What Seven Looks Like

Seven looks like a boy uncharacteristically still in bed at 6:45 in the morning.  Look closer and you’ll see he’s mostly feigning sleep, eagerly waiting for the clock to turn so he can FINALLY get up and open his birthday present.

Seven looks like a smile when a boy unwraps his gift to find the set of Star Wars LEGOs that he wanted. 

Seven looks like a boy blowing out the candles on his favorite kind of birthday cake. Cake that he insists on eating for breakfast.

Seven looks like a slice of birthday cake the size of a dinner plate. And Seven looks like a boy whose eyes are larger than his stomach.

But Seven… looks happy.  And Seven looks like it’s going to be good.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY KIDDO!  I LOVE YOU!

Back to Normal

Strange things have been happening around here lately.  Strange things with my son.  Or should I say, strange things with this stranger who looks like my son, and sounds like my son, but is… strange.  A stranger.  And it’s all of a sudden, and while I should be happy, at least about some of it, I’m not, not so much.

This is the kid who for 6 ½ years could not hold a pencil correctly.  He started out, naturally enough, using a fist grip, eventually moving on to some mangled version of a half fist grip.  When he was 3, and then 4, and then 5, daycare told us they would correct that.  Their main “goal” every year, was to teach him how to hold a pencil correctly.

They failed.

At a parent-teacher conference last year I discussed Snags’ odd pencil gripping ways with his teacher.  I expressed my concern that while yes, his hand writing was very legible, perhaps there was something we should still do? Some way to teach the kid to hold a pencil correctly? Because everything I’d tried had failed.  She suggested rubber pencil grips and where to buy them, then confessed that she had never learned to hold a pencil correctly herself. Then she proceeded to prove this sad point by writing a note on a pad of paper with a nearly identical half-fist grip.

And so.  Snags started first grade with the same bad pencil holding form.  And mostly I didn’t care.  He could write clearly.  But still. When Snags’ first grade teacher sent home a form where parents could write down any concerns they had, I made a quick note about the way Snags holds a pencil.  I turned in the note and didn’t give it another thought.  If six and half years had taught me anything, it was that this pencil thing just wasn’t that important.  Or Snags was very stubborn.

But then.  Snags came home from school this week and said he had a surprise for me.  He smiled as he showed me the new way he was holding a pencil.  The new PROPER way to hold a pencil!  And then… he wrote his name, holding the pencil in the new and proper way!  I fainted.

Okay, I didn’t really faint.  Instead I asked, “Who ARE you and what have you done with my son?”  I was laughed at in return.

But this pencil thing?  It’s the tip of the iceberg of strangeness around here.

Suddenly, Snags, the child who can’t be bothered to put away his LEGOs, wants to clean.  He wants to FOLD LAUNDRY.  He WANTS to MAKE HIS BED every morning. He wants to WASH WINDOWS.

This morning?  He asked if he could shake out some area rugs and then he got a broom and swept the kitchen floor.  He wanted me to hold a trash bag open so he could dump the dust pan into it.  And I was all “Look, this is really nice of you to want to clean up but OH MY GOD it’s only 6:30 in the morning and all I really want to do is relax a bit and eat my breakfast.  Can’t you do this LATER? Tomorrow? After school?”  Tonight he wants to vacuum.

In an effort to have a few moments of fading morning quiet in the midst of a million repititons of “I’m bored, what can I do, PLEASE! PLEASE! PLEASE?”, I agreed to let him “wash” the windows.  He pulled out a bottle of Windex, ripped off a single paper towel.  He spayed and wiped haphazardly over the inside of the glass door in the kitchen, quietly humming to himself before stepping outside into the dawn to clean the outside of the glass.  He worked away at a few spots, singing.  

He picked up the bottle of Windex again, holding it at eye level, working hard to pump the top and spray the door.  Except he had the nozzle turned the wrong way.  He sprayed himself directly in the eye.

He’s fine, now.  I watched as it happened from inside the glass.  The spray bottle dropped to the ground.  Snags, temporarily blinded in one eye, staggered inside.  “I sprayed myself in the eye!  Will I be able to see again?” He asked, alarmed, with the Windexed eye squinched shut.

I led him to the bathroom, where I flushed his eye with water, assuring him he would be fine, and sent him on his way.

