Category Archives: Health and Medicine

December 14, 2012 · 0:00

Newtown

I know this town.  My late sister Judy lived here for over 20 years.  She raised her three kids there.  They went to Sandy Hook Elementary School.

I know this town.  Its stores, the way the roads twist and turn.

I know this town.  The way the waitresses at the Blue Colony Diner know your order, even when you only come to town a couple of time a year.

I know this town.  It is America.  And America’s children shouldn’t die.  Not because somebody snapped and needed to kill.

I have written numerous posts on guns, gun control and the fact that guns are designed only to kill.  When those guns point at and kill children, well, perhaps it is time that we all took note.  That perhaps, just perhaps, folks should not be allowed to have guns that can do more than simply protect them and their homes.  That people should not be allowed to have guns that can do more than shoot Bambi.  That people should not fucking be able to shoot and kill six year olds.

We do all we can do to protect our children:  bicycle helmets, seat belts, safety restraints on everything they touch.  Screens around trampolines.  The list is endless.

But we don’t stop the possibity of them being blown away in their fucking kindergarten classrooms.

What is wrong with this picture.

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Filed under Childhood Traumas, Criminal Activity, Gun control, Health and Medicine, Mental Health

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December 2, 2012 · 0:00

For Medicinal Purposes Only

It wasn’t my fault that my dog developed a drinking problem.  Really.  It was the vet’s.

First of all, it is WAY too late to call the ASPCA on me.  The dog and my liver are both gone.  So is the vet.  And the neighborhood where this takes place is totally yuppified.  There are no witnesses.  Except me, and I ain’t talking.  Oh, actually, yes I am.

Anyway, like all drinking problems, Goliath’s started gently, innocently.

But I guess I’d better back up.

You see, if I’d had any sense, I wouldn’t have taken that psycho puppy home.  He was past the cute stage, and had clearly been abused.  He didn’t like me when I went to the door of the house where he had a short-term reprieve from the dog pound.  Jeff, the man who advertised the puppy in the Washington Post, had taken the dog away from his friend who was abusing the dog, but Jeff couldn’t keep him.  He was going to be taken to the shelter the next day to be put down unless a home was found.  For $15, I got a teenage psycho dog, a leash and half a bag of dog food.

It was the best money I ever spent.

But still, I was stupid to do it.  Totally out of my mind.  He had greeted me at the door when we first met with aggression. Nasty, scary barking and growling.  But as soon as he was in my car he loved me.  He was never cross with me again.  If you’ve never had a truly devoted dog, you won’t understand this; if you have you will nod your head in agreement.  No one has ever or will ever love me as much as that dog did.   Did he somehow realize that he owed me his life, or did he like the brand of dog food I bought?  Hard to know for sure.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t equally devoted to other folks.  Or they to him.  It was way closer to oil and water.

He loved my roommate, Keily, too, which was convenient since she lived there with us.  My mother, when she stayed with us later that year, became a favorite.  But everybody else was greeted at the door by a growing maniac of a dog who didn’t want them inside his house.  I would hold him firmly and assure my (gullible) friend(s) that Goliath would calm down once they were inside.  But I lied.

He didn’t calm down.  Not exactly.  Once he accepted that it was OK for them to be there, Goliath assumed that they had come to visit him and that the reason they had come was to play with him.  So he would bring his toys to them.  Each and every one he owned (including his Ronald Reagan and Mikael Gorbachev squeak toys.)  He would put his head on their lap and bounce his head up and down until they played — a particular favorite of visiting men.  He would put one paw on them, then the other, then the top of his torso.  He wanted to play.  Period.  And saying no to an ever larger German Shepherd that my friends were actually terrified of was generally not something any of them were really willing to do.  So they played.

I have incredibly good friends, in case you can’t tell.  Personally I have no idea why they came back.  The dog drove many of them crazy.

