D-Day and Animism

My operation is scheduled for 23 November, after five long months of delay following the first.  Due to the fact, I firmly believe, that Coordinated Health is more concerned about hard cash than aftercare, I had both a blood clot and pneumonia shortly after the first operation, causing an apparently arbitrary mandated three month delay.

I took the bull by the horns and asked for an ultrasound from another doctor in mid-October.  When no blood clot was to be found anywhere, I begged for Coordinated Health to allow me to see the surgeon earlier than the end of November when the appointment was scheduled.  When he saw me, along with the films of my hip, he once again shook his head in pity and muttered, 'I never have seen a hip worse than yours' and from the initial pronouncement that he had no openings until December, he said he could make a slot for me on the day before the American Thanksgiving holiday.  I accepted it instantly.  What is the point of a big meal if one cannot walk or have any moment without severe pain???

In any case, waiting for Godot...  and I asked for the very dead Christmas Tree from last year to be removed from the office that has been my abode for five months and for a new live Tree to be put in its place BEFORE I went into hospital.  The dead Tree HAD been alive before I had the first operation but no one cared for it and it died.  I felt it was a very bad omen and I wanted to come home to a living, breathing Tree.

Of course, Jim and Freya both pronounced me mad and so on and so forth.  If they had cared more about the whole Tree business, the poor Pennsylvania Pine would be alive still, ready for a third year of festivities.  Instead, it had to be carted off in a white shroud made of plastic. Poor thing!

I wonder if my request would have been shuffled off if Jim's family had not become involved in the quest.  George rang up one evening to say that there were living Blue Spruces at a local supermarket.  To me, it was a sign from God Himself.  When do supermarkets EVER have live Blue Spruces for sale?  It is my favourite evergreen and when the stupid neighbour who bought the house next door at the old address cut down the glorious Blue Spruce that the former owners had planted and tenderly nurtured for two decades, I cursed him to eternity.  (He swore I would love his landscaping, but in fact, he is the sort of person who has grandiose ideas but never follows through.  He dug two deep holes in place of the Blue Spruce, lined them with rubbish bags and filled them with water.  I expect he envisioned some waterfalls and koi but he never went beyond the initial filling and the water became increasingly fetid, spawning hosts of mosquitoes who no doubt carried West Nile Fever.  The neighbour on the other side of him crept onto his property in the dead of night regularly to pour household bleach into the water.  Some of it seeped into OUR garden, ultimately killing my Goddess Tree, a beautiful Birch I had planted when first I moved there and was pregnant with Freya.  There is a moral in this tale somewhere...

In any case, that is not the topic of THIS post, but the beauty of these internet sites is that one can ramble endlessly with no one to cut anything that is out of place.

The topic today is Animism.  I have addessed it before.  I always have subscribed to the belief that all things have souls.  It is obvious to most people now that Plants and Minerals have souls, but I think it goes beyond that and since I had the first operation, every object surrounding me has demonstrating that it has a mind of its own.

It does not matter if it is a plant, a rock, a plastic bag, the lid from a bottle or an article of clothing.  Every object that is not actually bolted to the floor or tied to a shelf has discovered FREEDOM.  I cannot reach for anything without having it leap from its position onto the floor and usually then to go off on an extended adventure into some remote corner hitherto unexplored by man, beast or any object that is supposedly inanimate.  It is almost like having a poltergeist in the house.

I suppose in some other cultures, people might pronounce me possessed by a demon because usually it is my hand that initiates the exodus.    In the old days, when I actually could reach the floor unaided to retrieve any object that had fallen, I was NOT clumsy.  I seldom dropped anything.  It was only when I could not retrieve items that had fallen or leapt to the floor that they all began to initiate these extravagant journeys.  It is beyond vexing.

In the space of a half hour, I have dropped the cap from a perfume bottle, the jumper I intended to wear today and a tube of medication  The medication in particular was most annoying because I could not see where it had gone.  I have two grabbers or whatever they are called.  They are basically long sticks with pincers at the end.  I originally had one but it kept falling so I had to buy another in order to be able to retrieve the first whenever it fell.

