Lie Down and Be Quiet

A glowering sky outside my window the other day which matched my mood.

I wonder if that's the philosophy of governments and health "care" as we age out and hopefully cascade into our graves or incinerators?

Don't get me wrong as I do have a medical team that is par excellence when so many don't. At last count, there were seven all told doing their very best to keep me upright.

But the peripherals are absolutely maddening. An essential drug was unfunded out of the blue eleven days ago by the lords of the health care system. We fought for the coverage nearly a year ago and won. Then it was yanked suddenly with no warning. My clinician was off on hols as was my doctor and the pharmacy was apologetic and said nothing could be done but I could pay for it out of pocket. Knowing how bureaucracy works, I declined as I knew it would be the nail in my coffin and my pocket as it would never get funded again. So I hung on with a few scattered pain relievers until the team got back. It was all sorted and for a year's coverage. How maddeningly unnecessary to put an old woman into such stress.

Secondly there was a $400 supplement allocated to seniors in the province, I applied in January and helped others with the complicated application which involved detailed descriptions of out of pocket medical expenses AND verification of actual addresses via copy of electricity bills. No on line apps permitted and a CHEQUE would be issued, no auto deposit, so copy of a cheque to be sent with the app. Can you believe this absolute nonsense in the year of Our Lord 2025?

So I mailed off a wad of these apps having scanned all the bits and pieces of paper that had to accompany them. This pittance of $400 was used up if I was being paid for services to others in this complicated process.

And here we are, July 2025 and a scattered few have received their cheques and the rest of us are left stewing, all old in various stages of decrepitude. Are the almighty "they" hoping we'll toss off this mortal coil before the cheques (maybe they're handwritten, whut?) are issued.

More work: I sent an email off to our member of parliament (I know him) with a request to find out what had happened in this sporadic issue of cheques to some and none to the majority of us?

Crickets.

All part of a senior's existence, fighting for the scraps, fighting for what's fair and just. 

And hoping there's a sliver of energy left over to suck a bit of joy out of the remains of the day.

Everything, everywhere, but not all at once.

 Checking in with you, my dear blogmates.

I'm dealing with a lot of exhaustion, though my last two specialist check-ins were good for my age and overall condition, i.e. just north of falling apart completely.

My days are unpredictable and sometimes the little battles that used to be a breeze overwhelm me.

(1) A breakdown between the provincial overseer of senior drug benefits and my clinical pharmacist and my regular pharmacist and me in the middle flailing around without my suddenly uncovered pain drug. Unconscionable, but sorted. Finally. Bout seriously? I didn't need the stress.

(2) My car hit a pothole and is doing that weird noise thing under the passenger side. I finally booked an appointment with the mechanic and will deal with the logistics of leaving her there all day and finding my own staggery way home. 

(3) The stress of the election I felt in my very bones. Squeaker. Truly. Carney meets with Cheeto today. Fingers crossed. Haven't watched it yet.

(4) Trying to plan an itinerary for my siblings who are ALL coming to visit me this month. Realizing my wee Toyoto won't fit them all and I'm too old to rent a larger vehicle. You read that right. Over eighties are deemed ga-ga and unable to navigate traffic. I have an accident free licence for 65 years (another you read that right). Millions of kilometres driven. Cheapest auto insurance on the planet.

Such things plunge me into a kind of paralysis. An unusual feeling for me. 

I say to myself: what am I missing that is making me feel so helpless. Looking for my mother to take care of me? To manage it all like an adult.? Decided I need to work with the Spotify sub my daughter gave me and load on all my stuff from the Ipod that has been my good friend for years and years. So I started and am delighted at how Spotify is set up. It has all my weird stuff on board. Delightful. It's like listening to my playlists it all over again for the first time as I listen to Ella and Beethoven and the Irish Kings and Oscar Peterson (eclectic I am). And oh yes a new artist I saw on PBS Sierra Hull, if you're a fan of mandolin - she's first class bluegrass.

So some pics from today when I went up to my deserted ocean and enjoyed the birds and the ever-rolling sea which always grounds me.

I'll catch up with you all now.

Tradeoffs

It took a while for it all to sink in.

Here I was with 2 years of disability, chronic pain, no energy, lack of oxygen and underperforming blood running through my system now behind me. Well almost behind me. I am feeling much better than I had been. So I plunged into a busy life with a lot on the go.

