Simpatico

Simpatico..I always loved this word. Friends that are on the same same wavelength in their values and concerns are simpatico. But in Italian 110, we learn that simpatico means..nice. Nice, a word to describe someone you barely know but so far you have seen no signs of meanness or evidence that this is an unlikeable person so you describe the person as nice.

While were in Italy learning the language and taking a film course, we saw the movie Le Fate Ignoranti which translated is The Ignorant Fairies though the English version was retitled His Secret Life. My Italian teacher, not Italian himself but he taught the class, said that the fairies in question were the gay people in the film. I asked the 'real' Italians who stayed with us learning English whether Italians ever use the word 'fairy' to describe a gay person. No they don't. This pejorative probably hasn't been used since the 50s here and probably never at all in Italy. Even  English English has its own silly pejoratives, Daffodil anyone? Anyway, the Italian teacher's explanation made no sense as the ignorant one in the movie was not gay. The fairies in question I believe are similar to the ones in The Midsummer's Night Dream who have magical powers to make mortals fall in love with inappropriate people (or a donkey in the play) for their own amusement although in Shakespeare's play, eventually the fairies made things right. Or Fate could mean The Fates, similar to fairies but have even more powers and are not necessarily benign and are under no moral obligation to make things right.

Sometimes I think Le Fate are messing with my life and they are NOT simpatico or simpatiche to be grammatically correct.

The 'real' Italians puzzled over our slang. As an assignment, they were to interview us. The man I was interviewed by was puzzled by our use of the word piss, which originally was a vulgar noun and verb to describe urine or urinating. Here is another example where the English English deviate from the American. To be pissed in England is to be drunk. Here it is both a transitive and intransitive verb.

I am pissed. (annoyed with everything in general)

I am pissed at so and so. (annoyed with a particular so and so)

My interviewer was especially puzzled by the last preposition. Shouldn't it be 'on'? He could see pissing on someone but to piss at someone did not make any sense.

I suppose an alternate title for this post could be Lost in Translation.  Another post I recently made should have been titled Isn't it Ironic? I could change the titles but the original always sticks around unless I delete the entire post. One of my recent posts was entitled 'post' as I hit publish before I could type anything.

Today is my Maya day. I hope that the rain holds out so that I can take her to the park. Yesterday I was feeding her treats. She clearly wanted more. I asked her to say 'more' Instead, she signed with ASL  to indicate more which the therapist last week was trying to make her do.

Fall back

Burning bush and yew

The other burning bush

Last of the leaves on our Norway maple. Last spring, the city tree guy said it was a sugar maple but I think he is wrong. Yellow vs orange leaves plus the leaves are the last to fall.

Daylight savings time or daylight saving time? The latter is correct. For some reason, the daylight saving time was extended one week. Michigan didn't use to have it at all as we are on the Western edge of the Eastern time zone. Growing up, I listened to my tinny transmitter radio  to CKLW,  which broadcasted from Canada, south(!?) of here. They had daylight saving time and we didn't so I tried not to be confused when the time was an hour off. I spent a week biking in Indiana, which seemed to let each county decide what time zone they rather be in. Confusing sometimes. I had stayed the night before in a hotel that promised coffee at 7:00 am. At 7:15, still no coffee and I was becoming crabby and vented to the desk. I was then informed it was only 6:15 am.
Oh.

Still is pretty outside here. Maybe I will see some of the kids today. Below are my purple toes and sparkly orange fingernails.

Delusional me

Me in 1985 capable of doing marathons and triathlons at a good clip

There once was a time that I would never leave the house without a good base of foundation covering up any imperfection on my face. I look at my bare face now and think..not too bad; I don't need foundation anymore. Now did my face suddenly become smooth as silk with age? Probably not. What has changed is my eyesight. I no longer am able to focus on things as small as pores. No one else probably could that is older than fifty either. I suppose I could do a reality check and ask Naomi as she is brutally honest but, I'm not in the mood.

And the running. I still think I am doing it though my times are getting slower and slower and slower. I have lived in the same area for a long time and have a good memory for silly things like how many minutes to a given intersection. What remains the same are the number of minutes I run. The watch does not lie. I tried to run while doing chemo. It was so hard. I would run for a mile total trying to get 60 seconds in without stopping. Sometimes I would need to stop 15 times just to make a mile. Now I can run (or whatever one might call this motion) 90 minutes before I need to stop.

