There’s always somebody worse off than you.
It’s articles like these that turn my whinge level down to a dull peep.
LT Ariyawathi is a 49-year old mother of three from Sri Lanka, who has just returned home after five months in Saudi Arabia where she worked as a maid. The couple she worked for decided to punish LT’s complaints of an overly heavy workload by hammering 24 nails into her hands, legs and forehead.
(Found at Nothing To Do With Arbroath)
“They told me they would slit my throat if I screamed, so I had to keep silent and bear it. What else could I do?”
I love horror films for the fact that they’re purely the product of someone’s deranged sense of fantasy, but there’s always that nagging queasy feeling that there are actually people out there who will happily drive red hot nails into someone else’s body for kicks. Horror flicks are just life, regurgitated.
Of course the worst thing about it is that there are thousands of people in an even worse condition than LT, that’s the real melon twister. My ingrown toenail seems suddenly like a blessing by comparison.
The Health Fuckup Executive
I’m very envious of those parents who can just bring their kids for vaccination jabs and be done with it, without worrying about what this stuff is actually doing to their immune systems. My protests seem so absurd, why the hell not give the kid something to ward off deadly diseases if it’s freely available?! How irresponsible am I to even CONSIDER not vaccinating them? The dirty great big needles loom over my babies and I do it anyway. Bar useless influenza jabs, the rest are just not worth gambling on, surely.
Puppychild got her two jabs against a multitude of diseases last month. I got a nasty dose of the flu straight away, then passed it to the Accidental Terrorist who then caught pneumonia. He’s been floored for almost three weeks, hemorrhaging money as he goes. Coincidence? Dunno. Dunno.
Sir Fartsalot got a BCG (tuberculosis jab) on July 5th. The teeny pinprick hole in his skin did not disappear, it slowly grew and grew, and turned into an abscess. A large purple eye-shaped growth with a pus-green pupil gazes at me and wills me to prick it out of its misery and all the while my boy-o cries. He cries when I feed him, when I pick him up, when I strap him into his car-seat, lots of tears and red-faced misery usually follow. So much suffering, so much blood-stained gunge erupting from my babóg’s arm.
It’s so un-fucking-fair that the HSE cannot sort its shit out.
I read that in 2002, a previously dodgy EVANS BCG was withdrawn from public consumption, to be replaced by the SSI BCG.
An article written in 2005 states that there have been 152 reports of local complications like Sir Fartsalot’s since the new vaccine was rolled out. I can only presume that the figure has doubled by now. I brought the kid to the doctor, to a local A&E (where I was told to bugger off because they’re not insured to treat babies), and to a paediatric A&E. They told me not to worry, that it was a normal reaction, that they get this sort of thing all the time.
ALL THE TIME???
I read that occasionally, such swellings result in lymph node infections which is a very serious thing indeed.
‘Not to worry!’ they say. O, but I do worry. I worry a lot.
Meanwhile Sir Farsalot hasn’t yet had his 6-in-1s, a process that was supposed to begin two months ago. The vaccination program for children looks like this:
- At birth: BCG tuberculosis vaccine (given in maternity hospitals or a HSE clinic)
- At 2 months: Diphtheria, Tetanus, Whooping cough, Hib, Polio, Hep B, PCV (Pnuemococcal Conjugate Vaccine)
- At 4 months: Diphtheria, Tetanus, Whooping cough, Hib, Polio, Hep B, Meningococcal C.
- At 6 months: Diphtheria, Tetanus, Whooping cough, Hib, Polio, Hep B, Meningococcal C, PCV (Pnuemococcal Conjugate Vaccine).
- At 12 months: Measles, Mumps, Rubella, PCV (Pnuemococcal Conjugate Vaccine).
- At 13 months: Meningococcal C, Haemophilus Influenzae B
- At 4-5 years: Diphtheria, Tetanus, Whooping cough, Hib, Polio, Hep B, Meningococcal C; Measles, Mumps and Rubella (by second injection)
- At 11-14 years: Diphtheria, Tetanus
- At 12 years: Human Papillomavirus (Girlz only)
That looks like a rocky road to me. A road full of miasms that will give our great-grandchildren strange side-effects, I fear. I don’t know what to do.
Why on earth do people still trust the HSE after all its fuckups? I sure as hell don’t, especially not with something as important as my kids, but yet those around me tell me I’m crazy.
Better crazy than dead though, hey?
Schmidt happens
Reward the good, ignore the bad. That’s the advice I got where child discipline is concerned, harvested from many hours scanning blogs and rollercoaster forums. It’s good advice, it seems to work, with a bit of naughty corner thrown in occasionally and the odd zap from a cattleprod.
It works too well though. Puppychild is a good kid. She listens, does what she’s told, has confidence and is always eager to please. This is because I reward her good behaviour with heartfelt thanks and trinkets… many many trinkets and comics that pile up in corners and Kinder Surprises jamming doorways. It feels like I’ve messed it up, like I’m pushing the idea that materialism is the best reward. Her trinkets are starting to own her, I’m teaching her to be owned by clutter, just like I am.