SOS: We had put out an anonymous survey in our building in an effort to ascertain the monthly income of seniors, what items they were lacking, what changes they'd like to see made in their current situations, etc. And also, if comfortable, please donate as we were not government funded. The response? Less that 10% of residents responding. A solitary donation of $5.00.

A request on the SOS page with its 600 members across Canada asking for donations and volunteers to help with our SAD day (Senior Awareness Day) on December 1st, resulted in zero.

As I was working on the SAD pledge poster and participant form which was the major fundraiser - all participants agree to live on the $7.00 per day impoverished elderly seniors live on - the lightbulb lit up in my head. My one assistant was deteriorating with an incurable tremor condition so can't keyboard and her tech abilities are diminished along with her voice on the phone.

I asked myself if I was living in joy or stress. And the answer was loud and clear.

I had to stop. And after 4 hours of graphics wrestling, I laid down and thought. Enough, already. Stop this nonsense. And the relief overwhelmed me, almost immediately. This was like a full time job that was a painful reminder of other positions I positively hated and couldn't wait to bail from.

I had let go of all the things I loved, blogging, writing, knitting, workshops, music, even repotting my plants. No time. It consumed me. And for what? The sound of crickets with every announcement, survey, pleas for help.

I met with my partner, and she agreed. Her health is failing. She told me she couldn't sleep with the stress of not performing even the simplest tasks. 

We gave it our very, very best. And would have given more. But the universe has a great way of showing us that even all that wasn't enough.

So we are each sleeping better. 

And my tradeoff is a return of all the joys I had let go.

A beautiful card of Dingle Beach Horses and a handmade linen star sent from my sister in Ireland.

Update

Sometimes we feel stress in different ways, don't we? Not quite aware we are in stress but the evidence of our own compromised presence in our lives becomes evident.

Example:

I nearly went mad from this knitting pattern I had designed. The first time I ripped it out, I had a chuckle. I had forgotten to take into account increases for the Aran part so I wound up with the beginnings of a bedspread rather than a throw (sofa blanket or afghan).  So rip down and start again. Great. I'm on top of things now. 6"inches in, the thing is decreasing in size. With no known cause. 

Closer examination shows no dropped stitches. I was close to weeping. I've been knitting non-stop just about since I was seven so I thought: give up now, as I tossed it in a basket, dementia has set it. Give up, stop knitting. And there it sat. 

I finally picked it up during the week and ripped it all down again and restarted, counting the stitches on every row and the thing was haunted, it was shrinking yet again. I read my pattern aloud a few times and realized I had consistently forgotten a vital increase to compensate for a double decrease in the pattern. Small beans I know to a non=knitter, but I have been knitting for seventy years. Yeah, seventy years and know my knits, cables, purls and lace.

In chatting with friends and family and sharing this, others offered stories of their own realities. Such as awkward stuttering when engaging in conversations, losing really, really obvious nouns when on the telephone, misplacing every day things and sleeping a lot - or the opposite side of that coin, waking a lot. And inappropriate hysterical laughter. I'm sure there are many more.

This pandemic has taken its toll in all sorts of ways, some of which we are not even aware.

Have you any odd or funny or alarming pandemic behaviour responses?

 

Mini Meltdowns

 I had a few yesterday. I was on CBC again (no clip yet, sorry) speaking on seniors and this ridiculous speedy election (power grab, basically) and the challenges for seniors having to vote in person (no internet usually, no access to online or fax requests for ballot). And another challenge, which falls below the radar of most, some of them have to work to make ends meet at the polling stations. I worked it last year and I'm telling you the toll of 16 hours on my body for $200 had me two days in bed. As it had the other seniors who worked it. 

So I expounded on what most would not be aware of, this fresh hazard for seniors with their compulsion to vote at all costs, as they have always voted. And begged a cancellation of this silly election. And lo and behold we had two pressers from the premier and the chief medical officer yesterday and we are now on Alert Level 5 overnight and this egregious election cancelled. The UK variant is here and most infected by this are under 20.

So yes mini-meltdowns. It's hard to be living alone in such circumstances. No one to share the fear with, apart from texting and phone calls which are not the same. There are still the long hours of silence when music can have the effect of making one long for live concerts and theatre. As when I played my Glenn Gould playlist, my god how he interpreted Bach is sublime!