And my body. I think I don't look all that bad and then I see photos of me...

It is a cold, crisp fall day. I ran by a small herd of deer (3 does..where are the bucks?) in the neighborhood adjacent to mine, closest to my house yet. Further deep in the woods I stopped to hear snorts (probably a buck) but the vegetation was too dense to see anything.

I was watching House Hunters the other night, international edition. They featured homes in Abruzzo where I had stayed 3 years ago. One house was rejected as the countryside around it were chock full of adders. Poisonous snakes!! I didn't even consider those as I was running cross-country on the sides of the mountains there. I worried about being gored by boars, a bit nervous when I saw the wolf, concerned about scorpions that I found around the monastery where we stayed but never considered snakes.

Doe..a deer

Me sitting  at the Jumbo Rocks campsite in Joshua Tree National Park

The leaves have been slow to fall this year although the colors changed more than a month ago. My burning bushes and barberry are bright red. Very pretty. On my long run into the country today, I am treated to two wildlife experiences at once. A hawk screeches over my head (I never heard them make a sound before; sounded like an eagle) while a doe stands by the side of the road not bolting until I am just a few feet from her.

The problems with language

Over the past 2 days, Ms. Maya has been evaluated for possible developmental delays. This has made Naomi testy as there is always some element of blame when ones child isn't performing as they should. She feels that there is extra scrutiny since she is so young and has little income. She devotes herself full time to Maya and wants what is best for her.Maya is her pride.

I do understand how she feels as all of my children over the years though for different issues have been found deficient and I could feel and hear It's all HER fault! even though I was NOT a young mother and probably considered 'high income'. I bristled when someone tried to have Josh pronounce a given word correctly as if I never considered to do this myself. Further waves of irritation when a list of much younger kids was given that could pronounce that word. Whispers of it is no wonder......because she's a working mom, she's got the wrong priorities, she's got the kids in athletics, she had a flawed childhood herself, she didn't set the right limits, she didn't say No, she's an enabler..on and on. And the kids all have their own lists of my shortcomings which they are too happy sometimes to recite. Blessed as we all are with 20-20 hindsight, I have my own lists of shouldas.

On Tuesday, a specialist showed up at Naomi's. Although tired, Maya was thrilled to perform for a potential adoring fan and did all her tricks. Aside from the language issues (she knows only a few words and really does not associated them properly with what they are to represent), they are looking for imitative behavior as this is the first step for learning assuming one is healthy otherwise (she needed a hearing test first). She clapped when shown, she pretended to use a phone, she waves when you wave. For extra credit, she points remote controller shaped objects at the TV. For the second evaluation, Naomi was to fill out a lengthy questionnaire. This was painful as it exposed some of her own difficulties in language. She was to distinguish between what Maya sees, looks at and watches. To Naomi, these seemed like the same word. One question was whether Maya used utensils. Naomi answered yes because Naomi feeds Maya with a spoon.

That's not what they asked.


While it is true that Maya will put a spoon to her own mouth (as she puts almost everything), one can't trust her to skillfully use a spoon to put applesauce in her own mouth.

The second stage of the evaluation was yesterday with 4 different specialists at the district's preschool. It was delayed due to a fire drill and Maya was missing her nap. Maya was very crabby and did not want to focus on the tasks. Her lack of speech right off the bat gives her the needed 20% delay to qualify for services. Much of the tests were trying to see if she imitated certain new behaviors and how good was she at solving problems. But the compliance issue kept coming up. They wanted her to put objects into a container and she wanted to throw them on the floor. She was able to imitate some things like coloring with a crayon and banging on a drum to reproduce a certain sound so she didn't completely flunk. For starters, she'll receive 2 therapy session a month and  can go to an enrichment class weekly.

How would my kids and I do on their tests at this age? Shanna and Naomi would have done just fine; Josh and I would have flunked. Naomi's difficulties were not obvious until much, much later obscured by her unusual memory tricks and her early fluency which is mistaken for mastery.

Here are three concepts that I would like the reader to consider and use appropriately in the following situations: IRONY, CO-INCIDENCE, AND MAGICAL THINKING.

