Allergies Bee Gone

honeycomb (two), harvested from the bee hives in our orchard,
October 2008, photos © 2008 by ybonesy. All rights reserved.



It just dawned on me. My late summer, early fall allergies never transpired. They usually start in August and stick with me until the first freeze. But this year, not an itch in my eyes nor a drip from my nose. How did I manage that?

The culprit is ragweed, a ubiquitious plant in the Rio Grande Valley. Could be that there’s less of the noxious weed here, in our new place, than in our old ‘hood. Ragweed grew like mad up and down the road and on the ditchbank behind our former residence, but it’s not exactly absent around these parts. After all, we only moved about two miles away.

I’m beginning to think it must be the honey. For a couple of years now, I’ve been consuming local honey—that is, honey collected from bee hives within about a five-mile radius of our home. The latest blast of honey came directly from the bee hives in our orchard. Dr. Moses, keeper of those hives, pulled out an entire honeycomb and handed it over as a special treat. It lasted exactly ten days. We ate honey by the spoonfuls, and we even ate most of the soft edible beeswax that made up the comb itself.

According to Tom Ogren, author of several books on allergies and how to prevent them, honey contains bits and pieces of pollen from the plants that surround the bee hive. As honey bees zip from plant to plant, they carry with them the pollen from those plants and deposit it into the honeycomb. When we eat that honey, the pollen acts as an immune booster, especially when taken in small amounts consistently over time prior to the onset of the allergy season.

It may seem odd that straight exposure to pollen often triggers allergies but that exposure to pollen in the honey usually has the opposite effect. But this is typically what we see. In honey the allergens are delivered in small, manageable doses and the effect over time is very much like that from undergoing a whole series of allergy immunology injections. The major difference though is that the honey is a lot easier to take and it is certainly a lot less expensive. I am always surprised that this powerful health benefit of local honey is not more widely understood, as it is simple, easy, and often surprisingly effective.

                                                           ~Tom Ogren

Allergies run in our family. Before he succumbed to a battery of allergy shots taken over many years, Dad always carried with him a sinus inhaler, a small white tube that fit into the nostril. I cringed in church whenever I saw him pull out the tube and then watch it disappear up his nose. That was the height of embarrassment for a kid aged 8-11, before I learned about all the other things my parents did that would eventually embarrass me.

My own allergies made their first appearance when I was 17. I worked as a hostess at a famous restaurant in the heart of the Rio Grande Valley. One night my allergies got so bad that I crouched behind the reception counter, sopping up the drips from my nose with a cloth napkin. I couldn’t find a box of tissues, and I was wearing a spaghetti strap dress, else I would have used my sleeve. I could hardly move from behind the counter given that my nose and eyes were running profusely. I finally had to go home.

It’s been a blessing not worrying about allergies this year. Usually I buy over-the-counter Claritin and take a dose on the worst days when my allergies hit. But this year I’m letting the honey do its magic.

I feel like someone who’s stumbled upon the best-kept secret in the world. What could be better than honey as preventitive medicine? It’s relatively inexpensive compared to Claritin and/or allergy shots, plus it tastes fabulous!

I just wish honey worked for the flu, too. Alas, I don’t think it’s that powerful. But, the good news is, I already got my flu shot—a week ago today—and even though it made me feel achy and sick for two days, I’m now ready for the onslaught of germs that always descend on our family when the weather gets cold.

Here’s to clear lungs, drip-free noses, and strong stomachs all winter long! And to the bees!

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I. P. Freely

yellow rivers by I.P. Freely, doodle © 2008 by ybonesy. All rights reserved.

I had a flashback the other day. I had to pee badly, so I ran into the bathroom, unzipped my jeans, peed, wiped, flushed, and walked out of the bathroom while pulling up my pants. Suddenly I saw my mom, 30 years earlier, doing the exact same thing.

She did it all the time. Ran into the bathroom, peed, walked out while pulling up her pants. No closing the door. Just pee and run.

One time I had just come home from school with my boyfriend and two friends in tow. We walked through the front door, turned the corner toward the kitchen, and there was Mom, heading out of the green bathroom off the entryway while pulling up her Bermuda shorts over white nylon panties, the toilet flushing in the background.

She must have said something like “Oh my!” but all I remember is, she was embarrassed, I was deathly embarrassed, and my boyfriend and two friends were speechless.

Yet, that was such a “Mom” thing. She never closed the bathroom door when she peed.

And now, I seem to have inherited that trait.