Before you say it, Goliath got plenty of exercise.  I took him on long walks morning, after work and often late at night.  At night I would drive him to the grounds of the US Capitol where we’d walk around the buildings, he’d swim in the fountains, he’d be off the leash and had a great time.  I threw sticks, I exercised him.  He would pick up huge branches and ram them into me for fun.  I was bruised from head to toe.  And something story-worthy always happened.

For instance, one night we were on the Capitol grounds a few days after the Labor Day concert was held.  It was lucky for me that there was a line of port-a-potties, because I was having GI problems that night and needed to go.  I tied Goliath to a tree branch and went inside to use the potty, something I’d never done before.  Goliath went out of his mind because he couldn’t see me.  He broke free and started jumping up and down on the front of my port-a-potty, rocking it back and forth.  I was terrified that he was going to up-end the thing.  He didn’t calm down until I came out, which was hard to do as he was jumping against the damn door.  The next day at the office where I worked as a paralegal, I regaled my friends about the Washington Post headline that almost was:

Paralegal Perishes in Port-a-Potty

Anyway, as Goliath grew into his name, it became obvious that something had to be done.  I took him to training which was great for sitting, staying, laying down, heeling and the like, but my $200 fee didn’t cover rules for inside playing.  Nor did it cover how to keep him from killing my friends who had the temerity to knock on the door.

And then it happened.  When he was about seven months, I mentioned the situation to Goliath’s vet.

“Give him a tiny bit of beer,” she said.  “It’ll calm him right down, and he’ll go to sleep and leave you and your friends in peace.”

It was brilliant; it worked like a charm.  And it hardly took any beer at all for him to nod off, and he was content with the cheapest variety (as was I – hey, I was young and poor).  It was the most cost-effective remedy I have ever seen.

For a while.

The trouble was, he liked beer.  No, he loved beer.  He was GERMAN for cryin’ out loud, of course he liked beer.

So instead of wanting to play with my friends, he wanted to drink with them.  (Yes, he matured quite quickly.)  And just as he refused to take “no” for an answer when he wanted to play, well, he was even more insistent when he wanted to drink.  Every alcoholic beverage that was opened in my house for years required a “dog tax” – Goliath got a sip.  And there was no way you were going to get away without paying.  He was bigger than all of us.

If you read My Silver Lining, you know that my mother spent 2-1/2 months with me helping me recuperate from surgery.  Well, Mom adored Goliath, and loved nothing better than to sit with me and him and have a beer.  For Christmas that year, Mom gave him a special bowl.  A red plastic, heart-shaped bowl that immediately became Goliath’s beer bowl.  Using his feet to flip it up, he could pick up his beer bowl in his mouth, and thrust it at anyone who had an open bottle or a can.  It was impossible to say no.  And it was always just a sip.

Beer Bowl

Goliath played a huge part in my life in the 1980s, and was the most incredible dog.  He had a brilliant sense of humor, and did so many crazy things that I always had a Goliath story to tell to divert my mind from the fact that I was then a very sick young woman.  Amazingly, Goliath could always tell when I was really sick and couldn’t walk him from when I was feeling lazy.  He never let me get away with laziness, but was gracious if I was really sick.

When my now-husband John arrived on the scene, Goliath loved him immediately.  After our first date, Goliath and I walked John to his car, and Goliath, so intent on watching John, walked smack into a street sign, a complete Wile E. Coyote move. Goliath was hooked.  So I had to be too, didn’t I?

John and I had known each other for years and had many mutual friends.  When they heard we were going to move in together they all said “What about the dog?”

“Of course he’s coming,” said John.  “It’s a package deal.”  Goliath and I chose wisely.

Goliath lived until 1992.  Interestingly, our two subsequent dogs, Charlie and Cooper, have both had liver problems, but neither of them were drinkers.  Goliath’s?  His liver was just fine.

Goliath look-alike 2

Goliath’s Twin*

*     *     *

Goliath was a wonderful dog and a great drinking buddy.  This is not an actual photo of him — this dog is actually a breed called a King Shepherd (the photo is from here:  http://www.kingshepherd.com/)  The breed didn’t exist when Goliath was around, but it is exactly what he looked like.  As it turned out he was a cross between a German Shepherd and an Alaskan Malamute.  He had longer hair than most Shepherds, thicker fur, and a straight back.

