Woke up yesterday to read about cutbacks for Daycare and seniors The folks they figure who won’t speak up. We’ve GOT to let them know they can’t do this stuff.Let’s keep the whole world from becoming just one vast corporation, eh? Or at least postpone it awhile.
Below is a song to a familiar tuen – the OTHER song from Singing In The Rain – Remember, ‘All I Do The Whole Night Through Is Dream Of You!? Debbie Reynolds and her troop of showgirls dressed up as 1920’s flappers doing the black bottom. If you don’t remember it – rent it and sing this:

Tune: All I Do The Whole Night Through
All they do the whole day through is privatize
Hospitals, schools, hydro too – privatize
Public trust, used to mean
We the people ran the scene
Now public’s gone private
All across this lannnnd
The boys who make the big bucks need
Always more dough
They say that privates, ’so naive’
and ‘wasteful, you know’
They’ll help us out, taking over
Anything to land in clover
All they need to do the deed
Is SILENCE from us!

Woke up to 2015 friends this morning but it’s early days yet. That number seems to be feeding off itself. Funny, I don’t feel any different. And how else could I end up with a considerable number of friends in India and other far off places? Sitting down to eat breakfast on my tv trray by the stove and, no doubt due to the nine hardcovers I had also piled on the tray along with a bowl and plate of breakfast, a bottle of kaopetak, pencils, scissors and unopened mail, the thing collapsed. it isn’t possible to have a little table that doesn’t fold up here. I’ve tried and periodically whatever I’ve installed needs to be gotten out of the way. So I put up with periodica collapses, sending the bowl of breakfast food across the room as it hits the floor, 2 glasses, (last night’s and this mornings) rolling under the stove (on which I have a stapler and another glass – I keep saying I’ll tidy up and then some great idea hits me and I move sidewise to the computer (at which I’m supposed to be wearing special computer glasses which I have tied to my lamp – eventually I’ll have 3 pair of glasses, two tied firmly to the nearest light source – talk about opportunities to lose things!) anyway, all this to say I am midway to kicked off Facebook. Yesterday I got three reprimands for adding friends too fast, yet they throw them at me. ‘Add friend! Add friend!’ they beg but woe betide me if I do. Sunday . I keep hoping my new friends don’t go out robbing banks or worse. You can never tell what your close dear personal intimate 2015 friends may take it into their heads to do next. I try to set aside a little time to check them out now. What are their interests? Are they really not this known poseur attempting to pass himself off? I unfriended a known poseur the other day and right away she was back in line, trying to get friended again. When the person has only one or two friends (for good reason), and you unfriend them, they notice right away. Why am I doing this? An interest in popular culture, I guess. To experience the full range of what it means to be Facebooked, I think you have to play their game of 5000 and off. Many have and seem to bear grudges. I don’t. Midway to explusion will be 2500 which I should hit sometime around Easter. The more friends you have, the more you get. It’s one of those rolling down hill kind of things. Names turn up whom I do not know, with whom I share something like 268 mutual friends. But maybe, in the back of my mind, I think that if war broke out, you would only need to yell between shootings that, ‘You are one of my Facebook FRIENDS! Check it out!’ and, given laptops in the trenches, the firing could cease. For sure they are not my enemies.

