Over It By Next Week

I almost hesitate to bring up the whole birthday/holiday/city festival weekend because I don't want to complain. And it's not even that there's much to complain about but still a few things are sticking in my craw.

Friday was B's birthday and we'd planned a couple months ago that if the weather was good we'd celebrate it the next day at the city festival. Go to the beer tent that was located at the end of our block, hang out with friends, have some beer and celebrate. My MIL informed us early last week that she and Gerd didn't want to go to the beer tent because it's too loud. M'kay. You may beg off.

We'd spoken with our friend, Kirsten, and she was going to be at the city festival on Saturday and we said that we'd meet up with her there. But with B there's always the caveat that if he's not feeling well, he can't go out. Sitting upright can be hard for him - it's just part of his physiology. Kirsten told us on Friday that we should call her daughter, Freya, on Saturday afternoon to coordinate meeting up with them - time and location and all that.

On Saturday B was about 75% in favor of going out. He wasn't feeling the greatest and it would be his first time outside since November so there was the possibility that he wouldn't be able to sit up and go in his wheelchair for more than maybe a half hour or so. Then my MIL and Gerd informed us that they were meeting friends around 4:30pm. They could help me get B into his wheelchair but if after an hour B had to go home because he couldn't sit up any longer, he'd be shit-out-of-luck. I appreciate their help but this time they were being...shall I say...a bit stingy with it - but that's a subject for another day. B decided that he wasn't feeling good enough to take the chance that he'd be stuck in his wheelchair without any available help to get him back out of it so he decided not to go out at all. We talked with Kirsten and Freya around 4:30 and I said I'd come up the street to meet with them.

It was nice to see them and I had a couple fast beers on an empty stomach with them before they had to leave to get back home to take care of their dogs. I walked around the festival for another thirty minutes and then went back home where I availed myself of the bathroom and promptly threw up the liter of beer I'd slugged down.

I was telling B about my visit with Kirsten and what the fair was like and B was saying that he was planning on getting out on Sunday. About then Kirsten called - drunk, I'm sure because she was fairly lit when I saw her an hour before - and got all up in B's grill about him not going out and how he was being lazy and he couldn't isolate himself from people and she was so mad at him. On and on about how she was going to insist that he get out more and he needed to get off his ass (the perfect thing to say to a quadriplegic). She yapped on for fifteen minutes and B couldn't get a word in edgewise. Then Kirsten hung up and B was furious. He seldom gets angry, even more seldom ever gets angry at Kirsten but now he was chapped something fierce. He didn't say much except to tell me he didn't know if he wanted to ever speak to her again but I know he was ringing the bell on the B-is-pissed scale.

As for me I was still rather drunk myself so I didn't say a lot at the time but thinking back on it...well, I'm not so much angry at Kirsten because I think she was shooting her mouth off because she was half plowed but I'm disappointed. Disappointed and irked. Does she think that B stays inside because he likes it? Is she under the impression that he looks at one room for six months straight because he digs the color of the walls? He's a quadriplegic. And while that doesn't limit the activity of some quads, it does for him. Every quadriplegic responds differently to his/her injury. B doesn't regulate his body temperature well so he can't go out if it's too hot and really can't handle any cold. His breathing is compromised and sitting upright makes it worse. We don't even mention the increased chance of him getting a pressure sore from possibly sitting on a fold in his clothes. B's older now and every year it's harder for his body, which is already compromised, to bounce back from any traumas. He's had a spinal cord injury for twenty-five years now, which is a fairly long time as far as that goes, and why has he had relatively few physical traumas in that time? Because he doesn't like to push his body past what he believes he can handle. What does that have to be turned into him being afraid and isolating himself?

B's sort of over Kirsten's phone call but he can be stubborn about such things. He won't hold a grudge but he won't seek out calling her either unless I talk him into it. And we did go out the next day. My MIL and Gerd came over and we all went to a cafe that was just at the edge of where the festival was located and it was nice. Still there was that stingy-with-the-help vibe from my MIL that I can't put my finger on.

But that's a bitch for another day.