I worry and cry for the young ones in my family. The long term effects, the mental burden of no socializing in the years when it is so important. 

My mail (I crept to the mail boxes late at night so I would not encounter the Maskless Wonders who would fuel my residual rage) was full of delight. Two gorgeous handmade cards from Daughter and 3 photos of my great-niece and great-nephew (twins) with a lovely card.

How do I plan my food was questioned in a couple of emails I received about my new regimen. Simple. I write everything down ahead of time. And stick to it. I am never hungry. One of the secrets is a little bit of protein and a little bit of fruit at 10 at night. So there's none of that night starving.

A long post.

A dear diary kind of entry. But there you have it from the Land of Alert 5. And oh yes, the weather. Here you go. Outside my window. There's no end to the joy.

Dear Diary

I find myself some mornings, early, lying in bed thinking of death. I mean, that's natural at my age, right? I checked with others of similar elderhood. Yeah, normal they tell me. But, warning, no prolonged inhabiting of that space.

I find it hard to slice the time correctly as it can get into morose territory. The "why bothers", the Black Dog scenario.

I was in a terrible state of sadness for the past week. Overwhelmed so much I had to call and cancel an appearance to give an after dinner talk on How Wonderful My life Is in Spite of Challenges.

I couldn't catch a glimpse of any wonderfuls anywhere and the challenges were resonating non-stop tied up with unrelenting awful memories.

A medication I'm on impacts my movements terribly which adds to my misery. And my doctors are dismissive. And out here on the Edge? Shopping doctors is not a possibility. I'm on this med as a result of my accident and additional family stressors. Walking and race preparation could alleviate this physical handicap to a huge degree but this is insurmountable at the moment. My podiatrist recommended a holistic doctor he knows who may be able to get me off this pharma-treadmill. I've been warned I can have a stroke if I wean myself.

Lately, returning phone calls and emails was the equivalent of climbing a tough mountain. But today? I started and the sadness still shrouds me but I am sharing it with loved ones.

In the midst of writing this, a dear friend dropped by as he was concerned about my invisibility, he had a "feeling." I love that. When a friend senses you are not up to snuff.

I filled him in.

What was clear, suddenly, is that when I am down and sad and don't want to inflict myself on anyone is that those are the exact times I should.

I must write that on my wall.

Whatever happened to wearing the world like a loose garment anyway?

I can't seem to settle into my own skin.

It's been hectic since I got back, workers still crawling around the house, municipal matters piled up while I was gone now scream for attention and the plans for finishing off Book 3 and sending it around recede into the background. I don't think my brain could cope.

Yeah, I'm living in chaos.

On top of that my android phone appears to have been stolen while I was gone. The wee shelf where it lives and sucks power is bare. Daughter hunted high and low while she was staying here. As did I when I returned. That leaves me feeling queasy.

Dozers and other machinery tear up and down next door building monster summer homes for the sons of the local merchant.

Discombobulated is what I am. Restless and irritable. And anxious. About what I couldn't tell you. Pileup it feels like.

This could be seasonal, or it might be the noise and banging around me not to mention the crunch of scrapings, dust and debris underfoot. Summer people are now leaving for warmer climes and that makes me sad.

Oh yes, good news in that a play I submitted to a St. John's theatre is being "considered" for production.

And no news on the artist's grant I applied for.

I can really see now how elders/artists living alone make a monthly choice between food and heat.

Seriously.

Nudge: To the Universe - grant, please, now. I need this grant!

Then it will be loose garment time.

Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth

Do you ever find you're running behind yourself and can't catch up? That's me. I know I am stressed to the max: far, far too much work in and far, far too little of me to go around.

I am taking a break to write before I go completely around the twist. I took a few hours off on Sunday (friends are kind enough to feed me) and I felt guilty. Then I knew I was in trouble. Guilty for taking off a few hours? I am in madness. I wish I could time the work that comes in the door, but it is always in one big flood of boxes and requests and emails. Speaking of.

The interwebz is gone hopeless again here which seriously impacts my days, so I took the time yesterday to write to my local MHA (Member of the House of Assembly in Newfoundland) yet again, with a copy to the local paper. Our local election is October 11th - which might fire up his arse a little, yeah? - and to date I haven't heard back.

