New Year's Eve

It is New Year's Eve. I was awakened this morning by a pig squealing. Lots of pigs are meeting their demise today to be spitted and roasted for the holiday.

My house helper and her friend are spending the holiday here keeping me company - and borrowing our kitchen. Last night they went shopping and came home and packed a box of goodies to send to their families in the countryside. They included things like small cans of meat and fish, a big bag of candy, packages of instant coffee, milk, and Milo, sugar, laundry detergent, soap, shampoo sachets, etc. They also included the makings for a favorite holiday specialty - macaroni salad. It's made of cooked macaroni, fruit cocktail, sweetened condensed milk, processed cheese, and a bit of mayonnaise. They also planned to send about 2 kilos of roast pork left over from the friend's Christmas party at work. They left early this morning bringing the box to the bus terminal to send home with a family member they met there.

Now they are busy in the kitchen making cupcakes and fried noodles. They have two loaves of sliced white bread and apparently plan to make fried noodle sandwiches with it. They will also make spaghetti for a relative who will be stopping by later for some cupcakes.

This evening they will watch movies on an old laptop, eating fried noodle sandwiches and cupcakes, until midnight when the whole city will be outside making racket to welcome in the new year.

As for me, I am writing emails, updating my blog, and pondering life around me. I, however, do NOT plan to eat noodle sandwiches! :-)

Wishing you a happy New Year!

Sad stories for Christmas

I think I am coming to the conclusion that it is not possible to completely solve the problem of poverty.

Lola is a 23 year old girl from the mountains. She and her two siblings were raised by their grandmother, and an aunt paid for her schooling through high school. She then came to the city and got a job in the fish market. There she met another orphan, also raised by his grandparents. He was a fish slicer. They didn't get married but just moved in together, which is quite common these days among the young folk. The excuse is that they don't have the money for a wedding. There are also plenty of older people who have been previously married who have "live-ins" because divorce isn't legal.

Six years later Lola has 3 children ages 1, 3, and 5. They rent one room in a house located over the ocean. There is no bathroom. All waste goes beneath the house where the tide carries it off each day, though of course it can be pretty smelly during low tide. They buy water from a neighbor, paying per bucket. Cooking is done over charcoal, usually outside unless it is raining. The husband lost his job a few months ago for some unknown (to me) reason and only intermittantly works now. He seems to have his heart set on being a fish slicer and doesn't want to look for other work. He spends his days at the market, hanging around with his friends and eating with them, waiting for an occasional opportunity to slice fish. Meanwhile the wife is at home with the kids. She is still nursing the baby and when she doesn't get enough to eat the baby cries a lot. While her live-in worked, they had plenty of fresh fish to eat. Now it's difficult.

She stopped by to pick up some CDs from her aunt. Her aunt gave her fare to go home but after she left, her aunt started wondering why she had bothered to come just for CDs and then realized that Lola probably didn't have any food in the house and had probably been hoping the aunt would give her money. Lola's now embarassed to ask for help because she has had to ask so many times and some of her relatives have begun advising her to leave the live-in and go back to the country where she and the kids can at least plant vegetables and eat.

Thinking about the kids, the aunt collected some stuff around the house, sugar, Milo, coffee, mung beans, a few left-over Christmas goodies and went to the market and bought charcoal, oil, eggs, vegetables, 10 kilos of rice and a kilo of chicken. When she arrived at Lola's house she found the live-in sitting there watching TV, hoping that a lottery ticket he'd bought would pan out netting them about $1.25 with which they planned to buy food. Lola had apparently bought 1/4 kilo of rice with what was left from the bus fare and they had eaten rice soup for lunch. The kids were super excited to see the Christmas treats and the big package of Milo.

Lola's grandmother has begged her on several occasions to come back to the country and so have several of her aunts. But she refuses. The man, who is quite large and through it all has managed to keep his weight up by eating with friends, refuses to look for other work. Is he cognitively challenged? Is he unable to think outside his small box? Is he lazy? Or does he just have the problem of being unrealistic? This is the kind of situation that makes relatives and other observers want to pull their hair out.

But you can't run people's lives for them.


Another painful, yet also hopeful story is that of Rita.

