Category Archives: First Person

Oh My Heart—And Yours

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I recently received inevitable bad news. Twentyish years ago, when I was treated for cancer, I had chemotherapy and radiation. Everyone thinks chemo is hard (and it is) but radiation is also a very big deal. Radiation affected my heart and lungs. I have worked hard over the years to keep my cardio strength up. But I can’t keep ahead of it anymore. Radiation has calcified my aortic heart valve. I will undergo open heart surgery in the spring to replace it.

(I’m begging you, please don’t send medical advice.)

I’m ok. I’ve always known this was a possibility. I plan on living through it. I’m grateful to all the people who gave me this last twenty years. I got to see my wonderful child grow up and become the most superb adult.

And let’s face it, when I’m given that long list of side-effects and asked if I understand, what I hear is “Do I want to die now or later?” My answer is always, “Later.” I have a feeling I’m about to sign off on another bunch of those.

I have things I say about this turn of events. “The chickens have come home to roost,” is one. When I’m feeling slightly bitter, I might say, “Cancer: the gift that keeps on giving.” And now, a new one via my friend Marnie, whose parter has had open heart surgery twice: “It sounds dramatic, but remember, for the surgeon, it’s their Tuesday morning.” Good perspective. Thanks for that, Marnie.

I will stay in the hospital for seven to ten days. There are a lot of things to worry about and contracting covid shouldn’t be one of them. Currently, there is a mask mandate for hospital workers in my jurisdiction, but who knows if it will still exist in the spring.

I honestly don’t know what kind of monster would visit a cardiac ICU without a mask on. Or any part of a hospital.

Can you imagine having that covid cough after your sternum has been cracked open? I can’t.

This is where you come in.

I hear people lamenting the state of the world. It is lamentable. They ask, “What can I do?”  Whatever the issue is that you are lamenting, the answer is to take action. Action (hopefully informed action) fends off depression, for one thing. It’s great for that. It gives you a sense of control and gets you out of your own head, often because you are helping other people.

If you are concerned about the suffering and sickness all around you, the first and easiest action you can take to lessen it is to wear a mask. I’m going to say something harsh here. Get ready. If you are not willing to wear a mask, take a hard look at yourself. You really don’t care about the sickness and suffering all around you.

I cannot think of a situation that is not made worse by the pandemic and that would not be eased if SARS-C0V-2 were brought under control. Palestinians are getting covid while being bombed to near oblivion. But if genocide is your goal, covid is your helper. Climate disasters are made worse by people getting covid. Any illness or weakness you have lurking in your body is made worse by this vascular disease that can affect every organ in your body, including your brain. The decimation of your immune system means you will be sick more often. These are all known things. Get your head out of the sand and do some reading.

I’ve been wearing a mask since the beginning. It’s part of my life now. It is my normal. It is me, living with covid.

I am no longer willing to cut people with privilege and means any slack on this. If you are unaware of the criminal obfuscation going on around the airborne nature of this disease by public health and our so called leaders, it is because you don’t want to be aware of it. That’s on you. I wash my hands of you (knowing that hand-washing doesn’t do much to stop covid.) And if you are one of those public health people or alleged leaders, start doing your job. Start with distributing free masks. Then work on cleaning indoor air in public spaces you are responsible for.

I’ll still be active here. I’ll continue to talk about covid, about this new foray into the heart of me, and I’ll carry on with The Grim Reader. The pandemic and covid are conjoined twins of disaster. It’s important we keep trying our best.

And for those of you who will newly mask or mask again, thank you. For those who never stopped, thank you. We are all connected. We can’t ever forget that.

Gardening and Writing

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Sometimes, gardening is better for me than writing. Both gardening and writing are creative, but gardening has a messiness and physicality that writing lacks. That’s what I need right now.

It’s mid-October and my garden is still producing. Red and green leaf lettuce, romaine, arugula, Swiss chard, kale, beets and a few cucumbers that are trying really hard to become something bigger. The lacinato kale has been growing all year and currently looks like it belongs in a Dr. Seuss illustration. I’ve harvested the last of the cherry tomatoes and a few matinas that are ripening on the counter. I’m busy roasting them and with the help of my little freezer, I will be able to enjoy them through the winter when store-bought tomatoes are always a disappointment.

Cherry Tomatoes

Lacinato Kale

My carrots have always failed. I’m going to try again next year. Why not? The garden is an ongoing experiment. I’m not trying anything exotic. But the joy I get seeing a ripe strawberry and getting to it before the raccoons can’t be beat. I make decisions with the plants. I have to observe closely. The tomatoes have “told” me where they want to be next year. They don’t want to be clumped together. They want to be scattered throughout the beds where they can get more sun. I’ve jotted their wishes down in my garden notes for the spring.

Garlic goes in this week. Russian red. I grew it last year and it came up beautifully. It’s mild and delicious and when I see my garlic braid hanging by the back door, I feel a sense of accomplishment.

Gardening whispers to me: grow.

