Losers can always learn

Hard times are instructional. What's the point of going through hell if you're not going to get something out of it? And I don't mean an opportunity for one-upmanship, the ever popular, "You think THAT's hard? Oh yeah???"

My older daughter plays soccer and I always tell her that we learn more from losing than winning. And as a frequent loser, I know what I'm talking about.

What do you really learn about good times anyway? Nothing. You just enjoy them. And here's another point about crappy times, without them we'd find it difficult to recognize the good ones. And here's another thing, what's "good" and "bad" changes, depending on where you're sitting.

With that in mind, I thought I'd outline what I've learned from some of our tribulations, starting with the most serious, and then ending with the bugs. Bugs are always on my mind and (more frequently than I'd like) on my head.

1. Heart failure:

• Every improvement counts, no matter how small.
• Things aren't always as dire as they sound at first.
• Someone should rename this condition in order to reduce the panic level among patients and their families.
• Young, healthy people get sick every day and everywhere.
• Waiting for the sky to fall is not living.
• Don't wait for retirement to really live.
• You can't live every day like your last. It's exhausting, especially if you could live another 20 years or so.
• When to push through and when to give in. It's not true that quitters never win. Go easy on yourself.
  
• When people offer to help, take it and tell them what they can do.
• Check your life insurance as soon as you have children. We never topped up my husband's and now, no one will insure him. What you get from the workplace is better than nothing, but less than you'd need if you died while your children were young. On the upside, my husband doesn't have to hire a food taster because he knows that he's worth more to me alive than dead. (He knows I'm kidding, right? I truly adore that man.)
  

2. Home renovations:

• Always get references, not just a quote. Cheaper is not necessarily better.
• If it's a big reno, like...say...a roof, consider hiring a home inspector to check the work. This can also prevent...say...rain in your basement in the event that the roofer skipped the important step of replacing the surface that was removed.
  
• Things always cost more than you think.

3. Buying and selling a home:

• Can you renovate and be happy?
• What you want versus what you need.
• Get a home inspection and fix the big problems before you sell.
• Sometimes going through lawyers is harder. Keep the lines of communication open between both parties, if possible.
• Get a long range forecast and if a tornado will be hitting your house in the foreseeable future, move. NOW.

4. Bugs:

• Gratitude: For having a washer and a dryer. If I was doing laundry on a rock by the river, I would have keeled over before the bugs did. On the other hand...
• Simplicity: If I was doing laundry on a rock by the river, we'd only have 1.5 outfits each and it wouldn't have taken as long. Pare your stuff down regularly.
• Reality check: No one dies from bed bugs (but you do go itchy-crazy).
• Don't accept used clothing or furniture unless you can poach, boil, immerse or freeze it. On that note, winter is a good time to get used stuff. Leave it outside for a while, preferably when it's a day like today and it's -33C with the windchill.
  
• If someone is getting weird rashes for no apparent reason, it could be bed bugs (I got hives, my husband didn't have any reaction and one of my daughters looked like she was thrown into an Iron Maiden).
• Get a canine inspection. Really. They now have dogs trained to sniff out bed bugs. There's a fella in Ottawa who does this through his company. It's money well spent. My daughter was getting a weird rash on her back in the fall and I was starting to hyperventilate. We got Patrick to come over with his dog Miley and we passed the sniff test. Whew.
• Check hotel rooms for signs of bed bugs before you flop.

What about you? What sort of trials have you been through and what sort of wisdom would you like to share?

Progress is approaching

I jumped right in and took the Meditating in Everyday Life course at the Shambhala Centre in December. I’m still a bit hit-and-miss on this meditation thing. See, now I should be meditating, but I’m writing instead.

I’ve made two important discoveries as I sit still (every second day) and struggle through five minutes of solitude.

I like to:

1. Stay very, very busy…
2. To run away from writing about stuff I care about because investing yourself in writing is scary.

Just ask Penelope Trunk, who uses squirm-inducing honesty about her personal life--marriage, parenthood, divorce, dating, pending marriage, end of the relationship--and links that to career advice--risk-taking, Asperger’s at work, family businesses.

As part of this meditation course, we’re encouraged to do readings in various Buddhist texts. But in our reminder e-mail, we’re reminded that we don’t HAVE to do the readings. These are Buddhists, remember? What are they going to do if you don’t do your homework? Look extra compassionately at you? Be super kind and forgiving?

