Funny week…winter has begun, with snow and
cold. My body is taking its time getting used to this. I’ve walked most
mornings. It was a little scary a couple of mornings, because of the ice
underfoot. I was afraid of falling. The other thing that surprised me…and
alarmed me, if the truth were known – was that on the last leg of my walk,
which is mildly uphill, I began to feel tightness in my chest. One
morning I even got to the edge of pain, which eased when I slowed down. I began
to wonder if the time for heart valve surgery is closer than I thought.
I had no trouble with walking in Ottawa. It
was warmer, and the climate as moist. Here, it’s been dry and cold. My
anxieties eased this morning, however. I walked a double length, and found that
not only did I limber up on the second leg, but also I had no chest tightness
at all on the whole walk. I’ll have to monitor this closely for Dr. Swartz…and
myself, I guess.
I haven’t been back to the pool since
arriving home. I still have scabs on my tattoo, and one can’t go in the pool
with an open wound. In the next couple of days, the scabs will go, and I’ll be
back in the water.
All this, plus my recurring trouble with
remembering things, puts me squarely in the line of “recovery.” Still a long
way to go, especially if I throw in the heart stuff as well. I’m using recycled
material for Sunday worship all this month, realizing that I haven’t the energy
to research and write a sermon and service each week for a month. Looks like my
career as a Sunday Supply Preacher is drawing to a close. I think back a year
or two, and remember how I could focus and work on this sort of thing all
morning without a break. Times have changed…or I have changed, more like.
Remembrance Day was emotional for me as
usual. This year, I had a special concern: the government’s change of policy
regarding veteran’s pensions. One has to be in the military for 10 years to
qualify for a full pension. The Dep’t of Veteran’s Affairs has taken to
bringing in all the 9-year plus vets, and assessing them for being “fit for
deployment.” If a vet proves to be unfit for deployment, he or she is promptly
discharged, leaving them without a full and indexed pension. The group that is
most affected by this policy is those who have been wounded of injured in the
service and in war. They have missing limbs, blindness, PTSD, all sorts of
wounds. And therefore they are unfit for deployment, and discharged. So there
you are, semi-crippled, perhaps unable to do sustained work, and now, with no
pension. These folk are abandoned by the government that urged them to
volunteer, praises their work, lays wreaths to “honour” them, and then cuts
them off at the last minutes – sometimes just months prior to their tenth
anniversary in the armed services!
The doctors tell me not to get excited about
anything, but this situation excites me. It enrages
me! The only thing I could think of
to do is write letters to the editor. So the local paper, the Red Deer paper,
the Edmonton Journal and the Ottawa Citizen all got my letter today. It seems like
very little to do. I won’t write to my MP again. He is a toady and an ass, and
will just send me a photocopied sheet of the policy and someone’s speech in then
House justifying it.
So I concentrate on genealogy, in which I
have interested again. Starting to put together a family tree, and looking
around for information. Maybe I’ll finally get to the Mormon archives in
Edmonton this winter after all!
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