This is nice. I hazard to guess that spring might be here, but I know from living in this country for many years that it is never a sure thing with this spring thing! We are awaiting the crow snows and spring storms. There is no hoar frost to report but on Sept. 12-13 there will be a strong wind. When we used to go grow Polish canola it was very bad for flying out of the swath and would blow across the field. I started to keep track of the windy days when I wrote down the hoar frost. The winds also follow a pattern. If you don't believe me, write it down, keep track.
On the home front, I am very glad to be out of the hospital. I had pneumonia and was coughing bad enough that I was blacking out. While it was a little scary for me I think it was a lot scarier for my wife Beverly. I got to experience the ride from Maidstone Hospital to Lloydminster Hospital in an ambulance. I was happy for the service, but the ambulance could have had air bag suspension. I never realized how many bumps there are on Highway 16.
It is nice to be home with the familiar surroundings. I was in captivity for five days and then they kicked me out because they needed my bed. That was fine with me! I won't miss the needles to draw blood, but that is really a minor consequence. They were taking blood two or three times a day. I will not miss that. I will also not miss the IV in my hand. I don't miss the poke in the finger three or four times a day. I was also getting an insulin needle four or five times a day as the doctor, I think, was experimenting with the rate. I told them when I went in, how much it took to keep my sugars in line, but they wouldn't believe me. They cut the rate then would do the poke test. It would be high, so soon they were back giving me some Humulin R to balance it down. Finally in the end they were giving me the same as I was doing at home and the sugars were fine.
The nursing staff could not have been nicer or treated me better. I had three young male nurses from India as well as some female nurses. They were all great. The one young guy I called George, because I could not pronounce his name, was a good visitor. He drew me a map of India where he came from. He told me that his grandparents were farmers and they grew palm oil trees, but now the large estates had bought up the small farms. The palm oil trees are gone. The cash crop now is rubber trees and the large estates have rows and rows of rubber trees. Between the trees they grow vegetables. There are two growing seasons a year. This is all hand labour and hundreds of people work there. I find that extremely interesting.
A lot of people complain about hospital food. My experience is that the food was, for the most part, really good. I was not impressed with breakfast as I got a small cup of porridge, a hard boiled egg and piece of toast. Only a townie would consider that breakfast!
On a hill side just south of Norman Churn's place is a gravesite where my great-grandfather Johannas Anderson and my grandfather's brother Johann are buried. They came to Canada in 1906 and the young fella, my grandfather's brother, was only 16. He got pneumonia and died. The great-grandfather got sick and he also died. He was in his 60s. This was before there were any cemeteries and they are buried up the hill from the cabin where my grandfather's other brother Gus Nordstrom was homesteading. There were four brothers and a father. All had different last names but that's another story. The hole where Gus Nordstrom's cabin was is still in the hill. The cabin was built half in the hill facing south, which was the custom then. That type of dwelling was much warmer that a wood frame house out on the bald prairie. The story is in the Waseca History Book. My Aunt Signe insisted that we put a marker up on the hill to mark the graves and with Norman's permission we did. I was always going to go back there, but I never have. Busy, busy, busy over nothing I guess.
I started to tell the story of my great-grandfather and my grandfather's brother to make the point that if not for modern medicine, I would be dead. I have had pneumonia four times in my life now and modern medicine has kept me alive. If this had been 1906 I would be on a hillside under the ground just like my relatives. They were not as fortunate as me to be born when there was penicillin and a multitude of other drugs. When you think back to what others had to deal with, I am grateful about my lot in life and my thanks goes to the Big Guy for looking out for me.
Joke of the week: How do you make a 100-year-old woman crumple up paper and use the F-bomb word? Let another old woman yell "BINGO!"
Victor Hult
