Public service on Sundays. Transporting the stricken

Transportation

When the worst of the emergency is stable you get the question of transport to the Emergency room. The basic rules for Medicare are this: If they do anything that involves using their supplies other than oxygen the subject needs to go in and be checked by the doctor. If you have insurance check the rules, and make your decision according.
If the emergency has been taken care of and you don't find spending three hours in the emergency room to be a good use of your time and you can do it without financial problems by all means don't go. If you must, then do it with whatever grace you can muster. 
Be sure you know where they are taking your person.  In my area  which emergency room you go to depends on what the emergency is. So ask.  Write it down and get the street address if you don't know where that is.

Don't ride in with them. After the ER releases your  person, you are on your own to get home.  So drive  down yourself.  Most of the checkup time is going to be sitting and waiting for the doc to show up, and waiting for the labs to be looked at. Your role is basicly to guard you person. You don't need to rush and this is a good time for some pre prep and a time to calm down.
Only one person is allowed to be with the one who had the emergency, so only one person should go.  Everyone else can  find out later.
If this isn't a freaking screaming emergency,  While they are loading your person onto the gurney grab a bag and put in supplies that will make sitting and waiting easier. I actually have a belly pack that is designated and half packed. I put in a glucose meter and strips, the Footless Man's MP3, his cell phone, the paper with the crossword, a pen and a munch bar. Depending on the state he is in I might also send a set of clean clothes, and I make sure that he has both prosthetics and his cane riding with him.
If you can, send the history sheet with the EMT's. If things happen too fast, bring it along. It saves repetitions and lets people know what is going on.
If it is an emergency, then you can take the time to pack after they roll. You will meet up shortly and believe me, right now you are superfluous.
So after the ambulance heads out, Stop and make yourself a cup of tea. Sit down and drink it, and review what you need to bring for yourself. Call a friend and bitch if that helps. Then pack up and go.
The following laundry list may be a helpful one.
If the ambulance rolled without waiting for the useful bags for your person, You need to bring them.
So here is what you and your person might need:
Your person may need a full set of clean clothes from undies out.
(It depends on the emergency, but sometimes they have to cut clothes to get to important stuff.)
If it is winter bring an appropriate coat.
They will need the standard medical stuff that they use, like their glucose meter and strips.
Pack some food. Hospital food can be appalling and the box lunches are doubly so.
Pack their cell phone.
They will need something to amuse their mind. a book, an MP3, a gameboy,their knitting.
You will need these too.
Bring the insurance info if this is the first time in.
Drive with deliberation, park with care.
Try to make sure that you are parked in a legal parking spot.  Having your car towed while you are in the emergency room is a copper bottomed drag.
You will be coming in through the emergency room entrance.
You will get a metal detector and bag search.
Make sure that your knitting needles are wood, and a project that fits in your purse is better than a whole bag for itself.
Be aware that what can come in with the ambulance is a whole different animal than what you can bring in through security. This is why you want to send stuff with, it saves an argument.
I can send a bag lunch in with the footless man, but security will try it's damndest to not let me take it in. Sometimes I wonder if they are culling the stuff for their lunch.
The receptionist people will take you back to be with your person.
from here on out it is sitting and waiting time.

Tiny canvas

I got to have a grand talk with Thursday's  Child.  Thursday's Child is my unofficial third child, the Swordsmans best friend.  When I am  struggling to come up with visual images for my card deck I like to talk to him.  He has helped me rethink and re-imagine some of the cards. 
That got me to thinking about the cards in general and kind of how and why these ones exist . 
There are many many tarot card decks out in the world.  People use them to "read" or tell fortunes in all kinds of ways.  There are a lot of reasons that this works.  It has to do with how our brains process symbols and patterns, and find meaning in them. My personal take on Tarot is that I just didn't connect with the images and the symbols  that they presented.

