Spring...

It was pretty cool out yesterday but at least it was sunny. My friend Larry who now lives in Sechelt stayed over last night and today we went for a coffee with his blind friend Mike and his seeing-eye dog Luke. We sat outside a Blenz cafe on Robson St watching a parade of passersby who often paused to fawn over Luke, who couldn't be less interested in them.

Mike is an amazing guy. He developed tears in his retina from his diabetes. It was an ophthalmologist unfamiliar with the laser equipment who blinded him while trying to repair the tears. In the past 10 years he has adapted his life to full functionality with the help of his dog and a host of talking technologies. He has the most positive outlook on life and his disability doesn't seem to slow him down at all.

On the other hand, I was feeling particularly hesitant with the new ramps, curbs and other physical obstacles that seemed to be more of a challenge for me than him. I am also not the type of guy who delights in learning new technologies. It frightens me how resigned I have become, how my life has become more limited in range. It even bothered me to sit outside on a beautiful day watching others do what I used to be able to enjoy.

I have been too cocooned by cold and ice over the winter. I need to get out and push myself to do more now that the conditions are more favourable. My upcoming trip to Utah to see Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks at the end of April should be a good push.

Rug burns

I have rug burns on the right side of my forehead. Either I look like I am a gay bashing victim or that I got carried away at the last sex party. (No doubt they have figured out my favourite position.)

Although, it is neither as dramatic or poetic as all that. I let my guard down, scuffed my left foot and fell forward, just a few feet from my end destination, on my way into work. My weak arms did not stop my face from hitting the carpet. (Ouch!!) Wearing my baseball cap hides most of it....

So, my 3 1/2 month stretch without a fall comes to an end. My 10-fall-average got up to 104 days. Not bad, but disappointing all the same. It was extremely hard to get up this time, so I do my very best not to fall again anytime soon. But maybe the stress from the heavy call volumes at work and the effect of the new diet are weakening me, and maybe the next fall will be sooner instead of later. Stay tuned....

"Life is full of misery, loneliness and suffering… and it’s over much too soon." - Woody Allen

Senseless violence

Walking home from grocery shopping yesterday afternoon I passed my favourite pub and stopped to chat with one of the regulars, Tim, who was outside having a smoke. He told me the pub was closed by the police last night and only just reopened about 20 hours later.

Rich, another of the regulars, a slight framed man about 60, a father and a regular patron, was playing pool the night before. A young construction worker, who had played the previous game with him, suddenly and without provocation, threw a punch and sent Rich flying backwards. The back of his head hit the tiled floor by the entrance so hard that the sound was heard even outside the bar.

A hush fell over the room. The construction worker tried to walk out nonchalantly but the head bartender and four patrons followed him and surrounded him on the sidewalk a few metres away. Lindsay, a fairly muscular friend, was one of them. He is a gentle man but was crackling like a down Hydro wire, daring the young man to hit him, but the young man shrank from the challenge.

Lindsay kept asking him why he did it. The young man said Rich had brushed against him while trying to position himself for a shot. "He's a faggot and he touched me. He deserved it!" He repeated this over and over, even after the police arrived, which should be enough to brand this as a hate crime. Apparently, another patron overheard the construction worker and his friend discussing which "faggot" they were going to take out before the attack happened. They had made a trip to this bar in the gay village to hunt for a victim.

Rich went into a coma when the back of his head struck the floor on Friday night. He hasn't come out of it. He was rushed to St Paul's hospital next door but they haven't been able to stop the bleeding in his brain. The doctors give him little hope of surviving. The news made me sick, the thought of this perennially cheery guy who did never did more than give friendly shoulder pats and talk about the Canucks. For all I know he is dead by now.

I am sort of a regular at that pub. I'm not into watching hockey games or alcohol that much but it's very friendly, convenient and accessible. I often go there for a snack or just to chat with the regulars. They are a mix of gays and straights, men and women, and we share hugs and an occasional peck on the cheek if we know each other well. Being that I am visibly disabled when I walk, if one is looking for that, makes me a prime candidate for a designated attack like this as I can't defend myself. Last fall while walking past the same pub with groceries in both arms, I was shoved against the patio railing and called a faggot. My assailants did nothing more. All I could do is glare at them as they walked away laughing. The incident upset me for several days, but I was able to eventually forget about it. Until today.