In any case, grabber in hand, I painfully navigated the room to try to retrieve perfume cap, jumper and medication tube.  The clothing was easy to find.  Clothing does not run away the way smaller objects do.  It is possible that it would love to be as nimble and quick as other objects but it more resembles a disabled person when it falls.  It looks more like a dead thing, perfectly still, remaining precisely at the spot where it fell, like a suicide who leaps from a building.  One could take a bit of chalk and draw an outline quite easily.  With all the clothing that has fallen in this room, I would have quite an intricate painting in chalk at this point.

The perfume cap, being made of plastic, even though it was NOT round and one would not suspect that it had such potential in terms of mobility, went quite far and ultimately lodged itself behind the leg of the recliner where I was unable to find it for about ten minutes.  When I finally did manage to scrape it out of its hiding place with the end of the grabber, it again leapt away and gave me a merry chase.  The tube of medicaiton, far more vital to me, could not be found initially at all.  I moved everything I could, searching and searching.  I searched the bedside table, packed with all the items I need and many I really do not need.  No antibiotic cream.  I searched the floor beneath the table and beneath the chair.  No antibiotic cream.  This fruitless search occupied another half hour of my life...

I finally realised I had to search the rubbish bin.  Not only was it there, but it had wormed its way into an empty food container.  Nothing could have been more disgusting... well, actually I can think of something worse but this was fairly disgusting as the bin had not been emptied for a couple of days.  I am not certain why it chose that spot for its walkabout destination.  In any case, it now has been brought to bay.

The reason I needed it is in itself another cause of vexation.  Basically, when one is going for an operation of this kind, the part of the body where the incision is to occur is inspected like a side of beef.  If there are any cuts, bruises or abrasions, the whole thing will be called off.

Having cats, and wanting to spend as much time with them as possible, I have been a nervous wreak essentially, fearing that I will receive a minor scratch from one of them in the process of grooming them or simply cuddling them.

I have been extremely careful but lo and behold, there now is a tiny pinprick of an abrasion or scratch or something on my upper thigh where it cannot fail to be seen.  (I wondered about the inspection before actually.  They scrutinise the FRONT of the thigh, but not the back.  Surely if it is such an enormous problem, they would look at the entire side of beef and not only the bit that is easily seen!)  So here I am, slathering neosporin on this tiny pinprick, this wound that barely would register at any other time, praying that it will vanish before Wednesday.

Meanwhile, when I dressed this morning, there was yet ANOTHER one of these tiny pinpricks on the same thigh.  What the deuce???  I haven't even been with the cats since I retired to my chair for the night.  I do not know if the Fates are determined to keep me from having this operation or if it is sheer bloodimindedness on the part of Life.  I might as well throw caution to the winds and groom the Puttikins to my heart's content.  They will not do worse to me than the invisible attacker!

So where do we stand in terms of readiness for D-Day?  The dead Tree was finally carted off on Sunday.  The Blue Spruce has taken its place.  Freya, with many protestations did help me with the fairy lights, so it has two little strings of light on it, and I think it is glorious.

I did not wish to really TRIM the tree this early.  I deprecate the marketing ploy that places Christmas decorations and paraphenalia in the markets immeidiately after Hallowe'en.  On the other hand, I have no idea when I will be mobile again.  It would be horrible if there had been no Christmas Tree this year at all.  If I did not insist on it, no one else would do it.  The fact that there was a sad little corpse from yesteryear in the corner made it absolutely imperative that a new, vibrant Christmas Tree be brought here BEFORE my operation.  Lights are common on trees even when it is not the Advent Season so I felt that was justified in the circumstances.

What I should not have done was birng out my little pewter ornaments from Germany but I did... and discovered that one of my oldest and most beloved ornaments is cracked.  I do not know if that happened when I dropped it (yes, I dropped it!  Surprise, surprise!) or if it occurred at some point in the past, but it breaks my heart.  It is one of my favourite Christmas symbols:  an evergreen surrounded wih wild creatures.  It really is a Tree of Life symbol, transformed into a Christmas symbol.  There are deer, squirrels and birds... and the tree is trimmed with lit candles.  And now there is a crack on one of the branches.

I bought this ornament in Munich many years ago.  It means a great deal to me.  Nonetheless, if I could buy a new one that had no crack, I would do that, and keep the old damaged one in a box now.  Unfortunately, I cannot find another remotely like it.  The new trend is to make pewter representations of cities evidently as well as various market stalls.  I  suppose the firms that knock out these little objects want to find something new to dangle in front of the customers who have more than enough of their old offerings.  And so they have moved forward to less sacred symbols.