Not a newsletter

Hospital update

Hello! I just posted a message reading:

Going to be in for a second night, so no newsletter again today. Things are tracking the way they should, though, glad to report. Thanks very much for all the kind thoughts.

All of that is true, but it also occurs to me that through the magic of copy and paste I could very easily send out something diverting to be going on with. So here, do please enjoy these copy and paste items.

The first is a Sunday column that I had entirely forgotten until the other day a friend messaged:  just trying to find your column about the dead guy in the room at the nursing home with Dad. Can’t find it on Te Internet. Any ideas? 

Well, I found it and enjoyed reading it again and maybe you will too.

At the going down of the sun

Leaving out the names of the rest home, and leaving out the names of all the people involved, here's a story from the other day about people in a rest home.

Each day one of you goes to visit. Some days are good and some are not so good. You all know that there's no turning back and this is where it will end, but there is warmth and there are smiles and the staff are kind. Kind, and so very busy.

Mostly he's in the room on his own, but one morning your partner says when he arrives back from his morning visit: "Dad's got a new room mate. Not for long though, I think. I tried to say hello. He didn't look well."

l be another chair in there.

You step over, you quietly pop your head inside the curtains. His eyes are closed and he's very still. You go in on tiptoes, and as you ever so quietly pick up the chair, you glance again at him and think Oh, poor old thing, they've put a tape all the way around his face from the top of his head to underneath his jaw. Hope he's OK.

You quietly step out through the curtains, carefully carrying the chair, put it down quietly next to your boyfriend's dad and there's silence for a moment as he looks at you and then he asks: why are you tiptoeing around a dead guy? And this is when you learn why they use tape like that.

When I tell this kind of story, a certain kind of reader suggests I'm just making stuff up, but real life has more than enough to keep me busy thank you very much.

If you've spent any time in a rest home you will know the endless collision of emotions and compassion and dark farce. When we can, we laugh in the face of death, coming for us all.

As it comes nearer you hold their hand more firmly and more earnestly, thinking this may be the last time we do this, and there never seem words enough to carry the magnitude of that feeling.

You take comfort from all the kindness you see and the attentiveness, but is there enough to go around? When a man can be left in a room for hours after his death while another is served his meals, does that seem quite right? Is there enough room, are there enough staff, do these places have the resources they need to make things work as they should?

What should we be taking from awful news stories about loved ones being neglected in the most distressing way?

Perhaps you read about the man whose mother went through misery, no-one noticing that careless handling would pull her catheter from its place again and again, leaving her unattended for hours in a urine-soaked bed.

Perhaps you recognised something familiar in it, because as compassionate as so many staff seem to be and, as much care as rest homes take, it can feel as though there's not quite as much care to reach all the way around.

It's hard to escape the feeling that cost-cutting and under-staffing could be putting vulnerable people at risk, and what can we do about it?

You might blame the staff, the minimum wage staff working long hours, but is that where the blame should go? Isn't the crucial question whether there are enough people being paid enough money to be able to do all that needs to be done?

And you might also ask: is this a sphere of life where profit taking has any rightful place?

It would be nice to think that all that's needed is better management, but just as we find with the health system, it's hard to avoid the feeling that it is, simply, very expensive and if we want it to work properly we have to find more money. And maybe change some priorities.

Perhaps a very large accumulation of baby boomer wealth may need to move in a new direction. Boomers, you have the chair.

An Intermission

The other item of sheer copy and paste is something that someone on Twitter randomly referenced the other day and it was not known to me and damn it’s good. I enjoyed reading it again and maybe you will too.

Elimination Dance (an intermission) by Michael Ondaatje

(An elimination dance begins with a crowded dance floor. At a signal, the band stops playing and the announcer reads an elimination. Any dancer answering this description must sit down, and his partner is also disqualified. The process continues until a single couple remains.)

Those who are allergic to the sea 

Those who have resisted depravity 

Men who shave off beards in stages, pausing to take photographs

Those who (while visiting a foreign country) have lost the end of a Q-tip in their ear and have been unable to explain their problem

All actors and poets who spit into the first row while they perform

Men who fear to use an electric lawn-mower feeling they could drowse off and be dragged by it into a swimming pool

Any dinner guest who has consumed the host’s missing contact lens along with the dessert

Any person who has had the following dream. You are in a subway station of a major city. At the far end you see a coffee machine. You put in two coins. The Holy Grail drops down. Then blood pours into the chalice.

Those who have filled in a bilingual and confidential pig survey from Statistics Canada. (Une enquệte sur les porcs, strictement confidentielle)

Those who have accidentally stapled themselves

Those who have unintentionally locked themselves within a sleeping bag at a camping goods store

Those who have woken to find the wet footprints of a peacock across their kitchen floor

Those who have so much as contemplated the possibility of creeping up to one’s enemy with two Bic lighters, pressing simultaneously the butane switches—one into each nostril—and so gassing him to death 

Literary critics who have swum the Hellespont

Those who have come across their own telephone numbers underneath terse insults or compliments in the washroom of the Bay Street Bus Terminal

Anyone who has testified as a character witness for a dog in a court of law

Any writer who has been photographed for the jacket of a book in one of the following poses: sitting in the back of a 1956 Dodge with two roosters; in a tuxedo with the Sydney Opera House in the distance; studying the vanishing point on a jar of Dutch Cleanser; against a gravestone with dramatic back lighting; with a false nose on; in the vicinity of Macchu Pichu; or sitting in a study and looking intensely at one's own book

The person who borrowed my Martin Beck thriller, read it in a sauna which melted the glue off the spine so the pages drifted to the floor, stapled them together and returned the book, thinking I wouldn’t notice

Any person who has burst into tears at the Liquor Control Board

Anyone with pain

Melody

Finally, here’s what I was listening to at 3 this morning. There’s plenty to make you uneasy about being in hospital but God I love a 3am concert.