Coffee withdrawal

Those sharp, crisp sunny days of the past week are gone. No more dipping below the freezing point and stepping over the frozen puddles in the morning, I hope. I expected to feel relieved and joyous this weekend and the warmer air moves in, but that's not the way it is. I'm feeling rather emotionally fragile, with anxiety coursing through my veins instead.

It is a cold, lonely day with not much light. I went out for breakfast as usual. The rain was cold, not much above freezing, and the chill seemed to whistle around my heart, biting a bit deeper than usual.

There nothing like a hot coffee on such a morning, but I didn't order one. I am trying to break my addiction this weekend before a start my candida diet on Monday. I can't imagine breaking my addiction, which means low energy, confused thinking and headaches, while starting a new diet on the busiest day of the week. I still have soy milk, cream cheese and bread to use up before starting the diet, but stopping the coffee seemed like one thing I could do at the same time.

Breakfast on weekends is usually a peaceful, reflective time, where I enjoy the warmth of my coffee, my bacon, eggs and hash browns alone of with a friend, allowing the energy time to start flowing. After this weekend I will not return for a while so I wanted to enjoy the atmosphere. But the wet chill made me miss the coffee more than usual. I watched the coffee pot every time the waitress rushed by. A very loud-mouthed middle-aged drunkard was making an ass of himself, in love with his own wit and charm in the most public way possible. No one else seemed to think he was funny or charming. His selfish antics made me feel all the more depressed.

My sister insists I need to do the diet, to de-acidify my body so her allergy treatments will hold. The diet means no dairy, no soy products, so coffee or tea, no bread or other wheat products, no pasta, no sugars or fruits, no raw vegetables or salads, no potatoes, carrots or other starchy vegetables, no alcohol, no red meat or dried seasonings.

I will be allowed to eat cooked, non-starchy vegetables, spelt bread, whole eggs (soft-cooked), white meat and fish and rice. For snacks I can have popcorn, almonds and brown rice cakes and for beverages I am allowed rice milk and hot water with liquid chlorophyll in it. I also have to take an anti-yeast compound, black walnut and a psyllium cleanser each day.

I am not sure where the anxiety is coming from. It can't be just the weather and the thought of missing coffee. I am a bit concerned that I might lose too much weight and muscle mass during the month-long diet, though I can have as much of the allowed foods as I want. I'm afraid I just can't see myself being all that interested in rice and cold fish or chicken for breakfast and lunch as well as dinner for four weeks straight. Deprivation makes me want to recoil into my shell.

New ground

For the past 62 months I have kept an accurate record of my falls, including an average of the past 10 falls (see Nov 25). I have never before made it this far into the year without a fall.

Last year I set a new record by lasting until March 4, but it was a hard fall. I slipped on some water on the bathroom floor. It was only one foot that slipped and only a few inches but I lost my balance. Another would have caught his balance but with my weakened back and leg muscles I couldn't. I aimed for a controlled fall, going down into a couching position, but as my knee muscles are gone there was no way to slow my fall. When I landed on my haunches I was thrown backwards by the force and I hit the toilet, breaking two ribs on my right side.

I sat there until I had recovered enough to struggle up onto the toilet and then up to a standing position. Foolishly I headed to work thinking I had just bruised myself but by the end of the day I was in incredible pain. Fortunately I suffer pain well, so well I kept forgetting to take pain killers.

Everything healed well, luckily. By the time I realized the ribs were broken it was already past the point of being in danger. I didn't even see a doctor, knowing that he would only send me on painful trips around town to get x-rays done in the pretense that he was helping me, knowing that he couldn't do anything for broken ribs but let them heal on their own.

So I am 6 days past March 4, and now also breaking records for my 10-fall average, which is now at 103.9 days between falls. I won't set any goals here, just thank my lucky stars that I am doing so well for now.

Winter returns

This morning, for the first time in over two months, I woke to see snow covering the trees and sidewalks below. It is depressing. The flowers are buried and clumps of snow cover the bunches of newly budding leaves on the maple outside my window.

It is still below freezing at midday and tonight it is expected to drop to -5C and then -7C Wednesday morning. So the year continues, like last winter and last summer, with colder than normal temperatures--much colder. The normal high for this time is +10 and the normal low +3. I'm going to sue Al Gore for false promises.

Busy at work

This is our busiest time of the year at the call centre. Those who have moved in the past year and who are getting their pensions by direct deposit have often forgotten to change their addresses so they all call because their tax slips haven’t arrived. Of course it is always “our fault” as we “should have known” somehow, or they insist they did call to change their address but we didn’t do the promised change. Yadda yadda. I resist the urge to suggest they visit their doctor to get tested for possible dementia.

