Trigger warning: non graphic mentions of date rape, child abuse. A dark story for the Halloween season.
_______________________________
Mr. Smith is telling me about his daughter’s addiction to meth when the commotion starts.
He doesn’t seem to notice. I ignore sirens because the fire house is 6 blocks up the street, but I hear hooves. And people in the waiting room. Loud.
And Mr. Smith…. appears to be frozen mid-sentence. Uh-oh.
I am not frozen. I open the exam room door.
Artemis is there. Breastplate, feather headdress, inlaid turkish recurve bow, and she is not wearing a lady like toga. She is wearing armour. She is grinning at me.
There are lots of people milling around the exam room. Horses outside. I suspect 200. Or more.
“Quaaludes.” says Artemis.
“Ok.” I say. “Um.” I am thinking about the DEA. I get my paper prescription pad. Controlled substance, of course.
“We’re going to do a little pillaging.” says Artemis. “Kind of like date rape. Only in reverse.”
“Happy to help.” I say. “Uh, Bill?”
Artemis grins. “Well, he’s not the only one. You’d… well, you probably wouldn’t be surprised, would you.”
“No,” I say grimly. There are men in the waiting room too. That’s a bit of a surprise. I know two of them. Attended their funerals. Aids.
“I need enough for all 200 to…. well, discourage date rape and Cosbying.”
“So 600? Or 1000?” The DEA will throw me in jail. I write the prescription. Artemis touches it and it blooms in her hand, to 200 prescriptions.
“Don’t worry. The pharmacy is in Hades. The earthly DEA won’t have a problem.”
My receptionist is frozen too. I nod towards Artemis’s band. “I thought it was virgins?”
“We were all virgins once,” says Artemis, fierce. I can’t argue with that. She smiles again. “Thank you. We are going to have some fun. Sweet sweet revenge.”
I don’t really want details. My imagination is way too active. “Blessings.” I say.
“You too.” She turns, holding up the prescriptions. “Mount up!” Two women are riding velociraptors. Some of the horses have wings and other have horns. Three glow red and breathe fire. Some people are riding stags. They all have bows.
“You do need a bow.” says Artemis, looking back at me. “You’re a good shot.”
“Ok,” I say. I watch them leave in the air. The air starts looking a little thick and I go back in the room with Mr. Smith. I return to my position as best I can remember and then…
I struggled after my mother died of ovarian cancer in 2000. She was 61 and our love was complicated. Two years after she died I hit an emotional wall and had to go find help. My marriage was showing cracks too. I have written about Adverse Childhood Experiences, but there can be love too, even in a difficult household. I wrote this poem during that time.
My mom loved me
It’s herself she didn’t love
She didn’t love her anger
She didn’t love her fear
She didn’t love her sorrow
She didn’t love her shadows
She packed all her troubles in her saddlebags
and rode forth singing
When I was angry
she felt her anger
When I was scared
she felt her fear
When I was sad
she felt her sorrow
When I felt my shadows
she felt hers
I hid my shadows
I hid my shadows for many years
and then my saddlebags were full
They called me
I dove in the sea
I rescued my anger
I rescued my fear
I rescued my sorrows
I rescued my shadows
At first I couldn’t love them
My mom didn’t; how could I?
But I loved my mom
I loved all of her
Her anger
Her fear
Her sorrow
Her shadows
Her singing and courage
I thought if I could love her shadows
I could love my own
It was hard
It took months
I looked in the mirror at my own face
And slowly I was able to have
Compassion for myself
I am sad that my mom is not
where I can touch her warmth
and tell her I love all of her
I tell her anyway
I’m finding many things as I surface from my dive
Sometimes I feel the presence of angels
I was looking for something else
I found a valentine
that she made me
No date
Many hearts cut out and glued
to red paper
I am so surprised
My mom loves me shadows and all now and forever.
__________________________
My mother used to quote “Pack all your troubles in your saddlebags and ride forth singing.” Does anyone know where this if from? I have not found the source. It could be her mother or her mother’s parents.
The photograph is my father, the year my sister died of cancer, 2012.He died in 2013.
Papers about antibodies and immune system responses are proliferating. About Chronic Lyme disease, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, long haul Covid-19. We are near the tipping point of understanding vastly much more about the immune system, though understanding what is happening and being able to “fix” it are poles apart. You have to invent the germ theory before you can invent an antibiotic.
