Category Archives: rural doctor

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Houndstooth Check

I found this delightful houndstooth check jacket years ago. It is quite beautiful wool. Inside are initials and “Individually tailored” by Sears.

Inside that pocket is more information.

Was it tailored for or by Mr. Stanley Gee on 9/18/1961? If the initials are SG, then presumably for him.

Whoever it was for, it fits my 5 foot 4 inch frame, so the person was not very big. And the fashionable houndstooth is in three shades of green. Fabulous!

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: checks.

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Numbers game

For Judy’s The Numbers Game #9: 130.

Photographs with the number 130. From small things to large. First, a butterfly. August, 2022, on a hike on Hurricane Ridge.

Biking on the east coast. I biked with my oxygen concentrator.

East coast forest, Maryland.

Back the Pacific Northwest. Snow on the north face in the Olympic Mountains.

Hurricane Ridge, looking southwest.

Hurricane Ridge again, layers of Olympic mountains and clouds.

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Stitch

I like to play with word cliches
Geraniums red and chrysanthemums white
As I wander busy through my day
Delphiniums blue, all are dark at night
Least said, soonest mended
Except for murder, rape and pillage
Loose lips sink ships, war ended
Sinner gossip round the village
Time will mend a broken heart
A stitch in time will save nine
You’ll never finish if you don’t start
Mend that heart and change the rhyme
Absence makes the heart grow fonder
Your love grows daily, what a wonder

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: absence.

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Oscar party

I’m going to have an Oscar party
No, not those Oscars. The trash one.
The grumpy one I grew up with.
The one who lived in the trash can
grumpy all the time. Reliable, you know.
Trustworthy. I knew how he would respond
to everything. I valued that then and now.
Let’s have a party and all come as Oscar
the Grouch. Let’s dress as muppets and be grumpy.
Let’s complain about anything and everything.

And what do you think you will hear,
listening in to this Oscar the Grouch party
as it devolves?

Laughter.

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Spring 2

My neighbor has tiny violas blooming in her grass, near the garage. I had a tax appointment in the morning yesterday so walked the cats around noon. The busier street by my house was noisy, so the cats headed for the neighbor’s yard, further from the cars. I don’t hold the leashes but keep a close eye. NO DIGGING, cats, at least not in the neighbor’s yard.

Little signs of spring. Spring still feels strange to me here, even after 24 years, because it is so long. We start in February but summer rarely arrives until July 4. And then it is very rarely hot. After summers in Alexandria, Virginia and Richmond, Virginia, it feels so odd to not be hot. Though my patients would complain when it’s 80 degrees and 60% humidity. “Hot and humid!” It is all relative. I have lived in quite cold areas, Wisconsin and Colorado, and fairly warm and humid in Virginia.

For Cee’s Flower of the Day.

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Stand up

I am in a large room, like an expensive hotel lobby. There is a large black bowl like structure, fountain size, but without a fountain. There is a big woman bullying me. She is making me dump containers of ice into the bowl structure. It will overflow and I will be blamed. Another woman whispers to me: “You have to sing a song about abuse, so that people will know that she is making you do this.” I know songs about abuse but at that moment I can’t think of any. Then I do. I remember a song my mother sang, this verse:

“Two little babies, crying for bread. With none to give them, don’t you wish that you were dead. Don’t you wish you were a single girl again.”

I wake up. The song is about a young woman, married, whose husband is drinking up his paycheck. She and the babies are starving and he beats them. Not a pretty picture of marriage, is it?

I wake up. One way to think about dreams is that each person in the dream represents an aspect of ourselves. So WHY is my inner bully showing up? I don’t like this!

That day my friend goes from the hospital to a nursing home for rehab. I speak to three people on the team, because my friend has a cardiology appointment the next day and I want to be sure that she will be taken to the visit. She is going to a nursing home 40 minutes away.

On the appointment day, I call the rehab just after 9 am when the internet says they open. There are three choices: two halls and a main office. I leave a message on hall one. I call back and leave a message on hall two. I wait another ten minutes and call the office. No answer, I leave a third message. I wait until 9:30 and call again. This time that inner voice with gumption is fired up: “I need a call back by 11:30 or I will drive up there, I need to know that my friend has transport to cardiology for her 12:45 appointment.”

I get a call back at 10:30. The rehab person introduces herself. “Oh, we can’t transport her because she just got here yesterday.”

“You don’t understand,” I say. “This visit is to make sure her heart is ok after restarting a medicine. It is not optional.”

“We can’t transport her.”

“I am sick, I can’t transport her. What is your name? What is your position? Who is in charge of the facility? What about her heart, your facility has no concerns if her heart is poisoned?”

“Just a moment.” Papers rattle. “Oh, we DO have transport arranged. Someone else wrote it down and I didn’t see it.”

“Oh, thank you so much. I was so worried!”

I go to the appointment, masked. The driver says my friend was a last minute addition. The visit goes well. I am on the tail end of a cold, not covid, and I am very tired from trying to be sure that my friend gets good care. I think THAT is what the dream is about, the inner strong voice who is not going to let my friend be abandoned, be bullied, be ignored. She is too ill to fight for herself so I am fighting for her. And I am formidable.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: gumption.

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Fear and Finials

The word finial takes me straight to Portland, Oregon and Family Medicine Residency. My grandmother loaned us the down payment for a house and we were in Southeast, on Belmont Street. The neighborhood was coming up rapidly. My son was six months old when we moved there.

Across the street were two houses owned by two couples. All four worked for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in the summers. One woman quit and started a landscaping business. She had six foot tomato plants in her back yard by the end of the summer. She had a gorgeous flower garden in front. She also put up a decorative fence with elegant plexiglass finials.

One day all the finials were smashed. We were all sure that it was Mike. Mike lived in a duplex next to us and was terrifying. Initially it was his mother living there with a potbelly pig that would use a ramp to go down in the yard. The son moved in with his wife and child. His mother and the pig left and then the wife and child did too. Before the wife and child left, Mike knocked on my door and asked about exchanging baby sitters. I explained that we had an arrangement with someone and could not do that. After he left, I told my husband, “Don’t let that man into our house ever.”

As a neighborhood, we discussed what to do if Mike came at one of us. We figured he was on crack, he was terrifying, and we should go for head or knees, because we did not think pain would slow him down. This sounds over the top, right? Nope. My little family was in Eastern Oregon for a ten week rotation. “You missed the fun,” said our neighbors. “Mike threatened to shoot himself, they called out the SWAT team. He shot himself but he missed and only creased his head. He’s in the state hospital for six months.” Except he was back in three months. I’ve also written about him chasing his upstairs neighbor into traffic stark naked, trying to hit him with a five iron. Rush hour traffic stopped dead to watch the show.

We thought the 5 iron probably took out the finials. The owner of the house next door sold it and Mike left. We were all terribly relieved. And that is what the word finial brings up.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: finial.

The photograph is not from Portland, Oregon in the 1990s. It is from London in March 2022.