I want to show her what appreciation at its most base level feels like, to feel that vast connectivity with life itself in its carbon-based efficiency and appreciate the fact that we’re not Blobfish, but that’s very difficult for a kid who can’t see past her own curly straw.
How I felt after my first bikini wax
Then I found the link to Plan Ireland floating around Irish Taxi’s blog.
Sponsor a chiseller
I remember the bleakness of Jack Nicholson’s character in About Schmidt, how throughout the film he fails to create a single connection with somebody, even his own daughter…anybody. It’s painful to watch. The bleakness thickens and threatens to envelop the character entirely towards the end of the film and it seems that he’s plummeting towards the edge of nothingness, but then Schmidt gets a letter… a kiddie coloured-in picture from Ndugu, a child he’s been writing months of emotional diarrhea to in faraway lands, and it evokes a beautiful reaction. Such a profound thing, to touch a soul thousands of miles away with a waft of a well-timed token.
Our letter arrived today. I showed Puppychild a picture of a little girl in Malawi who is the same age as her. Her mum is the same age as me. They smiled at us from printed photographs and we connected and Puppychild thought it was nice that she didn’t have to walk for a kilometre every day before school to get water for her ma.
When I had closed the atlas and finished explaining how basic our lives could be, kiddo set about drawing a picture for her little African counterpart of herself and herself holding hands in a savannah.
They shall grow up together and teach each other many things, two souls learning from parallel worlds.
I long to share a bottle with her mother by a roaring fire and have her tell me of stories of dancing and sisters and daughters who are stolen by Gulu Wamkulu people, how she bails her kids out with offerings of chickens and money, how fearful she is of her people’s traditions. Fearful of traditions. That sounds familiar!
So we post back. And we wait.
I hope they don’t find each other on Facebook first.
Secret Fire Revisited
While I write this, there is somebody learning to juggle, and there is somebody learning to play piano. They are of course seperate people. I am the fly on their garden fences, that strangelady nosy neighbour. Enjoy!!! Tomorrow I may even be videoing paint drying.
-o0o-
For any straggler readers that may have read my old post ‘The Secret Fire’, for which I was very happy to win a pretty shiny thing last year and a phone which I still do abuse and adore, there is a nopportunity for you to enjoy a Deja Vu for your very own self. If you can’t make it, don’t waste brainage with wasted excuses this time, for these people do seem to appear every year, at much the same time. Without fail, they are a true constant. I’m sure you may make it some day in your own way. I’m here just to remind you.
It’s in Wicklow, in the Parish Church on Church Hill, where two into one cars will not divide. It is Vivaldi with his Four Seasons in Summer mode. It is also J.S. Bach with his Suite in B Minor for Flute and Orchestra, it is Paganini with his heartbreaking Moses Variations and it is Tchaikovski remembering I.W. Samarin.
If you DO make it Wicklow Townward this year at eight bells on August 9th, you’ll find me at the back. I’ll be the one with the kid and the baby and the boy in the wheelchair that gleans strange amusements from stringy vibrations. I have a noisy bunch, for that I apologise in advance, but I just had to be there. You understand! I hope the locals will too. Eep.
Tomb stone nirvana
Puppychild still hasn’t been Christened, I’m hoping for a two-for-one deal, her and her baby brother in their whites with damp foreheads and sandwiches and bottles of Cidona. I just have to pull my finger out, when the next blue moon occurs.
In the meantime, it only makes sense to introduce her into the Christian world in all its complexity, so for the last month I’ve been bringing her to Mass. She plays quietly with other children where the tea-lights burn and asks me what a Holy Spirit is, and where does the basket money go? I failed miserably at the ‘Who is God?’ line of questioning, so I’m hoping the congregation inspires her somehow, but it hasn’t. When I asked her yesterday if she’d like to go to Mass again, she replied “No, thank you, if that’s okay.”
That’s why I left her to sleep this morning, bundled up warmly in her blankie in her girlie nirvana on the couch, and I skipped Mass to go instead to the cemetary behind. Sir Fartsalot nuzzling in my kangaroo pouch, we climbed uphill to his great-grandparent’s plot for they had not yet been formally introduced.
We sat on their grave and gazed into the valley below and I bit his nails and dropped the tiny crescenty pieces onto the soil beneath so that their DNA may mingle forever, and we whiled away and watched the clouds until the congregation’s relief finally shattered our peace. It was a morning well spent.
I think we may do that, my children and I, from now on. We might skip mass and picnic above with our ancestors every Sunday instead and I’ll teach them about God through nature, it’s far easier to explain that way.
The suits might wonder who the strange heathens are who float about in graveyards instead of sitting with them in their pews, and in time to come maybe my children will choose to join them, if not just to scout for boys or shelter from the rain.
It’s their choice, but I’ve chosen already. I’m with the crosses, the Hawthorn trees and deer-droppings in the silence beyond in God’s own church, not Man’s. Chocolate and daisy-chains and snowballs in February, memories by association attributed to God. I might even bring a bible, for the skaa!
