Happy Birthday to Me, E.T.

Oh dear, how do I tell my 91-year-old mother that she gave birth to an extraterrestrial being? What else could explain my extraordinary quirks, peculiar ailments, and uncanny ability to survive against all odds?

I’ve recovered from accidents that no mortal should have survived. I suffer from maladies so bizarre that no one has ever heard of them before.

Then again, how many people survived a rabid skunk bite as a toddler and lived to tell the tale?

My latest episode involved the right side of my mouth festering until my gum line resembled the embers of a dying fire. A thread under my lip pulled my gum away from my tooth, exposing the root.

My Swiss dentist pried open my mouth and exclaimed in awe, “Très intéressant! I’ll do a frenectomy!”

Frenectomy?

In the past, when diagnosed with other strange ailments, I had no idea what my American, French, German, Greek and Swiss doctors were talking about.

I’ve always been different.

After all, I was born in Sandwich.

“Which kind? Baloney!” friends teased.

According to my mother, I was the only planned baby of her four children.

Good grief! Who in their right mind would have planned to birth an extraterrestrial being?

Fortunately, back in Sandwich in 1957, I was a bargain baby! The doctor who delivered me charged my folks only 50 bucks.

Since then, I’ve cost a fortune!

Braces, glasses, orthodontia, orthotics, and umpteen surgeries. Disintegrating discs, temporal mandible dysfunction, neuroborreliosis. I had strange conditions before they became common knowledge. My treatments, considered controversial quackery at the time, have become part of standard care, like chiropractic and TMJ dental treatment.

Why me?

Blame it on that rabid skunk bite!

My poor mother! How did she survive my childhood?

My poor Frenchman! How does he endure my adulthood?

After each calamity, he picked up the pieces, paid medical bills and waited for me to heal. With his help, I am still ticking, albeit slowly.

Today, doctors suspect I was born with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS). EDS? Huh? It’s part of a group of genetic connective tissue disorders, which could help explain
my proprioception issues and propensity for falls.

We’re all unique beings, trying to move forward, stay strong, and beat the odds.

No one chooses their family, the genes they inherit, the beliefs they assimilate, or where they grow up. No one can predict what physical, emotional, and mental challenges they’ll face.

Wouldn’t it be easier if we didn’t see ourselves only as Democrats or Republicans, Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans, Indians, Australians, Muslims, Jews, or Christians?

Could we live better harmony if we didn’t identify so much with one religion, nationality, race, or ethnicity, but more as tiny specks in the universe?

What if we all came from somewhere beyond Earth?

How’s this for conspiracy theory?

What if we’re all aliens?

Who knows?

I am here still questioning, still yearning, still learning.

Time is running out. I may never get it right. For now, I exist in a state of grace, warts and all, grateful to be here even during these troubled times.

Thank you, my beloved mother, for bringing me into existence and guiding my path!

Merci mille fois mon courageux français for staying by my side.

Happy Birthday to me, E.T.

Another Accident? In a Doctor’s Office? You kidding?

Another day, another doc.

Another accident? At the doctor's office? You kidding?

What kind of a klutz am I? Was I born accident prone? Or does it go back to bad balance at my base, from toes, so crooked I could hang by them from a tree.

Who gets taken out by a treadmill in the doc office at the hospital?

At a routine checkup, I mentioned shortness of breath. My primary doctor heard a heart murmur. She insisted I follow up with a cardiologist. Pronto. Eight months later, (you know how long it takes to get an appointment with a specialist) I finally got in with the specialist.

After an EKG and a battery of tests, the cardiologists diagnosed arrhythmia in the upper and lower chambers of the heart. Then she wanted me to take a stress test and walk on a treadmill.

“I need to measure your heart beat under exertion,” she explained as she hooked me up. “Every three minutes, I will increase the speed and incline on the treadmill.”

The first six minutes, I was fine and feeling chuffed to bits. Then at the nine minute level, she cranked up thetempo.

“You still doing okay?” she asked.

“Un huh,” I grunted, huffing and puffing like a steam engine, feeling light-headed and wobbly and cursing myself. (Ever the damn athlete still competing for a better time, I continued gasping for oxygen.)

That’s enough!” the doc exclaimed, “we’ll stop here!”

I stopped.

The treadmill did not.

Before I had time to react, my feet splayed out from under me and my body pitched forward. I hit my chin, my forearms, my elbow and my knees on the rubber mat that kept rotating.

Nooooo, I’m going to be sucked up by the roller.