1. A runner brags that for years she has been relatively injury free. The very next week, she trips while running and breaks her arm.
2. One week, a woman spends comforting her close friend dealing with a breast cancer diagnosis and the very next week discovers her own breast cancer.
3. A woman berates a stranger for letting his dog poop on her friend's yard. The next week it is discovered that the man is her SIL's co-worker.
4. A woman is thinking that everything is going fine for at least one of her children and the very next day finds out how untrue that really is.
5. A woman's co-worker turns out to have been a brother's co-worker in a  distant state for all involved.
6. A woman who has many talents, has also many shortcomings, one of which is the inability to see things in three dimensions (spatial reasoning?) yet her main source of income relies on this ability.
7. A man diagnosed as a child as having a  speech defect and possible other cognitive disorders routinely gives presentations to large audiences and is considered gifted in many respects in a very difficult field.
8. Two of a woman's children have ultrasounds independently scheduled on the same day but the scans show  very different results.

Nota bene: Magical thinking as I see it covers both the positive and negative aspects as in If I think it, it will happen. ( a  variant of  the Laws of Attraction). Situation #2 describes someone else's experience, which was IMHO wrongly described as irony.#8 is a co-incidence but also very much an irony.

Asking the right questions

This has not been a good week for a variety of reasons that I won't go into completely due to privacy concerns. Suffice it to say, I have more stuff to keep me up at night.

At lunch the other day, Josh recounted a recent visit with the doctor who diagnosed him with a non-life threatening problem. A chill went through me as I have read about this situation and its implications that could greatly impact his quality of life. I asked if Dr. Useless made him aware of these and that he might need a consult with a specialist ASAP. No, nothing of the sort was mentioned. Well he has a consult next week no thanks to me scaring the begeesus out of him but it makes me mad the lack of advice given to him. He will be armed with some pointed questions.

This summer, a good friend had a very painful, quality of life ruining problem and sought  help from her primary. The primary was able to diagnose the problem, which had no immediate cure but the situation would resolve in a few months. The diagnosis seemed perfectly reasonable but to deal with the side effects, my friend had to see a specialist. Instead of just dealing with the side effect, the new specialist disagreed with the original diagnosis and went on a very expensive, painful witch hunt for a new diagnosis, which was never made though lots of scary suggestions were thrown her way. My big question was why didn't the specialist think the primary was right? My friend never asked, just endured more speculations and useless tests. Meanwhile, the primary left the area. A few months later, the situation did resolve per the primary's prediction.

Both my friend and son are highly educated, bright people but both did not ask the right questions. Part of it was who are you to question the experts. So, Sue, since you are so quick to criticize others for failing to cross examine and second guess their doctors, certainly you never would be guilty of this yourself? Well I am, once for my own concerns and worse, once concerning my daughter's health care.

With breast cancer, there is a small window to get chemo and to kill the rogue cancer cells that might be circulating through your body. This window is even smaller with TNBC as the cells are much more aggressive and once they form mets....game over. I had just finished my two surgeries to excise the tumor and the surrounding suspicious cells, it was time for chemo. The onc thought we could delay it a month to give me time to recover. I questioned whether this was wise as it just gave those cells which according to my staging, had a 50% chance of being there, a greater chance to gain a foothold. She replied that there were studies that showed that delaying chemo one or even two months made absolutely no difference in over all survival. The question I should have asked was whether these studies were done in TNBC patients or were they just applicable for BC patients in general. Some doctors for convenience sake seem to treat all BC the same. For instance, another TNBC patient on my blog was given a script for Tamoxifen after treatment because that is what most BC patients take. But it would not do any good for TNBC patients. This patient knew to question. Well I am still alive but I think I gambled unnecessarily.