I developed  this deck over the last fifteen years and continue to work with it regularly.  I have retired some of the cards, re imaged others and some are the  very first images and my first drawing style.  They are pretty rough, those first cards.  We are talking small canvas.  They sit 2.5 by 3 inches and the style has gone from pen and ink black and white to water colour  plus pen and ink.

I have a number of feelings about my mini brush work and drawings including some that  are a bit disapointed .  I want to be able to do noble inspiring work that helps people when they look at it. 

What do I come up with? tiny quirky pictures of the human condition that  cause people  to sit and laugh at themselves  while viewing them.

 I just don't do noble.  It comes out quirky every time.  The pictures are two of the originals and two re-images. 

Prosthesises and being able to stand on your own feet

   The Footless Man has been in to the prosthetist today for the first fitting of his new socket.  It seems that even the best prostheitist has times when things just aren't working and  the Footless Man's prosthetic was past  tinkering grinding and playing games with socks.
   The two of them were working on the  basics of fit and I was sitting and watching  as the Footless Man stood, leaned, pushed walked and did his best to get the  test socket to give him a problem.
This is the shorter leg and so the prosthitist has some problems getting a fit that doesn't cause pressure and pain  somewhere in the socket.
    I sat and watched and began designing a prosthetic sock in my head with a graduated  level of thickness and parts where the bones are close to the surface that would need thinner yarn  and parts surrounding  that where you need thicker yarn.  Of course they need to be knitted in the round and how are you going to get it to do all the things you need while knitting in the round?   How about slip stitching for the thicker parts?
  Inspite of the fact that much of my knitting output is socks, I never knitted socks for the Footless Man.  Actually I did.  I had a single sock on the needles for him when his  remaining foot broke down and he chose to have it amputated. 
   I see no point in knitting a sock for a prosthetic foot, so the five inches of top languished for about three months  until my best friend's pre birthday month.  Then in a spirit of lemonade from lemons I made her her a pair of socks with solid navy blue tops and varigated feet. 
   Meanwhile I think that as soon as the new socket needs an extra sock I am going to start knitting and see what I come up with.

The Footless Man told me that he doesn't like having his picture taken.  I told him that someday all I would have of him is pictures, so suck it up and deal.

Oh Look!

I haz new glasses! 
and unbeknownst to me they come with rhinestones.  Glasses bling!  They have the bifocal thing, meaning that I have to decide which side of the line I want to look at the keyboard from.   Mostly my eyes want to look at the keyboard from the middle of the line.
I put them on in the store and just about staggered.  I could see clear over to the far wall. I could see the lady three feet away, colors were crisp and everything stands out.  I have not been so struck sideways with the colors, textures and crispness since the very first pair, when I put them on, and the whole world hit me in the eye. 

The Footless Man and I spent the morning talking, drawing pictures, re drawing pictures and waving our arms  to come to some kind of meeting of the mind about what  should be done with the cherry cabinet thing plus the cherry box. 
Geometry is not on our side.  It has to do with ceiling hight and box hight ( 2 1/2 inches taller than ceiling)  and how to get the box upright , which will take it through an arc way higher than ceiling even with quite a few inches removed. 
The Footless Man was preparing to proceed with next steps that lead to next steps to get to the place where things settle into proper order.

I came in properly glassed and found the next step had been taken.

see the standing two by four in the middle of the picture?

The footless man took his christmas present from me

                                                                                                                                                                         and cut it off.  progress has been made for the day.

Visible progress at that.

huzzah!

Ok, so what do you want for dinner?

I came in from my usual tuesday with a mind focussed on retrieving Lucille from the Mechanic's and glooming ever so slightly because my glasses won't be in until tomorrow to find this:

Note the less than tidy arrangement of the chairs and the addititon of the large cherrywood box to the decor.

The kitchen is functional  but includes another massive cherry cabinet which you may notice is blocking the window.the Footless Man  has begun the last part of the kitchen renovations. 