When I came downstairs, I fully expected him to be cleaning the glass again.  But the dropped bottle of Windex was gone, the lone paper towel had been thrown away. Snags’ urge to clean had, apparently, been wiped clean by one shot to the eye.

I found him, like in days of old, like last week, before he learned how to properly hold a pencil, before he turned into Mr. Clean, on the floor of the library, in the middle of a large pile of LEGOs.  He looked up as I walked by, he asked a single question:

Aren’t you going to PAY ME for cleaning the windows?

I think about this for a moment, and tell him maybe.  Maybe later.  I don’t have any cash on hand at the moment.  And also, I think to myself, I didn’t ASK him to clean the windows.

But I might pay him later.  A few dollars for his ambitious in thought, if not in deed, effort.  And then I think I’ll bill him back for the medical care I had to administer.  Eye flushing is mighty expensive these days.  And accidents are preventable if you know which way to aim the nozzle.

And that Windex?  It’s pretty good stuff.  It brought my child back. I can finish the rest of my breakfast in peace, without some crazed Mr. Clean running around me in circles with a bottle of cleaner and a paper towel, begging me to plug in the vacuum.  Instead, I get to listen to him whine that he can’t find a particular LEGO piece amidst the hundreds and hundreds of LEGOs he’s spilled all over the floor. And I know, life is back to normal. A new and improved normal - one in which Snags can hold a pencil correctly.

My Fault

Last Thursday night my husband and I returned from Back-to-School Night to find Snags and the babysitter relaxing on the sofa as they raptly watched Scooby Doo and the Cyber Chase.  Actually, I think the babysitter was probably itching to leave and go home already, but Snags begged her to stay until the very end and so she sat, for the remaining 20 minutes of the movie, and did exactly as Snags instructed: “Watch this!  Watch!  Watch this part!  Watch!”

When we finally let her make her escape, Snags announced that he had a sore throat.  My husband gave him Children’s Tylenol and sent him to bed where all was well…  Until 2:30 in the morning, when Snags woke up felling very ill, and vomited.  “I feel better now!” he said, somewhat jubilantly, as he stepped back to flush the toilet. 

Friday morning dawned, and Snags, while not feeling entirely up to snuff, was able to eat a slice of toast and drink some water.  Since he kept that sustenance where it belonged, in his stomach, and he had no fever, just the same sore throat as the night before, I decided that he should go to school.  Because that vomiting?  Maybe it was just a fluke.  Maybe the Tylenol didn’t agree with him. And also?  It was only the second week of school.  You can’t start raking up absences in the second week of school.  Because the school?  They’re keeping score. 

It was also show and tell day.  Snag’s first grade teacher was bringing in a snake skin that her dog had sniffed out in her yard.  I mean, how cool would that be?  A kid with just a sore throat wouldn’t want to miss that, right?  Plus, said kid with sore throat had his own cool item for show and tell: a hornet’s nest knocked down from our roof (don’t worry, we sprayed it with killer bug spray and stuck it in a ziplock bag).

And so Snags got dressed and set off for school.  I kind of expected a call from the nurse that day, but it never came.  Snags soldiered on and stayed in school all day.  That afternoon I even took him, with his sore throat, to get his hair cut.

Saturday dawned dark and gray and the skies opened and rained upon us.  But it didn’t matter.  Snags was still fighting that sore throat so we stayed home where it was warm and dry and we could watch TV and play board games.  But by evening, Snags was decidedly miserable.  His throat still hurt, and he had a slight fever.  He was so miserable that he decided it was all MY fault.  As if I’d opened a box a sick and poured him a big bowlful of it for breakfast.  Here, eat this.  It will make your throat sore and you’ll get really grumpy and mean and blame me for your illness.  Good stuff.  He blamed me because I’m not.a.doctor.

“This is the WORST virus EVER!” he cried, over and over as he shot piercing accusatory glances in my direction. 

I tried to make him feel better.  I told him how I bet a bunch of kids in his class at school had sore throats too.  Because that always happens when school starts back up in the fall.  Kids get sick.  Viruses go around.  Snags, I said, could rest assured that he wasn’t the ONLY one feeling under the weather. It was just a virus, he’d fell better in the morning, I was sure.