First Person: My Life in Blog Posts

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I’m fixing up my website with the help of my friend and website wizard, Lou Morin. As part of this overwhelming (to me) task, I’ve had reason to dig into my blog. Wow. There’s a lot of stuff there. And it’s pretty random. But that’s the way it is. To slightly misquote Walt Whitman, we all contain multitudes.

I’ve decided to categorize a whole bunch of random as “First Person.” First Person posts are wee ideas I’m noodling around, minor ramblings, occasional rants but also full blown essays. I’ve been writing about feminism forever, That won’t stop. And I notice that I write a lot about grief, recovery and finding joy. These are all good topics. There’s everything from Helen Reddy to George Orwell in there. I wrote some especially good stuff with a lot more detail pre-concussion. It makes me wonder if I should concentrate on essays for a while.

There will still be events and book info and posts about writing, but I hope to start posting more regularly in the First Person category. I don’t have a schedule and write when I’m inspired (and often, when irked).

If you’d like to follow along, please subscribe. The link is on my home page. When I figure out how, I’ll add it here too.

Travelling in Troubling Times

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Fires near Kelowna BC. Photo Credit: The Canadian Press.

British Columbia, the province in which I live, has just issued fire-zone travel bans in response to unprecedented wildfires. Evacuations are underway. Non-emergency vehicles are not needed on the roads while people try to escape to somewhere else.

I wonder: how long will any of us be travelling anymore?

I am disinclined to fly anywhere anymore. At least not for pleasure. (But seriously, the pleasure of flying ended a long time ago. Cramped, uncomfortable seats, intolerable security lines, unexplained delays, and so much more have made flying an experience to get through rather than one to enjoy.) For me, the end of masking made flying dangerous to my health. It’s a grand opportunity to catch SARS-CoV-2. A recent study found over 80% of US flights had Omicron RNA in the wastewater, and the number of people coughing or otherwise visibly ill on the two flights I have taken since the start of the pandemic easily convinced me that flying is a bad idea for me unless absolutely necessary.

I took those two flights wearing a respirator and carrying a personal air purifier.

Me, waiting for a flight in November 2022. Funny/Not funny story. I was in the Air Canada Lounge and this woman not 15 feet away from me was having her snack and complaining to her friend that she didn’t even know why she was eating because she couldn’t taste anything. She said, ”Isn’t that weird?” No. Not so much weird as it is SARS-C0V-2. I moved to the other side of the lounge, where, likely, someone else had it too.

By 2019 standards, I looked ridiculous. By pandemic standards, I look just fine, at least to me. (Although I also look disastrously tired in this photo. It had been a long and difficult trip. And I can tell you, people stared.)

But what has really landed me in my own personal no-fly zone is the climate crisis. One of the half dozen or so truly impactful things I can do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to stop flying, or at least stop flying except when absolutely necessary.

What constitutes absolutely necessary? For me, the two air travel trips I have taken since the start of the pandemic were to prevent looming family crises. The thing is, we’ve come of age at a time when it is typical to live far away from family, and I do. Air travel made it possible to live like this and still be involved. Sometimes, I will have to travel by air if we want to be in touch on vital family matters. For me, I have decided this is necessary.

If I’m going, if I’m going to burn up all that carbon, I’ll make the absolute most of it. I combined the first trip with a book tour. To be clear, I would not have taken the book tour to Toronto if there also hadn’t been important family matters to attend to.

A vacation with air travel is a whole other thing. I can’t justify it anymore.

This summer, my partner and I drove our hybrid vehicle on our vacation as we camped and visited friends. Nothing is perfect, you know? Driving is better than flying. But it’s not great. There’s no holier than thou going on here. (One of my new favourite expressions is ”granolier than thou.”) I am by no means the person who lives an exemplary life. Like all of us, I’m struggling to learn how to live in our new pandemicene era. I’m just sharing one of my own personal decisions, a judgement I made for myself—not for others.

It’s a privilege to travel in so many ways, one which I acknowledge and am grateful to have had. I am giving up a privilege. I’m not giving up clean water. But it’s also not like giving up turnips, which I do not like. That would be easy to do. I’m giving up possibility. I’m giving up something with positive associations. It’s been a long journey to first recognize and then deal with the new negative associations. And the airline industry hasn’t helped. I would get daily offers from Air Canada and Aeroplan in my inbox. I finally unsubscribed.

And what about driving? Some of the areas of BC that we travelled through by car this summer are now, just a few weeks later, ablaze. Our road trip did not help. I’m grappling with that. Earlier this summer, I read a news story about planes full of tourists continuing to land in Greece even though the country was in a state of emergency because of wildfires. A sister of a friend is flying to Maui in September. It just feels bad to me. It feels bad for me. It is not something I would do. Again, I make that judgement for myself. I’m not saying no one should ever go to Maui or Greece again. They depend on tourism. Or at least they have until now.

