Category Archives: Pain

A Book Review

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9781608198061This week is a book review. Roz Chast, a cartoonist for The New Yorker, has come up with a graphic memoir.  I enjoy her cartoons, all quirky, EMOTIONAL, and full of insight about people.  Her new book is about her parent’s last years and death, a big subject for me.  Carol, her sister Judi, and I did a blog about caregiving for elderly parents.  The elderly parents are dead, as is our active blogging, but the website is still up.  www.desperatecaregivers.com

 

So when “Can’t we talk about something more Pleasant” came out, I bought it. I think I am fairly typical for persons my age-I’m not a reader of graphic novels.  I have read some graphic stories, but this was my first full-length graphic anything.  Ms. Chast is a master at communicating feelings with her work and caregiving for dying parents is full of feelings.  Often children of parents who are at the end of life don’t really like their parent, and all sorts of feelings come up.  Guilt, shame, resentment, anger, sadness, fear, anxiety, and a sense of futility are some of the feelings.  The book evokes them all.

 

I am having trouble writing this review because the book brings all these feelings up in me, making it hard to get any flow in my writing.  I have been working on this review for three days and have 230 words written.  When we did the caregiving blog this happened to me.  Writing about subjects other than caregiving is easy.

 

Roz Chast does so well communicating her feelings as well as her parent’s feelings that I feel like I know them personally.  I appreciate her ability to express her reactions to her parent’s denial and show the dynamic with her parents that shaped her life and the way she dealt with their declines and deaths.  Her memoir must have been more painful to write as it was to read.

 

I tend not to read or write about books that I found painful to read.  This one is an exception.  I recommend it to anyone who has aging parents or is a parent.  Roz Chast deals with a difficult issue in a creative and intensely personal way.

Posted in Books, Memoirs, My Story, Pain

If it Doesn’t Hurt, it Itches

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Copy-2-of-CIMG0019-212x300I have reached that age where parts of me do not work quite as well as they used to.  I have aches and pains.  I have a titanium knee.  I am short a finger on my right hand.  I wear hearing aids.  A tooth is missing.  A LOT of hair is missing on my head.  My right shoulder, both wrists, left knee, and right foot hurt.  My left little finger has this hitch where it doesn’t want to straighten out and sort of snaps past a point when I do straighten it.  That hurts as well.

I have sinus headaches, acid reflux, a bad disk in my back, and an ass that is so small my pants won’t stay up. No ass, no hair, no little finger, what is going on?

When I was in my forties (I am 72) I did a career change.  I went from being a desk bound bureaucrat to working in the water business.  My first job required water treatment knowledge and a lot of physical work.  I laid pipe, repaired manholes, cleaned sewer lines, pumped a lot of water, read meters, and did a lot of pick and shovel work.  I remember thinking that I could do everything in my forties that I did in my twenties.

Then I hurt my back carrying an unbalanced load up a ditch bank.  I  learned about physical therapists and chiropractors.  I am still learning.  Up to then I had taken my body for granted.  I did what I wanted to and mostly got away with it.  From the back injury on, it has been downhill.

Since then, my body tells me when it does not like what I am doing to it.  Usually it uses pain.  The other strategy it employs is the itch. My head, back, legs, and arms itch.  It is seasonal. I itch spring, summer, winter, and fall.  I have recently discovered that some of the itching may be from ultraviolet light.   I am eliminating UV light in the house.  I take Benadryl and Allegra.  They help.  I still itch.

I have had prostate surgery, hernia surgery, a knee replacement, several colonoscopies, several endoscopies, a finger amputated, and an optorectomy (severing the nerve from your butt to your eyes to get rid of the shitty outlook).  I have high blood pressure.  I get migraine headaches.

I don’t do some things I used to do.  Run, jump, carry heavy loads, mess around on roofs, or think.  I have ADD.  Therapy and medication help a great deal, but I still forget, get crabby, and do impulsive stupid things.  I have been able to do some writing, however.  That is, if you can call this writing.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining.  That is a lie.  But, I can still do a lot and have fun at it.  I have the limitations of an aging body, but I remain active and can work with the school kids at Four Mile.  They seem to like Mr. Bill.  Life is good.

Posted in Memoirs, My Story, Pain, Stories
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