And the thing about a bunch of kids in his class having sore throats too?  Ahem…cough… cough…  It’s probably true, NOW.  Because this morning we took Snags to one of those health clinics that’s open on Sundays with the hope that they’d do something to stop his whining and complaining and blaming… and they did!  They gave him an antibiotic for his STREP THROAT.  His STREP THROAT that I unwittingly sent him to school with on Friday.  His STREP THROAT that he started complaining about on Thursday night.  When the babysitter was here.

And so I’d just like to remind the babysitter, that I paid her very well, and she should think of anything else that she may have received on top of the cash I handed her as she walked out the door, as a special kind of bonus!

Mea culpa.  But then again, Snags was right.  I’m not.a.doctor.

Perfect Insanity

There are certain things that drive me to the brink of insanity and they are these:
The sound of the dog licking her paws at night when I am trying to fall asleep.
The sound of cellophane crackling.
The sound of Snags playing Perfection in his bedroom at five o’clock in the morning.

That last one?  Heard it this morning.

The rule is, the kid is supposed to stay IN BED, and preferably in bed ASLEEP, until 7:30 a.m.   And that is the sole reason why I bought him a digital alarm clock.  So there could be no mistake on the hour. 

When I decided I’d heard enough, heard enough plastic pieces rattling around, heard enough small explosions as the timer ran out and the Perfection pieces flew into the air, I shakily climbed out of bed and opened his bedroom door. All the while repeating to myself, “it’s just a noise, don’t kill him.  It’s just a noise, don’t kill him…” 

GO.BACK.TO.BED! I nearly barked. 

He looked at me mildly, said, “But Mom, I’m just playing Perfection.”

“GO.BACK.TO.BED!” I said again, perhaps a bit louder this time. “You don’t play perfection in the middle of the damn night,” I added as I turned out his bedroom light and yanked the door shut behind me.

“It’s not the DAMN NIGHT!” he cried back at me from behind his closed door. 

He’s been crying a lot lately, this child of mine.  I’m not sure but I think it’s the stress of first grade. Summer is over and now he can’t spend endless hours playing video games or building starships out of LEGOs.  In first grade, unlike kindergarten, there are no naps.  The kids have to be up and alert like the rest of us, for a full six hours straight. That kind of paying attention can wear you out, wear you down.

Snags comes home from school in the afternoons and lies upon the sofa.  He watches whatever cartoon he can find on Nickolodeon, his eyes glazed over.  He denies being tired even as he yawns, even as he “rests” his eyes.

And little things are getting to him.  Little things are setting him off.  Like yesterday, when I made him set the frog free. Snags caught a frog, or maybe it was really a small toad.  I don’t know.  I’m calling it a frog.  He brought it home and made a home for it inside an old aquarium that he set out on our front porch.  He put in some water, and some rocks and the frog.  And then he more or less left him there, in the aquarium, all alone.  He played with the frog sometimes, but he didn’t feed him.  He dropped the frog at least half a dozen times on its head, on the pavement.  I’m sure the frog, if he had the ability to think, must have wondered if he’d been captured and sent to Gitmo.  There was the small room where he was kept, Snags the guard who occasionally tortured him by manhandling him and dropping him on his head, and there was the isolation. Left all alone in the aquarium, in the bright sunlight, for days on end.  Five days to be exact.  And then there was the starvation. I’m not sure what frogs eat but I assume they eat bugs.  And no bugs were flying into the aquarium.  And the frog wasn’t let out to hunt on his own.  By yesterday I’d had enough and told Snags he had to set the frog free.

He went out to do so, but reluctantly.  I followed him out to make sure he did as I had instructed. He told me that he’d opened the frog’s mouth and looked inside.

 “HOW?”  I asked. 

“Want me to show you?” He said. 

“Yeah,” I said, curious now. 

But Snags wasn’t having any luck.  The frog’s mouth wasn’t opening.  In fact, the harder Snags tried to open the frog’s mouth, the harder he pressed upon the frog’s… chin? neck?, the more I feared he was going to rip open the flesh of the frog’s throat. I couldn’t bear it and so I asked Snags to stop.  I yelled at Snags to STOP.  Let the frog go NOW.

And Snags got upset.  “YOU NEVER LIKED FROGGY!“  He screamed, tears streaming down his face. ”YOU DIDN’T LIKE HIM FROM THE MOMENT I GOT HIM,” he cried.  His face was red, contorted in anger.  His eyes bulged. Except for the tears I think he was a perfect picture of me, the way I felt when I heard him playing Perfection in the middle of the damn night. In the blink of an eye, the leap is made from peaceful calm to perfect insanity. Over a noise. Over Perfection.  Over a frog.   

