Bloggy Birthdays

N at justmakingitupasigo is much better the last few days. She is sitting up and feeding herself, albeit very slowly, and, says her husband, is very much herself. He told her about all of the messages the blogging world sent and she is touched and pleased. I hope it won't be too long before she can get on line herself and rejoin us. She's not out of the woods yet, but the trees are thinning.

Today is the first anniversary of my very first post -- Them's My Sentiments is one year old today. I had planned on writing a thoughtful post about everything I have learned about the mommyblogging world, about your generosity to newbies, your warmth, your caring for one another, about the sheer fun it is to swim in this sea. I made notes; I started off several times. However, it is now late at night and the anniversary post is still not written. Maybe tomorrow after I shovel a foot and a half of snow off the decks. Again. I don't know how deep this fall actually is, as the wind is now sculpting it into impossible drifts and the power has flickered several times. But I have shoveled the front porch off twice today, it has disappeared again, and the piles around the porch are higher than my head. Again, after JG took them down with the snowblower. Twice.

The man is muttering about figuring out how he can get onto the tractor tomorrow and clear snow -- this two weeks after a complete knee replacement surgery. If he tries, I am going to hide the keys. Or hide all his coats. Or maybe both. I think he is kidding. I hope. We have a good neighbour who will come and dig us out sometime tomorrow, and even if the power goes, I have two wood stoves, a generator, plenty of food cooked and lots of good friends close by. One of them barreled through the drifts this evening to find out if we were all right. My real neighbours are as wonderful as my on line community.

So, before a tree falls on the hydro lines, what I want to do is to say thank you. Thank you to the people who welcomed a newbie in, gave her instructions on how to do the basics and encouraged her fledgling attempts with warmth and praise. Thanks also to the hard working folk who do the award thing every month, who devise the Monday Missions and Hump Day Hmms that allow me to exercise my rusty writing and make me think. Thanks to those of you who urged me on to confront the rude sales clerk and followed the story. Thanks to those of you whose humour and grace brighten my days, whose gorgeous photographs and art work are things I look forward to seeing and appreciating, to the BlogRhet group and to those of you who turn up to read what I write. Love you!

Thanks also to my daughters, who let me write about them and about my granddaughter. I'm so glad you're cool about this.

Here's me -- in all my wrinkly glory. But it isn't the photo that's me; it's what I write that tells you who I am.

Large flakes of fluffy snow are falling outside my window. The sky is bright, however, and the temperature is mild. If this is the March lion, it is a fairly tame one. One of my neighbours has declared that this snow presages an early spring. I do hope she is right, as we are all heartily sick of winter in eastern Ontario. It came early and it has dumped close to a record fall of snow on us since November. I can't wait to put the shovels away.

I am also feeling springlike, joyful in fact, because N of just making it up as I go is awake and aware, off the ventilator and talking. Such good news! She still has a source of infection that the medical team has not found yet, and is catastrophically weak, but she's fighting hard. Here's part of what her husband had to say:

In order to prepare to remove N from the ventilator, they needed to give her two units of blood. This is in addition to the unit she received last week and the blood products that she received in the early days in ICU in order to keep her alive. A very small percentage of people donate blood on a regular basis. But I can attest first hand how important it is to the people who need it. I am a regular blood donor and I promise you that it is an extremely easy mitzvah (good deed).

In more medical news, JG is up on two canes and doing his road work, including stairs. If things go as planned, he will be home on Monday. The YD is on shift today at the hospital, making sure he is doing his exercises and generally behaving himself. Had she not chosen another career, the YG would have made an excellent drill sergeant; I, for instance, have been ordered home to rest today, in no uncertain terms. I do love her, a lot!