Besides the obvious aspects of our peeing proclivities (the fact that we don’t wash our hands when at home and that we’ve fallen into this loosey goosey don’t-care-if-someone’s-in-the-next-room groove whenever our pants are down) I’ve gained another insight from this flashback.

I realized that I never bother to close the door when I pee because, frankly, I don’t have time. I’ll be standing at the sink washing the dishes and then, BOOM, it hits me. I have to pee! (In Spanish, they say, “Me estoy meando,” which literally means, “I am peeing on me!”)

Maybe it’s a familial thing. Maybe it’s from having babies. Maybe it’s the last thing I ought to be sharing about myself on the blog, but for whatever reason, once my brain registers “I need to pee,” my pee seems to scream, “I need out!”

Sure, I can wiggle and squeeze and even do what my sister (who used to work with toddlers) fondly calls “the pee-pee dance.” And in a professional setting I somehow manage to hold it until I reach the bathroom. But when I’m in the comfort and safety of my home, I have a tendency to push the envelope and barely make it to the bathroom.

So I’m thinking, if I have this problem, I bet Mom also had it; ergo, Mom never closed the door when she peed because, like me, she suffered from stress incontinence.



                      
                                                                             



There are other signs, too. Jim plays this trick on me whenever we shop for groceries where when we get to the aisle with toothpaste and shampoo, he waits until someone is within earshot and then yells, “Honey, don’t forget your Depends!” Then he zooms off with the cart in the other direction, leaving me facing the person who’s just come down our aisle.

And there was that one time I got a coughing fit at the grocery store. I was eight months pregnant with Em, and Dee was about three years old. With an almost baked eight-pound baby pressing down on my uterus, every time I coughed I peed just a bit in my pants. (Actually, I was wearing leggings over a maternity top.) Fortunately the coughing finally stopped, allowing me to finish up our shopping and head to the check-out line. 

There we were, standing in line. One lady was in front of us, one man behind. Being shy around strangers, Dee clung to my legs. I could feel her little hand probing around the spot where my leggings were soaked, so I tried to push her away, but before I could she looked up at me, eyes wide, and said, “Mama, you peed in your pants!”

I tried to ignore her but that only made her think I couldn’t hear, so she backed up a bit and yelled this time.

“MA-MA, you’re wet DOWN THERE, you PEED in your PANTS!”

I bent down and whispered in her ear that if she stopped talking and went over to find the kind of gum she liked, I’d buy it for her. As she disappeared around the point-of-purchase display, I looked at the three people staring at me—the cashier, the woman checking out, and the man behind me—shrugged, smiled, and gazed back down at my cart.


 
                                                                                              




Truth is, though, I don’t think I technically suffer from stress incontinence. I mean, stress incontinence is a pretty serious issue, and once you get to reading about the many incontinences there are—stress, urge, overactive bladder, functional, overflow, mixed, transient—well, I’m not ready to go there. 

My little problem? A bad family habit of peeing and fleeing. Or fleeing, peeing, and fleeing. That’s all.

I just need to listen to my body and get to the bathroom more frequently. And I need to start closing the door before my girls inherit our trait.

I know. My apologies. Too much information.

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Crisis Changed My Life

By Robin*


When I think of the word “crisis,” I’m reminded of an earlier life. Not in the sense of Shirley McLaine living past lives but in the sense of my years before and my years after my own life-changing crisis. It was the ultimate crisis, the one that prepared me for every other one—even as they come for me now.

The old saying, “God doesn’t give you any more than you can handle”—well, it’s not one I buy in to. I believe we torture and smear ourselves up in our own personal crises and then God pulls us out of the muck. If we’re willing. I am surrounded by “muck survivors,” and I promise you, God had nothing to do with the pain inflicted on each of them. But they are all survivors, and thankfully, so am I.

I grew up the youngest of three daughters, separated in age from my sisters by the eleven and seven years between us. My father, the best man I ever knew, worked at three jobs to provide for us. Seems now like he worked the better part of his life. My mother, a woman with extraordinary Movie Star looks, suffered from mental illness—schizophrenia.

My beautiful eldest sister left home at 18 to marry a man she did not love. She sacrificed her dreams and her body to find some form of unattainable inner peace. She searches for it even now. My middle sister ran away a month later, to escape the private Hell—our own dark secret—we lived in. She was only 15-1/2 but she was strong and grew into a fearless warrior of the streets. My father would frantically search for her and then drag her back to “safety,” only to find her missing again. Finally he gave in.