First Grade

First Grade.  My son is starting First Grade today.  He breezed through Kindergarten last year and summer vacation has disappeared in the wink of an eye.  I don’t know where the time has gone.

We met my son’s first grade teacher last week.  The school holds an open house so all the kids can come and find their new classroom, meet their new teacher, and drop of their new school supplies at their desk.

Long gone are the days when I was a kid and you could show up to class on the first day with nothing but yourself and some money for your lunch.  I always insisted on wearing my new school clothes, a pair of jeans with a new top of some sort, both of which turned out to be too uncomfortable for the first day of school.  I was always hot and sweaty and sorry I’d chosen that particular outfit to wear the first day. I was always miserable in the new school shoes my mom had chosen.  They were too stiff, too formal.  I wanted Keds, or Docksides, or Vans like the other kids.  Not nerdy brown leather lace-ups with a slippery sole.

I remember coming home the first day of school and insisting that my mother HAD to take me out to get school supplies THAT.VERY.NIGHT.  I NEEDED my new Trapper Keeper notebook for the second day of school for sure.  The stores were always crowded.

Now the stores are crowded in advance.  Our local Target has a binder in the school supply aisle that contains lists of all of the needed supplies for each grade at each school in the county. I found it two months ago, surrounded by a circle of women, like a coven of witches, mumbling to themselves.  It wasn’t a spell they were casting. They were simply committing to memory as many supplies as they could from the list so they could gather the necessary items before returning again to elbow their way in to check the list for more. More pencils, more pens, erasers, pocket folders, spiral notebooks, more glue sticks, crayons, scissors.

We went to the school and we met Snag’s first grade teacher, found his desk, his locker. We went back to his Kindergarten classroom from last year to see his old teacher, let her see how much he’d grown.  She told Snags that she’d met with his first grade teacher and told her all about him.  She told her that Snags liked to eat brisket, and in the understatement of a lifetime, that he liked Star Wars.  I told her we were going to see Clone Wars that very night.  Snags was very excited.

And we did see Clone Wars.  And Snags pronounced it one of the best movies he’d ever seen.  In the very beginning of the movie some words scrolled across the screen, something like: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” and as they did so, I leaned over to Snags to read them to him.  He shushed me loudly then added angrily, “I can READ, Mom!”

I had to admit, it was true.  He can read.  He learned how in Kindergarten.  I guess he’ll learn even more in First Grade.  I hope he pays attention because there is one thing he doesn’t really know the answer to and that is this: How did Jabba the Hutt have a baby?

I pray that my son isn’t the only First Grader out there concerned about the reproduction methods of the nasty green Hutt.

“Maybe Jabba was married at one time,” I offered.

“No,” Snags said.  “That isn’t it.”

“Well, um, I don’t know then,” I said, giving up quickly and hoping he would give up too.

He didn’t.  He pondered other ways the baby Hutt may have come about:

“Maybe something grows on Jabba the Hutt and then if falls off and they put it in a jar with some chemical stuff and it turns into a baby Hutt…”

Hmmmm.  Maybe.  It’s Star Wars, after all.  But YUCK. I cringed.  I took slow, deep breaths, trying to pretend that I wasn’t having a Hutt sex talk with my six year old.  Why do these conversations ALWAYS happen to me?  And why do they always happen when I’m driving, and hit me out of the blue?

“Or maybe,” Snags continued.  “Maybe Jabba the Hutt laid eggs and they came out of the end of his tail and hatched into the baby Hutt!”

And me, shuddering: “Yeah.  That sounds possible.  But let’s not worry about that right now!  We need to think about what kind of new clothes to buy you for school. And shoes, we’ve got to get you a new pair of shoes too.”

First Grade.  Do they teach Hutt sex-ed in First Grade?  Does anybody know?

A Beer by Any Other Name…

I was fixing lunch for my six year old son, Snags, the other day when he asked me, “Mom, how did you and Dad name me?”

“How did we decide to name you Snags?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said.  “Where did you get my name?”

I thought this was an interesting question.  I wasn’t sure what prompted his interest, but I figured he deserved an answer. 

