On things forgotten

One of the things that I find disturbing is what I haven’t remembered. I realized that I don’t have an accurate count of the number of operations I have had since the accident. There was the big one in Fredericton. There was also the one for which I fasted for to whole days which was a clean-up operation. That one was at the Montreal General and was towards the end of my stay there. Those ones are clear. However there were about 2 to 4 operations in-between at the General which I don’t remember all that clearly as when they happened and what happened in them. It is disconcerting to say the least.

Then yesterday, I received a copy of my charts from my week in Fredericton along with information from Moncton. It is over an inch thick which only goes to show how much paperwork hospitals generate and why medical librarians are a specialized breed. I have to send it on to the SAAQ. However, I leafed through it enough to come across something that disturbed me greatly. It listed my injuries in medical terms, including a fracture to my left femur. I was very surprised by this as I do not remember knowing that. Yes, I have scars above my left knee, but I assumed that was just the accident. However, it turns out that at least one of them was made by a surgeon working on my femur. How did I not know or how did I forget? It feels very weird that there is this gap in my memory.

A lesser gap in my memory that the stack of papers revealed was the concern the doctors had over my kidney function. I do remember there was an issue, but as it was more complicated than I could cope with, I had simply put it down as “kidney problem: for the doctors to fix.”

The chart was part of a batch of mail that Mummy had brought in her newly acquired second hand Toyota Prius Prime. This marks the first time she has bought a second hand car since the van that Margo bought on her behalf in 1984 for the trip to California! She had just come from picking it up and as it had summer tires in the back, I didn’t ask her to take me somewhere.

I did ask her to escort me to a pharmacy on Côté des Neiges and back. Coming home, the sidewalk was blocked to me by a hose going from a fire hydrant to a City of Montreal water truck. The driver of said truck cheerfully got me over the hose. After thanking him, I asked why was he filling up his truck with water? I had previously seen a truck (possibly the same one) filling up at that hydrant from my bedroom window. The answer was in order to flood outdoor skating rinks which made perfect sense in hindsight.

One piece of mail was a card from Lady Mary in Edinburgh. It was a card hoping I would weather my storm like the ships on the front of it. I must confess that I could not decipher many of the words.

Earlier in the day, I had spent a certain amount of time dealing with SAAQ related paperwork and trying electronically submit some claims. I was not impressed with the SAAQ’s website which requires one to jump through too many flipping hoops. Furthermore, once one has successfully submitted a claim, it dumps you in a dead end page with no link back to the beginning. I was helped by the Lindsay’s social worker who is used to patients having trouble with the website. I was put in mind of a with the teaser joke of a Sunday Calvin and Hobbes cartoon.

In other news, I gained a roommate yesterday. Gilles is a retiree whose presence in “my” room is a transfer from another room in the Lindsay for reasons that have yet to be revealed to me. Our conversations have established the groundwork for a peaceable coexistence. 

Just before my physio session started, the Physio needed a few minutes to sort some things out. I said that I’d soak up some vitamin D while waiting, i.e. park the wheelchair next to a window. It so happened that the window was next to a set of bars attached to the wall like a ladder. The Physio said, “Actually, I think that you should do some exercises using those bars.” First, I stood with my right side next to the bars and holding on with my arms, I lifted my left leg out to the side while balancing on my right. She then had me turn my back to the bars and practice balancing on my feet while pushing out my chest. She wanted me to let go of the bars which I did reluctantly. She said it was safe giving that I was leaning back on the bars. I replied that I believed her, but my head wasn’t so sure! She laughed and accepted my anxiety. She had me lift my arms and legs to the sides. I quipped that I was feeling like a Leonardo  da Vinci drawing.