched the brand name and came up with their website in Germany…apparently they don’t know their product is used in South Africa, as this country was not on their list of countries they serviced! With a bit more sleuthing...and a fever starting to cloud my vision…I came upon a South African site for the product line and decided to ask their customer service for a list of salons in my area that used their products, expecting a quick response with a list attached. That’s not exactly what I got…
________________________________________
From: Sweet Violet
Sent: 05 April 2010 02:19 PM
To: Customer Service, HairCare Division
Subject: HairCare Enquiry - General Enquiry

I moved to Joburg from Cape Town in January. I have been unable to find a salon in the Sandton/Morningside area that uses your hair colouring products. I am so desperate for a touch up that I am considering switching to Redken or L’Oreal just so I can get rid of the contrasting stripe down the middle of my head.

Please advise how to find salons in my area that use your colouring products ASAP.
________________________________________
From: Customer Service Liaison
Sent: 05 April 2010 07:31 PM
To: SweetViolet
Subject: HairCare Enquiry - General Enquiry

Dear SweetViolet,

Thank you for contacting us with regards to your enquiry.

Are you referring to HairCare Salon products or HairCare Retail products (Spectrum Hair Colour available at local stores)?
________________________________________
From: Sweet Violet
Sent: 06 April 2010 06:19 AM
To: Customer Service Liaison, HairCare Division
Subject: HairCare Enquiry - General Enquiry

I am looking for a salon in Sandton, preferably near Morningside, that uses HairCare hair colouring products. My hairdresser in Cape Town uses HairCare exclusively. When I moved to Joburg she gave me the formula for my hair colour, but I cannot find a salon in Joburg that uses your products. I thought perhaps you would have a list of salons in Joburg that stock your products.

Thanks for your time
________________________________________
From: Customer Service, Hair Care Division
Sent: 06 April 2010 09:21 AM
To: AnotherPerson@websiteforanothercompany.com
Cc: Yetanotherperson@yetanotherwebsite.com; sweetviolet
Subject: HairCare Enquiry - General Enquiry

Hello,

Could you please assist with this enquiry?

Thank you kindly,

Customer Service Liaison
________________________________________

In the meantime, while I am still waiting for the company to provide me with a list of who in the area stocks their products, two of my friends have found salons where I can go (at malls near their homes). Gee, if I didn’t already have friends here to pull their bacon out of the fire, if I was newly moved here with no prior local contacts, the company would have lost a loyal customer, someone who ordinarily spends about R500 every six weeks ($66 USD) or so on her hair…a good bit of which goes for the purpose of buying their hair colour!

I dunno…I’ve been contemplating going red lately and there apparently is no salon using these products near my new house, so I just may bite the bullet and try something new…whattaya think? Red? or stick with the old faithful, blonde?

Let me know what you think…