The larger truth is, we just liked the name Snags.  The details behind that larger truth are what I explained to Snags.  But maybe I shouldn’t have.

“Well,” I said to him, “When your Daddy and I were in graduate school together, we knew a man with your name, and he was a really nice guy, just like you are.  So right away we kind of liked the name.”

“And then one day,” I went on, “You’re Daddy and I went out to lunch at a restaurant in the city.  This restaurant made their very own brand of beer called Snags Ale.  They even had coasters they served your drinks on.  They’d bring your glass of iced tea or soda or beer, or whatever you ordered to drink, and put it on a coaster that said Snags Ale.  Ale, by the way, is a kind of beer.  Anyway, when we saw the coaster it reminded us again how much we liked the name Snags.  And I even took one of those coasters home with me!”

“And now,” I said, “We even have these glasses, like the one you are drinking out of that we bought from that very same restaurant, and the glass as you can see, says Snags Ale on it.  So you have drinking glasses with your name on it!”

That is when Snags interrupted.  “So let me get this straight,” he said.  “You named me after a BEER?!”

“Well, uh… not really,” I stammered.  “Remember, your Daddy and I liked the name Snags.  There was that nice man at graduate school.  And OH! also there is a character in a movie with your name, and it’s a good movie too, and so when we saw the coaster with the name of the beer on it, it just reminded us that we liked the name Snags.  So you see, we didn’t really name you after a beer.”

“Actually,” Snags said, “You kind of did.”

I guess now that the truth is out I have nothing left to do besides wait for the day that Snags is given a homework assignment to research his name.  I can see his classmates standing up to report that “I am named after my grandmother, Mary…” or “I am named after my great uncle Paul.” 

So now I’m thinking, that to avoid the inevitable meeting with the principal when Snags stands up to report that his parents named him after a beer, I am going to teach him to recite this: 

‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Snags.
What’s Snags? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a beer. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? that which we call a beer
By any other name would taste as good;
So Snags would, were he not Snags call’d,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title…

Or maybe I ought to just leave well enough alone.

That Ain’t No Cat

I was in the sixth grade, when a male classmate, David, asked our music teacher if she had a pussy.  I don’t recall how much sex education we’d had at that point in time, but certainly we’d had enough to realize, at least on some level, that there was some kind of forbidden sexual connotation to his question, and the class sat and watched in fascinated horror as the teacher turned from her seat at the front of the class toward the boy.

She asked him to repeat the question, (WHAT DID YOU SAY?) and feeling emboldened by the barely suppressed nervous giggles of his classmates, he did. She was not amused.  Nor was she placated when he insisted that he was talking about a cat.  Did she have a cat?  A PUSSY cat?

David was sent to the principal’s office.

He was, I suppose, the kind of boy who, had this been the 1950s, would have been considered a bad boy.  The kind of boy who girls might like, but parents wouldn’t like at all.  He might have been like Arthur Fonzarelli from Happy Days, or Danny Zuko from Grease, or even Eddie Haskell, from Leave it To Beaver. Except he had big blonde hair, and this was 1979.

David, as it turned out, liked me.  Or more specifically, he liked my chest.  There were few girls in the sixth grade with a stack like mine.  He asked me to be his girlfriend.  I think I asked my mother if I could have a boyfriend.  I don’t remember what her verdict was.  But I remember going to the pool one summer afternoon and seeing him there.  He tried to kiss me.  I was a good girl, and he scared me.  He talked about my boobs too much.  That made me uncomfortable.  I hated my boobs.  In all truth, I still do. I avoided him after that.

A few days ago, my son Snags was bored.  Bored, bored, bored.  Bored out of his skull.  He played Star Wars LEGOs on Xbox.  He got bored.  He played Star Wars LEGOs on his Game Cube. He got bored.  He moved on to Star Wars LEGOs The Complete Saga on his Nintendo DS.  He got bored.  He built some ships with his Star Wars LEGOs.  And what do you know?  He got bored.

I suggested that he play outside.  He said it was too hot.  I suggested he go outside and ride his bicycle.  He didn’t want to.  “I don’t want to change my shoes,” he said.  He was wearing Crocs.  He was too lazy to kick them off his feet and switch to tennis shoes.  I suggested he go outside and ride his scooter.  His eyes widened with interest, but just as quickly returned to normal when he realized he couldn’t ride his scooter wearing Crocs. 