Allopathic medicine currently says that behavioral health disorders are caused by “neurotransmitter imbalances” in the brain. That’s a bunch of vague hooey, isn’t it? There is one mouse neuron that has been studied and has 300 different kinds of receptors for serotonin. Scientists blocked one and the mice acted obsessive compulsive. That was one kind of receptor. They are trying to figure out the other 299 and what they do in combination. Does this sound like we understand the brain? No, it doesn’t.
BUT there are papers about antibodies. Antibodies can mimic neurotransmitters, like dopamine, like serotonin, like adrenaline, like norepinephrine. Hmmmm. With multiple different types of receptors for each neurotransmitter, the antibodies could be specific for some receptors and not others. The antibodies could block the receptor, like the wrong key in a lock. Or the antibody could act like a key and turn the receptor on.
One barrier to understanding Long Haul Covid-19 and chronic fatigue as autoimmune diseases is that they do not cause a rise in the usual inflammatory markers. Those are the ESR (erythrocyte sedimentation rate) and CRP (um, I forget — oh, C-reactive protein). This does not mean that there is no inflammation or that these are not autoimmune disorders. This means we have not found a diagnostic marker. Rheumatoid arthritis can be “sero-positive”, with a positive rheumatoid factor marker. Or it can be “sero-negative”, with a negative rheumatoid factor lab, but it’s still rheumatoid arthritis.
What does this have to do with werewolves? Great question! I am thinking about the adaptive advantage of making antibodies to our own neurotransmitter receptors. How could that POSSIBLY be an advantage? What it means is that when someone is very very ill, or very very stressed, or both, at a certain point the immune system starts making crisis antibodies. These cause neurotransmitter and other symptoms. Brain fog, obsessive compulsive disorder, anxiety, muscle pain, fatigue and on down some very long lists. A recent study of fibromyalgia patients looked at 8 antibodies. One was an antibody to the GABA receptor. All of the patients had some of the antibodies, none of them had all of them, and they all had different patterns. So there is no marker and the neurotransmitter antibody could explain brain function changes.
Why werewolves? I am thinking of the old legends that are embedded in multiple countries and languages. Werewolves, demons, vampires, angels. My fourth pneumonia has left a problem: I can’t tolerate gluten any more. We did the antibody tests last week. I think they will be negative, because my gluten intolerance is relatively mild. I can have a tiny bit. People with bad celiac really can’t have any. I may have an antibody that is either a low level or one that has not been described yet. So with repeated infections, four pneumonias plus the exposure to my mother’s antibodies to tuberculosis in the womb, I now have what is looking like a permanent change in diet. This pneumonia started in March 2021, so it’s over a year. I had diverticulitis after that in August. I ate a piece of tempura two months later and thought, ooops, that has gluten! The next day I hurt in the same place as the diverticulitis and decided that I would stay well away from gluten for a while.
The adaptive advantage of having antibodies that change our diet or character or make us stronger or weaker would be to force us to change. To leave a community. To ask for help. To hide during a pandemic. To fight or be suspicious of everyone. Being a grumpy werewolf might save your life in a pandemic, as long as you don’t break any laws and eat someone. A friend likes the dark and hibernates and likes protein best: vampire or bear? I am not sure, maybe a vampire bear. Chronic fatigue seems to “save” or at least stop people from working 20 hours a day and driving themselves to illness. I am not saying that chronic fatigue is good or fun: but it might be adaptive. Brain fog and stiff muscles: zombies, anyone?
Can we do anything to prevent ourselves from getting these mysterious but probably autoimmune disorders? Yes. Lower stress. BUT WE ARE IN A PANDEMIC. Yes, but we can still lower stress. Here are three things to do:
Do not work yourself into the ground, into illness, into the grave. Take breaks.
BREATHE. A simple exercise to quiet the nervous system is to breathe in four seconds and out for seconds. You have to pay attention or count, unless you do it as part of facing a wall meditating, but it works. The veterans I worked with agreed that this works and they are not an easy crowd to please.
LOLCATS or whatever makes you laugh. Sit under a tree. Throw rocks in the water at the beach. Play with a child’s toy with or without the child. (Remember to share.) Sit in a rocking chair and rock gently. Go for a walk, slowly, no ear buds. Listen to the birds. Watch the tops of trees move in the wind. This quiets the sympathetic fight or flight response and switches us to the relaxed parasympathetic. Do this every day at least once.