Today was a joyous day for a 9-year-old girl I will call Rita. Four years ago Rita had suffered a broken femur. Nothing was ever done about it and eventually the bone became infected. Earlier this year social workers brought her to the city where she was taken in by an expat doctor and his wife who helped navigate the paperwork to get the girl treated. It was a long process with many obstacles. They got her some crutches and she began to be able to get around a bit. She was hospitalized for nearly a month on IV antibiotics to clear up the bone infection. Then she had some heart arrhythmias and the cardiac consultant refused to give permission for surgery. Colds and such caused more delays. She had also been quite malnourished and was tiny for her age. One of the doctors was outraged when he saw her. He said it was child abuse to allow a child to go that long untreated. Social workers eventually brought her 12-year old brother to the city also and he is staying with his sister. He too was tiny and malnourished and had never been allowed to go to school. But finally, just after Christmas in a surgery that didn't start until 11pm and went until 2am, the leg was repaired. Today Rita is leaving the hospital to the great delight of her foster parents and all of her well-wishers. Go, Rita!

Hypnotism crime

Apparently a common method used in crime in the second of my worlds is hypnotism. You know, the criminal hypnotises the victim so that they do not see the crime or cannot resist. In our town a guy was arrested by the police last year for stealing motorcycles. When he was released he walked through the police station in full view of a dozen police sitting at desks. He swiped one of the police helmets, in full view of them all, and none of them could lift a finger to stop him.

Recently a TV news station showed footage from a security camera at a convenience store where such a crime occurred. A group of 6 men and women came into the store and pretended to shop but in various ways they also tried to distract the cashier, asking where the bathroom was, asking for change, etc. While the cashier has the cash drawer open and her hands counting change right over it, you can see one of the guys reach over and take a large wad of bills right from under her nose, apparently without her seeing it.

Last year a city newspaper helpfully gave some police tips on how to protect yourself from hypnotism crime. Some of their suggestions included things such as:

- Believe fully that evil hypnotism cannot happen to people who reject it,
because all hypnotism is self-hypnotism where our fear is used by the
hypnotist.
- Beware of people who come up and befriend you because all hypnotism is a communication technique.
- Keep your thinking busy and don’t let your mind be empty when you are alone in a public place because when your mind is empty you are very susceptible to suggestion.
- Be careful when you feel sleepy, nauseated, dizzy, or have tightness in your chest especially when it comes suddenly for no reason because there may be someone using a telepathic forcing on you. Immediately decide to throw off that negative energy to the ground and pray according to the religion you believe.
- If you are suggestible, don’t go out alone or else get over your suggestibility.

I'll try to remember those suggestions the next time I'm out and about! :-)

Where have all the flowers gone?

I recently returned from a month long trip. Our back yard was looking pretty overgrown and since the El Nino has ended and it is raining again, it seemed a good time to do some “bush whacking”. I noticed though that several of the potted plants have disappeared. That is, the pots are still there but no signs of any plants.

I think I have discovered where all the flowers went:

He has replaced the hanging plants!

Such a cozy bed!

Taken before I went on the trip - I should have known!

Even the mama cat now likes the flower pots! Sigh!

Cat in the tree

Last Sunday morning I heard a commotion across the way. The neighbors in the opposite apartment leave their door open a lot and apparently a stray cat had gotten in and they were trying to get it out. The poor cat was trapped in their window and couldn’t get out because of the screen. It was a pretty uncoordinated effort. Two kids were outside poking sticks at the cat through the screen while somebody on the inside was hitting it every time it dropped to the floor. Eventually somebody decided to open the drape on one side and the cat scooted out of the window on the inside and was frantically slipping and clawing on the tile floor trying to get away as they kept whacking at it with their sticks. It finally got straightened out and scooted out the door – only to be met by the family’s big long-haired cat who promptly attacked it. We heard some screeching and then the intruder came leaping across the pavement and climbed up the big talisay tree while the family stood in their doorway laughing at the scene. Their cat didn’t try to follow it up the tree and eventually went inside.

I didn’t think any more of it. The next afternoon a warkman said there was a cat stuck in the tree. When I looked I realized it was the one who had been chased up the day before. It was a young cat, still a kitten really. White and black and quite handsome. A worker who is a good tree climber attempted to get it but it was scared and he said it tried to bite him and only climbed higher up in the tree.

The next morning I could see him out the second story window all curled up comfortably on a branch about 20 feet up. Periodically he’d meow but made no effort to come down. I figured that eventually if he got hungry enough he’d come down, especially at night when there were fewer people and less commotion. But he didn’t come down that day either. I looked on the internet for ideas. Most had unhelpful advice such as calling the animal rescue squad or a tree trimming company, none of which exist here. But they all advised trying to get it down if it had been there more than 12 hours. And several refuted the idea that cats will always come down. They said that sometimes they are too scared and will cling for days until they are so weak they fall. Kittens especially. One guy said he was a tree trimmer and had seen cat skeletons in trees. Of course I get more upset thinking about the poor cat starving to death and having to listen to his plaintive meowing for days. I certainly couldn’t reach him, our ladder didn’t go high enough. Nobody else was interested in risking their life climbing up there and trying to grab a scared cat. The worker tried poking the cat with a long pole but it just climbed even higher.
Since I couldn’t do anything else, I decided to just pray. I know, it seems crazy to pray for a cat, what with a world full of humans who desparately need prayer. But on the other hand, God created cats too and the Bible says He even cares for the sparrows. Maybe somebody’s guardian angel could take a few minutes off during a slow time to give guidance to a poor traumatized kitten in a tree?