In a last ditch effort to get him outside, I offered to walk with him to the nearby playground.  “I’ll push you on the swings,” I said.  That was something I knew he liked, and so finally, he thought that sounded like fun. An escape from his boredom.

As we started up the sidewalk toward the playground, Snags said to me, “Mom, there’s this thing called a pussy…”

Sixth grade music class came back to me in a rush. I wasn’t ready to give a sex talk.  Snags is six years old, not sixth grade. And this was summer vacation.  I couldn’t send him to the principal’s office.

I didn’t want to hear any more, but warily I said, “Yeah?”  I waited, with dread, for him to go on.  

“Yeah, there’s this thing called a pussy and I don’t know the rest of what’s it’s called or I can’t remember what it is exactly?”

What should I say I wondered.  Should I explain that boys have a penis (which he knows) but that girls have a, um…  No.  I can’t, I thought.

But before I could decide how to respond, he went on…

“And this thing called a pussy… something, it grows in a pond!” he said.

I died with relief right there on the side walk. As I lay there dying, my sixth grade life flashed before my eyes.  I saw my music teacher point David toward the door.  I heard her reprimand as she sent him to the principal’s office.  My final words, right before I died for good were surprisingly strong for a dying woman, and nearly shouted with joy: “PussyWILLOW?  You mean a PussyWILLOW?”

“Yeah!  That’s it!” Snags said, all smiles.  “A pussywillow!”

And then a miracle happened.  I was brought back to life and we walked on.  To the playground.  And the swings.  Where Snags wasn’t bored at all.

As If The First Time Wasn’t Fun Enough…

I guess there are worse things, but I’m going to complain anyway.  Just.Because.I.Can.

I had my annual woman checkup last month you see.  And the gynecologist, she said, “We mail out letters now with the results of your pap smear.  If you haven’t received a letter from us in three weeks time, then give us a call.”

The three weeks?  It went by.  Without a letter from the doctor’s office. 

I was actually sitting at the computer thinking to myself, “Should I give them just one more day or should I call the doctor’s office now,” when the phone rang.  It was kind of like telepathy, only I messed the back end of it up, because while it was the doctor’s office calling, it wasn’t with news I wanted to hear.

“Hi.  Doctor Do-Over asked me to call.  Your pap smear results were unsatisfactory.  That means there were not enough cells for the lab to do a complete screening.  Doctor Do-Over would like you to come back in for another pap smear.” Can you believe my luck here?  Who wouldn’t jump at the chance?  I mean, the first one was just so much fun.  And now I get to do it again? Woo Hoo! Boo Hoo.

So now I have to schedule an appointment, take time off from work, drive an hour to the doctor’s office, strip from the waist down, lie down with my feet in stirrups, and let Doctor Do-Over scrape away at my cervix a second time.  I suppose I’ll have to do that, but I’m not all that confident she’ll do any better of a job this time than she did the last time.  And I sure as hell don’t plan to give her a third opportunity. I know they say the third time’s the charm, but come on.  

So I’m thinking, can’t I just do this myself?  How hard can it be? What do I need, really?  An old popsicle stick?  Too short you think?  We’ve got chopsticks around this place somewhere.  I could take a sample myself and mail it to the lab from here.  The great thing is, I’m NOT a doctor.  Without stirrups and a that shoehorn thing they pry you open with, I’m sure I’d scrape the hell out of my cervix, possibly remove the thing in its entirety, thereby ensuring the lab would have more than enough cells to get a satisfactory result this time around. I could save myself a lot of money on gas too!

At my last appointment, Doctor Do-Over was kind enough to inform me that since I recently turned 40, I’ve earned the pleasure of receiving annual mammograms.  She even filled out an order for me to go get one. What a birthday present! 

I bet your doctors aren’t this skilled or this much fun.  I bet they don’t give you gifts for your birthday, either.  So let me know if you want Doctor Do-Over’s number. If you’re planning a pick-up game of kick ball, I hear she’s the one you want on your team…

Top Ten Reasons I Failed to Feed the Parking Meter

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Okay, fine.  I don’t have ten reasons. 

And, it appears, I don’t have ANY reasons at all for failing to pay the parking meter.