For me, sitting still is like trying to sit through a hurricane. When I sit, I have:

• imaginary fights in my head with family members and co-workers
• find fantastic success in the publishing world
• win the lottery
• watch my life fall apart
• rebuild from the ashes, and
• wonder when I’ll get around to using those Crest Whitestrips that are sitting in my drawer

The readings from this course tell us that by meditating we can find our own “divine goodness”.

Ouch! I think I just blew my ganglia on that one.

That just seems so radical to a Catholic raised on original sin.

Just shut up and be still for a while and you’ll find out that you’re just fine. Of course, I’m paraphrasing here.

But I like this idea. I really like it.

The problem is that I’m feeling more snarly and irritated since I started. This is common, apparently. The meditation masters liken the early stages to sitting under a waterfall.

Well I’ve gone over the edge, my canoe is in pieces and I’m being smashed to bits.

It’s very tiring lugging this thought machine around. I’m managing about five seconds of mental silence every second day and it's not enough.

So, now I’m trying to write. And in doing so, I’m running away from meditating.

As my friend Helen likes to say, “Progress is approaching.” She tells me that this quote might be from someone literary, but I'm too lazy to look it up and Helen is too scattered. She also says that the "H" in ADHD stands for "Helen".

Paranoid 3: Betting our hedge

The roof of our former house narrowly missed the car across the street. Photo by: Jennifer Oberhammer

Looking back over the past five less-than-stellar years has me thinking about luck. Most of us think in terms of bad luck and good luck.

I don't think it's that simple. There's good-great luck and there's good-could-have-been-much-worse luck.

An example of the former is having the winning lottery numbers. When I think of the latter, I think of a scenario like this:

A woman gets dragged under a bus for a mile or so and then is set upon by a pack of feral dogs, but is still alive. The newscaster reports that she's in a medically induced coma while awaiting a donor for a full-body skin transplant. The cop featured on the five-second sound bite says, "That's one lucky little lady."

I'd say that's my kind of luck, but I'm luckier because I have all my skin--and teeth. And we got out of there, by the skin of our teeth.

So far, I've recounted major house damage and then heart damage. Then, there were the scabies-that-turned-out-to-be bed bugs and the therapeutic demolition job.

Next up we have real estate snafus, lice and a tornado. But there I go again, rushing things.

When I left off, we were engaged in a full out war against bed bugs. For months, we watched each other carefully for any rashes or bite-like lesions. I felt like a scout for the porn industry: "Take your clothes off and stand over here." And that was just for guests.

And the nightmares! In the dead of night, I'd go from a twitchy prone position to standing with all the bedding in my hands and the light on in 1.2 seconds. It wasn't long before Oli stopped asking what I was doing. He'd just wait until I was good and ready to hand the sheets back.

Bed bugs and beyond

After a year, we were in the clear. Not one to just sit back and enjoy some free time, I started advocating to move. I wanted to live in a house where I didn't have so many bad memories. Not that all memories were bad. I'd brought home my two (colicky) infants from the hospital to that--. Yeah, now that you mention it, there weren't a lot of good memories, plus we were running out of room to store all the sports equipment we couldn't use, now that we were parents.

I found the perfect place, just blocks away. We put an offer on the house and it was accepted. In a divine stroke of luck, acquaintances expressed interest in our place.

But of course, when your last name is Murphy, things rarely work out the way you think they will. After we signed off on our home inspection, our inspector's "just-in-case insulation test" for asbestos came back positive. I wanted out of that purchase in a big, bad way. But the vendors were really great about it and got it removed and replaced, largely at their expense.

The home inspection on our place didn't go so well either and we had to pay for some big expenses there.

What's a life event without bugs? This time it was lice and all of us were afflicted. The treatment and the moving stress had me flirting with female-pattern baldness.

Hegemony (Phonetics: Hedge-eh-money)

The universe wasn't done with us yet though. The purchaser's lawyer had hedge issues with our place.

Our hedge's proximity to a property line had our sale teetering on the edge of oblivion. It was the most confounding situation and I can't get into details here because I fear angering the gods of property and libel law.

Our legal fees quadrupled, while my mental faculties halved.

My and Oli's parents swooped in as I unraveled. I could neither eat nor sleep because I felt so responsible for our impending financial ruin.

In the midst of all this, there were layoffs at work and I was called to an unscheduled meeting. As I walked down the hall, pondering rules for filing bankruptcy, I was ushered into the "survivors'" meeting and I almost fainted with relief.

Hedge-ectomy

Our lawyer hit on a solution at the 11th hour, which involved a night-time visit with a chainsaw and a headlamp. Oli's hedge removal was masterful. When he was done, there was no evidence that a 12-foot hedge had ever been there.