This dog is Goliath’s twin, except that Goliath had one ear that flopped over, making him look completely ridiculous.

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Filed under Criminal Activity, Dogs, Family, Goliath Stories, Health and Medicine, History, Humor, Pets, Stupidity

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November 21, 2012 · 0:00

My Silver Lining

Thursday, November 22, is Thanksgiving in the U.S.  It is also the 30th anniversary of the surgery I had for what was then thought to be severe ulcerative colitis.  It was a difficult time for me, but one for which I will be thankful for on Thanksgiving and really every day.  Yes, I got my health back as a result of the surgery, but that wasn’t the best part.

The most important part, the silver lining, was that I got to know my Mom, and it started a close relationship that lasted for the rest of her life and that I will feel grateful for for the rest of mine.

Mom was the sweetest woman on the planet.  My friends adored her.  Our house was always open to hoards of kids.  We lived near the beach, and it was convenient for everybody to just hang at our house.  But it was more than that. For years dozens of teens used our house as their home away from home.  There was always room, always plenty to eat, always a welcome.  No one was ever turned away, and the answer to “can So-And-So stay the night” (or “the weekend” or in some cases “the summer”) was always “sure.”

But we weren’t close, Mom and I.  I was Daddy’s girl from the start.  Mom, well, I loved her.  I even liked her, mostly.  It’s just that there wasn’t a whole lot about Mom to make me respect her.  She was completely helpless, you see.  Hopelessly so.  I can’t stand that and never have been able to deal with dependent people.  And “helpless”?  That was Mom in a nutshell.

She didn’t drive.  She didn’t shop without Dad.  She didn’t go for a walk alone.  She didn’t try to take control of family problems and help figure out how to solve them.  She waited for my dad to get home to reprimand, make a decision, to blow her nose, or so it seemed.  She was utterly and totally dependent upon my Dad.  It was incredibly annoying to this girl growing up in the late sixties and seventies during one of the strongest pushes for equal rights for women.  My friends’ mothers were out protesting the Vietnam War.  Mine didn’t even vote.  They burned their bras; Mom ironed hers.  They voiced their opinions ever more loudly.  Mom looked to Dad to indicate which way was up.

After I left home and became more self-sufficient, my irritation at Mom’s inability to do anything without Dad’s help, grew.

So when Mom announced, just weeks before I was to have radical, difficult surgery, that she was going to come to help, well, I panicked.  She was going to help me?  Yeah right.  Her announcement sent me into apoplexy.  It was the worse possible news heaped on a whole ream of really shitty news.  Who the hell was going to help her?

I lived with my roommate, Keily, and my 120 lb. alcoholic German Shepherd, Goliath, in a tiny Washington, DC, townhouse, in a not terribly safe area.  I was sure that Mom would get mugged — she’d make an easy target.  I feared that she would let the dog out and they would both die.  I drove a battered and temperamental VW Bug with a stick shift that Mom didn’t know how to use.  And of course, I wasn’t going to be able to help her because I was going to be recovering from having my guts totally ripped open and reorganized.

I couldn’t believe she would do this to me.

At the same time I couldn’t hurt her feelings and tell her that I didn’t want her.  Nope.  I could never have done that.  Not if my life depended on it.  Which of course, it might.

But once she dropped that bomb, I stopped worrying about the surgery, about the recovery, about everything except how I would take care of my caretaker.  Thankfully, my brother Fred came to help too.  He could drive my car; he could help with Mom for the week he took off from work.  My roommate, Keily, was a star, too.  (That’s a whole different story.)  But Mom came for what was a very long recovery, 2-1/2 months, so felt like I’d be pretty much on my own in taking care of her.

It wasn’t long after she arrived before I realized that Mom without Dad was a different person.  Dad loved the caretaker role, and she was happy to let him play it.  Without Dad, Mom had opinions on stuff, could make decisions and could give savvy and sage advice.  I decided quickly that maybe she and I were related after all.