These all quiet the nervous system which in turn quiets the immune system.
But wait, some people are in a war zone or a disaster zone or an earthquake! Yes. Help them. Get them out. Send something locally or internationally. Give something to your local “buy nothing” group or Heifer or one of the groups in your town: Rotary, Soroptmists, Elks, your local Area Aging help group.
And that is Drkottaway’s Werewolf Theory, a work in progress, under study. I need NIH West. Contact me to start the fund drive.
When I was married, my husband described my parents as “Time-Warp Beatniks”. That is a good description. We had no television until I was nine and my sister was six, because my parents disapproved of television. This lack made me even less social at school, even though I was never ever good a small talk. I still don’t understand the small talk code.
My mother disliked Barbie, so she conspired with her brothers. We had five girls and two boys in my maternal cousin generation. My mother got the four younger girls all 8 inch china dolls, instead of Barbie. The next summer, the younger boy got one too, since the girls were all sewing and building furniture and generally going to town with them.
I was also given the doll in the picture. She was my grandmother’s china doll, Katherine White Burling. I do not know who sewed the dress that she has on, possibly my great grandmother. The stitches are by hand and tiny. We understood that the dolls’s world was in the late 1800s and since this doll came with a wardrobe, we sewed doll nine patch quilts and my grandmother helped make demure pantaloons for our dolls.
My sister and I did manage to score Barbies eventually, though our china doll world was much more full. The china dolls went with us to Ontario, to Blind River, Canada, where my maternal family has shacks on a lake. We were all allowed to use scrap wood to build tables and chairs and benches and beds, as long as we PUT THE TOOLS AWAY.
Meanwhile, my paternal grandmother, Evelyn Bayers Ottaway, was a brilliant knitter. She taught me to knit at age 8, but it didn’t really take. I learned again in Denmark and still knit. Grandma Ottaway knit elaborate Barbie clothes on microscopic needles. I still have a few of them. They were in the late 1960s and early 70s and really beautiful. One was a tiny knit stole, with a mohair, lined with brown satin. My china dolls stole it from my Barbies. Or perhaps there was an exchange, I don’t know.
The hand sewing came in handy. I have had surgeons ask me where I learned to stitch. “Doll clothes,” I say. They tend to look confused at that.
At one point I had a patient here who was indigenous to the area and age 104. She told me, “When I was in my twenties, even if I dressed like the Caucasian women, they would get up and move to a different pew if I sat by them in church.” I apologized. She told me not to worry, things are changing. So in the photograph, the woman behind my grandmother’s doll is an indigenous weaver. There is a tiny baby on a cradle board. They are having tea together. That is wishful thinking on my part, but we are allowed to wish for peace and work for harmony. Two cultures, still trying to come together with respect.
An essay from my church talks about the writer avoiding conflict, fearing conflict and disliking conflict. This interests me, because I do not avoid conflict, I donβt fear conflict and actually, I like it. Our emeritus minister once did a sermon in which he said that when you are thinking about two conflicting things at once, that is grace. I have thought about his words many times, especially when I am not in agreement about something.
Does this interest in conflict mean I fight all the time? Well, sort of, but not in the way you think. I donβt fight with other people much. I fight myself.
What? No, really. Most topics have multiple sides. Not one, not two, but many. Like a dodecahedron or a cut gem. Hold it up to the light, twelve sides, each different. I argue the different sides with myself.
I learned this from my parents. My parents would disagree about something, they would discuss or argue about it, and then they would bet. Sometimes they bet a penny, sometimes a quarter, sometimes one million dollars. Then one of them would get up and get the Oxford English Dictionary, or the World Atlas, or some other reference and look it up. This was pre-internet, ok? 1970s and 1980s.
Sometimes my parents would even pay each other. The penny or quarter. My father spoke terrible French and my mother had lived in Paris for a year after high school, so he could get her going by insisting that his French was correct. It wasnβt. Ever.
There were other arguments in the middle of the night that were not friendly and involved yelling, but the daytime disagreements were funny and they would both laugh.