“Oh no, sorry madame, sorry,” the doctor said. “I am not sure how that happened."

“I’m okay,” I gasped feeling mortified. Who the heck face plants on a treadmill at the cardiologist’s?

After profuse apologies, the doctor sat me on her exam table and told me, “calm down and raise your arm.”

As she fitted the blood pressure cuff, she explained, “I need to record one more reading”.

Of course doc, my BP is too high right now, I wanted to tell her. I just survived a near death experience.

What? Am I hearing clearly. She wants further investigation.

“I am going to set you up for a heart CAT scan to check the valves and heart function and to rule out coronary artery disease,” the cardiologist said, “Don’t worry, this is routine procedure.”

Sure for someone who flunked the treadmill test.

Now once again, I have to squeeze into a white cylinder the size of a toilet paper roll.

Necessary? Really? After a life time of X-rays from accidents and injuries, I am pretty sure, I glow in dark.

“Seriously, doc, “ I lament. “I don’t need more tests. I know why I am short of breath. “You try keeping up with a sixty-nine-year-old Frenchman, who thinks he is 20!”

“Yep, typical,” the hubby says, “Throws her mate under the bus.”

Again!

Do It Yourself Home Projects so Fun (Not)

Between our old furniture falling apart after three years in storage and builders mistakes, each day in our new house brings a challenge. One morning, I opened the closet and the hanging rod broke, burying me under an avalanche of clothes. The next day the drawers collapsed, stripped from the support rail.

Meanwhile, Gerald struggled to assemble the innovative Swedish do-it-yourself home furnishings and shelves. IKEA is like Lego for adults.

“I need more shelves,” I whine, “Move it higher. Lower. To the left. To the right.”

We nearly split up over the process of making do known as “bricolage,” which is derived from the French verb bricoler (“to putter about") and related to bricoleur, the French name for a jack-of-all-trades.

Bricolage projects can put any marriage at risk.

A trip to a Swiss equivalent of Menards or Home Depot does my head in with its rows of wood, tile, kitchen, bathroom and plumbing fixtures and endless racks of tools, clamps, brackets, bolts and shelving.

While Gerald headed down aisle five to find a specific size screw out of a billion choices, I meandered down thoroughfare where I’m sideswiped by a motorized vehicle hauling lumber across the store. To escape traffic, I ducked into aisle three where I breathed deep and touched my toes ten times.

Then I wandered over to the luminaires department where hundred of different light fixtures blink. Imagine the spectacular light show? There were suspension, platform, ceiling, wall, desk, and table lights in three categories - incandescent, fluorescent, and high intensity discharge - all with various strengths of bulbs to choose from.

We needed to buy twenty-two different light fixtures and I can’t decide one!

Home improvement retail stores are Candy Shops for the amateur bricoleur, but they make me feel discombobulated. It’s as if I am taking psychedelics and trapped in Disneyland. My brain short circuited from the sensory overload of bright lights and cacophony of voices and canned music.

Gerald, once a successful CEO, managing a big company, has a meltdown trying to figure out which hook to buy to hang one light fixture. He gave up and bought a dozen in different sizes.

I can distinguish between a classic nail and a screw, but there are 25 different kinds of nails and 26 different types of screws in dozens of sizes. Even worse, Swiss measurements are in the metric system (ie. centimeters, millimeters), but my poor brain is stuck in inches, feet, and yards.

I never ask for help. A French speaking salesman will tell me where items can be found, but I can’t translate his words to English. I have no clue what a “lathe” is in any language. I can differentiate a hammer from a screw driver, but I’d never know a Phillips from a flathead. Learning the lingo for DYI terminology is like trying to master Chinese.

Ever the good sport, back at the house, I tried to help Gerald put together shelves and hang light fixtures. All I learned was that “I hate bricolage!” But now I can appreciate why guys swear so much when doing home improvement projects.

I still have no idea when our house will be finished, but no worries. In the meantime, I am broadening my French vocabulary.

Living in a Construction Site Called Home

We officially moved a month ago, but we keep having to relocate within our walls. We continue to rotate tables, chairs, dishes, books and clothes from place to place, so builders can replace broken fixtures and access faucets covered by dry wall.

Instead of looking for Waldo, the cartoon character hidden in a crowd of people on the pages of “Where’s Waldo?” books, we hunt for the little artisan and mistakes concealed in our house!

