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musings
In which we are decamped to the in-laws' while our home has no stairs, I find myself resenting medical breakthroughs, and I can't remember anything my father did that ever made me angry or annoyed once I was older than about 14.
The framing of the addition is done (or mostly done), and Monday we noticed they'd started going at the bathroom window frame with a prybar, so yesterday we packed our bags and went over to Himself's mom's house until ... we don't know when. At least some time next week, but hopefully not much longer than that. Today is when they were supposed to take out all the stairs, but they can't take a staircase down and replace it all in one day, and we don't have any bathrooms on the ground floor, so we just can't stay in the house until the new stairs are in. Life is like that. Once there are stairs again, we hope to be able to return; but there will be holes in walls connecting the old (heated) part of the house with the new (unheated, unplumbed, uneverything-including-insulated) part of the house, and the contractor isn't sure we'll want to come back in the expected weather conditions. My feeling is, if he puts the sort of insulated plywood barrier outside the holes in the wall that he said he'd put there, and if we keep all the relevant doors closed and bundle up, we should be able to endure a chilly house for the few hours per day we're in it. I think it will be more comfortable than every day cramming ourselves into the in-laws' house, where they are very wonderful to be taking us in, but it's not our home. (The bed in the guest room is small and very wobbly-springed. The room itself is freezing. The water pressure in the shower is less than ideal. I adore my in-laws! And a cat lives there.)
Tonight, Himself is on the way to another city for some professional training, so at least we won't have to share the too-small bed. :-) I'm going to head up and join him on Friday, and we'll have brunch together and take the train back on Saturday, and we'll suss out next week when we get there.
The other day, I heard a teaser for a report on NPR (ATC? maybe?) about immunotherapy for cancer. I wasn't in the car (where I listen to the radio) much longer after that, so I didn't hear the piece itself, but since then I've been thinking about that and every other new! miraculous! treatment! we keep hearing about. Using 3D printers to make viable copies of organs, for example. I am sad to report that the first or nearly the first thing I find myself thinking when I hear such things is: where the hell were you when we needed you?!
I mean look: of course I want other patients and their families to have better outcomes than my dad and our family did. In no way am I suggesting, nor would I ever suggest, that there is anyone who doesn't deserve to benefit from treatments and technologies that didn't exist as recently as two and a half years ago. But it still makes me upset to think that there are or will be things that could have saved my family--who die in droves from interestingly (to the medical community) varied forms of cancer--if only someone had discovered them twenty, fifteen, three years sooner. Upset and envious, I think. I don't like feeling resentful of modern medicine, though, and I don't like that that's how I'm feeling, so I probably want to think about doing some work on that.
In unrelated news, for reasons that aren't clear to me I've been trying to remember times when I was annoyed or angry at my dad. I think I'm reaching a point where I'm sort of oddly aware that I'm only remembering good times (well, good times and then the year of his illness), and while it's not like I'm canonizing him in my head or anything, I mean I know he did have tiresome and annoying habits and qualities, when I try to come up with an example of such a thing I come up dry a lot of the time. I don't mean I think of something that I know bothered me when he was alive but doesn't bother me now. I mean I know that there were times when he was alive that he did things that bothered me, and I cannot remember what they were. I know when I was a young teenager he didn't have a good read on when it was time to stop teasing me. That's like it. But I know there were times much more recently than that when I would turn to my mother and wonder how she put up with X--and it's like X has been erased. The memories of X are not accessible to me.
I don't know why this is happening, but I do know it bugs me because now I've got this idea that what I'm preserving is an incomplete mental image of my father. But I don't want to like sit down and laboriously try to recall every time he ever upset me. So I don't really know how to solve it. (I don't need suggestions. I'm just musing.)
The framing of the addition is done (or mostly done), and Monday we noticed they'd started going at the bathroom window frame with a prybar, so yesterday we packed our bags and went over to Himself's mom's house until ... we don't know when. At least some time next week, but hopefully not much longer than that. Today is when they were supposed to take out all the stairs, but they can't take a staircase down and replace it all in one day, and we don't have any bathrooms on the ground floor, so we just can't stay in the house until the new stairs are in. Life is like that. Once there are stairs again, we hope to be able to return; but there will be holes in walls connecting the old (heated) part of the house with the new (unheated, unplumbed, uneverything-including-insulated) part of the house, and the contractor isn't sure we'll want to come back in the expected weather conditions. My feeling is, if he puts the sort of insulated plywood barrier outside the holes in the wall that he said he'd put there, and if we keep all the relevant doors closed and bundle up, we should be able to endure a chilly house for the few hours per day we're in it. I think it will be more comfortable than every day cramming ourselves into the in-laws' house, where they are very wonderful to be taking us in, but it's not our home. (The bed in the guest room is small and very wobbly-springed. The room itself is freezing. The water pressure in the shower is less than ideal. I adore my in-laws! And a cat lives there.)
Tonight, Himself is on the way to another city for some professional training, so at least we won't have to share the too-small bed. :-) I'm going to head up and join him on Friday, and we'll have brunch together and take the train back on Saturday, and we'll suss out next week when we get there.
The other day, I heard a teaser for a report on NPR (ATC? maybe?) about immunotherapy for cancer. I wasn't in the car (where I listen to the radio) much longer after that, so I didn't hear the piece itself, but since then I've been thinking about that and every other new! miraculous! treatment! we keep hearing about. Using 3D printers to make viable copies of organs, for example. I am sad to report that the first or nearly the first thing I find myself thinking when I hear such things is: where the hell were you when we needed you?!
I mean look: of course I want other patients and their families to have better outcomes than my dad and our family did. In no way am I suggesting, nor would I ever suggest, that there is anyone who doesn't deserve to benefit from treatments and technologies that didn't exist as recently as two and a half years ago. But it still makes me upset to think that there are or will be things that could have saved my family--who die in droves from interestingly (to the medical community) varied forms of cancer--if only someone had discovered them twenty, fifteen, three years sooner. Upset and envious, I think. I don't like feeling resentful of modern medicine, though, and I don't like that that's how I'm feeling, so I probably want to think about doing some work on that.
In unrelated news, for reasons that aren't clear to me I've been trying to remember times when I was annoyed or angry at my dad. I think I'm reaching a point where I'm sort of oddly aware that I'm only remembering good times (well, good times and then the year of his illness), and while it's not like I'm canonizing him in my head or anything, I mean I know he did have tiresome and annoying habits and qualities, when I try to come up with an example of such a thing I come up dry a lot of the time. I don't mean I think of something that I know bothered me when he was alive but doesn't bother me now. I mean I know that there were times when he was alive that he did things that bothered me, and I cannot remember what they were. I know when I was a young teenager he didn't have a good read on when it was time to stop teasing me. That's like it. But I know there were times much more recently than that when I would turn to my mother and wonder how she put up with X--and it's like X has been erased. The memories of X are not accessible to me.
I don't know why this is happening, but I do know it bugs me because now I've got this idea that what I'm preserving is an incomplete mental image of my father. But I don't want to like sit down and laboriously try to recall every time he ever upset me. So I don't really know how to solve it. (I don't need suggestions. I'm just musing.)