Now it seems they need their resources for themselves. Last November, we drove through the region where Lytton is, and there were signs asking people not to visit. Of course, we did not go there. I get it. No one needs a bunch of lookie-loos. People need to grieve, to regroup, to kick the ashes. And they don’t need me trying to buy a sandwich while they do it.

So, for now, rather than travelling in troubling times, I’ll be staying close to home. I’ll be revelling in the joys of the here and now, in the small pleasures of my glorious neighbourhood. That’s not anything to be upset about.

 

Struggling in the jolly season.

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‘Tis the season to be jolly. Whatever you celebrate, whether it be Solstice or Hanukah or Christmas, or anything else (including the arrival of so many extra cookies and treats) I hope you are able to find peace and contentment in the season. I’m struggling.

Maybe you are struggling too.

Many of us are keeping the holidays very differently than we used to. Some are back to big get togethers, but I suspect there is friction, a little cognitive dissonance gnawing at the edges of whatever is happening.

Me? We’re keeping a quiet holiday. Just the three of us. Daughter arrived a week ago before the storms made travel almost impossible and worked ”from home” from our home until Friday. She had been isolating the week before, tested negative (as did all of us) and we are all in it together now for another couple of days.

We are not joining the big family gathering 4000 miles away for two reasons: we were just there in November and my desire to be indoors in a large group is zero. So we had our visit in November and somehow, miraculously, managed to make it back without getting sick. We took all kinds of precautions, but we were also lucky. 

I’ve been called a fear-monger on the socials. Ok. Yes, I am fearful of catching a disease we still know hardly anything about. The likelihood of getting long covid is twice that of being hurt in a car accident. If anyone is really interested, I’ll try and find the source for that figure. It stuck with me. I’m not so good with the memory stuff right now because I have a brain injury. 

So yeah. I’m being careful. My ”recovery,” such as it is, has been too hard won. And incomplete, even now, almost seven years later. I can’t go back. And SARS-CoV-2 causes brain damage (among so many other things).

I miss entertaining. I used to have big parties. Big holiday things. Big non-holiday things. But those days are over for now. And I’m grieving. Much and all as I do not want to be at the family gathering, I miss the family gathering. If that makes any sense. I even miss shopping. And I hate shopping. I miss things I hated in the before times. I miss the before times.

And I’m worried about those who are gathering. Will it be another superspreader Christmas? I want to be wrong. You have no idea how much I want to be wrong.

And even though I’m safe and cozy here with my beloved husband and daughter, and so grateful, I feel a pall over everything. Sometimes I feel absolute fury. Other times I feel merely disappointed. Oh, how I’d love to be wrong. But I’m not. I want to yell from the rooftops about what it takes to keep safer, how it’s not actually that hard, how it’s worth it. But no one wants to hear that. Tonight they want to party like it’s 2019.

Ok.

So the jolly season is not so jolly for me. I’m grateful. I’m warm and loved and privileged to have a turkey in the oven as I write. But there’s an edge to it all. I’m worried sick about people who have had SARS-CoV-2 three times. Two times. Once. I’m worried about those who pretend that’s not what they have. Or had. Yeah, maybe it’s not. But maybe it is. I’m worried we aren’t testing, tracing, tracking, learning. I’m worried that public health officials have abandoned their posts and debased their positions. I’m worried.

Like all of you, I’m doing my best. So ’tis the season.

Abortion: Everything Old Is New Again

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As Roe v Wade is overturned in the US, it’s hard not to ponder what this means for reproductive rights in Canada, and of course, for our fellow humans south of the border.

Cover of The Abortion Monologues, three women and a child standing together
The Abortion Monologues

I have a substantive body of work about abortion and frankly, I always hope I will never have to return to it. I want our rights to bodily autonomy to be secure. They never are. Nothing is. There’s always some patriarch, some autocrat, some fascist, ready to upend democracy and any social progress we have made to assert their will. The will to power. So here we go again.

My play, The Abortion Monologues, is out there and I offer it free of royalty payments to reproductive rights organizations and equity seeking groups who want to produce it. Get in touch. (Seriously, get in touch. We’ll still need to do a contract.) My old blog associated with the play is archival now. But it’s still there, and aside from some language that I would now make more trans inclusive, it’s still pretty spot on. You’ll find a lot of info there.

We’re going to have to step up our work again. That is, I am going to have to step up my work again. I hope you will join me. Without doubt, my next offering to the world, Patterson House, is pro-choice. It’s clear what happens to women who don’t control their bodies or their choices.

There are those in Canada who would send us backwards. We are a long way from Pierre Trudeau saying, ”The state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation.” I’m not even sure his son Justin would make such a bold statement. And that new Pierre is a threat to all of us.

Feminism is a theory. Feminism is an ideal. But feminism is also an action. It’s time to take action. As my friend Marnie reminds me, we can’t just hope for the best. Quoting David Orr, she says, ”Hope is a verb with its shirtsleeves rolled up.” So take action. Roll your sleeves up. We need you.