In the middle of my life, I found I was CELIAC, Thank heavens. What I’d been was sick which got worse and worse. I’d be bumbling along in my life and WHAMO! I’d get pains like lightning hit my stomach. Rolling around on the bathroom floor. They would last about a day, weak for a week after.
Every fall in the hospital for two weeks, Great family doctor setting aside an afternoon appointment nearly daily during the bad times. It was official. I was a sickie.
After a lot of hoo-hah, gastrontologists at the hospital said I had Crohn’s Disease. Except I wasn’t skinny like all the other Chronnies. Lots of times I could digest anything and then, WHAMO!
I’d go to Crohn’s clinic and get sidelong looks as though I was a doctor groupie. The gastro’s would ask me if my marriage was okay and was I under stress? Well, yeah, when I’m trying to get some work done but I get this stomach pain and the backdoor trots out of the blue. Did some part of me secretly WANT to be sick but wasn’t letting on?
Finally, after the usual two weeks in the hospital, my family doctor, Nick Cristoveanu, volunteered to let me abandon the clinic and take over looking after the WHAMO’S himself. Buoyed by his confidence in me and desperate for answers, I went to the net and began to research.
Bingo! One of the Crohns sites I was on suggested that Crohns and Celiac Disease, whatever that was, were often linked. It meant not eating wheat-oats-barley-rye and cutting out milk. It meant you had to read the labels on anything you ate that hadn’t come out of the ground, from a tree or an animal.
Well all rightie then. I cut all that stuff out immediately, then sat and waited for the WHAMO! as it was fall and I had my little bag ready for the hospital. But nothing happened. The pain didn’t come along to greet me,( as the raindrops song in the Sundance movie says the blues do). Week after week, and no pain, except a couple sharp jabs once following a bakery cookie mistake.
I went to Nick Cristoveanu with my new diet. “Isn’t it hard to follow?” he asked.
“When I’m pain free? I’d do anything to keep the pain away.”
“Early days yet,” he said, but I could see he had his fingers crossed. Still all the gastros at the clinic would’ve demanded I get back on the meds, which I’d stopped taking. In fact I wasn’t on anything at all. Nick supported whatever I thought I had to do. He had noticed I wasn’t coming in sobbing in the afternoons anymore.
There was a short time out when I decided I probably didn’t have Crohns at all and ate some popcorn which resulted in a blocked bowel and an ostmy. “The gastros are bald,” I told him when got out. “Their hair is falling out because they haven’t got any cures for the pain.”
“They’re not ALL bald,” he said. “Your diet’s really working?”
“No pain,” I said. “By now it’s been nearly three years.”
He said he should’ve thought of it himself and I said it was his believing my pain was real and supporting me that gave me the courage to do the research and besides, NONE OF THE GASTROS EVER SUGGESTED IT MIGHT BE DIET!
The clincher had been overhearing a head gastro talking to a bunch of medical students out in the hall when they were doing rounds. The ward was filled with middle-aged women patients, whom he suggested were ‘bed blockers,’ women with other than medical problems who enjoyed being the centre of attention in the hospital, as though we didn’t have rich full lives and families to get back to.
I never wanted to leave a place so badly in all my life. I wished them all bald and I knew I’d do anything to keep from going back in. Even live the rest of my life without wheat-oats-rye and barley, read every word in every tiny label on anything before I bought it. Even eat the laughable rice flour bread still touted to Celiacs as ‘just as good as wheat.’ It isn’t. I keep expecting to see ‘gravel’ listed as an ingredient.
So here I am, seven years into this thing and going strong. Yeah, you have to fight off all the fabulous Celiac desserts made by those who feel sorry for poor deprived us: Squishy lemon squares with flaky pie crust base, peanut butter squares with Belgian chocolate tops, the long, long list of replacement treats.
If they can make sweets this good, why can’t they make real bread? But with breakthrough diagnosis’s on every hand, Celiac products are going mainstream so it won’t be long before hot buttered toast that actually crunches, is a reality. (It doesn’t exist, not where I am in Canada, anyway. There’s some that slithers…)
At any rate, thank heavens for the net and all the generous people who share their stories as honestly as I am doing now.

If you are a lighthearted fiction author, especially Chick Lit or a lover of Jane Austen, please let me know about your work. I am also interested in ideas and history. Not keen on the Drats & the Boo Hoos. Taking the risk of living large, stepping out, encountering the possibilities, learning and growing, (whether we want to or not), all that sort of thing welcome here.