When you’re nine and left behind, you have no choices really. You’re too young to make any. I clung to my father whenever he was home, taking in all of his kindness and his unspoken heartache. He did what he thought was best for me at the time and I did everything I could to please him.

When he wasn’t there, I was left in my Mother’s “care” and I was just too small to know how to fight back. (He later discovered that his youngest daughter with the beaming smile was just not strong enough.) I learned to turn inward, to hold it all in, trying to escape the madness that surrounded this terrified, shy little girl.

I learned to never ask for help, never to draw attention to myself, never to tell anyone about my home-life, never to show anything but absolute harmony and my big wide grin. I faked my way through school, church, and every friendship I managed to cling to. I survived by performing, as if in a hideous play that never ended.

Eventually, blessedly, I grew up, moved out (that’s a story in itself) and scraped by with what money I had. I landed a good job, a nice home, and a wonderful partner who I thought I would hang on to forever. I had done everything by the book—working hard, not making waves, and never, ever showing a sign of weakness.

Things were going well until at 30, my “perfected life” took a nosedive and I lost my forever partner. I was tougher by then, plus I was still young, so I dusted myself off and kept my head high knowing I had weathered far worse.

Within a month, I got laid off from my job. A fingers-tightening-around-my-throat panic started to seep in. Within six months I lost my beautiful home and everything else that I thought defined me as a successful, “normal” person. I moved in with a friend, and for the first time in my adult life I had to admit defeat.

From there, it was a small step from a life with fulfillment to a life without meaning and I became totally enveloped in the old terror of the past. I got up, ate, went back to bed, slept and maintained that cruel existence without understanding what was happening to me, nor knowing I needed help—badly.

There’s an insidious thing called “depression” that eats at your soul, making you feel unworthy. Most of us have been down that road at some time in our lives. But within my family tree, there’s a villain that is far worse—extreme psychotic depression. If your life takes that road, chances are you will not return whole, if you return at all.

At 30, I knew nothing of either ailment and when voices began to fill my head, they seemed to have an answer for finally eliminating my crisis and all my pain. Oh, I fought them with everything my will had left, but my will was scarred and battered. Eventually, I lost the battle.

I stood at the mirror and watched another person—a weathered, beaten version of myself, older in body yet terrified like the little girl—put her hand to her mouth, repeatedly, and swallow the pills. I was helpless to stop her.

I awoke in a strange bed with no recollection of where I was or how I had arrived there. I remember a woman talking to me, her voice full of fear, saying she had just driven her car into a tree but somehow survived and that she would try again. I was later taken to a room to be evaluated by a Doctor who gently told me that I was in the psychiatric ward, in a wing for the “less dangerous,” and that I had survived swallowing over 400 pills. I believe the words he used were “a damn lucky walking miracle.” The pills had no lasting physical effects.

Here’s what happened in my biggest moment of crisis: everything I knew before that moment became my past and every minute aftewards became my future. My future, now crystal clear, was all the life I had in front of me, come what may.

I was released within 48 hours, completely altered from the ghostly human that had arrived, reborn as someone new. As God as my witness, from that moment to this one now, I have never looked back for an answer or questioned why I survived. I knew.

There were 21 people in the entire world that knew this story. They have honored me these past 20 years with their protection, their silence, and more important, their love. And now, there are more who know.

Today, I take each crisis as it is. I deal with it the best way I know how, and I move on stronger than before. Everything from that moment taught me how to live, how to forgive, and to have absolute faith in miracles. And as I age, I grow younger. I’m now a laughing child whose heart is free.




Robin (*not her real name) is a friend and fellow creative spirit. She wrote this piece in response to red Ravine post, WRITING TOPIC – WHERE DO YOU GO IN TIMES OF CRISIS? Because of the personal nature of her story, Robin chose to use a pseudonym.

Here’s what she had to say about writing this piece: It was tough to write those words, but I thought maybe anonymously, I might be able reach someone who’s in trouble or thinks they’re alone in their own crisis. People close to the edge are not as easily recognizable as the general public seems to think.

Thank you, Robin, for sharing your story with red Ravine.

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Reflections Of A Once Skinny Chick

American in Vietnam, pen and ink on graph paper, doodle
© 2008 by ybonesy. All rights reserved.

