I'm a Deaf vagabond currently living on Vancouver Island. Bicycles dominate my life, but I also make time for climbing, hiking, camping, and cats. And if I have time left over after all that, I write about it.
Many of my posts are inspired by conversations I have with Yann. He’s my one-man test audience. Whenever a horrified look spreads across his face, I think, “Ooh, this is definitely blog-worthy.”
My first thought was that Yann had grown impatient of me treating the bedroom as a makeshift office, and had shut off the light as a way to announce bedtime. This wasn’t rational as it’s not his style. If anything, it’s something I would do.
The glow from my notebook was enough for me to see that Yann wasn’t standing at the bedroom door as expected. I jump to conclusions poorly: the wind had knocked out the power, blacking out our building.
Yann was brushing the snow off our car when a passerby stopped to wish him good luck with backing the car out of its spot. When Yann responded, “I’m not worried,” the man caught Yann’s Quebecois accent, and changed his mind, “You’ll be fine! You’ll be just fine!”
I was not there for the interaction, so this is based on a true story. I’m blogging for two now! I’ve suggested that Yann start a blog, but he insisted that people should not make their presence felt on the internet if they have nothing unique to add. However, I have successfully convinced a friend–who I first got to know through the early 2000s blogging platform, LiveJournal–to resurrect her blog.
The other day, someone came into the bike shop for a hub repack. This is when we remove the axle and replace the bearings (either loose or sealed). What are loose or sealed bearings, you might be wondering?
It doesn’t matter.
As the guy handed over his wheel to Yann, he mumbled something about how he would have done it himself. Yann was technically still on his break, so the job was passed on to me.
Before I got my chest piece done, I needed to get rid of two moles from my chest. Unlike moles, you can tattoo over scars as long as they’ve fully healed.
One scar is inside the wing while the other is next to the tip of the other wing.
It’s not uncommon to get moles removed for non-cosmetic reasons, so I did not need to justify my superficial reasoning. I can’t remember whether the doctor I ended up seeing was a specialist that required a referral from another doctor. It happened so long ago, but based on how the procedure went, the only thing this doctor specialized in was being presumptuous. Obviously, I don’t remember his name but for the sake of this story, let’s call him Dr. Clown.
After telling Dr. Clown what I needed, he gestured for me to take my shirt off and lie on the examination table. He cleaned the skin and then snipped the two moles off with surgical scissors. He finished the job by slapping a single adhesive bandage over the wounds, which meant the sticky parts were over the wounds instead of the square of gauze. This was a real head-scratcher, but I had gotten what I wanted. I was in and out of his office in less than ten minutes. Twenty years I’ve had these moles on my chest, and they were now in the medical waste bin in Dr. Clown’s office. Or perhaps he tacked them to his corkboard? He didn’t seem to be much of a stickler when it came to following medical protocol.
I am not giving the condensed version of this story: at no point did Dr. Clown explain the procedure and what to expect. He gave no aftercare instructions. It was uncomfortably abrupt.
Hearing people limiting their interaction with me is nothing out of the ordinary. When it comes to medical procedures, though, skimping on the details is flat out negligence.
The other day, Yann directed me to look to the left. He’s so bossy sometimes, trying to control my facial movements. Then, he informed me that I had a spot of blood in my eye. I love receiving this kind of information! It does not freak me out at all!
“It’s not blood, my right eye is just two different colours,” I said defensively.
Irked by my reaction, he took a picture of my eye as proof: it really was a 3mm spot of blood in the white of the eye. My lower eyelid had been twitching all day, which was annoying, but not alarming. But, the photo Yann had taken was enough to conjure the worrywart in me.
I told Yann that he had to play Web MD. No way was I going to subject myself to more gory eye photos! According to Dr. Internet via Yann, it was a subconjunctival hemorrhage. Mostly harmless, but on occasion turns out to be the spider eggs that have just hatched from inside the eyeball. Furthermore, the older I get, the more I can look forward to these spontaneous burst vessels.
This wasn’t a piece of fun new information to learn about myself.
At 11:59pm on December 31st, I stood behind Yann as he washed the dishes. I had Enfoiré in my arms and an eye on the range display, waiting for 12:00 to pop up. At midnight, I yelled Happy New Year at the back of Yann’s head.
The scene an hour earlier had been even grimmer: I was hunched over on the couch, trying to comb the mats out of my toque’s pompom, which had shrunk in the washer. (The entire thing shrunk, actually. I aimlessly restored a pompom on a now too-small toque. I should have known better than to put a toque in a washer. Fuck.)
4 out of 5 stars. It started out really cold and concluded on a slightly chilly note. I took one star away because I would not relive it. Moving across Canada by car with the cats in the backseat once was good enough.