From the get-go, an incompetent project manager created chaos, then made it worse by jumbling the order of jobs to be completed by subcontractors. For example, the dirt road up the steep incline to our building cannot be black topped until heavy trucks deliver boulders to construct the back wall.
The master bedroom had only 1 outlet because the dry wall person covered the others. For the electrician to access the wall to drill for a line, we had to move our furniture and belongings. Again.

The plumbers installed bathroom fixtures; water flowed into the pipes, but they forgot the shower doors. If we take a shower, we flood the bathroom! Water from the sink leaks into the vanity drawers. Cabinets had to be emptied again, so that electricians could separate wires between the overhead and the mirror light, which went on and off simultaneously.

In the meantime, new crews of craftsmen traipse in and out, drilling, dry walling, painting, plastering and pounding in an attempt to fix everything that was done wrong the first time around.

Our unfinished front terrace, built over the garage, has flooded, the outside stairs go nowhere near our door, and the retaining wall has not been started. Some walls slant; doors don’t close. Tile had to be ripped out to install electrical wiring. A workman chipped the sink mirror that had been moved umpteen times to access the wall for repairs. Fortunately, Gerald noticed the break when the new project manager was on site, so he reordered a mirror, along with shower stalls, remote controls and broken window replacements.

On a positive note, workers systematically remove shoes at the door and clean their work area. Naturlich, tidiness is a Swiss trademark. However, they still leave behind a trail of drywall dust, sanding dust, and other airborne particles.

Though gains have been made to the interior, our exterior premises should post warnings — attention toxic debris, danger falling rocks, beware avalanche risk.

And who ever heard of a new home with “provisional utilities?” (including heating and plumbing). Our room temperature fluctuates anywhere between 45 and 90 degrees.

provisional mailboxes

We also have a “temporary” mailbox - a leaky, tin box stuck on a post that vehicles keep hitting.

And what exactly is our new address?

We have an alphabet soup house identification. Originally, our building was designated number 1. Numbers 2 and 3 were attributed to the buildings below us. Then architects switched the timetable constructing our home last changing our building from number 1 to 3.

To complicate matters, the postal service labeled our complex as “3" to identify the street number. To distinguish the nine family dwellings, we became 3a, 3b, 3c… d, e, f, g, h, and i. After several calls, the Swiss national phone service discovered, “Aha! Your optic fiber line was connected to the 3 i, instead of 3 c.”

To add to the mess, it has rained for 40 days and 40 nights.

We are considering moving again.

Noah’s ark here we come!

a view from our neighborhood

Calamity House Move with COVID and a Fractured Sacrum

Everyone has a crazy moving house story to share, but can you top this?Changing a domicile, never easy in the best circumstances, becomes an even greater challenge when unforeseen complications arise.

Due to an accident, illness and life-coming-at-you, our long awaited relocation became extremely difficult.

The first snafu arose when our moving company insisted they had only one day available to move us in 2023. Even if the house wasn’t ready by mid October, who are we to argue? We rescheduled 8 previous moving dates. No wonder he wants us out of his storage space. We can’t complain. For two and a half years our mover even stored our car during holidays and shuttled us from the airport.

As the move-in date approached, our anxiety increased. To de-stress, a few days before moving day, I walked our usual trail next to our Airbnb. The path wound through the woods, then down a steep slope to the train track. Ba-da boom! Whoosh! My feet slipped out from under me; I landed smack on my tailbone, walking sticks flying.

Luckily, I had my phone, so I called Gerald for help. Poor guy! How many times has he rescued me?

After my first misadventure, he fished me out of a river! My former college teammate, who played ball with me in Germany, always introduced me as, “My friend, who jumped off the cliff with me in France.” (Referring to our career ending car accident cascading off a bridge over the La Meuse outside of Verdun.)

Now I can add skidding down a mountainside to my escapades.

After I picked loose gravel out of my shoulder and forearm, I limped down the mountainside whimpering. When the trailed leveled out by the track, I staggered alongside the little red, two-car train that shuttles commuters up and down the mountain.

In a flashback, I relived my first spinal injury, which my best friend and coach surmised was the onset of my back problems.

“I remember we were playing pick up ball. You stepped in front of a linebacker to take the charge,” Phil recounted, “and hit the court so hard, I heard the crack.”

“`I prayed stay down Pat, stay down,`” he said, “but you popped right back up like one of those inflatable clown, punching bags.”

Does my body have PSTD? Reverberations of the past injury shot through my spine.

At the trail head, Gerald helped me to the car insisting we rush to the emergency room. I refused. I have been in one too many hospitals one too many times.

“Let me call Nic,” I pleaded, crawling in the backseat and curling into the fetal position.