I once went bathing suit shopping in China. The store I went to was tiny, the size of a master-bedroom closet. All the swimsuits were either Large or Extra-Large. After poring through the racks I finally found one Medium-sized bikini. I took it to the sales clerk, pointed to the M on the tag and asked by motioning around the store if there were any others that size.

The sales clerk looked at me askew. At the time I was a size 4, and what I really wanted was a Small but figured I’d have to make due with Medium. I pointed again to the M on the tag then to myself, and with all the flair of Vanna White I waved my arm up and down the length of my body as if to say, See? I’m not Large or Extra-large.

The clerk said something in Mandarin, at which point four Chinese shoppers broke out giggling. She disappeared to the back of the store and soon emerged with three more bathing suits, all size M. I picked out a bikini with bottoms more like shorts than panties, gave her my money, and walked back to my hotel without trying on the suit.

When I got to my room and changed, I could hardly pull the bottoms up over my hips. Once on, the fabric squeezed so tightly that what bit of fat I had rolled over the waistband. The top was even worse. I could barely get it over my shoulders and breasts, and in the end it looked like parts of me were vacuum packed. It was then that I realized that Large and Extra-Large in Chinese women sizes were more like Small and Medium in U.S. women sizes.

The night before I bought the suit, I’d walked down to the pool and noticed a man who I assumed to be European, rather large in the belly, wearing such a skimpy Speedo that you could barely see it under his rolls of flesh and flab. When I saw my own reflection in the mirror, that way-too-small bikini pressing me like sausage casing, I decided to go down to the pool anyway. If men had no compunctions about flashing their imperfect bodies, well, I’d have zero shame about bearing mine.

This might seem a tad disingenuous, a size 4 woman lamenting the phenomenon of incredibly shrinking body sizes in Asia, but on my recent trip to Vietnam I became even more aware of how large we Americans look next to the Vietnamese. I asked my female work colleagues about it and they said that young Vietnamese women are extremely body conscious and have landed on the tiniest of sizes as the body ideal.

When I lived in Spain in the mid-1980s, women in their early 20s smoked and drank coffee to stay thin. The food I loved most—sharp cheese, air-cured ham, and chewy rolls—was comida non-grata among my Spanish amigas. My best friend regularly pulled the soft doughy sections out of her dinner rolls, and at times after I finished eating whatever was on my plate, I’d polish off the guts from her bread.

As middling ages tend to have middling effects, my body has slowly grown into a size 6, which it is barely holding. I can’t keep up with the exercise regime that once kept me at my thinnest and firmest. One of my Vietnam colleagues and I talked over dinner my last day in Saigon, and she confirmed that in her country, size 6 is not even close to Small. More like 0 or 1, she said, which is not surprising given that women there naturally have much smaller frames to begin with than we Americans.

Fortunately, like me she enjoyed good food, and so the two of us ate our several shared meals with gusto.

For better or worse, I did feel more self-conscious of my body while in Saigon than I’ve ever felt before. Walking behind throngs of size 0 Vietnamese women, I found myself wondering what will become of the body ideal over time as images of super-thin supermodels become ever more pervasive.

Interestingly, the woman across from me on the flight home from Hong Kong was a U.S. Olympian returning from Beijing. Her body was muscular yet by no means small. She looked healthy in all her sinewy glory.

In the end, I realize, it’s not size that matters (except insofar as weight—too much or too little—imperils one’s health). What matters most is how you feel, inside and out. One can be super-thin yet unable to swim across a pool or hike up a mountain.

What good is a skinny body that can’t do much but look great in clothes?

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Anxiety On My Mind

anXiety, pen and ink on graph paper, doodle © 2008 by ybonesy. All rights reserved.

I want to write about anxiety. Not panic attacks, since I don’t think I’ve ever had one of those, but rather, the general sense of dread that covers me at times like a veil.

I want to write about anxiety, but not in a medical way. I want to write about the days I feel like I can’t possibly smile, can’t possibly let myself get into a good mood, so shellacked into place is my heart that if I allow myself to feel it pulsing in my chest I might just burst open.

I catch myself increasingly more in this predicament, anxious and paralyzed and becoming the impatient, often enraged woman I knew as…my mother.

Yes, my mother! She suffered anxiety for many years, and there is indication that, like brown hair or Diabetes, anxiety runs in families. As one article put it, “More often than not, anxious women grew up in anxious households.”


 

Mom must have been in a near constant state of anxiety. There was a 13-year spread between me—the youngest—and my oldest sibling, which means Mom was living and breathing children from the moment Patty was born until I moved out at age 18. That was 31 years of dealing with kids through every stage, and it doesn’t include my niece, who was six years younger than me and who Mom eventually brought into the fold.

I tell the story of being five years old and walking into my house one day after having spent a few hours across the street with my best friend at her grandmother’s trailer. My eyes were lined in black; we’d gotten into Suzanne’s grandma’s make-up bag. I came in through the back door just as Mom was getting up from a nap. Usually she made me take naps with her but this day I got to play with Suzanne instead.

I can see Mom now, making her way to the kitchen to find her cigarettes and maybe a glass of iced tea. I am happy and proud; it’s the first time I’ve put on make-up, the domain of grown-up women. Mom crosses the living room, I’m coming up through the den. She sees me and I am smiling, about to open my mouth and tell her “Look what we did!” but before I can get out the words she raises her arm. WHACK! In a throaty voice she screams, “COCHINA!” “PIG!”

Later on, when I started school and life became more intense for Mom, it was hard to separate her meanness from her Meniere’s Disease. When I think of her during those times I see her in bed or on the bathroom floor or the couch, a wet washrag on her forehead and a glass of water by her side.

I remember one summer we drove to Juárez, pulled into the parking lot of the Camino Rael Hotel. Its pink stucco and turquoise swimming pool shimmered like a mirage just beyond the asphalt, and there went Mom, puking into a brown paper sack. The long road trip with three of us fighting in the back of the Caprice, plus the heat, set off an attack.

Always sick, always throwing out certain expressions: “I can’t stand you!” “You kids are driving me crazy!” “I’m a nervous wreck!” There were good memories, too, a flood of goodness, and I don’t want to make my mother sound like a monster. She wasn’t by any means. I’m just trying to understand the cycles of anxiety, what they transform us into, and how I might break the pattern.

Which reminds me, my youngest jokingly calls me Momster. Am I?

If not, I suspect I am on the road to becoming one. Like it did for Mom, my life seems to be getting out of hand. At times my emotions, even my physical being, are hijacked by anxiety.

I sometimes find myself driving in my car and thinking, I shouldn’t have become a mother, I shouldn’t have become a mother, and then I retract it all, convinced that God will punish me by taking away my daughters. This is anxiety talking, taunting in its urgent whisper, That’ll show you.

      


My friend Deborah calls it “middle-aged rage,” and maybe she’s talking about something different but I tend to think it’s just anxiety in its angry incarnation. Deborah says it stems from the pressure to be good – good mother, good employee, good partner. She also says it’s the mountain of responsibility that piles up daily – bills to pay, deadlines to meet, cans and bottles and paper to recycle.

“Passions unmet,” I chime in, giving away that for me the crux of the matter is almost always this balance between being the solid matriarch of my family and being myself. Artist, writer, and individual.

I do agree that middle-aged rage is a symptom of our inflated expectations. Disappointments taken to the nth degree. The bald realization that we’re not perfect. We’re smart women. We may or may not hold down well-paying jobs. We might be great gardeners, mostly solid friends. Our parents need us more than ever and we’re struggling to meet those needs, never mind looking and feeling good and meeting the pressures of being decent role models.

For me it’s gotten worse in the past year. It’s the perfect storm. Daughter in mid-school with those funky dynamics, another in elementary (and I can always find something to worry about in her life – too skinny, too sickly, too talky). Aging parents, stressful career, big house, new dog. You name it, I got it.

Anxiety becomes worse as women take the long walk toward menopause, and I seem to have been stuck on that trail for years now. Given the physical changes in my body (temperature changes, night sweats, weight) I think I’m heading deeper into the forest, but I wish this body of mine would just squeeze through the eye of the needle and emerge, with all the apparent downsides, into the desert of post-menopause. I will give up any day the last of my so-called youth for that long moment of calm.

I tell Deborah that we were stupid to wait until our mid-to-late 30s (her, early 40s) to have children, but she reminds me we would have simply had longer periods of rage and be less equipped to cope. I suppose she’s right.

I feel fortunate that she’s opened up this conversation. Over this past year I’ve felt the anxiety growing like yeast in my belly, yet I’ve kept a lid on it. But once I get something out in the open, exposed to air and light, there’s no hiding from it. I will talk, write, treat it to its pretty death. My submission will lead to its submission.

My annual check-up is coming up this fall, none too soon to get the medical help I need to get my calm back. Mean time, I’m exercising, cutting out the crap I’ve been eating, setting boundaries, and holding on tightly to daily practice and prayer. 

The girls still tell me I’m a nice mom. But I tell you, it’s a thin thread that holds me to that reality versus being Momster 24/7.

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CAUTION! You May Need To Read This Lying Down

If you’re anything like me, that is. The kind of person who at the sight or mention of Blood gets weak from head to toe. Like those pens you stand on end and the color drains, revealing a naked woman underneath. Except, instead of busty nude, you get floppy, boneless mass. Which is what I am right now, sitting in the waiting room of Urgent Care.

I lean my forehead against the cool of my palm, elbow on the arm of my chair. I try not to look at the sick people around me, try not to deduce what it is that brings them to this small, germy room. As long as they keep their distance I can hold my limp self together. I can pretend to be patient, care-giving wife while inside the bowels of Urgent Care, Jim is probably passed out himself.

This is our running joke. We’re both fainters. We come from long lines of fainters. We tell fainting stories at family gatherings. I have to lie down to hear most of them, even the ones I’ve heard before. I am working hard not to add to our repertoire.

What brings us here is Jim’s finger. And the deep slice he inflicted on it, by accident, yesterday. I knew it was bad by the way he staggered through the front door and announced, in a low, serious tone, “I got cut.”

It wasn’t a nonchalant “I got cut,” tossed out as he grabbed a Blue Sky soda from the fridge. Nor was it an “I got cut” spouted irately as he marched into the bathroom to fetch a Band-Aid. No, this version implied so much more.

It was a come-help-me-I-am-bleeding-profusely-and-am-about-to-faint-oh-my-God-I-can’t-even-look-at-it-it’s-so-deep “I-got-cut.” It was the kind of “I got cut” that caused me to drop my cheese grater and say, “No, don’t tell me,” to put my hand on my forehead then drop it to my side, to rub hard the thighs of my jeans, something I do to remind myself that I’m still here. The kind of “I got cut” that finally sent me hobbling, as if crippled, to the bed where I crumpled and yelled, weakly, “What do you need?”

Deep breath.

Even writing this makes my heart race. I pull my legs up under my body, form myself into a fetal position (as much a fetal position as one can get while sitting in the waiting room of Urgent Care). An extremely overweight man gets up and stands by the door. It’s as if he senses my internal debate over whether or not to maintain full consciousness.

I hate it that I do this. I want to be strong. I want to be the kind of person others would never vote off the island. I’m strong in so many other ways.

I did manage to cut a strip of cloth out of a clean flannel pillowcase for Jim.
I didn’t clean or bandage the cut, which was hard for him to do on his own.
I did call three Urgent Care centers to see if any was not crowded.
I did clean up the blood that had dripped all over the bathroom.
I did drive him here, and I am sitting, waiting. Weak, but waiting.

Flash back to another time we were in a medical clinic together — 1991, the weeks before our wedding day. You used to have to take a blood test to get a marriage license. Jim and I went together. We entered our respective examination rooms at the same time, emerged at the same time, smiled that the other was still pink in the cheeks. We walked together — soon to be Husband And Wife — to the check-out counter to pay. Then this:

Jim: “I think I’ll go wait outside.”

Me: “What’s wrong?” (alarmed) “You’re not going to faint, are you??”

Jim: “Eh, I feel kind of woozy. I’ll be OK.” (off he scuttles)

Me: (standing there, thinking about him, sure he’s going to faint. soles of my feet start to hurt. shuffle from one foot to the other. what’s taking the guy so long to run my card through the card reader??)

Me: “You almost done?”

Guy: “I keep getting a busy signal.” (has his back to me) “Let me try again.”

Me: (feeling light-headed, picturing Jim sprawled out on the grass by the parking lot…the tunnel, here it comes…)

I ended up running back to my examination room, flinging open the door and flinging myself onto the table right before losing consciousness. I woke to Jim and the Guy standing over me, the Guy laughing about how one minute I was there, the next minute gone.

Kind of like today.

Oh, here’s Jim now. He seems jolly. An old man in a wheelchair asks what they did back there. “Well,” Jim begins, “the doctor squeezed it together so hard I almost screamed…” 

“No, Jim, don’t,” I call from where I am. Heads turn my way. The old man’s mouth opens then closes, like he’s just seen something scary.

Jim and I walk out the door. “Don’t tell me anything until we get home,” I whisper. “OK,” he says.

Our pact. In sickness and health. And sight-of-blood-induced fainting. ‘Til death do us part.



         

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