Dear (Name redacted)~

I am sure you are getting just as tired of this as I am of writing to you and I even had columns in The Telegram published on this issue. I've been seven years now, count 'em, seven years, advocating for high speed service in my peninsula of (blocked for privacy).

Seven long years of empty promises of "next year", "soon", etc. The turbo stick was a temporary stop gap measure, which when it works it is OK. Adequate. About half the speed of broadband at more than twice the monthly cost. Oh monopolies like Bell Mobility can charge what they like and tell you to suck it up when you call frequently to complain as I do. They even have the nerve to tell me to walk up a hill and use it there, or go out on the road for better reception or get more users complaining (which I did) and they might check the cellular towers. They tell me to run my business from the top of my hill or the middle of the road in front of the house where there is better reception!

All very amusing I am sure to those who are complacently using their broadband and fibre optic in the comfort of their homes and offices only a few kms from here. I am told it is hardware failure, yet I take my turbo stick across Canada with me and it works perfectly everywhere else and has the capacity to work perfectly here. On those few occasions that are getting rarer and rarer. Why the inconsistency of service? No one has the answer except to blame me, the user for not working where they tell me to work, in the midst of traffic or at the top of a nearby hill with the birds.

I find it appalling that we continue to be treated like second class citizens out here, not 90 km from the metropolis of St. John's. Where I have to take up my knitting as I wait for page downloads and uploads and updates to software which can take hours while I do nothing else on my system. The inefficiency and unfairness of it all in trying to run my business makes me crazy to be perfectly honest.

Reliable high speed access is a RIGHT in this day and age. Like health care. Like education and fire and police. Why on earth is it not being fought for? Am I the only one living in this ongoing frustration, losing business (and my mind) because of the failure of the government to provide the most basic of business infrastructures?

I was in Ireland during the spring and even the out islands have broadband service. They were shocked to hear that our island of Newfoundland doesn't have this basic technology in the places that need it the most (remote health care, education, web-based business start-ups, information sharing, remote and satellite branch offices, etc.)

What is the latest on this? Am I still stuck out here losing business due to the inadequacy of my government in providing what so many others have taken for granted in the last 25 years?

Best personal regards as always,
Signed
Me.

PS And I as I write this, my internet connection has been dropped four times. FOUR TIMES.

What, Me Worry?

Another in the ongoing series of sunsets from the porch, taken a few evenings ago

A small irritating thing can go wrong and it will drive me crazy, stressed out, yelly, snarly, not nice.

But a whole accumulation of stuff can happen, I lurch from one catastrophe to the next and I just laugh and say: OK, Universe, what else can you throw at me, see if I care. I will NOT surrender.

I was out and about yesterday taking some lovely shots as The Bay was at her best when I get back to the car and she starts up as she normally does but the gears don't engage, they slide slackly in their appointed track but nothing happens. Ends up I walk for miles in the blazing heat to the post office and call CAA who tell me they will have to send a flat-bed from the sounds of it. Which they do, several hours later, my being at the back of beyond 'n all. I wave bye-bye to Strawbella, who has never let me down quite this badly in all our years together. Today my new best friend Ed calls me to tell me not a part can be found in all of Newfoundland for my baby (a gear cable) so he arranged for it to be flown in tonight at a cost of $15, did I mind. The cable itself is, gulp, $470 + labour + taxes + air freight.

Soldier on, sez I.

One of our cast members did not show up at a crucial sound rehearsal on Sunday night (we now have a professional sound man but his time is limited as he is also involved in another ongoing production) and as our next venue is huge and just about sold out it was crucial she be there. Efforts to get hold of her have all come to naught and WE HAVE NO UNDERSTUDY. Performance is a few short days away with a final dress rehearsal the night before.

I heard Gordon-the-Gift was in town but has gone away again to his contract in Labrador and never came by to fix what he so badly effed up in The Tigeen.

Our theatrical troupe has also been asked to perform the play (with a deadline for answer of early this week) during the month of September for a festival and can't access the venue to assess it for space, sound, set placement, movement, etc. and THEY WANT AN ANSWER NOW.

A client downloaded one of her files to me and crashed my system here. Oh, six times. Eating my time and shovelling away at my temper.

