Terrible photograph, right? But look for the deer. Two can be seen, and there was a third, another fawn.
First I see the buck in my yard.
Buck eating apples in a driveway.
Then I see him across the street with two fawns. I didn’t get a good picture of all three. But he did that deer thing where they tell the fawns to stay put. I go over to that neighbor’s house for coffee and here are the fawns.
Fawn lying under an apple tree on a lawn.
This is the second year that I have seen a buck with fawns. This time two fawns. The fawns are still spotted but about twice the size of newborns.
I don’t know if the buck is babysitting for the day or if something happened to mom. The fawns don’t move when I walk past and go in the house. I only see the second one because I am looking for it. This is a busy street, but the deer are pretty safe as long as they don’t get hit by a car. We have to pay attention in the early morning and twilight. The deer do teach the fawns to cross at crosswalks too, at least, the moms with fawns are. I think the big bucks have decided they can cross where ever they want.
“White-tailed deer mate in the fall (October β December). The male deer (buck) plays no role in raising fawns.” from here: https://dnr.maryland.gov/wildlife/Pages/plants_wildlife/Deer_Fawn_FAQ.aspx. That is a different species. Ok, try information on Washington deer: “Adult bucks take no part in raising fawns, and generally remain solitary or form bachelor groups throughout the summer.” from here: https://wdfw.wa.gov/species-habitats/living/species-facts/deer#. Apparently our deer have not read the manual. Or maybe those two spotted ones are males, but I can’t really tell yet.
Our deer are bucking the trend, aren’t they? Deershines instead of monkeyshines?
This photograph is from a box sent by my cousin. My sister Chris and my mother Helen. On the back it says “pear tree”. My mother would try to assemble the parts of the Twelve Days of Christmas. When I was in my teens, she would hang glittery pears on her avocado tree that she had grown from a seed. One partridge, two calling birds. She had seven tiny glass swans that she would set swimming on a mirror lake, with white fluff around it for snow. I don’t think she got past seven. My mother had wonderful traditions that she developed for Christmas. She loved the old carols and wouldn’t sing the modern ones at all.
I think my grandfather or grandmother took this photograph. I thought, why isn’t it square? But it isn’t: it was cut from a page and is a bit of a trapezoid.
My sister is about four, so this would be from around 1968.
I would tell my pregnant patients not to let anyone tell them a really difficult delivery story until after their own delivery. “Blame me,” I would say. “Tell them your doctor says you can’t listen right now.” So if you are pregnant, read this after the baby arrives.
Umbilical cords can be scary.
I delivered babies as part of Family Practice for 19 years. I was good or lucky or both. I still saw scary umbilical cords. Cords with a true knot, where the baby has managed to tie a knot moving around. More than one of those, not tightened down. Cords with two blood vessels instead of three, which can be associated with birth defects or genetic abnormalities, but not always. Cords with an abnormal insertion. I was waiting for the placenta once, with the baby in mom’s happy arms. One puts “gentle traction” on the cord to tell when the placenta is ready. I felt like the cord tore a little. I promptly call the ob-gyn. He arrives and tears the cord off. He then gives mom some “forget this” medicine and very gently gets the placenta with a ring forceps. The cord had a velamentous insertion on the placenta. This means that instead of going all the way to the placenta and diving in and spreading, the three vessels separated a few inches from the placenta. Not very well attached and I had torn one of the three vessels. Mom and baby did fine and I was glad I had called the ob-gyn. One of the scariest umbilical cords was normal but wrapped four times around that baby’s neck. Luckily I had called the ob-gyn, she agreed something was off and mom agreed to a casaerean section. Whew.
Most umbilical cords are not scary and most deliveries are wonderful. I loved holding new babies and saying hello and welcome.
This child is not afraid of the saxophone because she is growing up with it. The saxophone player is her father. She’s ready to help and be up on stage as well! She’ll have a fabulous jazz foundation and her father didn’t miss a note!
This is Tuesday night at the Bishop Hotel in Port Townsend, Washington. Chris Miller and Peter Leopold Freeman.
My cousin asks me once, why do doctors say, “This will only hurt a little?’ when they give a shot.
I thought about it. “It’s a matter of scale. Picture this: in room one, I have a woman who thinks her lung cancer is back and it is. In room two I have a mother and daughter crying because the daughter is pregnant and frightened. In room three, I have a well adult who needs a vaccination. Scale their levels of pain.”
Room one is very high, room two is very high, room three barely registers on my pain scale.
I would give out a health department vaccination information booklet by 24 weeks to my pregnant patients, especially the first pregnancy. I previously had given it later, but then I had a woman who refused the child’s vaccines at visit after visit after visit, saying that they were still doing research. The child still had no vaccinations at 9 months.
Remember the woman who refused vaccinations for her children? She had more than four children. They all got whooping cough, pertussis. They whooped for months and were on quarantine. They were not allowed out of the household, any of them, until they were no longer infectious. The mother said she now was for vaccines and got them vaccinated.
I have seen adults with pertussis. Adults do not whoop but they cough. They can cough until they throw up or until they break a rib. For months. It is not fun at all. The adult Tdap stands for tetnus, diptheria, and acellular pertussis. I have never seen a case of diptheria and I don’t want to. It sounds horrible and can kill.
Have I seen a complication of a vaccination? One in 30 years of practice. And I know a person who had a complication, but they were not my patient.
The illnesses cause way more damage and disability than the vaccine. In residency I care for a young man in a group home. He can’t talk and has an odd skull shape. His mother got measles during the pregnancy. Measles is one of the infections that can cause severe birth defects. Get vaccinated before getting pregnant, though half the pregnancies in the US are “unintended”. That usually means “unbirthcontrolled”. I do not really understand that, since the risk of pregnancy in a fertile woman is one in four every time. Twenty five percent seems a pretty high risk to me.
I’ve written about my response to my last Covid-19 vaccination. It’s not a complication. It is an antibody response and it means that my immune system is WORKING, though admittedly it is weird and annoying. I don’t like the muscle dysfunction, but I will get the vaccinations anyhow.
I have a very alternative young woman in for prenatal care once. I give her the vaccination booklet. “Oh, my child is getting every vaccine there is,” she says.
“May I ask why? I was not expecting you to say that.”
“I was in the Peace Corps in Africa. I have seen kids die from every single one of the diseases we vaccinate for. My kid will get ALL the vaccinations.”
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.
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.
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