Well, the next day (day 4) the cat was gone. No more pitiful meowing and no cat in the tree. Later that afternoon I thought I heard it again and sure enough, there it was eating some leftover rice in front of another neighbor’s apartment- on the ground.

So did God send an angel? Maybe. Maybe He sent mine, because that evening, sometime after I prayed, I got distracted while carrying a bowl of boiling hot soup and spilled it all over my hand. It certainly provided a painful distraction to worrying about the cat! Ha, ha!

Coping with brownouts

The past several months have been much drier than usual due to an El Nino. This island normally gets most of its power from hydroelectric sources but this year the water levels were extremely low resulting in power shortages. In this city they have managed to organize the brownouts such that you can sort of plan your day. The city is divided into three groups which have a rotating schedule of brownouts, not to the exact time but the general part of the day. In my part of town on Mondays and Tuesdays we are scheduled for afternoon brownout of 2-3 hours duration. Wednesdays and Thursdays we have them in the early evening. Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays we have them in the morning.

It does interfere with work since it’s too dark inside our house to read or see the computer keyboard, and my second monitor doesn’t work. If we have a brownout in the morning I often use that time to go shopping or do errands because the malls all have their own generators. Or I might go to our office which is on a different rotation schedule. There I can check the mail or photocopy or use the library. When we have an afternoon brownout that is when it is the most difficult because it is not only dark but also very hot. Sometimes if I’m sleepy I take a nap on the cool tile floor. Or else I just sit and sweat and listen to a pre-downloaded mp3 radio broadcast or sermon while playing a mindless computer game until the power comes on. When the power goes off in the evening, I light 3-4 candles, power up the mp3 player and hike laps around the kitchen and living room for an hour.

It has been raining again recently so we hope that eventually the reservoirs will fill up and the power will become more regular.

BREAKING: They just announced a change in the schedule. To be more "equitable" the schedule will change every week. Sigh! Just get a system figured out and they go and change it again.

The most expensive rice I ever ate

Reading glasses are a bit of a pain and since I wear them all day long for computer work, who wants to drag them out at the store? Well, last Sunday I stopped by the grocery store at the mall. I saw some really nice looking unpolished brown rice that I had not seen there before. It was less than half a kilo so I threw it in the cart to try. I didn’t check the price. After all regular rice is about 80 cents a kilo and although brown rice would be more, I figured at most it would be $1 a kilo. It was in a simple plastic bag that the store uses for breaking down wholesale sacks of rice and repackaging into smaller retail amounts of 1, 5, or 10 kilos. The price is on little stickers but it’s hard to read without digging out reading glasses. I had several items at the checkout and tho the total seemed high, well, everything is higher now.

But the next day at home, we noticed the price – amounting to $10 per kilo! Good thing it was less than half a kilo. Was it mismarked????? It’s hard to believe that that could really be the price! We are cooking it now and it does smell wonderful. But it will be the most expensive rice we have ever eaten.
If I ever see it again I will definitely want to recheck the price. I will also plan to dig out the reading glasses when in doubt. (And I will probably be in doubt more often now!)

PS Turns out the rice was some special kind imported from Hawaii!! I saw it again the following week and this time looked at the labels. It WAS very nice rice , but I don't think I'll get it again!

The elephants are still fighting

Now we are in the post-election phase. Losing candidates are busy complaining about the automation machines, challenging results, demanding recounts , accusing the winners of corrupt tactics, and filing lawsuits. The top two vice-presidential candidates have been neck and neck with only a few thousand vote difference so that has been mildly interesting. Both have been very civil about the whole thing. They haven't yet declared a winner but are promising to do so soon.

What's been interesting is the local mayoral race. The Daughter won 65% of the vote for mayor and the incumbant Mayor won 80% of the vote for vice-mayor, or rather, Vice-Mayor. The election committee has long ago declared them the winners. But somehow the Opponent continues to fuss. Rumor has it that he threw huge amounts of money into winning this election but after all he didn't and he can't believe it. I guess he doesn't yet understand the perfidy of people.