Other clients drop in today and the lawn is overgrown, great imagery. Leo had been badly stung by a series of wasps and his reaction is to crawl under the covers and cry and forget the mowing. A reaction I totally respect, and well if the truth be known, envy, as what one of us out there wouldn't like to do the same thing if life ain't going our way but being grown-up we grin and bear it and carry on. More fools us.

And I haven't cracked. Here I am writing my blog and looking in the larder at all the hidden things we keep for emergencies when we can't access a grocery store.

Did I mention there isn't a car for rent anywhere on the island? Bloody selfish tourists.

The Secret Six

~~~~~The Secret Six on Sports Day, 6th Class~~~~~

The days are tightening up. I get phonecalls. I get emails. Cork beckons me. Stress piles a little high as it's Canadian tax season and we all know what hilarious fun taxes are.

Meetings and more meetings. Mindlessly I applied to the Canadian Census Department for a position. Never thinking...tax season+trip+play+census...might make my head explode. And now they want me and it has.

But I don't really miss my brain as for 2 weeks I won't need it. Starting Wednesday. EVERY SURVIVOR of my High School Graduation Class is going to be there including the one who couldn't because of illness and family commitment. She left a message on my phone today to say she'd be there and I was thrilled.

We had a devious little group of 6 of us in 6th class (Grade 6) who were truly appalled at all the girly stuff going on around us and on a series of lunchtimes built a fort (with our fathers' 'borrowed' tools) up high on a tree behind the wall of the sports field. Seriously. And then go there and store and read books, safe from boy/lipstick talk. We were rather an odd group, but extraodinarily lucky to have found one another all those years ago and stick to each other all through high school. And find nothing wrong with getting good marks and avoiding stupid classes like domestic science (home ec. now)and demanding calculus in our all girls' school which didn't offer it. They had to ship over a male math teacher from the boys' school across the river to teach it to the 6 of us after regular school hours. We would be called geeks today and would have been weirdly proud of that designation. I am in touch with 2 of those fairly regularly and understand two more are coming from England and another from a convent where she's been a nun forever.

The past is very much with me these days. And sometimes that's not a bad thing.

Well, duh, we could have told them that. Free of charge.

UCLA Study On Friendship Among Women

An alternative to fight or flight.

A landmark UCLA study suggests friendships between women are special. They shape who we are and who we are yet to be. They soothe our tumultuous inner world, fill the emotional gaps in our marriage, and help us remember who we really are. By the way, they may do even more. Scientists now suspect that hanging out with our friends can actually counteract the kind of stomach-quivering stress most of us experience on a daily basis. A landmark UCLA study suggests that women respond to stress with a cascade of brain chemicals that cause us to make and maintain friendships with other women.

It's a stunning find that has turned five decades of stress research---most of it on men---upside down. Until this study was published, scientists generally believed that when people experience stress, they trigger a hormonal cascade that revs the body to either stand and fight or flee as fast as possible, explains Laura Cousin Klein, Ph.D., now an Assistant Professor of Biobehavioral Health at Penn State University and one of the study's authors. It's an ancient survival mechanism left over from the time we were chased across the planet by saber-toothed tigers.

Now the researchers suspect that women have a larger behavioral repertoire than just fight or flight; In fact, says Dr. Klein, it seems that when the hormone oxytocin is release as part of the stress responses in a woman, it buffers the fight or flight response and encourages her to tend children and gather with other women instead. When she actually engages in this tending or befriending, studies suggest that more oxytocin is released, which further counters stress and produces a calming effect.

This calming response does not occur in men, says Dr. Klein, because testosterone---which men produce in high levels when they're under stress---seems to reduce the effects of oxytocin. Estrogen, she adds, seems to enhance it.

The discovery that women respond to stress differently than men was made in a classic "aha" moment shared by two women scientists who were talking one day in a lab at UCLA. There was this joke that when the women who worked in the lab were stressed, they came in, cleaned the lab, had coffee, and bonded, says Dr. Klein. When the men were stressed, they holed up somewhere on their own. I commented one day to fellow researcher Shelley Taylor that nearly 90% of the stress research is on males. I showed her the data from my lab, and the two of us knew instantly that we were onto something.

