Der mentsh trakht un Gott lakht – take 2

One of the main things that took Catherine and me to the interior of British Columbia was the harshness of eastern winters. I endured eastern Ontario for more than forty years, and she lived in Ottawa for almost all of her life. Because of reduced vision, Catherine could often not see ice in front of where she was walking, and the dip off a sidewalk could easily surprise her at a street corner. We thought it would be great for her to be able to walk alone safely in the winter. And we were both looking forward to the prospect of walking through the winter without having to bundle ourselves in several layers of protection.

This past winter was a dream, even though Kelowna is still in Canada and it made sense for the temperature to stay below freezing for a few days in December and January. But we never missed the heavy coats we had left in Ottawa and we could already stop wearing boots in January. The heavy cloud cover that obscures the mountaintops above the Okanagan Valley – an inversion that may help keep cold out but which results in unmitigated greyness for more than two months – broke up enough from time to time in early February to allow sunlight through, and it was all uphill from then on.

But there was one major fly in the ointment. The little toe on Catherine’s right foot was a concern almost from the day she got here at the end of November. She went to Emergency before she had been here a week. Later, a vascular surgeon put her on a series of antibiotics for what appeared to be a stubborn infection. That effort at treatment could have continued for months. The doctor eventually offered her an alternative – amputation – which she chose. The drugs were tearing up her digestive system, and she was certainly building up immunity to antibiotics that she might need later. On top of that, there was no guarantee that the treatment would ever allow the toe to recover.

This story could go on for several paragraphs more, but my point is not to tell the story. It is to record my reaction to what happened. Besides, the physical part of it is Catherine’s story, not mine. So fast forward from the amputation in early March to late June, when an orthopedic surgeon finally told us the problem had nothing to do with infection. All the antibiotics were treating an infection that never existed. What was happening was that the bones in her right foot had collapsed. The condition is called Charcot foot.

In her third hospital stay, Catherine was fitted with what used to be called a walking cast, but the term was either ironic or altogether inappropriate in this case because she was cautioned not to put any pressure on the foot (that is, not to walk) for at least another three months.

So here's the math. She got here in late November. Three months from now puts us at late September. Now do the philosophy. We came here to be able to walk in the winter, but we only considered was the weather, not whether our bodies would hold together for long enough to support us. And it is our own physical condition that is now tripping us up. Lesson: it is hard to live anywhere but in the present beause we cannot see the factors that will control the future.

The future is never what we anticipate. When we try to picture some event that has not yet happened, the reality that materializes is never what we imagined.

When we moved west we expected certain parts of our life to change, both as a couple and individually. but we never could have imagined the eventual consequences of the events that have transpired in the past six months. I will get into some of the major consequences in my next post.