And as soon as we got to the hospital, I was incredibly glad she was there.  I was admitted and headed up to my room, sending Mom and Fred to get settled in their hotel.  It was about dinnertime, which didn’t matter to me; I’d been on a clear liquid diet for about a week.  And while I was starving, I knew I couldn’t eat.  I had my instructions from my doctor:

(1) Do not eat; (2) Continue taking your medicines just like you are now; (3) Show up to the hospital.  (Always pay attention to the details when your guts are on the line.)

Now Hopkins is one of the best hospitals in the country and it was also one of only two places in the country where the operation I was to have could be performed.  The surgery was brand, spankin’ new – just a smidge beyond experimental.  It was dangerous.  It was highly specialized.   My doctors were to take out my large intestine, rearrange what was left of my plumbing so that things worked normally, and close me up.  Two surgeries were involved – they had to give me a colostomy (ewwww – a bag) in between the two surgeries while my innards healed.  Only 100 of these surgeries had been done in the world.  I was my surgeon’s 7th.  I was scared shitless which is saying a whole lot for a girl with bowel trouble.

But when I got to the hospital, everything went wrong.  They tried to insist I eat; they tried to give me the wrong medicine; they forgot about me and left me hanging out in my room where I fell asleep for several hours before someone wondered who I was.  The grand finale came when two nurses wheeled in an EKG machine, hooked me up and turned it on – and the machine started smoking.   The nurses, trying valiantly not to laugh, had to quickly unplug it and get it out of there.

“MOM!!!!”

I called her at her hotel in a complete panic, hysterical.

“I am not going to have this surgery.  What kind of a hospital is this?  They can’t even get an EKG machine to work.  It was smoking Mom, SMOKING!!!!  I’m not.  I’m not. I’m not.”

How is it that Moms know just how to calm down the most hysterical daughter?  I was and she did.  And she didn’t need Dad one little bit.  Yup, she calmed me down, and then, I heard later, called the nurses’ desk and chewed them out royally.  I’m pretty sure that was the first time she’d ever chewed anyone out.  But she wasn’t going to let anybody or anything upset her daughter or get in the way of the surgery that her daughter desperately needed.  And whatever she said worked.  Nothing else got screwed up.  They paid attention to her daughter.

In fact, Helpless Mom became SuperMom.  She corralled doctors when they didn’t come in a timely manner, she sweet-talked most of the nurses and they seemed to come around more and more often as they laughed and joked with Mom.  She was on a first name basis with all the residents and interns, knew if they were married, where they were from.  They got a little bit of mothering whenever they came into the room, and she charmed the lot of them.

She was always full of laughter, encouragement and fun.  Except when her sixth sense told her that I was feeling sorry for myself; then she’d tell me to stop sniveling.  Sometimes I needed that.

Back at home, she was great too.  She found the grocery store and walked to and from, lugging bags of food.  She fed me and Keily, gave beer to the dog, helped me get upstairs and downstairs.  Helped me do many things that were totally disgusting.  She helped me be independent again.  We laughed our way through Christmas together and then my birthday in January.  We laughed for two months, barely coming up for air.  We talked a whole lot, too, about everything.  We became fast friends.

There is one incident though, that made me realize that I’d never really known her before.  Could this crazy woman really be my Mom?

We’d driven my VW to Baltimore for a pre-surgical checkup before the 2nd surgery, scheduled for the 9th of February.  It was late January, and there were several inches of snow on the ground.  On the way back home, the VW died in the center lane of a busy highway.  I managed to coast to the side of the road, where the bug sighed once and died.  Shit.  I was still not at my best, and the promise of a long snowy walk was not a pleasant one for either Mom or I.

But a blue Honda Civic two-door driven by a big burly guy pulled up along the roadside next to us.  He rolled down the window and asked if we needed a lift.  I was about to explain that my car had just died and would he please call a tow truck, when, well, Mom jumped into the back seat! I stood there with my mouth flapping. Because I could hear her voice from my childhood talking in the back of my head:

NEVER EVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES GET INTO A CAR WITH A STRANGE MAN.