I’m growing sick of the vampire as reading material. Plus the werewolves, witches and other fantasy folk who think erotica is an important plot point. I’ll do my own fooling around, thank you, which means I don’t need anyone else’s vicarious experience, all of which is simply good fodder for the Liar’s Club.
I’m a retired bookseller after about 40 years in the out of print book business. I’m running out of good books. Right now my system is to find out what the book clubs are reading – and read the opposite. If a book is award winning and recommended, I’m not interested. But I’m going through genres too fast. Like mysteries, which used to be fine, prior to the bloody serial killer necessity or the determined but preposterous cozies.
I want some evidence that the author has a sense of 1) humour, which rules out the devout catholic soccer mom series, a woman who runs around killing demons, disguised as the paperboy, the mailman, the furnace repairperson. As a metaphor, this means anyone who annoys her or gets in her way. You just hope no one takes this dumb writing seriously.
I’m looking for some real life connection, 2) a bit of memoir, disguised as fiction. Almost ‘how to. Chick Lit often fills the bill 3) minus erotica. We make the most important decisions of our lives at the time we are least equipped; Career, Marriage, Children, Education, in our mid-twenties. I’m happy to explore these
I’ve read through Austenania, glad that it has become a genre in its own right but after Georgette Heyer and all the Jane As Detective and Personal Encounters With Jane, where do you go? I’ve read the highly under-rated Georgette Heyers, all 60. Why aren’t modern authors as prolific?, 4) gripping plot, peaceful conclusion.
The supernatural’s okay when it doesn’t take itself too seriously like the odd Michelle Rowan. Christopher Moore is actually profound. But there’s not enough ‘light paranormal romps,’ around. There’s mainstream stuff with Marian Kane, Susan Isaacs, Penny Vencenzi, Janet Evanovich and the wonderful woman who wrote, ‘Shut Up & Wear Beige. Also Lee Child. Thank heavens most of them write at length and none have gone tits up after less than ten books, except for Wendy Holden whose bitterness about the rich cancels out her last two. (C’mon, Wendy, get a perspective already).
I’ve still got a bit of influence on readers. Tell me someoneI’d enjoy reading who doesn’t have a ‘smiling through tears,’ sensibility for pete sakes and sans religion please. No warm generational stories where the one wise character makes you want to smack her. No totally unbelievable predictable romances. Having said that: TELL ME WHAT TO READ??

I am looking forward to the future when all the facebook mysteries, the tales of misplaced correspondence, the Kicked-Off-Due-To-5 Thousand-Friends, all the separations due to someone’s worlds of communication being shattered into too many thousands of splintered ‘hellos,’ will someday be told.
The old days of a small collective seem to have twittered away. Or maybe they can be regained, once the heavy weight of friendship is off our backs. I chose to do mine in small armies, friending everyone of a certain name till a small army grew up that I thought of fondly, protectively as a force. How startling to have proof that the name you thought was yours alone, belongs to a great number of individuals with tastes and desires greatly different from your own but equally fierce possessors of the same name.
Whatta small psychological suggestion this facebook is! All these strangers, strangers still but lulled into unawareness of that fact. All the nonexisting gifts being given, nonstatus being attained, bits of self being revealed.
Who has yet to explain the facebook phenomena and its social impact? What has it done to our worlds? And those outside, how truly outside they seem; uncomprehending, plodding along their same pathways, encountering all the usual pathos and pain of the real world while facebookers seem to have some sort of immunity in these psychological kingdoms where they are small gods surrounded by all the other small gods who went out and got their 5 thousands.
What IS it, this thing only made possible through contemporary electronics? Does it have any meaning at all? How far out of the real world does it push us? How much real time does it take?
There we swim, side by side, those convinced that venturing on to the computer in any form will instantly compromise their identities; that they will be stolen and used around the world while around them swim those to whom the computer is their own warm pool. And with these, the possessors of the ‘5-Thousand-And-Off-Friend’s, feeling they are queen or king of some small, nonexisting kingdoms to which they now invite their ‘fans.’
Is it all a vast psychological experiment by some unrevealed university department? What kind of effect will it have on the generations who tumbled in? Is it over yet? Is Google Buzz the replacement, our promised land? Will this yet unexplained phenomena take over time and mind , consuming years down the road? Or has it linked the whole world up, giving me commonality with those who tweet to tell me we have 365 ‘friends’ in common, none of whose names come readily to mind?
Have I been too busy online to keep up with those I love in the real world?

http://rosedeshaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/cut-12.wmv

Note- This was about 2 years ago. I am presently bagless but still very much amused and laugh when I think of how it went:

The funniest thing that ever happened to me, to date, turned out to be something no one wanted to talk about.  I had absolutely no idea what the solution to a bowel blockage was, till I woke up in the hospital to find there was an addition to my regular body.  