Ok, good.

 I asked him as I do every night "Do you have an idea of what you would like for dinner?"    and he said that he didn't have an opinion or even a thought about what he wanted to eat. 

So I am not cooking.    It is five thirty or so and I am going knitting.

chayote revisited

Chayote tastes a little bit like zucchini except with less flavor and a firmer texture, more like sponge than glop.  So what do we have here?  a sponge that smells and tastes  faintly of compost.
Ok, I gave it a fair try. 

I have a better idea for what to do with the rest of them. 
Puppets anyone?

Nasty sneaky Basterds

When I was booting up my computer I got a wee flashing red windows shield in the right corner of my screen telling me that my firewall had been turned off and click on it to turn it back on.


I checked in my control panel and the firewall is still on. this is a nasty sneaky try to get you to turn your firewall off. beware!
Run your whole system scan and Don't click on that shield.
this link takes you to a very good place if worst sould befall.
Cheers.

the footless man strikes again.

Today is Saturday and so today The Footless  Man wended his way to the foodbank.  He came back with a wealth of veggies including five Chayote.  They look like pears with an obscene backside or a puckered up mouth.  My two usual ways of figuring this stuff  out have not provided.  The recipe pages on the internet did not provide and The Swordsman hasn't either.
What the heck do you do with these?   what do they taste like?  How do you cook them?
Sunday Morning:
The swordsman says to cook them like potatoes.  I am going to try a light fry  and see what happens.

Fun and Games with the fire guys: more public service.

I hope that  you may not end up on a first name basis with your friendly local EMT's.
 I am.  This is not through any real wish to be on my part.  The Footless Man has periodic episodes of Insulin shock. They seem to be worse at the season changes and when he is ill or going through too much stress. Over the years I have gotten very familiar with the way this works.
  EMT's show up  in a sort of come as you are Chinese fire drill and they usually end up seeing people in embarrassing clothing  or lack therof, in embarrassing places at strange times with no real explanation except that it seemed like a good idea at the time.  Whatever it is that they walk into is not going to seem strange to them, they have seen it all.
In spite of all that, you may not want them to see it all in your house.
Moving things you don't want them to see to a quieter or more discreet location is a fine idea. Nobody needs to know the size and color of your underthings so getting them off the floor into a laundry basket is a good move.
Most of the fire guys ( Guy's come in both male and female.) are EMT's too, and in my neck of the woods you end up with both when you call one.
You get the huge honking fire truck plus the huge honking ambulance parked in front of your house to entertain the neighbors with speculations.  In talking to the EMT's, I find that part of the reason they send both is so that if they need extra muscle they have it.  The Footless Man is fairly slender but in the throes of shock he can be a lot to handle.   Having a couple extra guys around to sit on him has been useful on occasion.  It also helps when they have to muscle someone onto a gurney, or down a flight of stairs.

Anyway, if you have to have their help, it is good to remember that you will have four or five large and buff guys  (both male and female) standing about in your house and (oddly enough) more likely than not in your bathroom.