Once my sister is visiting after my mother has died. My father is present. My father, sister and I get in a three way disagreement about physics. Iβm a physician, my sister was a Landscape Architect and my father was a mathematician/engineer, so we are all three talking through our hats. However, we happily argue our positions. Afterwards, my gentleman friend says, βThat was weird.β βWhat?β I ask. βThat was competitive and you were all arguing.β βIt was a discussion and we disagreed.β βI wonβt compete.β βWe let my dad win, because it makes him happy.β βThat was weird.β βOk, whatever.β
My gentleman friend is also shocked when my teen son challenges me at dinner. My son says, βI am researching marijuana and driving for school and there isnβt much evidence that it impairs driving.β I reply, βWell, there is not as easy a test as an alcohol test and it was illegal, so it has not been studied.β We were off and having a discussion.
Afterwards my gentleman friend says, βI am amazed by your son bringing that up. We werenβt allowed to discuss anything like that at dinner.β I say, βWe pretty much discuss anything at dinner and both my kids are allowed to try to change my mind. About going to a party or whatever.β He shakes his head. βThat is really different.β βOk,β I say.
This habit of challenging authority, including adults, did not go over well when my son was an exchange student to Thailand. It did not occur to me to talk to him about it. He figured it out pretty quickly.
Back to my internal arguments. If I take a position, I almost immediately challenge it. I think of it as the old cartoons, with the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. The devil will make fun of things and suggest revenges and generally behave really badly. The angel will rouse and say, βHey, you arenβt being nice.β Then they fight. The internal battle very quickly becomes comic with the two of them trading insults and bringing up past fights and fighting unfairly. When it makes me laugh inside, I can also be over the driver who cut me off, or someone who spoke nastily, or whatever. My devil is very very creative about suggested revenges. When the angel says, βYou are meaner than the person who cut you off!β I am over it.
When I was little and disagreeing with my family, my sister could tell. βYou have your stone face on!β That meant I was attempting to hide a feeling, especially fear or anger or grief. Siblings and family are the most difficult because they can read us and see through us like glass. My physician training also teaches control of feelings. I have sometimes wanted to grab a patient and scream βWhy are you doing this to yourself?β but that really is not part of the doctor persona. I am doing it inside, but I can put it aside until later. Then the devil goes to town! And the angel tries to calm the devil down.
Maybe we all need more of this skill. Pick a mildly controversial topic. Argue one side of it. Then switch positions and argue the other side. Go back and forth until it gets ridiculous. Let each side get unreasonable and inflammatory and annoying. This can play in your head and not on your face. Once you can do a mild topic, move on to something a bit more difficult. If you only know the arguments on your side, read. You can find the other side, the internet is huge. Start gently.
A friend says, βYou always argue about things.β I say, βI prefer to think of it as a discussion.β βYou always take the other side.β βWell, it interests me. And if there is no one to discuss something with, I discuss it with myself!β βWeirdo,β says the friend. I think heβs jealous, really I do. Donβt you?
When I first think about divorce, I call my sister.
I say, “I am thinking about a divorce.”
She replies, “YOU don’t want to be a single mom.”
I think, well, crap, that is true. Me: “I AM a single mom. It’s just that one of them is FIFTY.”
My sister proceeds to tell me how difficult it is to be a single mother.
I have to self examine my OWN prejudices against single mothers.
Then I wade in, to solo and couples counseling, for a year. My ex fires our couples counselor after a YEAR. He says the counselor is on my side. “We have been talking to him for a year!” I protest.
“I want a new one,” says my then husband.
I find a new one. I am filling out the paperwork. It asks, what is your goal?
That is the moment I decide: I write “Amicable divorce.”
The two years before that moment, I am not sure. I am trying very very hard to see if it can be fixed. But it takes two to tango and my then husband will not tango. Not one step.
We were each attracted to something specific in the other person. My then husband did not want to work at any sort of traditional job. His father would come home angry from work for years. I loved working, always.
I was a terribly serious child, growing up in an alcoholic family, and I have food insecurity. That is, at some deep level, I always worry about whether there will be food. When I meet my then husband he says that his goal is “To have fun every day.”
This slays me. Have fun? And he WAS fun. Biking, jitterbug dancing, he was a tennis and golf pro, he was smart, well read, divorced from a marriage of convenience to a lesbian to cover so she could be a small town librarian. Really? Yes, really. I demanded to see the divorce papers before we got married. My then husband thought I was very very funny and I thought he was too.
When we divorce, people tell me he will never pay child support. He won’t stay in contact with the kids. There are a lot of opinions.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. My ex returns to school, gets a “displaced homemaker scholarship” because he was a househusband (yeah, I said he was smart). He goes to nursing school and gets an RN. “You’ve yammered about medicine at me for fourteen years, I might as well.”
