WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and share advice, pootie pictures, favorite adult beverages, and anything else that we think might help. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. Won't you please share the joy of WYFP by recommending?
This is in Wales where I had hoped my spouse and I would visit in the next year or so when we could afford it, presumably with an improved economy and me with a fulltime job. Portmeirion is also the location used for a British television program that came to the US. called
The Prisoner. My spouse died suddenly in April. MFP is not only the grief on which I'm scheduled to write a
Grieving Room diary, but all the tasks that come with having your spouse die.
Rather than a cabaret, life is a series of counterfactuals, asking hypothetical questions of a past that seems even less fulfilled as a way of coping with the future when all of the arrangements are done, probate is yet to be settled, and the bills for medical treatment arrive. It's the epitome of the lack of universal health care that co-payment even for items covered under Medicare cannot be covered under the VA, but perhaps I'll get that worked out as well.
So I ask: what if I had called 911 from Colorado in the first 12 hours, what if I had been more cynical about even going there, what if we had never become a couple? The reality is of course more therapeutic at least for writing here in WYFP and the past months have at least given me perspective on the differences between private and public healthcare especially in terms of medical care decision-making.
Come below the squiggly line for more FPs, because an unimprisoned life is like your wildest dreams.
When we met seventeen years ago, we had a lot in common, sci-fi movies more than novels and television programs that were clearly parodic like Monty Python, MST3K or perhaps more paranoiac like The Prisoner. We never shared musical tastes so much classic rock versus jazz, the 70s versus trance. More importantly for this diary, I never understood my spouse's history in the military since it was classified and included unexpected combat experience. Our generation has experienced PTSD not only as civilians living through unjust and undeclared wars but encountering veterans who are never fully cared for after their military service as so many have discovered and which is referenced elsewhere so well in DK. But we had a family only more legally recognized about seven years ago when we got married, but we were a family with our pets and some common professional interests as well.
I will honor my spouse elsewhere because life is more than accomplishments and perhaps more about the relationships we've made. MFP is how to inform our extended family/friends since some of them have not wanted to be found or simply not located close to our state which would have helped me with the current FPs.
Our politics were quite different but we both understood the importance of social difference and the need for autonomy and caring for the self-defense and social justice for our differences. Our politics were actually quite common as we began to pursue similar business and recreational interests as my spouse attended to military retirement and I tried to continue my career.
The health issues were always a family issue, the PTSD being the most important, and knowing folks who had passed did not improve a sense of grief brought from the loss of our psychically damaged rescue pets. The first woozle was abused severely and the second was simply found on the street. they both thrived with us but it is through that care that my spouse showed how military service is always about defense before it is about war. More importantly the decision to end medical care should never trump any measure of caring for any living entity or our memory of our life with them.
In comparing military healthcare in terms of the VA and the care done in private hospitals I can say personally and not as a matter of policy that there is a clear difference in practices, especially in terms of the definition of doing no harm and providing a depth of personal as differentiated from personalized care. 2012 had more hospital visits than usual and it did seem that there were more incidents of dizziness and falls unaccounted for, but so many had happened in the last decade that it didn't seem or I didn't recognize how much cumulative damage from physical imbalance might have occurred.
The first event in the VA hospital was as problematic as usual, perfunctory rather than engaged care by comparison to the second intensive care unit in our local hospital. I don't ever blame the VA for my loss, but institutionally they engage the more extreme products of political policy, and obviously more so this past decade and I understand their unconscious diffidence. I noticed it only because the second visit to the local emergency room in our town hospital evidenced greater respect and caring for me as a spouse influenced my our state's decision to allow greater respect for marriage as a measure of family healthcare decision-making.
We lost a lot of pets in nearly two decades together, what with losing the two cats, two rescue dogs: Aussie Terriers, and our beloved German Shepherd dog. I'm left with our African Grey parrot and our AKC Aussie which we raised together and for whom this diary is dedicated because we are both in the same place, not knowing what is ahead and still coping with what happened.
I had to go for a job interview in Colorado on a Wednesday, flying out of Boston and returning two days later, so I drove the two hours home, hoping that my inability to phone call was not symptomatic of what a worst fear might look like.
I figured that the seizure happened sometime after we talked on Wednesday. There had been many times we had not talked before for extended periods when the phone was shut off because my spouse wanted more sleep and I know how elusive that sleep was for seventeen years. What I now worry about is our dog's 36 plus hours with a lifeless body more than all these bills can ever worry me, hence a lot of procrastination since then.
At this moment it's about sustaining my current, smaller family and beyond the basics of surviving but I worry about being too numb to cover all the responsibilities I have to handle now. We tended to watch media that allowed us to escape those responsibilities and I wish I could do that for a very long time away from the exact site I found my spouse's body. I think of this episode as one my spouse and I could never watch even though it's supposed to be a comedy and close with it here so you can perhaps more closely examine and express your own FP below.