They tell me that due to the nature of bathrooms, People tend to have emergencys there  because it is very bad manners to disturb someone meditating in the bathroom.  Uncle Charly goes off to use the facilities before supper and is discovered there, pants round the ankles forty five minutes later deep in insulin shock.  The Guys are not embarrassed. You don't need to be either. 
  You get two sorts of emergency guys.  The majority of them are very nice people.  They show up  and help all sorts in all weathers at any time of the day or night.  Once they get your measure they tend to listen to what you have to say.  (The guys at the local station know the Footless Man and me.  They know not to slam him with a full ampule of glucose and that he has to go in to the ER because Medicare won't pay for the trip over unless he does.) 
You run into problems when you get a strange crew and the lead is an Arrogant Prick.
The Arrogant Prick is generally new and hasn't figured out that the people in the house tend to be experts on  the reason the ambulance guys are there.  I may not have  general experience on diabetic insulin shock but I have twenty plus years with my particular diabetic and if I say he is in shock I don't want some jerk asking me why I think that.
You can defuse some of the AP's power trip by having a basic facts and information printout ready when they come ramping in the door and head for  the trouble.  This saves a lot of time and confusion.  It also helps you because you don't have to answer a bunch of what may seem like irrelevant questions when you are too anxious to think.
  On it you have the name, age, basic problems, past history, med list, last blood sugar if thats part of it,  and a space for the latest history of what happened before they got there and what you have done already( like if you administered Glucagon and how many glucose tabs or gel you got down him first and how long ago that might have been.)   Mine also has some useful tips for dealing pleasantly with the Footless Man.
I have my med history as a word doc and after the nice conversation with the  911dispatch, I go and print it out. 
Then the lowest guy on the totem pole doesn't have to sit around with you  and miss out on all the action.  I mean, they made the trip, they want to be there while  whatever it is  goes on. 
This particular attitude sometimes leaves you with the impression of finding the answer to the question;
How many big guys can you fit into a bathroom the size of a refrigerator carton?  
Seven seems to be about it the last time I counted, and two of them had to stand in the tub.
This brings up a good point.  Once the guys get there, find another room to be in.  You can ask them to put a layer between the sheets and the IV so that you don't have to get blood off the bed clothes, and then just get out of the way.
I usually busy myself making a bag lunch that the Footless Man is likely to eat once he is up and running again, locating the items he will want while waiting in the ER and being available if needed to answer questions.
Be aware that the job here is to get the emergency stable enough to transport  it to better fascilities. that means that the next time I will talk about  the transport process.

Testosterone Poisoning

The Footless Man has decided that he is going to take on the task of putting new tires on the back of Lucille.
(Lucille is my little white truck.)  In support of this he is going down to the pawn shop to see if he can find an impact wrench.  Then he is going to remove the back tires and move them up to the front wheels and put the newer tires on the back.  The newer tires are on different rims but he thinks they will fit anyway.  If not of course he thinks we can have them moved to the front truck rims and then put on the back wheels.
To me this all sounds like his manly balls are on the line for some reason that I am not quite sure of.
I think that paying some tire guys forty dollars and having them muck with it sounds like money well spent.
It also sounds to me like I should get up early and get the hell out of the house until he is done with whatever he is going to do. 
Knitting, anyone?

Surprise

The Footless Man was smoothing up the blankets  on the bed after getting up and spied the ear buds to my MP3 player, sticking out from under the pillow.  He nearly beat them to death before he realized that they were earbuds.  I had replaced the  former set of fetching lady bugs with a pair of  flies. 
If I am listening to music in a public place, it is because I would prefer not to be approached.  I find that a pair of off putting and distinctly wierd ear buds does the trick nicely.  They have  very nice sound quality as well.  Just the thing for the hour bus ride I sometimes have to take home.  Pretty good for scaring the heck out of the Footless Man too.

The Twenty first of January

My #2 son, the Swordsman, turns twenty three today. 
He is a child of epic imagination and great courage.    From the first he showed a wonderful combination of determination, a strong sense of self and an epic sense of fashion that is unlike anyone elses.  His sense of adventure  made him somewhat hard to keep track of. I think he got lost everywhere he went including at the county fair.  The first sentence I taught him to say was "Me Jamey, me lost."
 Mercifully he didn't tend to disrobe, he always loved costume and so wore a self selected collection of clothing  intended to increase his sense of adventure.  It included a star spangled cape, boots, swim goggles, dishwashing gloves, black face paint, and a collection of batiked dragon t shirts. 
In the first grade, his teacher allowed him to wear the cape but after several incidents decided regretfully that his mask wasn't allowed to come to school.
James was a kid that really needed swords.  Any stick became one and he spent a lot of time jumping out of bushes after monsters, stick in hand and telling me about sword and  sorcery adventures that he made up as he went along.
In the fifth grade I set him in front of the keyboard of our first  constucted computer and suggested that he write out one of the storys he told me.  In an hour he cranked out a five page epic titled "The Voyge of Aartreu"  complete with car crash spelling that worked if you took a run at it.
James came with a sound effects track.  He hummed honked and hsshhed, binged and bonked in many tones constantly.  One of my quiet enjoyments was to listen to him in a tiled room with good acoustics.