He gave me hell about us living in an “old person’s” town. Then in nursing school he calls. “Hey, I’m doing a rotation. Guess what it is.”
“Don’t know, what?”
“Nursing home.”
I laugh.
“I LOVE these OLD PEOPLE.” he says. And he DOES. He is wonderful with them. He works in a nursing home for years. He gives scholarships to the medical assistants when they leave for nursing school. He brings coffee to his medical assistants and the other staff. He drives by on his day off because one elderly woman will only take her medicine if he gives it to her. He gets pianos for the nursing homes. He does memory loss concerts, where he tries to engage memory loss folks. We store music as entire songs, or entire albums, so if someone starts a song, they can often go through the whole thing. He can sometimes get someone singing who no longer can string a sentence together. Families love it.
Early in covid he calls me. “I have covid.”
“Sh-t.” I say. “Are you ok?”
“Oh, yeah. Everyone at the facility has it. Two staff didn’t so we sent them home. We are working sick because there isn’t anyone else.”
“Holy crap.”
“Yeah, it’s a little depressing. My memory loss folks can look ok at the start of the shift and are dead by the end.”
A quarter of the patients die. This is before the vaccine. My ex sails through covid, says he doesn’t feel bad, for him it’s just a cold. He says, “I miss some of them.” Yeah, holy crap.
So another hero. And he paid the child support every single month and stayed in touch with his kids in his own odd way. “Mom, he tells me about his golf shots,” says my daughter. I laugh, “Yeah. Well, he loves you.” “I don’t care about golf.” she says. “I know, me either,” I say.
The photograph was taken with my camera by my friend Amelia in 2014, I think. It is me and my ex, seven years after the divorce was final.
I read this to my ex prior to posting. Posted with his approval.
I had cobra from my job in 2009 and the insurance company refused my bills. Not one bill. Not once. EVERY BILL EVERY TIME: 1. my healthcare 2. my son’s healthcare 3. my daughter’s healthcare 4. my daughter’s orthodontia 5. my dentist 6. my son’s dentist. I had to call EVERY TIME to get them to pay. Calling an insurance company takes 25 or 30 minutes, right? Eventually I asked for customer service who first said it was my fault because “you probably paid the bill late”. I said, “No, I was on time every month.” Then customer service wouldn’t call me back. I finally called their COUNSELING HOTLINE, since it said I would be “paid” $30 to get counseled, and said, “MY LITTLE SISTER IS DYING OF BREAST CANCER AND THE THING THAT IS MOST STRESSING ME OUT IS YOUR INSURANCE COMPANY WON’T PAY THE COBRA BILLS AND I HAVE CALLED CUSTOMER SERVICE OVER AND OVER AND THEY WON’T CALL ME BACK. HOW ABOUT YOU COUNSEL ME HOW TO DEAL WITH THAT!” And I cried. I got a call back from the head of customer service saying “Oh, it’s a computer glitch and we had you misfiled. We have fixed it.” They “misfile” people all the time, or drop patients if they get sick, or say the person didn’t pay on time. I HATE INSURANCE COMPANIES. Anyhow, be warned that insurance companies are there to earn money and will try to avoid paying you in all sorts of ways, including ways that are illegal.
We need single payer healthcare, medicare for all. If we all have healthcare, think of how many small businesses would start up. And why don’t we have single payer healthcare? I think the big corporations don’t want it.
Who is the man in the photograph? I don’t know. This is an old tintype. They came from my Great Aunt, Esther White Parr, married to Russel Parr. Perhaps they are Parrs, because my Uncle Rob did not know any of the people in the four tintypes I have. My sister and I used them for portraits in our china doll houses.I hope he is not the CEO of an insurance corporation, but then, all the white collar white men tried to dress that way then.
Discover and re-discover Mexicoβs cuisine, culture and history through the recipes, backyard stories and other interesting findings of an expatriate in Canada
Engaging in some lyrical athletics whilst painting pictures with words and pounding the pavement. I run; blog; write poetry; chase after my kids & drink coffee.
Refugees welcome - FlΓΌchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflΓΌchtete Menschen in der deutschen Sprache. I am writing this blog in English and German because my friends speak English and German. Ich schreibe auf Deutsch und Englisch, weil meine Freunde Deutsch und Englisch sprechen.
KO Rural Mad As Hell Blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.