On my stomach was a little bag that surrounded a new hole in my midsection. And the hole, well, let’s just say they’d rearranged where the poop comes out.  Well that was convenient.

But having it out there where I could see it – ? Wasn’t that somewhat obsessive? I’d always thought I gave the dog the wrong idea, picking up after him and then carrying the little bag home, as though it were some kind of special trophy. Now here I was, toting mine around all the time.  

Nobody had ever mentioned that such a thing could happen. I found it hilarious – at least until the bag filled up, a nurse came rushing in, grabbed it and WHOOSH! She and I and an Aid were suddenly extremely stinky. Have you ever wanted to crawl out of your skin and get far, far away?

I shared the hilarity I found with several classes of medical students who were rooted past my bed, shortly after the operation. None of their professors seemed to share my point of view.

Actually, ostomy counseling, for the newly-bagged could use a reality check. Living with a temporary anus on your abdomen is no one’s definition of what the hospital booklet called, “a brand new adventure!”

The booklet devoted a page to sexual activity for the bag wearer. It suggested in a vague sort of way that the wearer flick a little cloth daintily over what they call, ‘the appliance,” a sort of out-of-sight, out-of-mind, theory.

“What’s that big fat covered-up lump on your stomach, darling?”

“Oh…nothing.”

Some bags are temporary, only a few months, others permanent. Every bagged individual has a story. The permanent ones could likely publish books on the subject if it weren’t so entirely off limits as regards social conversation.

There are around 100,000 of these operations, called ostomies performed annually in North America, making it a relatively common surgery that no one claims to ever have heard of. The bagged patient is called an ‘ostomate.’

While it isn’t age or gender exclusive, the average age is 68, with 57% of them women. When your bowel gets tied up in knots, narrows or obstructs, medical science uses the bag as an answer.

Within a couple of hours, the diseased part is removed, the distal portion blocked off and the proximal part brought out through an incision in the abdomen to form a temporary anus, called a stoma, located somewhat west of your navel.

Then a doctor slaps a bag on the stoma and melts away. The homecare nurse takes over. “Ostomy bags seem to have designed for someone lying comatose in intensive care,” one of them confided.  Many hospital nurses had never seen someone tootling around to the shops with their new little lump jiggling around their middles.

It turned out my younger brother had one (and of course, never said), several years back. At one point he had to take a liquid laxative, fell asleep and the bag exploded, he warned me.

Something to look forward to. I told him the bag was the solution to fears of being mugged. Instead of self-defence, just open the bag and dribble on the assailant’s feet. In a lineup, he could be picked out by sniff.

By the second week my stoma had herniated, blown up too large to fit the normal range of ostomy supplies. They usually come in two pieces; appliance attached to skin and bag attached to appliance, secured by a belt. “Wow! You’ve got the largest soma I’ve ever seen!” one homecare nurse said, as though I should be phoning Guinness.

My surgeon suggested I keep swimming my three days a week. I was also co-hosting a cablenet show for seniors and going on various gigs with a few women singers. The bags leaked. They fell off.

I swung back and forth from home to the ostomy clinic like a demented yo yo.  Continuing to be vertical, rather than horizontal, seemed to be the problem. The clinic said they could solve any difficulties I might encounter but they didn’t seem to have run across the ones I was having.

Finally the clinician brought me a two piece bag with a paper rather than the standard cloth edging. The new bag seemed to be strong as steel and dried in a few seconds. “But there aren’t any more,” she cautioned as she gave me a single spare in addition to the one she’d affixed to me. “I snuck down to surgery and managed to filch the only appliance in the hospital that would fit a stoma your size. They’ll have to be special ordered and if homecare won’t agree, you’re on your own.”

Having very restrictive insurance and a tiny pension, I had visions of a pair of scissors, a box of sandwich bags and some duct tape. But homecare agreed. They placed the order.

