Twenty Minutes in a Clinic Waiting Room

Rage Against the Normal

I like to torment the political staff at the Ministry who talk, as if it were their idea, about a future with neighbourhoods where all distances are walkable and people can be born, grow up, grow old and die in one place. I tell them their vision is of the past, not the future. 

Before traffic engineers brought land use monoculture to post-war North America, everyone lived in a neighbourhood of the future. You went to the corner to buy groceries. Your kids walked two blocks to go to school. A few more blocks away there were offices and banks and dry cleaners. In these neighbourhoods, rich people and poor people and everyone in between all shared the same church pews, sidewalks and parks.

In North America wherever pre-war city settlements have not been pulverized by redevelopment, expressway construction or riots, these neighbourhoods still exist. But they have a bad reputation. They are thought to be congested, noisy, dirty, crime-ridden and dangerous. And they're expensive. 

Well, there's expensive and then there's expensive. A normal suburban household spends more than $32,000 a year sustaining the average 3.4 cars parked in every driveway. That's about the same cost as carrying a $600,000 mortgage (fixed rate 5 year at 3%). 

I live in a pre-war neighbourhood. I've never had a mortgage that big. 

All of which brings me to the twenty minutes I spent in the neighbourhood clinic (two blocks from home) this Friday, waiting for my doc to tell me that, if I wanted to get physiotherapy for my hip, I was going to have to pay for it myself.

My appointment was at 10:10 a.m. I didn't get there a minute before that, and expected I'd be there a long time. I found a seat in the crowded waiting room. The whole neighbourhood was represented there: a young pregnant woman who didn't have an appointment; a man in late middle-age with about four pounds of metal suspended from various parts of his head, tattoos covering every inch of visible skin; a still-in-operations transsexual, a wizened old woman folded like a rag over her walker, a whole bunch of ordinary-seeming people between the ages of twenty and fifty, and six little kids, ranging from barely over three to maybe five years old.

A playroom was set up in a sizeable alcove off of the waiting room. Colourful toys almost filled the space, but the kids were most interested in the toys' storage cupboard. Big enough to crawl in and out of, and generously ventilated to forestall tragedy, the kids vastly amused themselves by crawling in, closing the door, opening the door and crawling back out.

They were laughing loudly and making those crazy noises kids make with other kids. One of the three women watching over them would shush them and the volume would dip for four seconds or so. I'd brought paperwork to beguile the waiting. I didn't find the sound of well-behaved children having fun with one another to be too distracting.

I did notice, as each mother's name was called and she gathered her kids to go see the doctor, the small ceremonies of farewell among the children, until just one little guy was left all alone with his mom. He looked after the two girls - twins, I'm sure - who were disappearing around a corner, gave his circumstances some thought and with deliberation and care, crawled into the storage cupboard, closed the door and stayed there.

As for where I fit in the mosaic, I was the middle-aged white woman, dressed in crumpled business casual with three-week-old polish on her toenails, engrossed in her Blackberry and paperwork, oblivious to everything around her.

Good advice walking east on Wellesley Street

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen 

Evidence-Based Decision-Making

Detail from artwork on construction hoarding - Gerrard Street just west of Sherbourne

Recently I purged my iPad of any games that asked me to do one or more of:

• watch an advertisement
• pay money for gaming pieces
• pay money to reach the "three star" score in a level
• pay money for any reason at all

All I have left on my iPad now is Bejewelled, Scrabble and a couple of shareware games.

I find I now have more time to do other things.

The evidence that led me to this decision arose from the simple act of keeping track of expenses. A couple of years ago, because retirement was looming faster than our mortgage was shrinking, I bought an accounting app called Homebudget. The app lets you quickly create a set of books and, so long as you're diligent in both entering your data and being honest about what you're spending your money on, shows you your spending habits clearly -- habits such as pissing away money on stupid games.

The evidence was overwhelming; the course of action clear.

  

The whole work, of which this is just one side, is called "All My Relations"

I went to the Holland Clinic at Sunnybrook hospital for my arthritis assessment this past Wednesday. The assessor,  a charming woman named Veronica, put me through my paces, asked me lots of personal questions and, after hearing the response "no" to her enquiry of whether I'd brought my x-rays, sent me off to get some more x-rays. 

The radiology department is conveniently located on the second floor of the premises, so less than twenty minutes later I was looking, with Veronica, at a picture of something I'd never seen before: my pelvis.

I think, because of how I'd managed up to that point, Veronica'd had her doubts about whether or not I truly had arthritis. My leg moved too well. I had too much flexibility and too much strength.

She said, "There's no question you do have arthritis," as if she'd needed some convincing, and she pointed to the out-most edge of my right hip ball and socket joint, where the cartilage was all gone.

Seeing that really brought everything into focus. No kidding: I've got bone rubbing bone every time I take a step.