When my daughter was ten, she needed to have both of her ureters re-implanted to prevent eventual kidney damage due to this condition known as reflux, which causes the urine to back-up under pressure into the kidneys. This now is a simple surgery but not back then. She did not recover as quickly as planned and all the pain killers made her ill. It was hell. On top of that, I was pregnant and Steve had to leave to deal with his dying father. I kept finding temporary homes for Josh, which upset him greatly. At one point, they thought she had recovered enough to come home though I would need to provide lots of care. For instance, her bladder was still being allowed to recover. Her urine was shunted into two bags, one from each kidney. She had surgical drains that needed to cleaned too. I noticed right before I was to take her home, that only one bag was filling up. Shouldn't the kidneys be doing equal work? Or maybe, did they find a way to reroute all this plumbing so only one bag was needed but then why did she have two bags? I told all my concerns to the nurse. She said she would check and soon came back and said this was fine, don't worry. What I should have done was ask the doctor myself instead of trusting this nurse. I hadn't much sleep in the past week, I was tired from early pregnancy (which I ended up losing) so I wasn't as thorough as I usually am. I took her home and throughout the day. she became sicker and sicker. She was on antibiotics to prevent infections but of course, she puked them up. The one bag was not filling at all. Perhaps there was a blockage. Meanwhile my daughter was not alert at all and only capable of moaning. I took her to the ER and it was hell trying to get her re-admitted. I was correct, there was a blockage and my daughter suffered unbelievable and unnecessary pain because of it. The next morning, Nurse Incompetent Liar was assigned again to her care. I told her to tell her supervisor that I find her personally responsible for pretending to seek answers and that she needs to be reassigned. I should have insisted that some disciplinary action be taken. But part of the fault was me...I should have spoken to the doctor myself and refused to take her home until my concern was addressed. Before all of this, she weighed 70 pounds. After this, she weighed 60 pounds and was almost 5 fee tall. She was a skeleton. Up to that point, her growth curve was almost identical to that of Naomi's later on, destined to be as tall as Naomi but she is 4 inches shorter.

Another positive example of asking the right questions: Naomi was about to be discharged with Maya from the hospital. At the last second, she asked whether they had typed Maya's blood and if Maya was Rh+, highly likely, when are they going to administer the Rhogam? It is scary that one needs to watch out for all these factors.
It is pretty out still but soon a mass of cold air will hit us so there will be no more running in shorts.
Today, I will go with Naomi for a further evaluation of Maya. The initial one yesterday indicated, indeed, something should be done but today will decided just how much.

Busy Bee and the pedantic penguin

I am hoping there are some better pictures of Maya on my camera which Naomi has at the moment. Ms. Maya is becoming harder and harder to photograph as she is constantly in motion. Busy bee...from one of my favorite movies Best in Show from when a neurotic dog's even more neurotic owners go ballistic as the dog's favorite toy, Busy Bee, goes missing.

She went trick-or-treating in Josh's neighborhood as the houses are closer together than in ours and his sub is especially kid friendly. This year, we still have daylight saving time so it is light out at 6, the time I showed up in his neighborhood, all ready filled not only with the kids in costume but the parents and the dogs.

She was out there only about a half hour as she was getting cold and besides, she can't really eat the candy though I gave her a little piece of a peanut butter cup and someone had given her goldfish. She was perfectly happy to rush to the door, along with Sunny, the German Shepherd, to greet the kids.

Such elaborate costumes these days!

At one point, I went to the door myself to find a boy of 8 or 9.

Oh, what a cute penguin costume!

It's an emperor!!!!

Huh?

I'm  an EMPEROR penguin, not just a penguin.

OK. (I should have asked him if he was sure he wasn't an adele)

As he waddled off, Josh tsked-tsked that this poor boy probably got beat up a lot at school. Aside from being alone although perhaps a parent was waiting on a sidewalk (boys that age like to travel in packs), there is a certain age at which little boys do not want to be cute any more and refuse to dress up as cute animals. Maybe when they are 5?

I thought back to my childhood to a boy in 6th grade who hands down, was the cutest boy. All the girls had crushes on him. He and I had the same birthday. One day he showed up minus his long, black eyelashes and a good part of his eyebrows. I asked what had happened.

Tired of being cute.

Josh, a cute boy if there ever was one, bristled when he heard the word. Below at ten holding Naomi who is one.

It was a nice Halloween. Josh fretted that he hadn't bought enough candy and started being very stingy, a fact noted  by some of the recipients. I asked if he wanted to be known as the crappy candy guy. True he got some points for his glowing UM carved pumpkins, his cool dog, his really pretty wife dressed with cat ears but one 'fun-size' milk duds box? Milk duds...aptly named.

We had some wine, rationed for me (love it when your kids tell you what to do) and freshly roasted pumpkin seeds. Back at the home front, Steve reported few treaters. We have plenty of the fruit snacks left over. Indeed for a while, only the med students collecting canned goods for the homeless showed up. (I was prepared for them). Across the street, the miracle baby's parents (baby in question is now 14 but has many problems due to her extremely early birth) go all out and had all these flashing lights, blow up ghouls playing an organ, dancing skeletons, etc all over their yard. I brought Maya over earlier to admire them up close and she was terrified.

Back in Boston, the kids slogged through snow to return to a powerless house. Not so fun plus Oliver became ill.

More Maya: