I went to the vet’s office yesterday morning to fetch Her Highness’ prednisone pills. As soon as I got home, I gave her the first dose in hamburger, and she gulped it all down. We are on our way to relieving her from the vile effects of her autoimmune disease. I am very happy!
There was no walking for us yesterday. She was not ready. The day that began so beautifully turned dark, cool and wet in the afternoon. I was content not to walk because it meant no heavy breathing. We managed well. I read and I paid lots of attention to her and I bought her some bones at Nester’s to help her cope with her inactivity.
Once her foot heals, we’ll be going to Rollo Park often to help her lose some of the weight she’s gained over the past three weeks of inactivity. Playing fetch is a bit of a joke for me because I must throw with my left hand; my right shoulder has been damaged and hurting since last June. You should see me at Rollo. I look like a young teen out for a secret smoke and constantly monitoring all around me in case a parent or neighbour should venture by. But I’m monitoring the park because I’d rather not be seeing throwing in such a pathetic manner. Throwing left-handed is very challenging. Clearly, I still have an ego.
I got a very nasty comment on a post I put on our community Facebook page. It was horrid how she wrote to me, and her post was full of assumptions about my personality and intent. I wanted to reply because she angered me. I wanted to shut her down, so I kept it simple: I wished her good luck with grade four.
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I was sad to read that Hudson’s Bay has filed for bankruptcy protection. The Bay was such an amazing force in the early history of our country. Vancouver’s downtown store was the epicenter of our city as I was growing up. It had the grandest architecture, and it was an entire city block wide, and right out front of its main doors was where I caught the bus to return to West Vancouver after I’d been downtown.
My spirits were revived, however, when I read an article about Michael Sheen, an actor I have long admired. This wonderful actor and lovely man wrote off a million dollars-worth of debt owed my his neighbours in southern Wales. He paid off their debt with his own money! He did it for two reasons, to help his neighbours suffering since the closing down of mills in his area, and to expose the inhumanity of the interest rates they were forced to accept. My hero, Michael Sheen!
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Last night I wrote my essay for Dr. Shoja, and I outed myself to myself. All my life, I’ve been doing something that went unnoticed to my conscious mind. It’s been an autonomic response I’ve had since the onset of consciousness. I was writing to her about the absence of my dog-walking friends. Here’s what I wrote.
For a long time, I have understood my life this way: My conscious mind shares functional custody of my body with FND. It appears to me that FND is winning. I blame FND for the absence of creative drive, for making reading hard to do because I keep wanting to get up and move (I was a very long-read person prior to my breakdown), and for my poor speech, seizures, and ticks and jerks. And now my breathing is also making me abandon things I’ve always done. Losing contact with my dog group …. How do I feel?
Here’s a very telling thing about who I am. You’ve heard me say many, many times that it mystifies me how people name their feelings. When I pondered the question of how I felt about losing contact with the group, I saw a rope so frayed that only a few fibrous strands held the two pieces together. I am the piece of rope that is going to fall.
All my life I’ve seen images in my brain when I’ve tried to ascertain how I was feeling. But I’ve never taken the fact in consciously until last night. Now I know more about why creativity was so central to my life. Don Tyrell, my absent male owner, was a writer. When I was still a child, I started reading what he wrote. He wrote about sports. Nothing could bore me more, so I focused on his writing. Soon into my new editorial role, I asked him: “Have you ever used a comma?”
He tried.. He was a shit typist. But he did well as a marine writer. He never answered my question. Instead, he gave me his copy of the stylebook of his newspaper, The Vancouver Sun. Learning that book changed my life. The book and my visual way of expressing emotion are my foundations.
On my social studies class test in grade seven, whenever I didn’t know the answer to the question, I wrote down where in our textbook the answer was—what page, what column and how many lines down from the top or up from the bottom. Also, whenever I am asked how my breakdown started, I always explain that one night, when sitting and relaxing in my bath, it was like a slide show started playing in my brain. At first, I didn’t understand what all the images were about, and then I realized that they were scenes from my childhood and I saw how lonely and alone I was.
I think and feel in images. I’m terribly chuffed about that.
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