Then Veronica shared the decision that she believed the evidence supported.

"There isn't a surgeon in Toronto who would replace your hip. Anything they can give you will not be as good as what you have now."

"But I'm also in a lot of pain right now," I whined, "And I can't walk and do yoga like I used to."

Veronica thought that physiotherapy might help. She also said that she believed at least some of the pain - the pain that shoots below my knee - may be from a pinched nerve in my back.

She said, "Go to your GP and get referred for some physio to help with the arthritis pain; tell them what you've told me and see if they can't do something about your back, too."

"And," she said, "You can always come back here."

More than 20 first nations artists participated: this mural is my favourite, but I don't know who the artist is

Right in the middle: a water lily.

The murals decorated the site for three years

And now they're gone

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Variety

Pipe cleaner flowers decorating the fence around a vacant lot on the south east corner of Sherbourne and Gerrard

The same day I read a story on CBC about a nice young couple who were doing well but also crazy in debt - and in debt for the craziest things - our microwave started screaming.

Well, not screaming. The microwave - a piece-of-junk-bottom-of-the-line-over-the-range-General-Electric-model that was all but new when we moved here in 2008 - was beeping: long, loud, sad-sounding beeps. It was on its last legs, and had just enough life left to send a message scrolling on its digital display: KEYPAD SHORTED OUT -- CALL FOR SERVICE.

Right. Call for service. For a seven-year-old microwave, six years past its warrantee and designed to function well for five years, max.

Parts of the keypad had already died. The 4, 6, 8 and zero keys had been non-responsive for years. I'd improvised work arounds to maintain a modicum of functionality in the stupid thing.

Bruce's flower

My flower

Feeling a bit grumpy about having to resort to old-fashioned methods to heat milk for coffee and thaw frozen bagels (the actions that account for about 80% of microwave usage in this household), but not as grumpy as I was going to be when it came to me that I was going to have to buy a new microwave, I read about that young couple who were $350,000 in debt.


I'm aware enough of my surroundings to know that values have changed a bit since the time I was raised. In the house I grew up in, where my parents had memories both of the second World War and their parents' stories of the Great Depression, debt was a terrible thing. 

If you had money, you spent it on necessities: food, shelter, that sort of thing. If you wanted something nice, you saved until you had the cash to buy it. Material things were not so important that you sacrificed your freedom for them.

Fast forward to these days, and this nice young couple, and the staggering implications of an obviously smart and capable person contemplating going forty grand in the hole because "without the glass railing, the look of my stairs is not doing it justice."  

Only con men sell purses for $7,000; only suckers pay that much money for 'em, and I can't think of the word to describe a person who would go into debt to be conned this way. 

Even as I simmered in my sense of frugal superiority to these two silly young people, Bruce showed me there are further points on the spectrum.

The flowers are the result of a pop-up community project, sponsored by the United Way, on June 6. Two young men in logoed t-shirts dispensed the pipe cleaners along with a short workshop on flower-making. Passers by were invited to make a flower and attach it to the fence. 

After I'd turned off my computer and gone downstairs to get ready to go to work, I found Bruce in the family room, laptop open, peering into the screen.

"What're you doing?"

"Looking for replacement keypads for our microwave."

Now that's frugal.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Superstars and Gentle Pressure

Table set with Chilled Asparagus Soup with Timbale of Crab, Avocado and Caviar 

It's a funny thing about my work that some days I really have no idea what I'll be doing or who I'll be talking to. That's because I get last minute surprises in my calendar, dropped there by persons unknown, that send me off to meetings I have neither been briefed for nor have any idea what will happen there.

What happened this past week was I got to witness two battle-scarred political gladiators swap war stories in a game of one-upmanship that ended without a winner being declared. Each of them had many successes - perhaps in reality not quite so sparkling as they made them sound - but there's no question they'd both distinguished themselves as people who got results.

One of them provided an assessment of their peers:

"In any caucus, about 30% of them are or should be in Cabinet, another 30% are your solid "B" team, and 30% of them are folks who peter-principled the moment they got themselves elected."

I'm surprised it's only a third.

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When I saw my GP the other week about my arthritis diagnosis, I kindly but firmly observed that the referral service from her clinic had let me down in times past. For example, I had waited almost six months for a referral to an ophthalmologist when my eyeball went berserk in September 2013. My GP assured me that their referral clerk was tremendously skilled, but, just in case, she gave me her name to call her if I waited too long for an appointment.

This gentle application of pressure seems to have worked. I was called by the Holland Arthritis Clinic at Sunnybrook (best news about this is the hospital is very close by) within a week, and I have an appointment for an assessment on June 17. 

Public health care works.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen 

PS - The "caviar" in the photo of the nice-but-a-bit-bland soup is kelp caviar. No fish children were harmed in the making of this meal. Crabs were, but no fish kids.

K