It really did work out in the end. I loved our new house from the first, but I could tell that my husband was a bit "meh" about the cost, the big mortgage and stress of the move.

But five months later, he developed a whole new appreciation for our abode.

The April after we moved in, a tornado stampeded through the old neighbourhood and tore the roof clean off our former house and deposited it in the middle of the road.

I'm sure the neighbours across the road were cursing us for upping the "R" value of the roof insulation because it looked like their giant maple tree was part of a pink ribbon campaign.

I felt so badly for our purchasers; what a beginning for their new home. I thought a fresh start would change the luck of the place. They've recently moved back in and much like us, I'm sure they have a whole new appreciation for home insurance.

That house could really do with a dose of good luck. An end to the bad luck would be a good start.

Now, I feel pressure behind my right eye. I wonder if it's a tumour.

I've sent money; now what?

A country in a mess has been hurled into the abyss.

Money is pouring into aid agencies in the wake of Haiti's earthquake and everyone makes a point of mentioning the catastrophe in appropriately grim and muted tones, so that we can say we thought about it today.

Then we pick our favourite registered charity to donate to, so we'll feel better and settle back into our easy, comfortable lives where our biggest struggles concern self-fulfillment, offspring micromanagement and worry about stupid shit like "do these pants make me look fat?"

These are things that, for the most part, we have control over, but our level of obsession would indicate otherwise. Worry over stupid shit is a privilege and I'm grateful for those worries.

Angst over Haiti is another matter. Aside from writing cheques, what can we really do? It's not practical to jump on a plane and join in the efforts. And last I checked, I didn't see much of a need for technical writers in Port au Prince. Best not get in the way there and leave the real work to others, I guess.

So, now what?

Hopefully that will become clear in the coming weeks.

On another note, last night I heard that Canadians had raised over $24 million in 24 hours and the government has pledged to match those funds. But it's unclear of how much of that will qualify for matching government funds.

Here are a few links to charities collecting for Haiti relief:

Canadian Red Cross

UNICEF Canada

Oxfam Canada

Health Partners International Canada

Plan Canada

Paranoid Part 2: Scabies seem appealing

If there was a theme for this litany of misfortune, it’s this: We all have a sliding scale of what we’re willing to accept or deal with. For example, I remember thinking (at a time before I had children) that dealing with lice seemed the worst thing ever.


In my mid-20s, I was a reporter at a small daily paper and I ended up doing a whole series on lice outbreaks at this particular school—an assignment that had me scratching my head and shuddering with revulsion.

The fun and frolics of 2007 made lice seems like a vacation. But here I am, jumping ahead of myself.

My last post ended with my husband adjusting to the reality of heart failure because the heart damage from his viral infection became permanent.

But there were improvements. He managed to work half-time, an effort that required him to sleep all afternoon.

Then, my contract wasn’t renewed. I got a full-time job offer from a company that I contracted for, but they were bought out by a U.S. firm and a hiring freeze was instituted.

I had a cushion, so we were fine at first. Though eventually, the funds dwindled and mild panic started to set in.

Then, I landed my current position at a medium-sized high-tech company. Whew.

It was a steep learning curve, but I was keen. Running out of your emergency funds is very motivating.

Could the hives be scabies?

Shortly thereafter, I developed hives on my arms and I joked with my co-workers that I was allergic to my job. I started a food journal to see if there was a correlation to the number of hives I had each day and what I ate.

The hives continued. Benedryl became my close personal friend.

Then, my children started getting hives. Off to the doctor we went.

“Hives aren’t contagious,” she said. “It looks like scabies to me.”

Scabies! It just sounded gross and when she told me that they were mites that burrow into the skin and lay eggs, I was nostalgic for lice.

Filling the prescription was a laugh a minute. The pharmacist, an enthusiastic East Indian fellow who seemed to be used to dealing with the hearing impaired, told me loudly how the pesticide was to be applied from “the neck down--avoiding the genitals, of course—for the most successful removal of scabies.”

In my peripheral vision, I could see everyone near the counter take one big step back.

Home I went for The Great Family Pesticide Rubdown. Then, all sheets and clothes went into the washer/dryer on the “boil”/”roast” cycle.

We were cured—for about a week and the marks came back.

The treatments were so hard on my asthmatic daughter. She was pale and wheezing and I wasn’t going to do another treatment no matter what.

I was crying on the phone to my friend Susan, who, recalling bed bug horror stories from her grandmother, told me to look for evidence of bed bugs.

Sleep tight; don't let the evil motherf#$%ers bite

“Are there small specks of blood on the sheets,” she asked?