When he was about fourteen, it became clear that he needed to learn how to really use a real sword.  We looked about and James found a martial arts class in sword, Iaido.
This is a picture with his friend David, and Nelson Sensei, his teacher.

I was concerned because I had seen too many people waving wooden swords around and I didn't want James to be one of them. 
He wasn't.  His teachers taught him the discipline and respect that using a weapon requires, including how to walk away from a fight.  I think he was sixteen when he began cross training in Aikido. There was a while when he attended Iaido on Sundays and Aikido on Thursdays, and I did not worry about him being bullied at school.

In this picture he is practicing sword cuts on a pumpkin.

James stopped training after he graduated from high school for a while.  He took some time to think about what he wanted and finally decided that he wanted to become a professional chef.

The same inner compass that steered him to Iaido and Aikido steered him to cooking school.  Cooking school took him to a big city and back to Aikido.

This is James, a Certified Chef, a title so new that is still squeaks when he turns around.

Now it is his birthday, and I am so pleased at how his determination and inner discipline have carried him so well and so far.  Happy birthday, James the swordsman.

For the fire guys

Last night when the EMT's were carting the Footless Man off to the ER, one of the fire guys asked me if I had drawn any cartoons lately.  I said that I had not.  He said that that was a pity, because he really liked my cartoons.  I think that this strip is one of the best I did.  It gives you a good idea about the way Insulin shock is.

click on the pictures to embiggen them

Settling into soup chickenhood

I looked into the mirror this morning and saw my mom looking out at me.  Someone replaced my knees with fifty year old creakers, and my chin has done something that looks like it is an extension of my neck.
 
A friend and I were talking about this today.  I was mildly worrying that the new glasses with the bifocal lines were going to make me look old.  Or something like that.  She laughed.  She said that if we asked someone in their twenties  they would tell us.  We are fifty-some.  We are old.  We may be attractive, nice looking but it comes with the rider For-a-woman-of-her-age. 
I am no longer in a category that will ever be seen as "hot". Worrying about lines, grey hair, and the effect of gravity is pointless.   I am a soup chicken no longer a tender young thing.

Then I went home to the Footless Man.  He thinks and says that I am the most beautiful woman on the face of the earth, truly georgeous, and genuinely "hot"  Last year he bought me a rhinstone spangled tank top, and keeps pointing out skirts that sit well above the knee as just what I should wear.
There are mirrors and mirrors.  I think I will stop looking in the bathroom mirror so much, and spend more time looking in the Footless Man's eyes.