THEY ARE ALL RAPISTS

But there she was, the woman who taught me never, ever, to get into a car with a rapist — she was in the back seat of a stranger/potential rapist’s car.  WTF?????  What the hell was she doing?

I didn’t know what else to do, so I got into the front seat.  And there on the floor was something else that shocked me:  A  teddy bear with a green t-shirt that said “I’m Going To Steal Your Love.”

“Wonderful,” I thought, “a rapist with a sense of humor.”

As it turned out, the guy wasn’t a rapist — really!  He took us to a reputable garage where they agreed to tow and fix my damn car.

But the adventure wasn’t over yet — we still needed to get home.  The hotel across from the garage had a shuttle bus that went to BWI Airport.  From there, we were told, there was another shuttle bus that could get us back to DC.  It sounded perfect.

Perfect except for the fact that we had hardly any money left  The shuttle to DC only took cash.  No credit cards.  No beads.  No chickens.  Cash.  Shit.

We didn’t have enough for the fare, and couldn’t have come up with any more money.  But that didn’t stop Mom.

She walked up to the shuttle driver and chatted her up.

“Do you think you can let us both on for $16.50?”

“Sorry M’am, the adult fare is $10.”

“What’s the child’s fee?  I mean, after all, she’s my little girl.”

The driver let us both on, shaking her head and smiling at Mom.  Feeling like she’d done a good deed (she had).

Mom was there for my second operation, and then she headed home with Dad who had come up for it.  When he arrived, Mom didn’t just let Dad do everything as she always had before.  She showed him around — showed him her turf.  She had realized that she really liked feeling in charge, and doing things on her own, for herself and for me.

For the rest of Mom’s life, she and I had a whole different relationship.  I had always loved her, always liked her.  But her care for me, and her resourcefulness and sense of duty and just plain fun let me develop a respect for her I’d never had.

I’ve always felt lucky in a way to have had these health problems.  Because they gave me my Mom.  I would never have known her, never have laughed with her so very much.  I wouldn’t have heard the stories of her life, told with love and humor, the way she did everything.

So on Thanksgiving, I will raise a special toast to Mom, my SuperMom.

Could you say “no” to this woman?

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Filed under Childhood Traumas, Driving, Family, Health and Medicine, Humor, Mom

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November 19, 2012 · 0:00

The Well

Today I am hanging out over at Le Clown’s — at his serious site, Black Box Warnings.  Come on over.

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Filed under Family, Geneva Stories, Health and Medicine, Mental Health

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November 15, 2012 · 0:00

He’ll Never Guess

This year, John and I are toning way down on gifts.  Money is a bit tight, and we have a house full of the junk from Christmases past.  We really don’t need any more.

So I’ve been trying to figure out something fun and different to give John this year.  He’s so hard to buy for.  He has plenty of clothes, electronics, crap.  He’s asked for a few nice books, and I’ll be glad to get them.  But I’ve been trying to figure out something different.  Unusual.  Unique.  A gift he’ll never forget.

You’ll be happy to learn that while reading the news today, I found it.  And it’s to die for.

I’m getting my husband a calendar.  Well, not just any calendar.  Nope.  He’s getting:

The Linder Coffin Calendar 

A calendar of coffins and cuties.

Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry?

Have you ever seen anything like it?  I didn’t think so.  Here’s a link to the rest of the 2012 lineup.

Surprisingly, there’s apparently quite a ruckus over in Poland about this calendar.  Would you believe it, the Catholic Church is peeved.  They think that it is disrespectful.  The article I read said:

A church spokesman has said that human death should be treated with solemnity and not mixed up with sex.

 You know, I’m beginning to think those bishops and cardinals just don’t get sex!

Still, we’re not Catholic, so we don’t have to worry.  Beside’s I’m pretty sure John will love his calendar.  He certainly won’t be able to guess what it is.

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