The truth is, I plain forgot.  I was going to get my hair cut.  I parked my car.  I got out of my car, and walked away.  No, I don’t know what I was thinking. I may have lost my head.  Perhaps I left it in the back seat of the car? If it weren’t for the fact that nobody looked or acted in anyway alarmed when I entered the hair salon, I might have bought that excuse myself.  As it was, not one single person screamed “Oh. My. God!  That woman is missing her head! You can’t cut hair on a headless woman!”

It was only AFTER I got my hair cut (and highlighted!), as I was walking back toward my car that I thought about the meter at all. ”Hmmm… I wonder how much time I’ve got left on the parking meter?”

And that’s when it hit me.  I didn’t have ANY time left on the meter, because I hadn’t bought any time.

I started to walk faster, hoping to get a glimpse of my windshield, hoping against hope that it would be clear, that I wouldn’t have received a parking ticket.  But luck was not on my side.

The cost of a good hair cut and highlights?  Priceless.

The cost of forgetting to feed the parking meter? $23.00 dollars my friends. $23.00.

The Heart Attack That Wasn’t

Listen up because I’m only going to tell this story once.  Miss something, and you’re on your own for finding out the details.

My son woke me up at 4:30 in the morning last Saturday because he needed a Kleenex.  He said he had a runny nose.  Or maybe he said he had a bloody nose.  As it was not yet the crack of dawn, and technically, in my book, it was still the middle of the damn night, I didn’t catch what he said.  I asked him if his nose was runny or bloody.  The room was dark.  He said he didn’t know.  And that uncertainty motivated me to move because if it was bloody, then it was probably dripping all over my carpet.  But as it turns out, his nose was merely runny.

My husband got up to help find the Kleenex so I went back to bed and realized with some alarm that my chest hurt.  A lot.  And not only that, my left shoulder blade hurt and the pain went up into my neck.  I asked my husband to rub my shoulder but as my brain started to wake up to the fact that his shoulder massage wasn’t helping, I also realized that this trifecta of pain was similar to something I had once read describing the symptoms of a heart attack. And then?  I felt sick.

When my husband asked if I wanted to go to the hospital I was sufficiently scared enough, and was in enough pain to squeak, “Yeah, that might be a good idea.”

And THAT is how I ended up at the hospital.  Where, if anyone would have read my file, they would know all of that.  And they wouldn’t have had to ask me over and over and over again, “What happened?” 

But, apparently, the doctors and nurses at my local hospital can’t read.  Or don’t bother to.

Because seriously?  I had to repeat that story over a dozen times over a span of 24 hours, and I got mighty sick of it.

Here’s some other stuff that should be my medical file should anyone care to read it: the hospital ran an EKG and gave me three yummy little orange baby aspirin in the ER.  The baby aspirin tasted like candy.  I’d like another handful please.

While I was hanging out in the ER, they did a chest x-ray.  And then later, a chest CT scan, with contrast.

The I.V. port?  Why yes, they gave me one. They put it right in the crook of my arm, the part that bends.  My right arm.  And I’m right handed.  So I bend that arm A LOT.  But when the nurse asked me where a good vein was, I thought she meant for taking blood, not for inserting a semi permanent needle so that it could jab deeper and deeper and deeper into my vein each time I moved.  Ouch! Tell me, what kind of person does that, places an IV in the crook of an arm?  Oh wait, I know.  Her name was Kim.

Nitroglycerin?  Why yes, they gave me three of those little pills in the ER.  But no, they didn’t help the pain at all.

Toradal? Yep, that stuff was good.  The pain went away. That’s when I wanted to go home.

Except I couldn’t.  My symptoms, you see, were “concerning” enough that the ER doctor decided to admit me for additional tests.  Tests that for whatever reason, couldn’t be done until the next day, which meant I got to stay overnight.

And let me tell you, the hospital?  It ain’t the Hilton.

For one thing, the staff at a hotel, whether a Hilton or a Motel 6, doesn’t come in every four hours to take your temperature, blood pressure, and oxygen levels.  They don’t hook you up to heart monitors and expect you to sleep that way.  And they sure as hell don’t wake you up in the middle of the night to draw more blood.  I understand that some hotels have bed bugs for that.  But I think my hospital bed had those too.  Because how else do you explain the bites I found on my legs after a restless sleep? Vampires?  As far as know, they go for your neck.