He is the one who demanded that the election committee take over the city during elections lest the emcumbant Mayor cheat. The Mayor agreed and so the election committee has been in charge of the city since a couple days before the election until now. Now he is filing a suit accusing the Mayor's party of having 17,000 dead people vote and 40,000 zombie voters (people registered in more than one precinct), and of other irregularities. (Not that 57,000 votes would have changed the election results anyway.) Meanwhile the current Mayor wisely noted that the suit should actually be filed against the election commission, not him as they are the ones who were in control of the city and the election. The head of the election committee is annoyed and says that that was not possible, that THEY were in control and were very strict and weeded out people registered in more than one place. The new mayor-elect, Daughter, said she was expecting about a thousand suits from Opponent. So this is just number 1 with 999 to go. But even frivolous lawsuits have to go through the courts and takes the time and money of the accused.

This has been an interesting election. Apparently many if not most politicians are lawyers who can spend all their spare time throwing legal challenges at each other. I also learned that these elections are deadly serious affairs, and the power struggle is awseome. Reminds me of the African proverb - when the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled. It may make for amusing news stories, but you sure don't want to get involved!

The first "automated" elections

Two weeks ago was election day for president, vice-president, senators, congressmen, and locally, mayor. It was the first time they used what they called “automated voting”. Each polling station had a machine that looked like a fax machine. Voters blackened in ovals next to the candidates of their choice on the ballot cards and then fed the ballot into the optical scanning machine which was supposed to count the votes and store the info on a flash card. It was then supposed to contact home via satellite with the counts every hour or so. Apparently there were numerous problems with the machines. Some had battery problems, some didn’t work at all, some were just slow and ballots had to be fed in multiple times before they were finally accepted, and there just didn't seem to be enough of them to handle the numbers of people quickly..

It seemed that the print was small for some older folk, and so some brought a grandchild with them to help them cast their vote.

One friend went at 7:30am and after multiple problems with the machine plus the slowness of the whole procedure, didn’t actually get to cast her ballot until nearly 7pm. It sounds like a lot of people gave up and went home without voting so that was frustrating.

Sounds like vote-buying was rampant too, especially by the Opponent of the Mayor. People reported being offered round trip fare if they would sign a list saying they would vote for the Opponent of the encumbant Mayor. Workers were reported as going door to door even on election day, offering up to $22 per household to vote for the Opponent. In some neighborhoods the Opponent was sponsoring roast pork parties on election day. Others whose kids had scholarships thru the gov’t (the Opponent has been a national congressman for a long time and has sponsored many scholarships) were threatened that the scholarships would be cut off if they didn’t vote for the Opponent. It was also reported that in certain precincts the ballots listed two candidates with the same last name as the encumbant Mayor. This was done in the last election as a way of splitting the vote for those who didn’t read the whole name carefully. The interesting thing is, though, that if you download the official ballot form off the national election site, there is only one candidate listed as having that last name. So when was the second name added????

Privacy isn't quite what it is in some other places. Most of the polling places were at schools. People were sitting at school desks in a classroom, several at a time filling in their ballots. A friend said that the print was so small she didn't think anybody could see what another person was filling out. But some people said that at their polling station there were people looking in the windows and they were afraid that, since they had accepted money to vote for the Opponent, those people might see if they didn't vote for the Opponent and so felt intimidated. At other polling places there were curtains at the windows and people felt secure.

The perfidy of people. A number of people reported having accepted money from a candidate but having no intention of voting for him. In a way I kind of felt sorry for some of the candidates passing out candies, t-shirts, snacks, and even cash and hearing people say oh yes, they were going to vote for them and then here comes the election and they lose big time. Then again they aren't supposed to be engaging in vote buying.

There were no reports of violence in this city – though I did hear of one guy who got so frustrated he tried to smash the voting machine. Police pulled him away and then he turned and broke a window so they hand-cuffed him and took him off somewhere. In other parts of the country there were some reports of grenades and gunfire used to scare off voters lined up.

There were daily updates on the status of the presidential candidates but it was a few days before they announced the results of the mayoral candidacy. Apparently the local election committee didn’t want to release any info until all precincts have reported. Eventually it was revealed that the Opponent garnered about 35% of the votes and the Mayor’s daughter won 65% of the vote. (The Mayor has to step down for a term because the law mandates a limit of three terms in a row. He can run again in 3 years time. So in this election he ran for vice-mayor while his daughter, who is the current vice-mayor, ran for mayor.)

My Dengue Journey

Everybody’s writing their Journey stories so here’s mine. This is the fourth time I’ve had dengue fever. According to what’s out there, there are 4 types of dengue. So I have apparently hit them all. Am I a world record or what? So unless they discover a fifth type that should mean that I am done with it and need never fear another mosquito!