visiting Insulin shock once again, damnit

It is something around 5AM and I am sitting here typing because I can't be in bed right now.
The Footless Man  damn his eyes and bless his soul, is in insulin shock again.  After twenty years of sleeping next to him I am so attuned that sometimes I wake him up just before he goes into the depths, feed him a couple glucose and go back to sleep. 
This is not one of those.  He managed to make the trip all the way down into unresponsiveness before his breathing and twitching woke me up.  Depending on what kind of brain feed he has going when he goes in he can be a serious pain in the tuchus while he is there.  Today isn't all that bad because he is relatively cooperative, and mercifully he isn't conversational.    When I say cooperative I mean, I put a glucose tab in his mouth and he eats it without arguing, asking me what it is, turning his head, or chewing it up and spitting it out.  The EMT's think I should be using glucose gel.   I think that if they think it is such a good idea they should try to get it in him.  I suppose that I should taste it to see what it is like.  He says that it tastes a bit like piss.  I mostly trust his judgement on this although you never know.  
Most Glucose tabs are pretty awful, and the orange ones reach a pinnacle of horrible that is hard to believe.  Dex 4 makes the best tasting ones and they seem to have come up with a formula that cuts the god awful cloying sweetness, and makes them easier to get down.  The Strawberry and cream ones are actually pretty tasty.
I have a fair bit of resentment about being jerked out of sleep with what is quite frankly an annoying medical emergency that won't go away unless dealt with promptly. It reminds me a bit of having your period start in the middle of the night.  You absolutely have to get it dealt with fast because the consequences are too horrible to let go. I realize that this is essentially unfair.  At the same time I also realize that His experience of Insulin shock is a period of blank with feeling like genuine crap for a while after, plus the humiliation of meeting the EMT's in embarrassing clothes and all too often in the bathroom.  It is the people around him that have the actual experience of the emergency and I find as I am getting older that it can be profoundly isolating and painful.
I used to think that it was carelessness on his part, but as I have watched and learned I now understand that  it is not.  Diabetes is unpredictable and after 69 years, he can't always tell what the results of his eating, insulin and activity will be.  Meantime sometimes I am up early waiting to get back to bed when his blood sugar levels come up.
If you are wondering why I didn't call in 911, it is because he was cooperating and eating the glucose, so I knew he would be OK.  I call 911 when his insulin addled brain makes it impossible to get him taken care of. I have too much to do today to want to pull three to five hours into dealing with EMT plus emergency room along with everything else when it isn't needed. He is doing fine now, his sugar levels are up where they should be.  I am going to get on with my day.
addendnum @ 7:29 Pm 
I came home from seeing a client @630 this evening  and found the Footless man on the floor in the throes.  He is off in the ER.  I am in here bitching.

Carving a place for himself

This is the Sword Man.  He is my other child.  He just graduated from school with his Chef Certification.  As I understand it this means that he can go anywhere in the world and learn any cusine that he chooses, and work his way as he goes. 
He too is an artist.  His chosen medium is food, an ephemerel art.  You can engage all your senses with it, and then it is gone.  I think of chefs as performance artists.  They make their art.  It is used,  then  there is just the next performance to think about.
He came home last weekend and sat and talked to me for several hours and while he sat and talked he carved a melon into a flower. 
He has a new job in which he carves melons as a part of it, so he is practicing  making beautiful carvings in vegetables.
I sometinmes wonder just what it was in his childhood that took him in this direction. 
Was it standing on a chair making scrambled eggs at age 14 months?
The years of training in  Iaido with leaning to draw and use a sword?
Was it an inborn bent that he simply was born to be a chef and a food artist? 
Whatever it is I must publicly say how proud I am of how hard he has worked  to get where he has gotten to.  Congratulations, Sword Man, may your knives be sharp and your fingers intact.

Seeing things clearly again.