Back at our Airbnb, Gerald texted our son at his chiropractic office in Warwick, England. Nic called back and after I described my fall and the location of pain, he tried to reassure me, “ I can’t diagnose you over the phone. Hopefully it is just bruised. You can wait a day or so to see if the pain worsens; if it’s broken, the treatment is the same. It just takes longer to heal.”

I laid on an ice pack, then took a warm shower while Gerald rushed out to find a donut pillow for me to sit on like Nic suggested.

The next day, feeling worse for the wear, I finagled an urgent appointment with my doctor at a hospital nearby. This sport and rehabilitation specialist, aware of my history, was already treating me for chronic knee and back problems. She checked everything thoroughly and diagnosed, “Contusion et fissure du sacrum.”

As if my accident wasn’t enough was to deal with, Gerald was battling a cough, sore throat, headache and fatigue. We called our daughter for advice.

“I am pediatrician. I treat kids, not geriatrics,” she said and chuckled. “I’d recommend that you start by taking a home Covid test.”

Bingo. Positive. Gerald slept, coughed and moaned for the next three days. Though I tested negative, I plowed ahead with an ever increasingly sore throat, burning trachea, inflamed sinuses and tightness in my chest. Two days later, feeling worse, I retested for Covid. Positive. Again. (And the second time around was worse than the first!)

On moving day, I couldn’t get out of bed, so Gerald headed to the house solo to help the movers figure out where to put stuff.

Moral of this story: in crisis call adult kids for reassurance, regardless of their profession, hearing their voice will give you a lift. And never move a house under the influence of Covid especially with a busted butt!

Are We Home Yet? House Building Saga

Over the decades, I adjusted to dozens of relocations between three foreign countries. From a cot in a German teammate’s apartment, to a studio flat in Paris, to a rustic chalet in Switzerland, “Where Ever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home.)”

Once driven by adventure and dreams of youth, what happened to that gutsy girl?

Today, as a jaded sixty-something wreck of a woman with a busted spine, bad knees, and a wonky brain from one too many accidents, I wonder have I made one too many moves?

What were my husband and I thinking when we decided to reinvent our lives in retirement by building a new abode above the clouds in Switzerland?

After nearly three years of waiting, our triplex in the Jura Mountains remains under construction. Did we sign bogus contracts?

Eight prescheduled moving dates have come and gone since we prepared for our first move in June 2022. Then we were told October, then December, next January 2023. Oh surely by March. How about end of June? When this did not happen the boss himself stated that we could move September 28, but… oops it’s October, already.

Like the other eight families, our rentals ran out. Our Heidi Hut expired in June. When we moved out, our contractors promised, “Mais oui! Your triplex will be finished by September.”

So in July, we escaped to the US for summer vacation, where we were welcomed with open arms. Merci mille fois chère famille.

Our holiday was sublime, until mid September. Then our European neighbors-to-be sharing our building set up a zoom video call revealing our condo’s interior. Nothing was done inside since we left 3 months earlier. The only fixture in the shell of our house was a bathtub, now filled with worker’s cigarette stubs, empty bottles and other debris.

Our simplest, logical solution would be to stay stateside. Yet, after four decades of loyal marriage to a crazy American, ze lovable Frenchman, retains “foreigner” status. As usual, Gerald received a citation to leave the US territory within a week.

Kicked out of the US after his 3 month limit, we flew back in Switzerland with nowhere to go. We scrambled to find an Airbnb in Arzier, the nearest village from the house, and harassed the sub contractors daily.

We swore we’d never ever build a home in France, Italy, Spain or any other European country.

But Switzerland.

Ah Switzerland, a country with an impeccable reputation for organization, dependability and professionalism, what could go wrong?

Everything!

Builders undercut us on every corner trying to save money at our expense. The windows were too small to meet Swiss building requirements. The garage door was smaller than the frame. Insulation was half of what the code required. Plumbing in one bathroom was built outside the walls. The stairs were crooked. And the retaining wall to prevent the mountain from tumbling down on us hasn’t been started.

It could be worse. The Greek countryside is dotted with half-finished house frames without windows, doors, walls.

We learned valuable lessons. Never sell your old house before you have another ready-made home available. Think twice about relocating in your mid 60s. The wisest move — a stroll around your present dwelling. Head out the front door and then in the back entry. Voila! No stress. No drama. Home sweet home again.

Promises! Promises! A move-in date has been scheduled for next week. Stay tuned. But don’t hold your breath!