Nobody writes much about what the dengue journey is like. You read about the symptoms of high fever, severe headache and backache but not much about the real, you know, experiential part of it all. Today is Day 6 of Round 4.

Headache. Oh yeah. All four times I had a headache. They say it’s often pain at the back of your eyes. Well this time it was the bones above my eyes, the bones below my eyes, the bones of my temples, the bones in front of my ears and my teeth. They hurt so bad I didn’t even notice the back of my eyes! Move your head and unnghhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lower backache? Oh yeah. Not as bad as the time I had it in South America when I had to grit my teeth and stop breathing just turn to the other side. This time I could still breathe when turning but it kept me rolling back and forth ever searching for some comfortable position.

Fever? Of course, that’s why it’s called dengue fever. Highest recorded this time was only 39.8 and that’s cuz a friend persuaded me to take paracetamol whenever it got above 39 (almost 103F). The record was the second time when it hit 41 (105+F).

Stomach pain? It wasn’t so noticeable earlier, it was a vague cycling from extremely hungry to nauseous to slightly painful and back around again. Now that the fever has broken those sensations have intensified. I don’t usually vomit as long as I don’t drink too much at a time. And nothing sounds good so no danger of eating too much. Besides, you get a weird taste in your mouth and if you do eat anything with chemicals in it the flavor of the chemicals is super enhanced.

Rash? Today I do have a rash but frankly I couldn’t really have seen whether I had a faint rash before that or not because when my fever gets that high my vision gets dim. Yeah, literally like somebody dimmed all the lights, including the sun, moon and stars.

What I don’t see mentioned in the medical literature is the weird mental stuff. It’s kind of funny but when you’re in the midst of it, it is not boring. Most of the time you’re lucky and just sleep or lose consciousness but sometimes you see weird things. Like, the time when my fever was 41 (105+F) I would see lots of ugly stuff, like heaps of squirming guts, mounds of worms, disgusting nasty things. If I opened my eyes and looked at something real it helped. But in the dark of a moonless night in a remote village you don’t see anything at all even if you do open your eyes. The only thing that helped was praying and forcing yourself to think about beautiful things like flowers, butterflies, clouds, etc. This time there was none of that but my mind was like incessantly nattering away at nothing, like it was busy-busy working on some urgent problem until I finally had to forceably shut it off and think consciously about something else. Later I was reading a weird email so long I couldn’t scroll long enough to ever get to the bottom and I kept finding it embedded and looped upon itself. The person it was from would never in a million years have been so verbose about anything! Of course in reality there was no such email but hey, I was READING it! I could give you a synopsis of it! That’s the weird kind of mental stuff you don’t hear much about.

The next step is wait and see if you get any of the the hemorrhagic stuff with it. So far on this journey I have been blessed and have not had any bleeding that I ever noticed, no gum bleeding or nosebleed or even noticeable rash. May God grant that this (hopefully) last stage of this journey also be so
blessed.

Do not let your cat sleep on your back

It all started one night when I was peacefully minding my business, snoozing on my stomach. For some reason the cat decided to take a nap on my back. Maybe he was lonely or maybe he felt cold, I don’t know. But since he’s hot and heavy I didn’t really want him there so I wiggled a little to get him off. Instead of getting off he dug his claws in. I know at least one claw went all the way thru my t-shirt!

Now a few weeks later, I have a huge, nasty, painful boil on my back – just below the shoulder blade where it is difficult to reach and impossible to see. They say heat is good for bringing a boil to a head. So for five long days I put hot water in a plastic bag, and tied it shut. Then I tied the bag into a sarong and hung it over one shoulder and tied it like a sash so that the bag would be on top of the boil. But after 5 long days it still hadn’t come to a head and I couldn’t lay on my back at all cuz of pain and swelling. So a couple days ago I finally went to a doc. She took one look and ordered a huge dose of antibiotic. Said she since there wasn’t yet(!) a head she didn’t want to cut until I’d been on an antibiotic for three days.

So here I am 2 days and several doses later. The thing has started to drain a little but is still very painful and still huge and I still can’t lay on my back. I don’t think it is an ordinary staph infection cuz the drainage is gaggingly foul smelling! I guess I'll have to go back tomorrow and see if the doc can drain it all at once.

And so my friends, that is why you should never ever let your cat sleep on your back!

PS It was cultured and turned out to be something the doc had never seen - Morganella morganii. But very consistant with something a cat might drag in  - ughhh!!!

