I had to drive to Fayetteville to go the VA Hospital there in order get some blood work done before my appointment with my regular doctor on June 2nd. The idea is that the laboratory will have all the testing done and ready for her consideration before the appointment. The VA doctors believe in a lotta blood tests. It's become a little bit of a problem lately because I'm receiving treatment at two different VA hospitals, and they don't appear to have computer privileges with each others databases.
I don't mind each hospital taking blood samples for whatever they need them for. It's not enough blood to threaten my life, and I kinda like the idea of my body having to make new blood. Maybe blood gets worn out. Sorta. Taking so much blood from my veins has gotta remove a small amount of stuff like heavy metals that have no other way to get outta there each time they poke a needle in me. If I knew how to donate blood I'd do it. I suspect it's good for you. Or not. Who knows?
Needles seemed to have become the bane of my father's existence in his latter years. Every time they would take him to the hospital and leave him alone, he'd rip the IVs out of his arms, and it was always a bloody mess. He really became a child again before he died of "the old folk's friend" pneumonia. It has an even more sobering effect on me now to remember it than it did then.
The writing I do is about the only other activity besides eating and sleeping I engage in that isn't tainted so much by my health problems, but the amount of time I'm hunched over a keyboard is not the only time I drift about in the dream time.
It's been written that the death of a man's father can mark the most significant change of attitude and behavior he'll ever engender. I was nearly an old man myself when my own father died at the age of 88 in 1995. Our relationship had been loud, constantly argumentative, and one-sidedly violent. I was bigger than him by the time I was fifteen, but I never hit him back. Despite that, the changes his expected death wrought came softly, and they took a long time to clarify.
Since then, I've become more like my father in some ways. My mother literally became him for eight years after his death until she died too. My father's relatively painless death of old age was the death of a newborn. Not a wrinkle in his brow. On the other hand, my mother's death mask looked remarkably like The Scream. Ain't that just like a woman? She was probably railing like a banshee against the dying of the light.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
