Not Entitled

"Male privilege and entitlement are dying a very painful death; no one gives up power without a struggle." - Gloria Allred

All the way around, yesterday was a lousy day.  Another visit to my cardiologist came with no good news.  He doubled up the medication he gave me two weeks ago, added an additional medication, is scheduling an angiogram for September and expects I will need additional pacemaker surgery in a few months.  Needless to say, I'm disappointed.  All this in the same week I had unscheduled dental surgery and a consultation with an endodontist to schedule the root canal I will be having next week. 

Setting all that aside, it's been a bad week in the world.  Seven months into Donald Trump's presidency, we are are facing the first threat of nuclear war. Two childish dictators in a pissing contest can take the whole world down.  It's too terrifying to contemplate.  But there isn't even a need to go so far from home to get up close to hatred and mayhem.  A trip to Charlottesville, Virginia would do the job.

Yesterday's neo-nazi, white supremacist  march in Charlottesville and the violence that erupted with counterprotesters ended with a 20-year-old white man deliberately driving his car into the counterprotesters resulting in the death of a young woman and injury to many others.  As if that wasn't bad enough, Donald Trump made a weak, pathetic statement that fell far short of condemnation of the neo-nazi groups.    For the rest of the day and night, CNN was filled with outraged pundits both in rebuke of Donald Trump's statement and in defense of it.  Several times I heard pundits on both sides refer not to just the rights of everyone to free speech but also to the right of everyone to their own opinion.  I take exception with that.

You can differ with me politically - I'm okay with that.  I may lean slightly left of center and you may lean a little right.  There is room for us both to hold our views.  But I will not defend or even support your right to hold an opinion that is rooted in hate and fear.  You do not have a right to believe you are superior because of the colour of your skin.  You do not have the right to believe you are superior because of the shape of your genitals.  You do not have the right to believe you are superior because of where you happened to be born.  You do not have a right to turn your back on desperate people because you are afraid that one in a million of them may hurt you. Refugees are not Skittles.  You do not have a right to hate.  So no.  If any of those things describe you - you do not have a right to your opinion.  Crawl back under your rock and stay there.  You will turn into fossil fuel soon enough.

Of Teeth and Tickers

"A woman's heart is a deep ocean of secrets." - Gloria Stuart

I could say I've had a tough couple of weeks but that would be like saying Noah got caught up in a slight overflow.  A couple of weeks ago, I went for all the tests my doctor routinely orders after my annual check up.  I had put them off for a few weeks because I've been really busy but I finally got around  to scheduling the big ones - mammogram, breast ultra-sound and cardiac echo.  No good results in any of them but more of a "six month follow-up" on the breast scans recommended.  The cardiac echo was an entirely different story.  A panicked technician spent an inordinate amount of time conducting the echo.  She was so alarmed by what she saw that I went home hooked up to a 48 hour Holter monitor.  A couple of days later, I saw a new cardiologist as it was deemed unsafe to wait for my own cardiologist to return from his vacation.  A couple of days after that I spent three and a half hours in a nuclear perfusion stress test - perhaps the most brutal test I've had to date.  It would appear that my heart doesn't like being paced and as a result I have developed both A Fib and heart muscle dysfunction.  The pacemaker that I got last year fixed one big problem and created a couple more.  So once again, I'm staring my mortality in the eye, trying not to panic, dealing with the side-effects of the new drugs I've been given to deal with the A Fib and hoping against all hope that there will be some new and effective treatments available by the time the current drug options have run out.  Of all the health issues I've dealt with over the years, I still find the heart stuff to be the scariest.

In the midst of all this heart drama, I went to my dentist for my regular hygiene appointment.  She noticed that one of my crowns seemed to be separating though I've been experiencing no discomfort.  She ordered a set of x-rays and informed me a couple of days later that I needed two crowns replaced as well as another root canal which will also need to be crowned.  Ugh. I spent four hours last Thursday getting one new crown followed by an endodontistry consult yesterday.  The root canal will be next Friday.  Today I went to have the second crown replaced.  It took all of five minutes before my dentist declared that the tooth couldn't be saved so a crown replacement became an extraction and a bone graft with a plan for a tooth implant in six months.  It's been a painful day.

I keep wondering what the universe is trying to tell me.   I can't seem to catch a break these days.  My back is extremely sore, my sciatic nerve is screaming and both my shoulders are shot.  I don't want to whine.  I'm tired, stressed and scared and trying to carry on without showing that I'm tired, stressed and scared.  I've been thinking about the advice I've been given in other tough times.  Though it pretty much annoyed me when my friend David said it to me years ago, it's probably the best way to go.  "Suck it up, princess".  Okay.  I'll try.