The women cleared their schedules and started meeting with one scientist after another from various research specialties. Very quickly, Drs. Klein and Taylor discovered that by not including women in stress research, scientists had made a huge mistake: The fact that women respond to stress differently than men has significant implications for our health.

It may take some time for new studies to reveal all the ways that oxytocin encourages us to care for children and hang out with other women, but the "tend and befriend" notion developed by Drs. Klein and Taylor may explain why women consistently outlive men. Study after study has found that social ties reduce our risk of disease by lowering blood pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol. There's no doubt, says Dr. Klein, that friends are helping us live longer.

In one study, for example, researchers found that people who had no friends increased their risk of death over a 6-month period. In another study, those who had the most friends over a 9-year period cut their risk of death by more than 60%.

Friends are also helping us live better. The famed Nurses' Health Study from Harvard Medical School found that the more friends women had, the less likely they were to develop physical impairments as they aged, and the more likely they were to be leading a joyful life. In fact, the results were so significant, the researchers concluded, that not having close friends or confidants was as detrimental to your health as smoking or carrying extra weight.

And that's not all. When the researchers looked at how well the women functioned after the death of their spouse, they found that even in the face of this biggest stressor of all, those women who had a close friend and confidante were more likely to survive the experience without any new physical impairments or permanent loss of vitality. Those without friends were not always so fortunate. Yet if friends counter the stress that seems to swallow up so much of our life these days, if they keep us healthy and even add years to our life, why is it so hard to find time to be with them? That's a question that also troubles researcher Ruthellen Josselson, Ph.D., co-author of Best Friends: The Pleasures and Perils of Girls' and Women's Friendships (Three Rivers Press, 1998). The following paragraph is, in my opinion, very, very true and something all women should be aware of and NOT put our female friends on the back burners.

Every time we get overly busy with work and family, the first thing we do is let go of friendships with other women, explains Dr. Josselson. We push them right to the back burner. That's really a mistake because women are such a source of strength to each other. We nurture one another. And we need to have unpressured space in which we can do the special kind of talk that women do when they're with other women. It's a very healing experience.

Taylor, S. E., Klein, L.C., Lewis, B. P., Gruenewald, T. L., Gurung, R. A. R., & Updegraff, J. A. Behaviorial Responses to Stress: Tend and Befriend, Not Fight or Flight"

For My Wonderful Daughter

My daughter's had a practically unbearable past week, I said to her if you wrote it all down no one would believe the amount of ill health, stress, sadness and grief you've had to bear. But bear it she did and we both escaped from our lives to have dinner together last night. It's important to celebrate our survival skills. For in spite of the odds we come out ahead with a teary grin sometimes.

I imagine the poem and the picture I took in the garden on Saturday will resonate with her. It certainly does with me.


I took the last of your flowers
And wrapped them in a blue cloth
And laid them on the chair
That still bears
The ghost of your body.
You sat there, fingers steepled
Under your chin as if to give
More importance to the words
That came out of you, all
Weighted with your ending.
While mine were just beginning.

Blog Jam

Picture is of a spot in Costa Rica in 2006 where the clattery bus broke down and disgorged us into a concrete bunker and I found this around the corner.

Up to my neck in real work, the work that pays the bills as it is tax season in Canada and even though I've substantially cut back on my client base to create room for more creative endeavours, there are still quite a few clients kicking around -keeping me stoked up on coffee and four hours sleep a night and absolutely no blog readings, dying to get at you, my favourite bloggers and catch the latest.

Though I have to admit, sometimes, it is just grand to get a full four course dinner of my favourites when I catch up after being backed up like this.

I'm a little stressed too as I committed to 30 pages a week of the Great Newfoundland Novel (this is a different project than the Newfoundland Short Story Collection) so all in all far too busy. But grateful too as I watch the man across the road do his dash and run details ten times a day and just about iron his driveway.

I'm moving on soon, leaving here for Newfoundland on April 29th. Catching the ferry on May 3rd from Sydney, Nova Scotia to Port Aux Basques, Newfoundland.

Lots to get done before then, friends to see, taxes to complete, novel to review, and most of all family to be with.



Here are four random blogger awards, a tiny sampling from my lovely list:

Nick
Orla
Twilight
Verna

You all never fail to enlighten, inform and delight me!