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“The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is another. The difference between them is sometimes as great as a month.”

April 7, 2017

We’re back from the appointment for Gracie at the vets. The good news is she didn’t have a stroke. The head tilt is probably from a lesion on her brain which may cause problems down the road, but she is fine for now. Her weak back legs are just that, weaker than her front. I should continue what I am doing to help her get around. Gracie was given a refill of her pain meds and got shots which were due anyway.

I had my MRI, but it is too early to hear the results. I figure there won’t be anything there, my lower back, as the earlier MRI’s showed nothing.

The most painful part of the last two days has been the $700 the two appointments cost me. I won’t ever be cured of that.

Yesterday it poured all day, a deluge to use my mother’s description, but today is the loveliest of days. The sky is a deep blue. The sun is bright, an almost need to squint bright. It is warm. When I left the house at nine, it was already 48˚. It is flannel shirt weather, a downgrade (or maybe an upgrade) from sweatshirt weather. I could do my outside work today. I still have that list, but I don’t want to for no reason except maybe relief. I was worried about Gracie. I still am, but it is a general worry about keeping an old dog healthy. The dread is gone. I just want to enjoy the afternoon, maybe sit on the deck with the sun on my face.

Lots of green shoots are appearing in my front garden. I saw the bumpy bud of a hyacinth this morning. Its color is starting to appear, a light purple. Daffodils are blooming. The yellow ones are first. The white ones are budded and waiting their turn. On my trip down Cape last Tuesday, I sat in a line of traffic on 6A. It was a long line so I had time to look around. I saw a tree with tiny, tiny buds. They were red and easy to see. I was thrilled. For me, that is the second sign of spring, after the bulbs flower.

My grass is squishy with mud. The ground wasn’t frozen when the days of rain began last week so the extra water just stayed right there, right on top, making the grass muddy. Footprints stay when you walk across the lawn. I try to avoid that.

I’m getting sucked in. I can feel it. Today makes me want to believe it’s really spring, but this is New England, and there are no guarantees so I’m still a bit skeptical, but the weather report is so amazing I can feel that skepticism draining away. By mid-next week, we may hit 60˚ and 50’s all the way to get there. That’s spring. No doubt about it.

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“I recently went to a new doctor and noticed he was located in something called the Professional Building. I felt better right away. “

March 30, 2017

Today is a New England spring day. The sun is bright, the sky is blue, and it’s in the mid-40’s. The weatherman calls this seasonable. I call it chilly.

Yesterday was a busy day for me. I was out and about early. I had a doctor’s appointment at 9:30 so I slept on the downstairs couch and set an Alexa alarm to wake me up. She did just fine. The doctor has decided my back needs to be looked at again. He used his knee hammer on my right leg five or six times before it reacted with that quick kick. “Something’s wrong with this knee,” was his professional opinion based on years of schooling followed by years of doctoring. I tell him about that knee every year, and every year he schedules tests which show nothing. This year we’ll do another MRI on my back.

When I was a kid, we never had regularly scheduled visits to doctors or dentists. We went only for apparent pain or injury. I remember seeing the doctor a day or two after I fell down the stairs when I was ten. I remember that doctor well. Pain sometimes does that: etches an event into a memory which dims but never disappears. That doctor, the one with no bedside manner, cleaned my chin gash quickly and painfully.

I remember sitting with my mother and then being called into the doctor’s office. It was huge with high ceilings and lots of wood around doors and windows. The office was in the front downstairs room of his house. The doctor was huge with the sort of big belly some old men seem to get. He always wore a vest with suspenders underneath. The desk was wooden and befitting a huge man. He had a skeleton hanging near his desk. That fascinated me. He checked the gash then cleaned it as if he were cleaning tile grout and then put a butterfly bandage on it. He told my mother it needed stitches, but the cut had become infected in the day or two since the fall so he couldn’t close it. I was thrilled. I didn’t care if that cut stayed opened forever. All I cared about was no stitches.

I loved my first dentist. He always used gas so I never felt any pain, but my father made me switch from that painless, expensive, dentist to a really old, cheap, dentist who didn’t even use novocaine. I swear his drill was a pedal model like the old sewing machines. I remember gripping the chair arms so hard I must have left finger impressions. He soured me on dentists for a long time, but I had to have all dental work finished before I went to Peace Corps staging in Philadelphia. I faced my bête noire and was triumphant. At the dental check in Philadelphia,  I was perfect, good to go.

I figure if my back is my only complaint, I can manage. I can still be good to go.

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“The practice of medicine is a thinker’s job, the practice of surgery a plumber’s.”

April 8, 2016

Today is sunny and beautiful. The ever-present wind is making the chimes play. The trees are swaying. More bird than I’ve seen for a long while have been at the feeders all morning. I’d label today hopeful.

At one I have a doctor’s appointment to discuss my MRI. I saw a line description of the results and it said: abnormal, referral to Doctor so and so. The doctor listed, aka so and so, was my surgeon on the last back operation. That didn’t make me too happy; however, I did see a bit of humor. I love the movie Young Frankenstein. When the doctor is putting together the parts of his creation, Igor is sent to get a brain. Something goes wrong and the doctor asks whose brain Igor chose. He says Abby Normal. That’s what ran through my head when I saw the one line results. I couldn’t help but chuckle.

When I was a kid, we never regularly saw dentists or doctors. My parents as kids hadn’t either so they just followed tradition. I did finally see an orthodontist for braces which were rare in those days. We even had to go to Boston by bus and subway to see him. I was seven or eight. The doctor’s name was Dr. Nice. I have a school picture of me in the third grade with my mouth closed, no smile. I was hiding my braces.

When I was about ten, I fell down the stairs which started my tradition of falling. We went to the doctor the next morning. He just cleaned it. I swear he used an SOS pad. All the way through high school I never saw a doctor. There wasn’t any need. Visits to doctors and dentists were based on pain.

Once when I was in the eighth grade I had a toothache and did go to a dentist, my father’s childhood dentist. I think his nickname was Butcher. He was about ninety, didn’t use novocaine, and I swear he pedaled to make his drill work. That was my last visit to the dentist until my senior year in college when I had to have my teeth checked for Peace Corps. I think I needed hundreds of fillings. That dentist didn’t hurt.

I saw the doctor once when I was in high school. It was for allergies. When I was getting ready for Peace Corps, I had to have a physical. I went to the same doctor as I had seen seven years earlier.

Now we’ll jump ahead. I have so many doctors I forget some of them. Other than check-ups I don’t see them more than once or twice a year except for my regular doctor. I see him when anything has gone awry. He’s the one I’m seeing today.

When I was in Ghana, if anything was wrong, I had to send a letter to the doctor in Accra to describe my symptoms. Luckily though I was healthy for the whole two years. I don’t think I even fell once. The closest I came was in the Sahara when a camel took off with me riding it. By the time I stopped the beast, I had just one leg thrown over the wooden saddle-like thing, and I was still holding the one rope rein. The camel and I were face to face. It spit at me. I am not a fan of camels.

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