Perhaps you have been wondering what the menu is in a cardiac ward? Well, I’ll tell you, I don’t think the American Heart Association would approve.  Breakfast was an egg and cheese omelet with FRIED potatoes. I’m not even kidding.

Lunch was my choice: a turkey sandwich on whole wheat or a Sloppy Joe of indeterminate meat origin.  I chose the turkey. It arrived with a bowl of something that I might have identified as soup, had it not been for the unnatural shade of orange. I blinked at it, but I didn’t taste it. The coconut cake looked okay, but my taste buds knew, after one teeny bite, that it was not.  Cake on a cardiac ward?  I’m not kidding about that either.  Or about the brownie that came with dinner. All I can say about the fish sandwich that was supposed to pass as dinner is this: Mrs. Paul would be appalled. 

I had the pleasure (NOT!) of meeting one cardiac physician’s assistant, one doctor of unspecified type, and one cardiologist, one right after another.  Each followed the other into my room so quickly that I can only assume they were standing outside my door in a straight line and taking turns coming in to see me. Perhaps, on the way out of my room they tapped each other on the shoulder and said, “Tag!  You’re it!” But to that I say, get over your egos and enter a patient’s room all at once so the patient doesn’t have to have to repeat “what happened” three times in a row.  Or better yet, read their damn file.

The doctor who failed to mention his specialty mostly asked questions about my mental state.  Was I depressed? Or stressed?  Anxious? Under a lot of pressure? Because clearly, if the tests were coming back negative (which they were) then I must be prone to hysterics.  Or depression.  Or anxiety.  And okay, I won’t argue that with you.  I might be a wee bit stressed out at the moment.  But, the reason I went to the hospital in the first place was because of PAIN.  In my CHEST. Like that of a heart attack.  I was not an overly anxious woman who thought spending an entire day, and then the night, and then another day in the hospital being poked and prodded would be fun.  Because what?  I wanted the attention?  What I WANTED to do was go to Target. And the bookstore.  And to my Uncle’s 60th Birthday Party (Happy Birthday!  Sorry I missed your party.)

As time stood completely still on Saturday in the hospital, I tried to fathom the LINE that must have formed behind the treadmill that caused the hospital staff to delay  my stress test for over 24 hours. I wondered: was it as long as the lines were for people who went out to buy the new iPhones?  Was that why I had to sit in the hospital ALL.DAY.LONG and then ALL.NIGHT.LONG waiting for my turn?  Couldn’t I have done a few jumping jacks in my room to prove that I was more or less okay?  Obviously not. They took my bra when they hooked me up to all the heart monitors. And the way I’m endowed? One jumping jack would knock me out. WHAM! Punch to the face! 

I wasn’t sure if they expected me to walk or run on the treadmill, but I was sure I hadn’t packed a sports bra when we took off of the ER.  So I asked for duct tape but they wouldn’t give me any. In the end it was all okay.  I only had to walk, I didn’t knock myself out, and the stress test was uneventful. 

I wish I could say the same about the arguments I got into with my so called “nurse”.  Did you know that nurses don’t like it when you question them?  Especially when you question them about the bucket full of medicines they bring to your room and want you to take “just because.”  Well, I’m not like that.  If I am going to take something, I want to know what it is, and what it’s for, and why the doctors think I should take it.

So on the morning of my last day in the hospital, when it was clear that this wasn’t a cardiac event after all, and I was tired of being in the hospital for no good reason, and I wanted to go home already, I refused to take the nurse’s proffered “stool softener”.  Nor did I accept her handful of aspirin.  And I most adamantly refused her shot of “a mild blood thinner.” 

“Is there,” I asked, “anything at all in my test results that would indicate that the chest pain I had was in any way heart related?” 

“No,” she said.  “They just give this blood thinner to everyone who is on this ward.”

“Well, not to me,” I said.

And that one little refusal turned the mild mannered woman into Nurse Witch Ratched.  Witch Ratched delayed my release from the hospital by several hours while she pretended that she didn’t have my discharge papers. When I asked how much blood would spill if I pulled out my own I.V. (and I swear I would have if I could have found a single bandaid in that place) she finally admitted that she had my discharge papers with her after all. 

And then?  I came home and vowed that I would rather dig my own grave in the backyard than go back to that hospital ever again.  Of course, I realize that’s easy to say when you’re feeling good.