POSTING #83

"A Hectic End-of-Week Schedule"

In a note at the beginning of last's week's posting, I mentioned that the posting would be uploaded earlier than usual because I was expecting "a hectic end-of-week schedule".

Me and my big mouth!

If he had heard me, my Russian friend Yuri, would have told me to touch wood and spit seven times over my left shoulder.

He would have said that I was tempting the fates to make the weekend a whole lot worse than 'hectic'.

And Yuri would have been right.

It was to be a pleasant, if busy, weekend in London, Ontario at an exhibition of quilts created by the women of Gee's Bend, Alabama. 

For decades, the dirt-poor, but proud, African-American women have been making quilts out of old clothes, sheets and other fabrics, sometimes for beds but often to be nailed to the inside of the walls of their wooden shacks to block the winter winds.

The quilts were practical but that wasn't enough.

They had to be pretty as well.

(Click here for a  sample of their quilts. I know it t is a pain to have to follow a link and then come back to the blog. I tried to find some public domain images that I could include in the blog, but couldn't. Trust me, these quilts are something very special and worth the trouble of following the link and then returning.)  

In the 1930s, the outside world 'discovered' the artistry and feeling of Gee's Bend quilts and they have been exhibited in New York, and many other American cities.

Now was a chance for Canadians to see a hundred or so of these quilts, talk to some of the women, and watch them work.

We drove to London on Thursday and checked in at the London Hilton, the convention hotel.

We then set off on an hour and a half drive to see a play at the Blyth Festival. After dinner at a restaurant near Wingham I started to feel unwell.

I had been nursing a self-diagnosed low-grade infection for a week---symptoms: feeling cruddy, with a cough and some over-activity in the downstairs plumbing.

We decided, reluctantly, to skip the play and to return to London for  a good night's sleep---that would surely finish off the bug, whatever it was.

At 3 A.M., the bug seemed to be winning and we took off for the Victoria Hospital Emergency Department (part of the London Health Sciences Centre), the first of three trips there during the weekend---one of them by ambulance.

If you don't mind I will pull one of those hospital privacy curtains around the details of what happened, all that prodding, those tests, the waiting, and so on.

The upshot was that I had a severe urinary tract infection, similar to the one that plagued me seven years ago in Baku, Azerbaijan.

By Sunday, the infection and the temperature were in retreat and I was declared well enough to travel back to Virgil---with packets of pills, of course.

I'm feeling much better (touch wood and spit), and our GP is now scheduling tests to see why the bug has recurred.

So what is the learning in all of this.

Firstly, and most importantly, a husband should listen to his wife when he is not feeling well, and for god's sake, GO AND SEE  THE DOCTOR.

Secondly, if one gets ill in London, go to the Victoria Emergency Department. Wow, they are good! Caring, thoughtful, and professional, they are able to somehow juggle a range of patients from bored prisoners at the local jail who fake heart pains, to street people, to run-of-the-mill people like yours truly who are sick and scared.

Thirdly, try to be staying at the London Hilton. Everyone from the Manager, to the dining room staff, to the doorman in his Tower of London Beefeater costume offered AND provided help, and kept asking how I was.

Fourthly, there is a special place up above for the friends who came to the hospital to sit with Pat.

Fifthly, I have a couple of technical points. Drugstore digital thermometers don't 'beep' loudly enough to be heard by persons with sluggish hearing. I am going to invent a thermometer that vibrates when it is 'cooked'.

Another point. Young interns, residents and nurses have been taken captive by the Celsius system and can't be counted upon to have an immediate appreciation of the significance of a temperature of, say, 101.5 F. The options are to seek out a person with a little silver in the hair, wait while conversion tables are consulted, or learn to use the Celsius system (I know, you can't teach an old dog...).

So that was last weekend.

Poor Pat was able to spend only a few minutes at the exhibition. I didn't see any of it, and we both missed the Gala Dinner and Concert.

But if life is partly about collecting experiences, we did pretty well.

As Pat said on the way home, "I think there is a blog in all of this."

And you know, she was right---again.



P.S.

(I should note that this posting is also being uploaded a little earlier than usual---in this case because of a soccer tournament involving one of our granddaughters.)

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See you on August 29th for Posting #84 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting,  or email me at johnpathunter@gmail.com.