I was marginally better off, though the bag was becoming a major concern. It would inflate with gas to the size and shape of a small chicken, half a loaf of bread, two pounds of hamburger (‘Stop that shoplifter. She’s obviously concealing MERCHANDISE beneath her dress!”)

The booklet warns bag-wearing airline passengers to bring along descriptive paperwork or expect an immediate strip search.

“I feel so conspicuous with this lump in my bathing suit,” I complained one day to a friend at the pool. “I feel like everyone is staring at it.”

“That’s easy to fix,” she said. “Stick a helium-filled balloon under there with it. Then you’ll have TWO lumps and no one will know which one’s the bag.”

“How will that help?” I said

“If anyone asks, tell them you’re wearing a bag. Then say, “Oh, I’m so TIRED of this,” and stick a pin in the balloon. BLAM!  No one will ever ask you again, if you do it publicly enough. Be sure, of course,” she added, “to poke the right lump.”

Needless to say, she is a thoroughly outgoing individual.

Full of gas, at the most inopportune times, the bag makes odd noises. During an interview I was conducting with university students, for the show, my bag began to emit sounds that resembled a duck quacking.

“What’s that?” one of the students asked, looking around though the noise was clearly coming from me.

“I wear an ostomy bag,” I sighed.

“Oh you poor thing! Does it hurt?” she asked, jumping up as though she could do something, meanwhile reassessing her judgment on me from competent professional to needy person.  Now I could look forward to it quacking on the show while I was miked.

The specially-ordered bags were taking awhile. My last paper-rimmed operating room bag wore out. “We told you, there AREN’T any more,” the clinic said. Flailing around wildly they came up with a one-piece putty-like wafer that attached to a foot long transparent bag that reached to my crotch and swayed back and forth as I walked.

One of these lasted a maximum of two days. At the least little thing it slithered off, which fact I discovered, at the studio when it become completely detached and slithered all the way down my stomach. (See why nobody ever talks about this stuff??)

          Fortunately I had nipped into the ladies room to check.  So I grabbed the bin liner from the wastebasket, thanking my lucky stars we were in the middle of a Canadian winter, which meant I was wearing more than one layer of clothes.

          As I started to strip down to the bag, two other hosts came in and identified me by my feet under the stall. They settled down to discuss how the show was going, the cozy way women do in washrooms.

          I was down to my underwear which I took off, rolling it and the bag into the bin liner while chat flew merrily back and forth over the stall door. I made a mental note about wearing more cologne, maybe industrial strength.

          I didn’t manage to get out before they left. Had it finally dawned on them that my non-emergence and our over-the-stall chatting, was peculiar? Or did they get a whiff of me? What had the situation done to my on-camera career?

          Wearing the bag was driving me compulsively towards a better class of lingerie, maybe in defense. That horrible day in the studio, I had on a designer-labeled pink silk camisole with hand-sewn pearls on the bodice.

          While I am everlastingly grateful mine was temporary, rather than  permanent, I constantly wished there was more information around about the whole procedure. To the end it both amused and exasperated me, a wild giddy ride that the most imaginative comedian couldn’t begin to invent.

          My aging strategy has always been to hang on till the 78 million baby boomers hit whatever obstacle I’ve encountered and smooth things out. Designer-quality bags, jazzier brochures., maybe even making them popular in mass culture, citing how convenient they are. (Your very own personal little port-a-pot!)  Yeah, I can hardly wait till they discover ostomies! But with an annual 100,000 going on every year, they’d better get a move on!

Sidebar:

There are Ostomy Support Chapters in all ten provinces and a magazine called, Ostomy Canada, though I never saw a copy. It doesn’t seem the sort of thing you display on the coffee table.

          The United Ostomy Association of Canada (P0 box 825 – 50Charles St E, Toronto On M4Y 2N7), holds annual conferences and also links to the international association whose last conference was held in Portugal. Just imagine wearing your lumpy bathing suit with all those other ostomates. Or maybe nude beaches! And all those bags, swaying merrily on the hairy stomachs across the sand!

