Sunday                                       I part way finished this the other day and set it aside.
29 September 2013                Now I am finishing the piece and including it out of sequence.

The days are indeed strange,

I'm surrounded by people who do very little in the manner that I'm used to

Strange day today. Last night at 2 in the morning I was finally given some blood pressure medicine as a stopgap to bring my ranging blood pressure back under control. An hour later the nurse came in to check my blood pressure had dropped significantly. I went to sleep finally believing that possibly the people in charge of the medical aspect of my care might finally beginning to understand where I come from and what I've been doing before I got here. Strange concept to be under nursing care for so long and find out the those in charge of my medical aspect are just now beginning to get a complete picture of me.


I woke this morning to the nurse calling my name and laughingly saying that she had been there for quite some time trying to get me to wake up. In all fairness anymore I mostly sleep with my iPad set to Pandora radio and a pair of in earbud headphones plugged in so I don't have to hear my next-door neighbor's television all night long. Sometimes he turns off, sometimes he doesn't. The choice of movies that are offered through the small hours of the morning are nothing that anyone would want to listen to through the doorway all night long. Plus he likes to play his television with the volume somewhat loud, and he really doesn't care what anybody else thinks.


So the nurse was calling my name with her hands full of my morning medications. Meanwhile one of the CENAs had already been in my room and delivered my breakfast tray. The tray was placed where I had formally had my water supply in my nearly full urinal, as well is my glasses. The nurse found 2 small edges upon which to sit down her handfuls of morning medications and then bustled out the door quickly saying that she would be right back with more medications. Meanwhile I turn off the music, unplugged and recoil the headphones and begin to search for where my glasses have been moved to. I don't see that well without my glasses. Small details disappear into nothing I cannot even see the hands or the numbers on the clock across the room. I gingerly pat around the breakfast tray and on it trying to locate my glasses. I stop as I do not want to inadvertently knock them on the floor or scratch them.


I can be patient. After all I was so poor of vision as a child I learned easily to be patient because I had grown up seeing that eventually the details come forward out of the fog. All I had to do was look a little harder or a little stronger. I used to climb trees all the time but I could never see the branches until I was almost on top of them. But I knew if I started moving up the trunk of a tree that the branches would appear in just the right place for me.


Several minutes later when the nurse re-arrived she was surprised that I hadn't started eating breakfast. I explained to her that somewhere on the tray tables bearing most of the things I need, some bright CENA had replaced my glasses, which were right exactly where my breakfast tray was and I had no idea where they were. The nurse went right into problem-solving mode, which is a standard way of interpreting everything by nearly everybody. Here the content of what somebody says then goes right into solving the problem. Just like school and all the tests we've ever had, the approved way of conducting oneself in school has been completely adapted to running ones life even if it makes the things we do to others favorable in one mannor but not helpful in other ways for someone else.


How sad.


I'm glad that the nurse helpedto find my glasses, but judging from her following comments she paid very little attention to what I was saying about having poor vision. Apparently she doesn't realize how much eyeglasses give me proper version, or maybe that doesn't mean that much to her. I know there are people who need glasses very little, that is not me. Imagine smearing vaseline on a pair off glasses, then try to see through them, thatisa measure of how well I see without corrective lenses. This is the very same excercize that is used to help those being trained in how to work with elder paitients.


I often find through almost every dealing that I have with other people that they tend to first interpret what I say as if they were looking for the correct answer, constantly, and never pay much attention at all to the content of feelings or the measure of misunderstanding that is being spoken about. Even on those occasions when I might try and bring them back around to the feeling content, they tend to be more interested in the materialism of stuff and things. This often centers around denying my input, saying that it would be against the rules, that they could loose their job. To me this seems so narrow minded, when the human mind can see things in a multiple of different ways simultaneously - both right brain and left brain utilization. It seems that we are so thoroughly acculturated by the effects of our early schooling in the way most everybody conducts themselves around us, to find yourself forever lost in a very foreign forest of materialism.


To me a large part of what I was stating in those first comments in the morning were more about the fact that I am in a position where I cannot control much of anything, including my neighbor's very difficult personal behaviors and how they affect everyone around him and that he is in no way considerate of anybody else's understanding our ideas. I was also trying to remark incredulously as to how the unknown CENA that morning was more concerned about depositing her load of my breakfast and getting onto the next in her series of tasks that she could move my glasses with impunity and not even spend a few moments to make sure I was awake to know where my glasses were and that the breakfast had been served. An obvious indication that she was more interested in finishing her chores above all else.


Often the CENAs will call good morning to me and I will wake up and clear the space for them, if I have not been awakened already. But it was strange to have a CENA assigned to me today who was more interested in getting the next part of her workload done to the point where something that I was expected to utilize with full waking consciousness, was delivered but no effort was made to make sure that I would be actually utilizing it in the realm in which I was expected to participate. That's awful cold.


I did get another dose of the new medication and another quick check of my blood-pressure. I do feel a little more safer in this place.


More later.