The lonely sky

In the last few weeks of my mother's life, I purchased an "intelli-clock", because she was having trouble keeping track of the days. 

Along with the weekday, the clock showed the indoor temperature, and the phases of the moon. It's sitting on our kitchen counter now, so this morning, as I walked to the coffeehouse, I remembered to look for the Hunter Moon, and saw it floating above the western horizon, enormous and ivory. 

 I'm glad I searched the sky when I did, because the view from the coffeehouse was nowhere near as clear.

 This is one of my favourite songs from Kate Rusby.

Come on down!

On the ninth anniversary of our escape from Hades, I find myself standing in the parking lot beside the community activity centre, which is my polling place for the snap provincial election. A light rain is falling, but I have a large umbrella, and fall into an easy chat with the lady just ahead of me -- something that rarely happened in Hades.  However, I live here now.

My line companion doesn't.  At least not all the time.  She moves between Victoria and Montreal, where she was rather annoyed to not have quite enough time to vote in the recent Quebec provincial election.  I tell her that a former student of mine was voted into the Assemblée nationale du Québec (Quebec's provincial legistature).  He was 19 when I taught him, if you can call it that - he was charismatic, sometimes sweet, and often a pain in the ass.  A young souverainist at the time, and I was not surprised at all to watch his political stance morph into that of a conservative populist.

We discuss other topics: housing in Victoria, my last visit to Montreal, almost exactly ten years ago, the challenges of navigating St Catherine's Street in Montreal through what appears to be a decade of road construction.

As the line creeps forward, a young masked woman regularly patrols the line, looking for mobility-challenged voters to assist.  She occasionally calls out different three-digit numbers, and if somone has that number on their voting card, they are escorted to whichever table has become available.  It's a little bit like Bingo.  The line companion and I compare numbers, which differ only by one digit.  None of the numbers being called are anywhere near what we have, so we relax.  I do slow, controlled heel pumps, as my legs tire.

It's my line companion who notices my number has been called and alerts me.  The volunteer takes me to the front of the line, and I scuttle forward in true The Price is Right! style, waving my card, and exalting: "I win! I win!"

The official, thank goodness, looks amused.

Because this is a snap election, with only a month's notice, there is no machine with which to struggle, nor a folder to juggle with my damp umbrella.  For the same reason, the name of the disgraced and dismissed Conservative candidate is still on the ballot.  I wonder how many will vote for him regardless, spoiling their ballots.  It's not a riding known for Conservative leanings.

I bid a cheery farewell to my line-companion, still about a dozen people back in the queue, and am home before 10 am.

Boning up

It's still quite light when I set out for a preprandial walk, but the evenings are drawing in, so I continue briskly down the hill, past front yards which have been blossoming into bones, severed hands, and billowing ghosts since Thanksgiving Monday.

Above, low on the pale blue eastern sky, a phantom moon, not quite full, has made its debut.

Deeper into Fairfield, the fashion seems to be Hallowe'en lights: eaves, doorways and bushes lined with golden and orange bulbs.  A little more cheerful than the carnage uphill, I guess.

Turning west, I step quickly but carefully along the ancient sidewalk along Chapman.  People laden with groceries are vanishing into the houses.  I reach the blocks of Cook Street Village where the sidewalks are full of errand-runners and election placards.  We've just had our municipal elections and it's the eve of a snap provincial election, called by the premier (who heads the New Democratic Party) to take advantage of the fractious factions the provincial Conservative Party finds itself in these days.  There isn't actually a Conservative candidate in our riding any more; he was tossed out on his ear a couple of weeks ago, for indiscreet and rather racist social media remarks, made in his not-distant-enough youth.

The street is also lined with youthful volunteers for the Green Party, greeting me at each corner, and asking if I will be voting the next day.  I reply affably that this is my plan, and, to save time (theirs and mine), that I've done some reading and made my choice.  They wish me a pleasant evening.