Then there are those who say they only got one slip. 9 out of 10 times the second slip is behind the first slip but they didn’t look closely. These are my favourite calls because I can feel them blush when they check their envelopes.

Knowing legislation, policies and procedures for pension processing is about 20% of my job. Most of the rest of the skill required is being able to explain it in many different levels of comprehension ability from university mathematicians to the mentally retarded and terminally bewildered, and putting up with the occasional ranting and self-righteousness without letting it get to me. I’m pretty good at what I do. It can be draining at this time of year trying to stay cheery so I usually crash or do something mindless when I am home in the evenings.

Expressing myself in writing is easy, but many of my clients have difficulty getting ideas out of their mouths coherently. Some can barely read. A couple calls per day start with “Yous guys sent me a paper. What am I supposed to do?” or even something less informative. From there it takes 20 questions to figure out if it’s a letter, an application, a receipt or even something from another department or level of government.

For others, vocabulary is a virus from outer space. A wife might say she’s her deceased husband’s executor, placing the emphasis on the first syllable instead of the second (erroneously implying that she murdered him), and several callers refer to Alzheimer’s as “All Timers”, like a four year old might.

Government jargon is another matter. When a client receives a large lump sum of back pay for a delayed benefit covering more than one year, the tax department can spread it back to previous years using a “notional” tax treatment. Last Friday a caller told me he was told he was illegible for an emotional tax treatment”. There is also a “child rearing provision” used in calculating a pension so that years spent raising young children will not adversely affect a client’s life average. One client referred to it as the “child rear-end position”. Calls like that keep the smile on my face.

Why was I born with such contemporaries?. - Oscar Wilde

Bird brain

I must have used too much bleach the last time I did my hair. My mind just doesn't seem to be working well these days. Perhaps I am empathizing too much with the seniors I help on the phone all day.

I've been leaving things at work, like my backpack a week ago. How does one not notice he is not wearing his backpack? Two nights ago I forgot my blood testing kit. I have been spacey at other times too. This weekend I was set to watch a mail order DVD movie and couldn't find it. I remembered exactly where I had set it but it wasn't there. I searched the whole apartment, even in all those places where I KNOW it couldn't have been because I haven't looked there for weeks or months, but it was no where to be found. I fretted over this for 2 days. Finally I wrote an e-mail to the video rental store last night, apologizing for losing it. This morning they wrote back that it wasn't lost, that it had just arrived back at the rental store. I had mailed it back without even watching it! DUH!

No more pot this week....

Good news: I have been taking increased amounts of my diabetes medicines without any reaction after my sister's treatment. Can getting rid of allergies really be that easy??

"Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein

Holistic treatments

My sister, the holistic allergist, tested me for allergies yesterday for the first time. She uses the body's magnetic energies to test for my +ve or -ve reactions to a wide range of food and household substances. She required me to press my ring finger to my thumb in a circular shape and to resist as she used her thumbs to pry them apart as I held various substances in vials next to my forearm. When I was resistant or allergic to a substance my strength failed. It was fascinating.

I had seen this used before and had received Bio-Energetic Synchronization Technique (BEST) treatments from a renowned doctor in Toronto for years, which operates on a similar principle. Rich & Luis were over to play "Settlers of Catan" when she arrived and they stayed to watch the testing, which they also found fascinating.

I always new I had certain food allergies, such as ginger, cardamom and maybe others. Sis found I was particularly allergic to gluten. I have also been allergic to both my diabetes medicines, which I need to take. They have caused me so much pain, diarrhea and loss of sleep over the past four years. She used an electric probe with a mild current (I couldn't feel it) on several acupuncture points to reverse my intolerance to some of these substances. They seemed not to affect me more after the treatment. This morning I took the most difficult of the diabetes medicines, Januvia, which usually makes me sick with one pill. So far, 14 hours later, there is still no typical reactions.

I could ask why my brother, who has make this work his career for a few years, and why my sister, who has taken on this line of work too for the past year, have not offered to treat my diabetes or muscular dystrophy before now. But then, we have been so estranged for so long. Neither even called me, let alone visit me, when I was in the hospital with a broken leg for 18 days over Christmas 3 years ago. They basically ignored me for years while my life fell apart and I slowly reconstructed it.

There's no point going there now. Suddenly both seem interested in my health and I am grateful for anything they can offer me. I'm not proud.