I Don't Do Anything Half Way, Even When It Comes To A Throat Infection

I knew I wasn't feeling very well.



I hate doctors, though. No, scratch that. I hate going to doctors. I'm pretty sure every time I go that they are going to take one look in my ear or down my throat and pronounce me dead in six weeks.

It doesn't help that they told me I had cancer once. That incident confirmed my belief that our bodies are wild things.

One time about sixteen years ago, I was volunteering at a not-for-profit fair trade store. I hadn't felt well when I got there, and, as my shift wore on, my abdomen slowly became so tender that I couldn't walk around the store. When the pain got so bad that even bending my body to sit down on a stool made me yelp, the old ladies I volunteered with shoved ten dollars into my hand, helped me slide sideways into the back of a cab, and sent me off to an emergency doctor appointment.

It turned out that I had an infection. A normal person would have had a bladder infection or a uterine infection or a cervical infection or an ovarian infection. Me? I HAD ALL OF THEM. At least, that's what they deduced from all the swollen everything I had going on all up in my lady parts and how they had to shush me when I yelled AYE-EEEEE after they scraped a sample from my cervix with a wooden stick.

Whoever invented that wooden stick hates women.

Anyway, today I have a similar problem if you replace "lady parts" with "everything above my shoulders". I haven't felt well for about a week, and I started to wonder what was up when my tongue felt like I had sprained it a few days ago.

I'll give you a moment to make sprained tongue jokes. Let it all out.

I had to admit that I was probably in need of some doctoring last night when, on top of the pain in my throat, the pain under my tongue was making it hard to talk, and I was pretty sure that there wasn't supposed to be a white growth there, either.

It turns out that I have not only been blessed with what looks like an infected aphthous ulcer under my tongue but what also looks like a good case of tonsillitis and strep throat.

I say "looks like", because after scraping at the disgusting growth under my tongue with a wooden stick — woman-hater! — the doctor said What IS this thing?, as though I had any clue whatsoever. I don't do anything half way.

On the bright side, nobody told me I'd be dead in six weeks.

Assuming it'll do the trick, praise be to doxycycline!

Sitting And Remembering And Waiting For The Heat To Kick In From The Boiler Below

1.  I am sitting at the kitchen table and listening to my Blip.fm station and thinking about what a nice visit the Palinode and I had with his parents when they stayed over last night,


taken with iPhone's QuadCamera app, exposure adjusted in PS Express

2.  and something about the quality of the light has me casting back to a time when three friends and I drove up to a northern lake together, and I sat in the back seat with my hand out the window pushing back the wind and my head pressed into the back of the seat in front of me so that I could only see the farmland whipping by with one eye,

3.  and I am amazed now at how comfortable I was to slip into my own spot in time, to disjoint myself from the rest of the car and exist in bits and pieces against the seat and out the window in the fields running past,

4.  taking notes in my mind about how the seat felt against my forehead and the wind between my thumb and forefinger,

5.  which was a favourite pasttime, at the time, this notetaking, a running narration of my small points of contact with the outside world,

6.  and some of those stories are still so vivid that I can recall them on a cold winter afternoon twenty year later –

7.  I can still remember how icy even a summer wind could feel at the right velocity in 1990 –

8.  and I wonder where all the skin went that once layered that hand and the water that I drank to feed that skin and the clothing that I wore to cover it and the seat that I leaned it against and all the grain that we raced past,

9.  because it's a wonder that we haven't buried the world under with all the things we make and shed, the things that lead us down another twenty years to a kitchen table where I look out the window at early winter snow in the middle of the afternoon,

10.  and I am contemplating supper and maybe a hot bath to wash some of the grey from me while I wait for the heat to kick in from the boiler below.

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PS. In case you haven't yet noticed, I have sprouted a new iPhoneography weblog in these here parts to celebrate the replacement of my sweet, sweet iPhone. Check it out.

I Deserve A Medal For Great Bravery

Over the last three-and-a-half years, since I had a bit of an emotional breakdown that I never wrote about and ended up sitting under a pile of blankets for six months, I've been working at cultivating the return of some of my courage.

It's not that I was a complete mouse before, because I wasn't. I just got beaten down by a lot of things like gender identity and a terrible job and cancer and my spouse's broken back and alcoholism and probably some other very dramatic stuff like my seasonal depression and general anxiety, and I forgot that I could come out of my hidey hole and take some control of my life.

Wait, I wasn't going to get all in depth about everything that went haywire over the last half-decade, plus that mouse analogy doesn't work at all, because the one time I lived in a place that had a mouse, it was a very brave mouse that would stand up in the middle of the floor where it was dragging one of my candles around and look right at me when I turned on the light as though to say Do. You. Mind? with its little feet balled into fists on its little hips.

Anyway, the point of this post is that I've become much braver. I'm winning my bravery back! And this is how I know that I'm winning my bravery back:

I took a shower tonight while the Palinode was out of the apartment.

This is huge. I am always certain that, as soon as I am not paying rapt attention to every creak and rustle when the Palinode is out, a mad rapist will sneak into the apartment and do unspeakable things to me and probably murder my cats. As a result, I have spent many dirty hours and days over the course of the nine-and-a-half years of our marriage patiently waiting for his presence in our home so that I can use soap on my person.

Tonight, I declared a victory over my fear by taking a shower while the Palinode was out, and not one of those hop-in-and-out three-minute showers, either, but a good and long shower complete with hair conditioner and some extraneous soaking.

Okay, I have to admit that I did turn the water off once and then stood very still so that I could hear which room the mad rapist was creeping through. It turned out that it was our cat Onion creeping very slowly down the hall, which is how he usually walks around. He's in no hurry to get from Point A to Point B, and, in fact, he often goes so slowly that he loses track along the way and ends up licking his butt and curling up to take a nap before he makes into the next room.

Still, though, I showered, and now I am awaiting the Palinode's arrival so that I can greet him with my clean, shiny face and brag about my great courage in the face if nearly non-existant danger.

Next, I will wipe out the weird little cupboards in our bedroom closet! They're small and dark and I'm pretty sure I'll find small spider and rodent corpses in there. I'm quaking in my Danskos.