I have worn glasses for thirty five or more years, since I was sixteen in fact. I am pretty nearsighted.  My glasses go on first thing in the morning and come off when I go to bed.   In general I love them.   The last time I got my eyes checked was in 2000 or 2001 so when the tell tale markers of needing to get my glasses tweaked showed up  I kind of figured that I was about due.
 I began looking at frames and saving up for the expense knowing that I was looking at several hundred dollars with the exam, frames, and lenses.  I had heard from friends that bifocals are more expensive than single vision and I knew that bifocals were in my future. I am getting tired of losing my glasses on top of my head when I take them off to correct my knitting.I suppose that I shouldn't fuss too much, at my age I am lucky that I am not holding the paper out at arm's length to read it.
I hate looking for new frames.  I can't see without my glasses unless I get really close to the mirror, and when I do my mom seems to be peering out at me.  I love my mom, and I think she is beautiful, at the same time she shouldn't be in the mirror checking out my glasses frames. 
The Opthomoligist  talked to me about the type of bifocal I should have, and suggested progressive lenses.  I said no.  When he asked why I wanted the line kind,  I told him that I had some brain damage. He quickly said Ok, you are right, no progressive lenses. 
He tells me that he gives vision therapy  to people with strokes, whiplash, concussions and other brain injurys.  He said that with a brain injury, you can't focus on your central vision because the peripheral vision keeps distracting your brain. This  is what gives me the impression that things (Like the car in the next lane) are heading towards me and are going to crash into me.  It is very tiring.  He described grocery store aisles as being very problematic, and I finally understand why I can't wear sunglasses, at least not the grey or green kind.  They make the side vision worse.   Progressive bifocals take that  and make it about a hundred times worse.   No thank you.
It is good to know that there is a reason for my flinching at the car in the lane over, and why I come out of a grocery store exausted. 
I am releived that I won't have to try to get used to something I can't handle, and that the professional agrees that I don't have to try.
New Glasses in two weeks.  My eyes will be thrilled.  

Whew! snorf!

the Earstwhile child came by and visited me on Tuesday, and told me a story that may only be funny to those who know the participants well. 
Then again, I am going to try to tell it as it deserves to be told with a few embelishments to maybe get this across.

The setting is Walmart. 

In the aisle that holds ( ahem) "feminine products"  In this aisle stand two males.  One of them is the Earstwhile Child at about age seventeen.  He is there with the other male The Footless Man.  They have in hand a note with a very specific brand and size of feminine product because someone (Namely me) was in the throes of something so awful that driving down for refills is Not To Be Thought Of.
In other words this is an emergency and from my end it is dire enough to sent a seventeen year old kid with his dad to get something he can't even think of pronouncing much less imagine his mother needing and using.
He is on this adventure because the footless man can't drive a stick shift, and at this time in his life can't drive because his eyesight won't let him.  Besides all that the Earstwhile Child has a certain amount of compassion greater than you usual teenage lump.  
He knows  that whatever is going on, Mom is in enough trouble that dinner is likely to be a hit or miss affair and is willing to help out enough to see if she will be able to get food on the table that night.  Any way he is there.

 Now His companion, The Footless Man looks a bit like a pirate, a bit like he lives on the street, and a lot like a real Badass.  His clothing has achieved a high degree of onionization with several layers of coat and sweater  topping a pair of jeans that is still together enough to be basicly decent , and worn enough to let the stainless steel  and carbon fiber show through in bits.  This gives his shins and knees a rather bionic feel to them.  On top of this, there is a stocking cap that has climbed up the back of his hair and perches on top like a cat trying to stay out of a puddle. He carries a cane more to poke things and pick things off the ground than to prop himself up.  He is peering very short sightedly at the wall of stuff.
So there they are scanning  the boxes of utterly forign stuff and looking from the specific note in hand to the variety of boxed things.  The one mom wants is not there.  This is before cell phones were common. They have to pick an alternative because going home without is not to be considered, Mom made that very clear.
Now they  have to pick an alternative box of this stuff and they don't know what the important criteria is. 
So the two of them are standing in the feminine product aisle talking about choosing a box of tampons to bring home to Mom and they don't know if it is size, brand  or some other quality of product that will make a substitute acceptable,..... and down the aisle comes a woman headed to pick up some supplies.

Which is why when I went into Walmart yesterday to buy Insulin and saw a guy standing in the tampon aisle with a lost look on his face I just about fell over laughing.

Black doesn't photograph well

This is #1 son The Earstwhile Child in my favorite photo of himself plus his Kitty.  the Earstwhile Child is one of a kind, with many wonderful qualitys.  He has a great rapport with children and animals and a marvelous imagination and a wonderful quirky sense of humor.  He is an artist in his bones and is presently educating himself  to be an animation and computer graphics artist.  You can see some of what his imagination does at his Website.  He is also one of my best knitting buddies and has my "Pattern? what pattern?" design skills.  He learned knitting as if he was being reminded of something  he had always known.  Anyway great gifts also come with great challenges and he has his. 