I've been reading, with great interest, some of the Hump Day Hmm postings on assertiveness. It certainly is something you need in the hospital. As I chased down nurses to get JG's overdue painkillers, watched residents who are incapable of listening, waited for physiotherapists who did not arrive and inspected meals that were less than inspiring, I really wished I had more of it. The surgical ward where JG has spent the week is horribly noisy, the rooms are so cramped that there is no place to put anything down except on the bed or on the windowsills on top of the heating vents, there is little continuity in the nursing care and the staff is stretched to capacity. Although a couple of his nurses were excellent, some of his physiotherapists were careless and out of their depth. There does not seem to be any system -- the hospital is at capacity and beds are not available where and when they ought to be. A patient without an advocate may fall into the cracks.

This is really a sad state of affairs. I am pretty sure most of the blame rests with hospital management and the scarcity of beds, which is a provincial responsibility. Our provincial government has lately set up a new level of medical management, called a Local Health Integration Network, which divides the province into compartments in which all levels of care are supposed to be managed efficiently. Our Community Health Centre out here in the hinterland has already encountered problems with these LHIN's, as we straddle the boundary between two of them. The LHIN we are not in has been trying to put all of its Mental Health Support Projects into one management, which would make the chart look really efficient, but which would also tear the MHSP that we manage in half. It's a pity they aren't tackling some of the hospital problems instead of trying to look good.

I would love to make each and every LHIN Board member spend a week on a surgical floor with their leg tied to the bed. And the Hospital Board members, ditto. Things might change for the better after they were let out.

Fair Fodder -- Hump Day Humm

Julie Pippert at Using My Words has this topic for this Wednesday's Hump Day Hmm: Are other people and the things they do (blog, email, news etc) fair fodder for our blogs? What are your ethics and mores as a writer, when it comes to characterizing others.

This is a very question very close to my heart today because a blogger I know is critically ill -- at best she has a 50/50 chance of pulling through. She is a highly talented, creative, warm, funny, involved person, a young woman, with young children. The news of the seriousness of her illness is truly a blow to the heart. I would like to direct you to her blog so that you could better feel with me the enormity of this, the sheer devastation her loss would bring to her family, to her friends, to the whole community.

But I am not going to say anything more about her here because I don't know whether she or her family would want me to do so. If she recovers, WHEN she recovers, I hope we will get beautifully crafted and hilariously funny stories of her hospital stay, thoughtful posts about how being so ill affected her and hers, incisive posts about what made her ill and how it was handled, reports on her children and pets, all the marvelous things she creates. And then I will be able to talk about it in detail. I don't know if I could write an eulogy, but that would also, in my mind be ethical. To go into any more detail than I have would not.

And so I am going to try to make my mind work rather than fret, try to go from the particular to the general and answer Julie's (she credits Lawyer Mama for the idea) very important question.

I will write only about facts that are public or that people have made public. For bloggers, that means something that has been written about in the blog or peripherals, photographed or referenced. If a blogger has been given an award, that's public. If there are ads or links on a site, that's also fair game.

Where there is information about family or friends, that's public. And so that is also the edge of a slippery slope. When I write about myself, no matter how carefully I do it, I am revealing facts that could lead a reader to my identity. And if I am identified, the trail then leads to my husband, daughters, grandchildren, friends and neighbours. Consequently, I am extremely careful not to post anything about friends or family that would hurt or embarrass them or that I would not say to them.

I very rarely make negative comments, child of the 1940's that I am. I don't make them to someone's face and I don't make them online, tempting as it sometimes may be. A correction of grammar or fact would go in an email to the writer unless it is so trivial as to be innocuous. If I really disagree with something, that goes into the comment section of the writer's blog. Politely. Only then would I write about that in my own blog. And cue the writer about the contrary opinion post. In fact, if I am picking up a theme from another blog, whatever it is, I reference the blogger.
Does this bowdlerize my blog? Make it less relevant, less real, less true? Probably. I read posts where people have laid something very sensitive out in the open and, I must admit, admire their courage for doing so. But I can't do it myself. I do feel entirely free to criticize government, business, public announcements and organizations of any sort, bad public practice, wherever I find it. Whee, fun! One of the best things about blogging, to my mind. As is analyzing and posting about what is going on in my own mind and heart, and sharing it with you.