Yes.

“Do you see little black specks?”

Yes.

“Can you see the bugs? They’re like apple seeds in size and colour.”

No.

I checked the mattresses and not one was found.

“Check the box springs.”

Holy Mother of God! It was a colony. Several colonies. It was a bed bug New World in my house!

I had an answer. I was elated for one day and then I found out that they are incredibly hard to get rid of. If you miss just one pregnant female in your pest control efforts, you’re screwed. Adults can survive up to a year without a blood feed and females lay one or more eggs a day.

I was pining for scabies.

So, we were plunged into a (new) hell. Actually, I think I was the most plagued by this special kind of six-legged crazy. My husband kept his perspective. After all, he felt that after his heart troubles, this was bad but not that bad. For me, it was my tipping point into full-blown anxiety, which was further fuelled by insomnia.

We purged like crazy. It’s amazing how quickly you can declutter when you assess everything as a current or potential bug habitat. Ironically, before this whole drama, we had a blog entry from Penelope Trunk posted in our kitchen, called “5 steps to taming materialism” in which she described her own family’s experience with bed bugs.

It was a reminder of our pledge to have a small house but big adventures. What a load of crap that goal turned out to be. I tore that off the wall.

Because of my daughter’s asthma and her earlier exposure to harsh chemicals from the home refinishing and then the “scabies” treatment, we decided on the pesticide-free approach and worked with Evergreen Pest Control.

Of course, the plumbing goes to hell

It took herculean efforts of vacuuming and cleaning and caulking every baseboard, electrical outlet, everything. My friend Susan came over and helped out. She caulked and then parked herself in the backyard to steam clean the pieces of furniture that we decided to keep. What a hero. I wouldn’t have set foot in the place if I were her. Of course, her husband made her strip on the porch before entering her home. Lucky neighbours.

I even inspected my neighbour’s house because we were attached by a wall and the six-legged devil spawn can follow a wire or crack into another dwelling. The neighbour was in the clear.

For weeks, I cleaned for four or five hours a night (after returning home from work), until the sweat dripped off my head and exploded onto the floor. I’m sure all this was very slimming.

By day, I was a mild-mannered tech writer; by evening a panicky, maniacal cleaning woman.

And the laundry! Everything that was washed had to be run through again. And in keeping with our stroke of luck, our basement flooded.

The plumber ran a camera through the pipe and called us over to see how “not good” it looked. The drain vomited chunks of rusted out pipe and dirt when he pulled the cable out.

The old cast iron main sewer line rotted away and had to be replaced. This required chipping a channel through the cement floor in the laundry room and garage. Cost: $7,500.

Our garage floor was old and cracked, so we opted for replacement rather than patching.

But none of the companies we contacted wanted to dispose or remove the remaining concrete. Demolition sounded so appealing. My husband wasn’t well enough to do it, but I sure could. I rented a drill from Home Depot and tore out that concrete all by my-damn-self.

And I loved it. Even now, when things seem to be going badly, I fantasize about jackhammers and crowbars.

See also:

Part 3: Betting our hedge

Just because the universe is out to get me, doesn’t mean I’m paranoid (Part 1)

I do have a tendency to wallow in negativity, but I’m hoping that discovering my own divine goodness will change all that. Meditation is supposed to be the vehicle to get me there, but it's stalled on the Lazy Highway at the junction of Excess and Sleeplessness at the moment.

I’m staring down the end of 2009 and wondering what 2010 has in store for me. An attitude adjustment would be a good move for me in 2010.

But before I go that route, I’m going to wallow in negativity one more time and then flush. (Actually, this is such a long post, that I may cut it into two or three posts).

If I had tunnel vision, I would be inclined to say that the last five years were a complete write-off. There were tough times and there were (paltry) good times. I should add a disclaimer of sorts saying: "I'm aware that I'm very fortunate to be born into the time and circumstances I'm in."

But since this is my last (multi-part) wallow, I’m going to highlight the low points for my reading audience. Right off the bat, I have to say that sometimes when things really suck they can be funny later. But some things just keep right on sucking.

Roof and heart: 2005/6

We returned home from our Christmas holidays to a terrible smell. I thought that perhaps we forgot to take the garbage out, but that wasn’t it.

When I walked into our living room, the ceiling was hanging down. The roofer took that old roof off, but didn’t get around to putting the new roof on and it rained while we were away.

This house was a three storey semi-detached home with a flat roof. I was home when they were removing the tar and gravel. I had assumed they were putting on the membrane to replace it, but they didn’t. Lacking a 50-foot ladder, I couldn’t confirm this. That was my mistake.