Green energy woes

It seems that we really are having an El Nino this year. We seem to alternate years, nothing normal anymore, just El Ninos and La Ninas. It hasn't been raining daily like it usually does and we have had to water the plants a couple times a week lately. We are told that the lake and river which provide almost all the power on this island are very low and so power has been cut back. Luckily this city has an old 40 MW Bunker-fuel plant as well that has helped pick up some of the slack. It is located less than a kilometer from our place and it has been running almost constantly for the last 3 weeks. It is extremely noisy and even at this distance there is a low pitched background thrumming that kind of gives you a headache after awhile. In fact, one of our neighbors is out house hunting right now because he can't sleep. He says not only is it noisy but it shakes the ground and even using ear plugs and closing windows and using air conditioner don't help. So they are scouting out a neighborhood out past the airport.

Today the power company said the allotment of hydro-electric power has been cut even more so they will have to start rotating brownouts of about 30 minutes duration. The local generator can be cranked up to 53 MW temporarily and when it does it REALLY gets noisy! But it can't sustain that level so eventually it drops back to 40MW and the noise subsides - a little.

So much for our green energy.

Avastin

No, it's not a nautical term. It's a medicine used for retina problems. Monday (Feb 8) I had Avastin injected into my eye – and I have survived to tell about it! What follows is the gory details of the injection. If you do not like gory details just skip this post! But I am writing it for others who may someday need such an injection.

In early January I noticed an area of distortion in the upper left quadrant of one eye. At that point it was not in the macula and did not affect reading. But since I am very myopic I am at risk for retinal issues so went to see a local retina specialist.

I kept hoping the distortion in my right eye would get better with conservative treatment (anti inflammatory drops) but after a few weeks the area only got bigger. Once I decided to go for the anti-VEGF injection I went to the one and only doc in town who does it – and found out I’d have to wait another week because the Avastin would have to be ordered from the capital city. Although I wavered again and again over the next week, the area slowly got even bigger until I was totally unable to read a clock or calander or recognize faces with that eye . Reading a computer screen was slow and difficult even with enlargement, it was like looking through dirty water at italic and other weird shapes with piecs of the letters missing. And of course it is my dominent eye so it keeps trying to take over. By the time Monday came I was ready, if not exactly looking forward to it. The doc had ordered eye drops to start 4 days before the injection and an extremely (excessively?) high power antibiotic (Levofloxacin). Seemed a bit of over kill and after googling Levofloxacin I’m sure my fingers and feet started feeling numb!

Day 1 On Monday after lunch I went and got in line. They took me first so no chance to ask anybody else how it went. I was gratified that they used good aseptic technique, anesthesia drops, betadine drops and a presumably sterile face cloth with only a hole for the eye. The doctor put on some kind of head gear as well (I couldn’t see well with no glasses.) I was told to look off to the upper left. I am very nearsighted and couldn’t see much in the dim lighting but found a piece of shadow I tried to focus on. They put a gizmo to hold the eyelids open and did some more touching of the eye, none of which was painful. The injection itself wasn’t very painful but I saw the swirling of the medicine go in and lost the shadow I was trying to fix my eye on. I’m afraid my eye moved a little as I ended up with a good sized blood clot on the white of my eye. They patched the eye and gave me a list of instructions – eye drops every 2 hours for a week while awake, an anti-glaucoma drug the rest of today and tomorrow. Continue with the antibiotic for 5 more days. no bending, strenuous exercise or activity, no lifting heavy things, avoid sunlight and dust, close eyes while bathing for next week, and come back tomorrow. (The needle was nowhere as big as the drawing shows and was inserted on the outer side not the top.)

Total cost was $760 which I paid in cash after it was done. (And that was the cheaper procedeure. Lucentis would have been over $2100!)

I felt okay but it was weird having an eye patched, you kind of lose distance perspective like stepping off curbs, reaching for things, etc. The eye was starting to ache by the time I got home but the anti-glaucoma pill really seemed to help. I ended up taking the patch off because what with wearing glasses over it my eyelids kept brushing it and it was annoying. I did find a piece of clean gauze in my cupboard to cover it that first night. I could see as well as before the procedure but the blood did look kind of gross and I had to wipe some clots away that ran down after I put eye drops in.

Day 2 went okay, still taking the anti glaucoma drug and high power antibotic and eye drops every 2 hours. When I went back the doc said to not get my face wet in the shower (now he tells me!) but just clean with a cloth and to wash my hair like in a beauty parlor, not bent forwards. Sigh! Do you know how many times in a day a person bends over? Especially a tall person in a short man’s country?? I mean, books off of shelves, getting clothes out of cupboards, pans out of lower cabinets, lower desk drawers. I even have to get on my hands and knees to plug my computer in! That’s not to mention feeding the cats, or picking up things I drop, making bed, etc. Good things my knees are still good as I get lots of deep knee bends in these days! My eyes seemed tired and so I rested in the afternoon and went to bed a little earlier than usual.