          Another link is Friends Of Ostomates Worldwide- Canada, a registered Canadian charity. Astrid Graham, Treasurer. 19 Stonehedge Park, Ottawa K2H 8Z3

I couldn’t believe my luck when I woke up recently from emergency surgery for an intestinal obstruction. There, on my stomach, like a good conduct medal, was a discreet little sort of sandwich bag, which, for the foreseeable future, would be externally collecting my poop.

            Oblong, rounded at the corners and rather loosely secured by what looks like a potato chip bag clip at the bottom, the gift was entirely unexpected.

            Did my doctor realize he was placing such a weapon in the hands of a Raging Granny? Especially one who had been desperately searching for a solution to the violence that often erupts during a peaceful protest, like Bush’s visit to Ottawa?

            With our mandate, to make the world a better place for grandchildren, the Granny presence is deliberate and planned. In hat and shawl, we quietly plant ourselves among the young to help with the larger picture with signs, smiles and songs.

Something topical, like: “I want a mouth, just like the mouth, that Carolyn Parrish has…” to the tune about the girl who married dear old dad. Everyone joins in, laughing, tension drops and then -

Suddenly, maybe ten body lengths away, some misguided youngster pulls up the bandana around his neck and without warning, bops one of the officers standing between us and the way forward.

 I am particularly sympathetic to the opposition, as I have had both husband and son in the peace officer profession. Fortunately neither has had to stand against me or haul me off, so far.

However, bandana face doesn’t see any humanity. Perhaps he has not yet learned to look beyond the uniforms on either side. Ooof! Whack! Without warning the push is underway, escalating, from zero to CHARGE!

            Grannies don’t move fast. Unfortunately, when bashing and bopping begin, we sometimes find ourselves caught in the middle.  

            And the official presence can lose it. The fact that grannies are stirred into the mix doesn’t always seem to register. “If you’re foolish enough to be on the front lines,” the attitude seems to be, “then it’s your outlook. What’re you doing here anyhow?”

            Hoping my benign, elderly presence, my commitment to peace as well as free speech, may cool aggression. Demonstrating that satire is a far more superior and memorable weapon. 

Yes, we take a calculated risk, being present, as hotheads unfortunately prevail on both sides. Any group of protesters, while perhaps containing some looking for a scuffle, also has its share of experienced old lady pacifists

            Well, now, thanks to the hospital’s gift of the odiferous little bag, the quiet, completely non-violent granny profile just took a giant leap forward.

            That baton, the hooves on that horse, the tires on that shiny motorcycle can get incredibly stinky if the wrong woman, the one with the bag, goes down. Statistically, a granny is much more likely to contain an ostomy bag than the average punk. Stomping me could mean a week afterward of scrubbing and scouring.  Am I worth it?

            At the best of times, the bag isn’t all that stable. Mine has taken to coming detached and falling off, not to mention the multiple possibilities of punctures.  It can come in handy in all sorts of situations.

            During the Millennial Women’s March on Parliament Hill, I took a short cut across a small park by myself; not knowing it contained just such a hostile opportunistic individual, awaiting his victim. 

With my handy little bag now, all I have to do, is loosen the flimsy clip and dribble on his feet. No need for a police lineup when he could be picked out, maybe for weeks to come, by a single sniff of his shoes.

My friend the poet Kemeny Babineau wrote this:
  
Fixing the Vote

I’m fixing a hole where the votes get out
And stop majority from forming
So I prorogue
 I’m filling the cracks from coast to coast
That kept majority from forming
So I prorogue

And it really doesn’t matter if I’m wrong
I’m right where I prorogue
I’m right where I prorogue
See the people standing there
who disagree and never win
and wonder why I close every door

I’m ending Canada’s parliament today
and my votes are wondering
Where I did go

And it really doesn’t matter if I’m wrong
I’m right where I prorogue
I’m right where I prorogue
Silly people run around
they bother me and even ask
why I’m closing parliament’s door

I’m taking my time for a number of things
that weren’t important yesterday
so I prorogue

I’m fixing a hole where the votes get out
and stop majority from forming
so I prorogue
so I prorogue
I’m fixing a hole where the votes get out
and stop majority from forming
so I prorogue
——————–