And it is.  Lucy Maud Montgomery had Anne Shirley rhapsodize in Anne of Green Gables (chapter 16, if you're intrigued) that she was so glad to live in a world with Octobers.  

So am I, but the month is running out. 

As is the light.  Almost home, I look at the moon.  It's now as white as bone, three-dimensional and palpable against the darkening sky.

Going under

I was in my mid-twenties the last time I had a general anaesthetic.  

My wisdom teeth needed to be carved out of my gums, after they refused to come quietly.  The dental surgeon told me to tell him when I tasted onions.  I did, and immediately felt myself sink into my supine body, falling and drifting downwards and backwards into blackness.

Years later, another anaesthetist told me he was adding "medicine" to the oxygen I was breathing in, to help me relax, he said.  I remember nothing after that -- until I awoke, firmly swaddled and disorientated, thinking I was back in my own bed at home.  Then I felt the gurney moving, and heard reassuring voices from the masked and gown figures pushing me along.

This was the long-hoped-for conclusion of four remarkably stressful (and educational) days, struggling with the logistics of consults and time-tabling by phone, and then three days of on-and-off fasting in preparation for a procedure that kept being postponed for other people's emergencies  - which is only right, I add hastily.  All in all, it's preferable to be a case of urgency, rather than an actual emergency. (Although, in French, it's the same thing, isn't it?) 

Being "urgent" rather than an emergency bought me time to get my head around how to navigate healthcare these days.  It reminded me strongly of the days when younger daughter was first "identified": when the Resident Fan Boy and I were like mice dropped into a maze and frantically figuring out where to scuttle to get the help she needed, with various degrees of success and a lot of wrong turns.

On Sunday morning at 8 am, the call finally came, telling me it was "likely" I would be admitted that afternoon, and to plan to arrive at the hospital at 11 -- but only if called.  The Resident Fan Boy decided to skip church, partly because I was terrified, and partly because he figured God would know where he was.

What followed was our weirdest wedding anniversary ever.

The "come in" call came at 10:30; we arrived at Emergency just before 11 am. When I was last here, in the catastrophic whirlwind accompanying Demeter's final fall, I don't remember much of what was going on around me.  This morning was rife with other people's bad days.  There were few seats, because a weeping young woman was surrounded by police officers.  The Resident Fan Boy told me that she had been out somewhere involving drugs, and someone had dumped an unidentified liquid over her.  Her grandparents had dropped her off at Emergency.  

Every time the sliding security doors opened on the Ambulatory waiting room, we could see a man slumped in a "baby pose" in the middle of the floor, rather like Mr Bean at church -- without the comedy.

A few months ago, I came across a remarkable article by Jody Paterson, of the Times-Colonist.

It's a detailed depiction of how steadily deepening opioid crisis has manifested in Victoria.  

Paterson begins with a street person waxing nostalgic about the days when there was one opioid on the streets:  "Heroin was like a warm hug."

This article was, for me, a clearer explanation of the decade-old nightmare into which drug-use has descended, and how dangerous even recreational drugs have become.  I grew up with quite a few of my peers casually experimenting with pot, hash, and even cocaine.  It was almost normalized.  Evidently not, now.

Back in Emergency, I did what I had been told.  I informed the lady at the reception desk that I had been called in for a procedure.  She pointed me to a seat, took my blood pressure and temperature -- and disappeared. With my health card.  

After conferring with the Resident Fan Boy, I used the phone number I'd been given, informed the team upstairs I'd arrived, and pretty soon people came looking for me.  Then I went looking for the lady with my health card.

Apparently, I'd failed to use the magic word:  "surgery".

As I was guided, kindly and patiently, through the preparation and procedure, it did occur to me that I was getting the care I needed, not because I deserved it, but because I had the right connections and information, was reasonably well-groomed and articulate, and was in the company of my attentive husband.  Unlike those people downstairs.

Also unlike those in Emergency, I was home about four hours after I left.