We spent the next seven weeks in a depressing little furnished apartment while the roofer’s insurance company and our insurance company funded the replacement of all of our ceilings and the floor refinishing and replacement. Thank heavens for insurance. We paid for the actual roof replacement when it was done and had our home inspector verify it.

The night we moved back in, my older daughter, who was four at the time, vomited all over her room from the overwhelming smell of varnish. My younger daughter, who was two (and who is the melded reincarnation of a goat and a science geek), wrote on some walls, broke into her sister’s piggy bank and dropped coins down the vents to give it that lived-in look. There. Perfect.

About six weeks later, my 37-year-old husband walked gingerly down the stairs from the office, where he had been entering his students’ marks.

He was clutching his chest.

“I have crushing chest pain. Can hardly breathe.”

Following the ambulance carrying my husband was surreal. This is something that happens to other people. All I kept thinking was: How could he have a heart attack? He’s a sub-three-hour marathoner, non-smoker and has the healthiest diet of anyone I know.

At the hospital, they ran tests and kept him overnight.

When I returned home where my neighbour and friend was minding my children, he told me that my older daughter’s asthma was acting up, so he gave her the “puffer”. A father himself to children with allergies, he was adept in assessing these things and administering her puffer.

I took her temperature and it was 104F. Not up to another trip to the emergency, but not feeling very tired, I gave her some ibuprophen, propped her up on me and administered salbutamol in intervals for what remained of the night.

I fetched Oli the next day. Tests revealed that he hadn’t had a heart attack. We were so relieved and regarded his followup tests with the internist as a precautionary measure.

Oli laughed and joked with the technicians as he sailed through the stress test. It was inconceivable that he’d fail the test. He returned home ebullient, but very tired. Hours later, the doctor called him up and said he wanted to see him first thing in his office.

That was our introduction the term peri-myocarditis. The doctor figured that it was brought on by a virus Oli had two or three weeks prior. Oli was over the bug, but just couldn’t shake the fatigue. But he didn’t let that stop him from riding his bike to work (in February), working out, coaching the basketball team and participating in exercise labs with his Grade 12 physiology students.

The pain he felt that night was from sudden swelling of the heart muscle (myocardium) and its membrane (pericardium).

Looking back now, I feel that this situation may have arisen from another factor in addition to the virus, and that’s chemical. We moved back into our home in winter time after the floors had been sanded and varnished and the walls re-painted. It’s not practical to keep the windows open for long periods of time when its -20C.

Lucky for us that we live in a place where we can access a heart-specialty hospital. Oli was put in the care of a cardiologist at the Ottawa Heart Institute.

And so went the rounds of tests and appointments. During this time, my daughter’s asthma was poorly controlled, and it seemed that when I wasn’t going to the heart institute or emergency with my husband, I was at the family doctor’s or the emergency department of the Children’s Hospital for Eastern Ontario with my daughter.

Oli was exhausted and grey and slept a lot. I worked, went to appointments and did as much as I could around the house. The girls went to daycare, as they had before. This tore at my husband, who felt that while he was home, he should at least be able to take care of his children. Not possible with his level of illness.

I remember Halloween that year. Oli was too weak to take the girls out, so he gave out candy—seated on a chair on our porch because he was too weak to stand up.

Happy Valentine’s Day—welcome to heart failure

Valentine’s Day 2006 was another low point. My husband's cardiologist, during an earlier appointment said that he was referring my husband to a "colleague". That actual reason is hazy but it was something like "making sure all the bases are covered."

Our appointment was Valentine's Day and when we arrived to meet our new doctor we found out that he was a HEART FAILURE AND TRANSPLANT SPECIALIST and we were there because Oli's heart damage was looking permanent.

Those were more frightening times. Our doctor was very reassuring, but still, Oli was trying to adjust to the fact that he couldn't trust his heart.

His heart was something he took for granted before. Now it thumped ineffectively like a big water balloon in his chest. Irregular heart rhythms woke him in the night and he was plagued with constant chest pain. At least his function wasn't so bad that he was on the transplant list.

Eventually, Oli felt well enough to teach one class a day, and so he did. He walked when he felt well enough and rested a lot. He spent every waking moment cuddling his little girls, fearful that he wouldn't be around to see them grow up.

Watching him go through that made me feel powerless. What's the saying about wishes being fishes? I wished that if he couldn't magically be cured, that I could at least hand him my heart and say, "Why don't we share and alternate weeks?"

See also:

Part 2: Scabies seem appealing

Part 3: Betting our Hedge