Be gentle with me. I've never done this before. Where do you start? The beginning? That was almost 60 years ago! The earth was still warm. Dinosaurs roamed the west. Dick Clark was just a kid.
I was born very young... brought up as a child. My mother never had any children that lived, so my brother was an only child. I like the way Ellen DeGeneres opened her autobiography: "I don't remember my first memory". Or Michael Caine's opening line to his first book: "How do you like it so far?" Doesn't that make me seem well-read? or at least well-read as far as the first page.
Let's skip ahead a few decades. My good life started with marriage to Dave. We met on the job, which was security at a local college. I wasn't all that happy wearing a uniform since I liked sneaking around in my Private Eye job.... like Mannix or Barnaby Jones. I bet Joe Cannon never ran out of gas in the middle of a chase. And I'm pretty sure Magnum PI never had to go to the bathroom in the middle of a stake-out! While I was pretty good at getting into the lives of those philandering men, it wasn't all that easy getting myself out. That's where Chuck came in. He was Da Boss. Chuck took me around the college and showed me all the jobs I was to do that night in my first effort as a Security Guard and I made mental notes of everything he said. Then he parted company telling me that Dave would explain all the other aspects of the job. Cool. Dave had nice eyes, made bluer by the blue uniform. Dave's first words to me, after "Hi, I'm Dave", were "The first thing you have to remember about this job is to forget everything Chuck just told you". Love at First Sight? Not quite, but certainly Like at First Hear!
At that time, Dave was only separated from his wife and their 3 grown kids and while she did not want him, she also didn't want anyone else to have him either. We married 5 years later with a police presence at the church to ensure this ex-wife didn't create any more bike-fires or knife-attacks like we'd been experiencing for the prior 5 years. Dave was handsome young 40 then and I was a nubile 27. I have never looked better than I did on my wedding day. It was the best day of my life. I think Dave was sorta happy too. He tells me so every day. We are a match made in comedy heaven. Nobody else could stand to be with us for any length of time so we get along really well 98% of the time. Well we have to disagree sometimes. Otherwise one of us would be redundant!
The next 15 years were a mixture of good times and not-so-good times, for better and for worse, but when my parents got to be retired and my Dad started having some older fella problems, we decided there was nothing holding us in the quiet little burg of Port Hope, and moved back to my home town, London Ontario. I had not been able to find steady solid work in Port Hope for several years and Dave was having trouble staying ahead of the game in Real Estate so we were both pretty happy to have good jobs waiting for us the day we moved to London. We enjoyed long walks on the beach and I still had some leftover jockette itch from adolescence and young adulthood, so we enjoyed these good times up to July 1, 1991. That day we hiked 13 km to the local airport to see the air show and we got about half way back when something 'slipped' in my back and I began a 2008 day stretch of uninterrupted unadulterated excruciating back pain that changed my life. It took me 5 and a half YEARS to get the tests and diagnoses I would need to finally get the surgeon to uncrimp the two pinched nerves in my neck. During that time I experienced every kind of delay and medical mismanagement available in this city and to most women everywhere. That epistle would take another long blog to describe so I'll assume that y'all know a little bit about which I speak.
By the time I got the surgery in my neck to fix my back - yep, they slit my throat and healed my butt - I was already on Prednisone for Ulcerative Colitis and had lost my teeth to gum disease among many other things. Short story - there wasn't anything I could eat and digest comfortably. I spent many weeks in various hospitals with dysentery bad enough to be deadly and over a period of the next 9 years I had 16 anesthesias to complete the surgeries that eventually eliminated my large intestine, part of the small intestine, my gall bladder (almost an after thought), all of my teeth, some bone graphs from both my hips to my jaw and a series of intestinal blockages followed by near lethal dehydration.... oh yes, and somewhere in that mess, my butt doctor mentioned I had contracted type II Diabetes. They couldn't do the usual Glucose Tolerance Test at the time because my BG levels were too high to risk adding sugar to the mix.
It took me about 10 years to come to terms with all of the above - learning to live with an ileostomy that did not work for years and finally getting someone to admit to the initial error and plant me a new one on the other side. This one works but it takes some coaxing. I now have a working set of implanted teeth. Those babies were not covered by any insurance up here in Ontario so I ended up in debt just to pay for them. By the time I could actually get outside and be semi-pseudo-sorta human, the surgery in my neck had long lost its effectiveness and I was back to that horrific pain all through my spine - degeneration caused mainly by the long term use of that dreaded prednisone.
But this time I was better armed with experience from prior years' horrors, and a couple doctors who knew me well enough to understand that I wasn't just imagining this pain. By now they had witnessed what I could endure and what I had to endure to get to this particular stage and they were able to help me with my pain - for a price. And that price is the get-up-and-go I once had had got-up-and-gone. I could sleep through the week if I didn't HAVE to get up and do stuff. I had already taken my work home and opened a small office out of my home which modern technology has allowed me to manage every bit as well as I could while travelling to someone else's office every day. I prepare tax returns for the first half of the year and then some free-lance photo-journalism the rest of the year. Hubby had to retire from his government job 8 years ago but kept working in security for a few more years until I convinced him to come home and play with me!!
Over the last couple of years I've been on 4 different medications for diabetes and still my BG has been out of control. Ironically, now that I can eat well and love all those foods that most people force themselves to take in - fruit, vegetables are my faves - my weight has crept over 95 kg and my BG hangs around the high teens (200 lbs and around 300 to the American readers). My GP of the last decade, one smart cookie who does not believe in patronizing people like Dave and myself, got me enrolled in a Diabetes Support Program in town and I started getting their help in August 2010. That was also when I found tuDiabetes. Now that most of my other ailments are either controlled or tolerated, I guess it is time to get my diabetes into submission - preferably before I start losing feet, kidneys and eyesight. I am not sure if I could endure what so many people here live with every single day in dealing with their diabetes. Also, now that my hubby is in his 70's, it is becoming his turn to start feeling his age and he is needing more of my help to get to his own appointments etc. I feel like I owe him so much for all he has done for me the past 15 years and want to truly be there for him in every way.... but I know I can't. I am not the same person and never will be. So the two of us struggle along in this effort to own a property and earn a little income, together we stand, divided we fall.... mostly we just hold hands a lot - it helps to keep the other one from falling down!
I hope this hasn't been too much of a bore for people here. Most of you have written wonderful and succinct descriptions of yourselves and your pasts. I only wish I could be a terser verser!
Thank you all for your guidance and understanding in this common condition. Maybe if we all hold hands we can keep the person next to us from falling down too.