Day 3 no more anti glaucoma med and so far so good, no aching. I got my hair washed today with assistance. We did at the outside sink. It was a bit messy and I had to change clothes afterwards but it’s great to have clean hair. It could be my imagination but the distorted area seems slightly clearer, I can read enlarged fonts through it, in a way it’s like having my own private magnifying glass LOL! Though still distorted. Faces are still not recognizable but I can see that it is a face, it’s not just all grayed out. And I can now see the center dot on the Amsler grid. I’m to go back in 2 weeks.

Day 4. Woke up feeling better. The bloody eye feels less sore. The possibly imagined slight improvement is still there. Wondering about this antibiotic tho. Something is giving me a head ache and making me feel kind of buzz-headed and spacey. It’s hopeless to do serious work. The bloody eye is getting slightly yellow around the edges (I can’t see cuz that eye still has the gray spot in the middle of whatever I look at but Maret helped me take a picture of it.)

Day 5 Still have a slight head ache. Wondering if it’s ok to stop the Levofloxacin a couple days early? Vision in right eye is dimmer than left. Used to be the other way around. Letters are also bigger in the right than the left. It’s been that way a long time, long before this bleed started. I CAN read with the right eye – it’s still dim and distorted but I CAN read. Interesting that in passages colored with colored pencil I can’t see the color. Hmmm. But I CAN read it. My eyes don’t work together yet, though so I still feel like things are kind of out of focus. I am going out to a meeting today so we shall see how I do!

Day 14 Went back to the doc today. I feel like the vision has improved significantly, tho not as to what it was before all this started. The line of print I read in a book or the screen is straight and clear tho the line above bows upward and the line below bows downward. I guess the distance acuity isn’t quite as sharp as it was as tho since I am not able to read all the letters on the chart. This doc is Dr Brevity. He kind of grunts and says “It’s flat”. Wondering if that’s good or bad I asked what was flat. He said the macula is flat that it had been swollen last time he saw it. I guess that’s good! But then he greases up the eye with lidocaine gel and sticks his scope in it and grunts again. Then goes off and writes a note to the referring doc and says it’ll happen again. (!?) He sees a scar, a black spot. There’s lattice degeneration and atrophy at 6 o’clock. I can go back to the referring doc in 2 weeks and she can laser it. So I am befuddled. Is this something new again? Why are we suddenly talking about laser??? His brevity doesn't help.

I have spent a lot of time on the internet and don’t find much. It seems no one has definitive answers to my questions such as why did this happen? How can I prevent a recurrence? Is exercise okay or not okay and what kind is bad? Anything but contact sports? Or as one doc said, only slow gentle stuff like walking and Tai Chi? And what about heavy lifting - like heavy bags when travelling and hauling water and washing clothes by hand in the village and hauling stuff on a motorbike? Certainly the three docs I have seem so far all had different opinions as to what was even wrong, let alone how to treat it or what if anything I could do to avoid future problems. Sigh!

Raining in the dining room

Well it’s “raining” again in our dining area. The 2nd floor bathroom of the apartment next door is once again dripping into our place. We are optimistically hoping it is clean water. Most of the previous occasions have been. It somehow gets into the wall and ALWAYS drips down into our place instead of theirs. It would be so much easier if it leaked into their own place – then they would believe that there’s a problem. Sigh!

The handyman came by yesterday and tore out a piece of our ceiling. Ew, what a smell! It’s extremely mildewed and moldy with a hint of something worse. Obviously some slow leaking has been going on a long time to get that much mildew up there. But of course the worker was not able to see what the problem was. He could see where it’s running out of the concrete wall but of course since the pipes are in the wall in the next apartment he can’t see anything from our place. We told him that, after all we have been through this many times over the years but each new handyman wants to rip apart OUR ceiling and see for himself. I’m going to take pictures this time and hopefully save the next guy the trouble!

The worker was uneasy about disturbing the neighbor, after all it’s not dripping into THEIR dining area. He suggested things like cutting a hole in our upstairs floor. Can’t imagine what good that would do, if he can’t see through the hole he already made in the ceiling he won’t see anything additional through a hole in the floor! The water pipes are embedded in the concrete wall – and the waste pipes are above the neighbor’s ceiling.. (I can just see somebody staggering out of bed and falling through a hole in the floor upstairs!) His other suggestion was to chip through the concrete wall from our side to try to get at the neighbor’s pipes.. (Just what we need, a window into the neighbor’s bathroom.)

Sometimes the best thing to do is to just go in your office, shut the door and play a computer game.

