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Last evening after dinner my wife commented that the day had been an especially good one. The two previous days she had felt ill with cold or flu symptoms, but was now feeling better. We had gone out during the afternoon to her appointment with the chiropractor, then ran some errands including a frustrating visit to a very crowded supermarket where we successfully acquired the last of the supplies needed for our holiday preparations. In the evening she went out to dinner with our daughter, continuing their "girls night out" routine for Friday evenings.
Though the day was not a stay-at-home-and-be-bored day, neither could it be described as a day filled with memorable moments. Just another "oatmeal day" (don't know about oatmeal days? see the links below), and yet that evening we both agreed that it had been a very good day.
=> Oatmeal Days | Oatmeal Days | The Oatmeal Days of January
The major reason it seemed a good day is that the past six or seven months have been times when she was so weak that she began to think she may not make it to Christmas, but now she is much stronger and it is wonderful just to be ABLE to go and do errands together.
As I was getting ready for bed I remembered that I had posted a while back about a similar experience. When I looked it up I was surprised that it was exactly one year ago! What a year it has been!
=> The Fiftieth December Twentieth
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π c: 2024-12-21 20:12 βοΈ e:
π· tags: #oatmeal-days #joy #satifaction #hope #Christmas #memory #family
=> 2024-12-21 20:12 π 12-20 * 51 = DΓ©jΓ vu
Have you ever noticed the various rituals and incantations that phlebotomists use? Do they belong to different cults or denominations of the Sacred Society of Phlebotomists?
I went to a doctor's office today and had an encounter there with a pleasant and very kind young woman of the phlebotomist persuasion. Now a brief bit of my personal history will be needed here before we can continue our enquiry.
I have long had an irrational fear of being poked with needles. Injections were tolerated slightly better than extractions -- but either one of them induced a great deal of stress and on occasion was the cause of me fainting in the middle of the procedure.
My wife discovered a strategy to improve the success of these encounters: keep me distracted during the process so I am less aware of the great injustice that is being inflicted upon my body. This works well, and I've trained myself to look away and focus my attention elsewhere during the procedure.
Her medical history is much more voluminous than mine and she has survived certainly several hundred of these procedures, most with only slight and brief pain. She does not cower in fear at the merest hint that a blood sample may be required.
Now back to the rituals and incantations. A very common one is some variation of "is this a good spot?". I sometimes reply with something like "I don't have this done often enough to have enough data to answer that question". Today I was asked "where is a good place?" and my reply was "I've never done this myself so I have no idea." And the rituals: sometimes they apply a rubber strap around my upper arm, sometimes it is "make a tight fist" and other times "relax your arm", today it was "stretch your arm out as straight as you can". Sometimes it gets physical, with the technician slapping or massaging my arm in an attempt to find the best place for their needle. The needle has ended up in the back of my hand, sometimes in the middle of my forearm, sometimes in the crook of my elbow, and possibly even in my upper arm.
My wife, with her greater experience, confidently extends her arm and points to the exact spot that works best. I just want to blurt out "I don't know! You're the professional, why are you asking me?" Hmmm... perhaps I should pay more attention to what they're doing and why -- maybe someday I'll have better responses, and better results.
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π c: 2024-04-19 09:55 βοΈ e:
π· tags: #medical #lessons #attention #avoidance
=> 2024-04-19 09:55 π Phlebotomists' Rituals
My wife and I sat in our easy chairs at the end of the day and both commented that "today was a very good day". We didn't win the lottery, or welcome a new great grandchild, or even find a lucky penny on the sidewalk. It was, in most respects, rather quotidian. Amanda was here, and Jamie spent the afternoon with us. We prepared cookie trays to give to friends and families. That's really about all that happened that day that's worth mentioning now (two days later).
After agreeing that it was a good day I commented that I have seen about seventy December 20th's come and go and I can't remember anything at all about any of them. Neither of us could call up any memories associated with any of our previous fifth-day-before-Christmas days.
So, I went digging through the archives in my computer to see what was recorded for dates that included "12-20". The oldest record I found on my initial pass through the most accessible material was a few photos that we took (without flash) on December 20, 2002 at a children's Christmas pageant that we attended at our friends' church.
Six years later there are three snapshots we took while visiting our daughter and her family in Arkansas, and last year I took a couple of pictures of a batch of oatcakes that I baked on December 20. That's all the photographic memory aids I could find.
It was really easy to find records of purchases we've made on December 20 over the past decade or more: 2012 - $13.49 for a prescription and $2.15 at a fast-food burger place; 2013 - three grocery stores and lunch at another burger place; 2015 - car parts, a dollar store, a membership warehouse store, and a convenience store; 2019 - a grocery store, and my wife got her hair cut; 2021 - two different big-box retailers fifty miles apart, and parking at the airport where we picked up our grandson coming to visit; and 2022 - a gift for our grandson from a local specialty retailer. We live such exciting lives!
Digging deeper I found over two thousand e-mail messages containing "20 Dec" going back to the late 1990s, most from mailing-lists that I've participated in. I did notice that on that date in 2010 I read an article online that was particularly appropriate for one of our grandchildren so I forwarded a link to "Reading, Writing, βRithmetic and Relationships" to my daughter.
=> Reading, Writing, βRithmetic and Relationships
We remember the days our family members were born or died. Great joy or great trauma stand out in our memories, great days don't. Still, it was a very good day, and now we may remember that for even longer.
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π c: 2023-12-22 12:16 βοΈ e:
π· tags: #Christmas #memory #family
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