Today he called me to say that he has managed to resolve a long term ongoing problem  sucessfully.  I called him to get the measurements on his net book to see if the envelope I knitted and then felted was of a size to fit.  It was.  I just took a photo of the thing.  You can see it sort of.  Never take a photo of something black and expect to see the details.  There are pockets on the back but they don't show up at all

At any rate here it is. And EC, congratulations in getting through the mess.

911 101

Today children we will have a lesson on how to talk to the 911 dispatchers so that they understand what you are telling them.  I learned how on the Footless Man who has insulin shock periodicly.  I hope this helps someone else have a better experience in an emergency, in getting the better sort of help.

1. They will want to know where you are.  It is smart to find out the address before you punch the buttons.  If you are out in the unaddressed boonies, knowing which quadrant of the USGS map, and aproximately which road you took is a generally good idea.  Playing hide and seek with someone is not their idea of a good time.
2. They want to know what sort of emergency so that they know who to send. General terms and then specifics are helpful. So if you say, Medical emergency and then say car accident with blood they will be able to sent the proper people to deal with it.  They don't need to know huge details, although if someones head is detatched from thier body they might want to know so they can warn the ambulance guys
3. They will want to know if it is you or someone else who is having the emergency.  If it is someone else they will then ask if they are consious.  This is were things get tricky.  What they want to know is whether the person is awake, not awake, coherent, and if they are breathing.  If this is insulin shock we are talking about the terms you want to use are "Semiconsious, incoherent, verbally unresponsive with eyes open," and if they are just plain wierd you tell the dispatcher the they are "combative"
4. They will then give you instructions including stay with the person and reassure them, and then in the next breath they will tell you to unlock doors secure pets and  turn lights on if it's dark.  Don't argue with them, just say OK and do the unlock doors and secure pets part.  Fairly shortly you will have a lot of buff people with big bags stomping into the house and asking you questions you may not know how to answer.  

Talking to the EMT's is another thing altogether that is a lesson for another day.

Public Service information

there is very little practical information for the loving bystander or family member who is facing Insulin shock.  Here is a flow chart that can take you through the steps of figuring out what can be done and when to call 911.  You can't imagine how I got the information to make the chart.  I hope to goodness that you never learn that way.

Starting out fresh, again

A while back I started a blog to have a place to practice writing among other things, as well as a place that I could put things like the process of the very slow motion kitchen renovation under the control of The Footless Man. As well as some of the black comedy episodes that go along with life with an overfull plate. It vanished into cyberspace and so I am starting over.

At present I am spending a lot of time building. I am continually building a practice as a holistic practitioner. If I get distracted it stops building and that does no one any good.

I am building a new part of my life as a patient navigator for the Doctor who gives me office room.

I am building a new healing process with a good friend that works with the deep brain and fear and safety, this is very promising.

I have spent a lot more time than I would like up in the attic over my kitchen helping The Footless Man build me a better kitchen.

On top of this sort of as frosting is building knitted things. I am an expert knitter. I find it an important part of my life. So in between all the other parts of what I do there is a steady production of mostly socks. They aren't complex socks with elegant patterns in them, they are simple ribbed instep solid wool socks that fit in regular shoes. I do other knitted things as well, just not as much as socks.

The Footless Man is the guy I am married to. He didn't start out that way, he simply achieved it over the years. He has some health issues mostly type1 diabetes and the attendant complications. In his case the most visible complication is that he has no feet and walks on prosthetic feets. The complexities of coping with this are myriad, frustrating and chaotic.

I am trying to save his sense of privacy by not naming him. Some of the episodes will wander in here as things go. He is on my mind and tends to frustrate the bejesus out of me on occasion.