Distortion of reality

It’s been a wild week or two around here in the third of my worlds. Two weeeks ago I noticed an eye problem. At first I thought it was due to fancy graphics on a website I was reading but then noticed ALL the windows on the computer were like that. Even the clock across the room looked dented in on one side. Being still a bit jet-lagged it took me awhile to figure out what to do. To make a long story short, I finally got in to see an eye doctor the following week and the next day had some tests. To see a doctor you find out his or her clinic hours and then show up early to get your name on the list. First come first serve. Even coming early doesn’t guarantee you won’t be waiting 3-4 hours on a hard, crowded bench in a tiny hot waiting room.

Having diagnostic tests is always an interesting experience. But even finding this place was an experience. I just kept asking security guards all along the way. You had to wend your way through the hospital and find the back door, go down a dirt alley out to a paved alley and kitty-corner across to what looked like a parking ramp. People I asked insisted the eye place was in there and after wending my way thru rows of cars in the semi-dark saw that there were indeed signs of a building back there. I guess they didn’t want to waste space and so built a parking ramp right at the front entrance. The eye place was cheerfully painted and lighted inside and was well air conditioned. The waiting room was much bigger than clinics around here usually are so I didn’t even need to worry about my knees blocking anyone’s way.

One test involved using a dye. Before the test they wanted to make sure I wasn’t allergic to the dye so they injected a small amount of the dye into the skin of my arm – like a TB test. The guy said it would sting a bit – yikes! He wasn’t kidding! I was NOT prepared for the excruciating pain~ all I could do was try to breathe like they teach women in labor to do. It left a fluorescent green welt on my arm the rest of the day.

Anyway the tests went fairly well once I figured out that when the technician told me to look right or left she usually meant HER right or left not mine. They had been saying I needed a companion to go home (maybe because people come out of there disoriented not knowing which direction was really right and which was left?? Ha, ha!). But since I felt fine I just got a taxi and went home. They gave me the results on two CDs so naturally I copied them and had fun looking at them on my computer.

So far treatment is anti-inflammatory eyedrops that give me a headache. It isn't doing any noticeable good but at least it's not invasive! I still haven’t heard what the doctor thinks is causing the bleeding. Sigh! I sure hope it improves in another week or so and no further treatment is needed. Meanwhile I’m chowing down the green leafies and antioxidents.

Choices, TV, Noisy houses and snow removal

Sometimes people ask what my impressions are of the first of my worlds after having been away for awhile. There are many but here are a few:

People seem to value lots of choices, unending choices in fact, at least over trivia. Coffee shops added another choice since my last visit: dark, medium or light roast. Even sandwich shops- you think you ordered a number 2 and solved all the choice issues? Oh no, you are still asked what kind of bread (6 choices) what kind of cheese? (4 choices) what do you want on it? (10 items to choose from, onions, olives, pickles, tomatoes, etc) What sauces? Mustard? What kind (3 choices of mustard). But not done yet, do you want it heated? Here or to go? Yikes!

Go down the cereal aisle in the grocery store or the soft drink aisle. Guess that says a lot about people's diets, huh? (Here it would be the powdered milk aisle or the junk food aisles.) It's not just food, there are endless cable TV channels, books, movies, magazines.

Some things, however, offer few choices such as the color of cars or the color of siding on new homes. Curiously clothing also offered few choices in style or even color. Example, women's winter tops were long sleeved but way too low in the neck. What's with that? This isn't Florida! And there were only certain colors available, didn't matter what store.

Yet other things offer no choices, such as political parties. The only thing different is the rhetoric. Actions and outcomes are the same.

Television? Unbelievable. Does anybody really watch it anymore??? News-tainment about the fallen hero of the day. And scaring people about the flu. Commercials? Lots of prescription drug ads, all of which have long lists of horrendous side effects including death and suicide.

Noisy houses. Furnaces, water heaters, sump pumps, blowers, beepers, buzzers, dingers, etc. My first nights back here– as I wake up at 2 and 3 am – by contrast were pretty quiet. The house was totally quiet other than my fan and out my open window all I could hear was the Swiss neighbor's cuckoo clock, a distant dog barking, a few leaves rustling in the breeze. That's it.

Snow removal is amazing. After the Christmas storm I saw thick ice on the highways mysteriously GONE overnight! I saw snowbanks being loaded up in trucks and carted away, and other snowbanks literally shoved back from the edge of the roads.

Nothing new in the public bathroom scene. It seems that everything that could be automated already has been. I did notice that in my home state 9/10 bathroom stalls had the TP very low down making it difficult for tall people to reach. Not so in other states. Maybe the state legislature was bored last summer???