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I read that in 2002, a previously dodgy EVANS BCG was withdrawn from public consumption, to be replaced by the SSI BCG.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!
Stop playing with yourself Daddy
‘There’s an app for that’. You know that ad on the telly (there’s an app for that too) for iPhones which shows all the fantabulous (there’s an app for that) things that it can do? I don’t have an iPhone, but TAT does… I’m sure it’s lovely but if it won’t flip sausages while I colour in pictures of Spongebob, I have no interest.
He won’t go to the toilet without it now. We walk past distant gunfire, waiting for our turn on the loo while TAT conquers spy allies. Sometimes he catapaults birds. Puppychild has to thump loudly and tell him to stop playing with himself frequently which is wrong in so many ways.
“It won’t wipe your arse though will it?” I scoff at him when he finally emerges with a burnt matchstick and a pins-and-needles limp. “No app for that, is there?”
It’s all very affecting, this waiting around for TAT and his crapps. I don’t know if there’s a helpline, but I’m pretty sure there’s an easy way to look for one if there is.
How to be eaten
I’ve never been on a diet. Diets fall into that category of things that need willpower, but I’m happily squatting in the quitter section of the ‘life is too short’ category, close to the ‘fuck that!’ department. It’s happier over here where mirrors and doctors are banned.
I do have a Wii fit though, the melding of fitness and gaming is genius even if it does sit for months on end gathering dust. I used it to gauge my weight in my seventh month of pregnancy, just to throw it off guard a bit. It turned my avatar into a Pillsbury dough-girl and scorned my girth.
Then I used it again shortly after giving birth and realised that it’s not as stupid as it looks. It told me that if I wanted to, I could re-do the body test carrying an object, and it would give me its weight too… something like a pet, or a baby maybe?
So I did, and it congratulated me. I was impressed.
A few weeks later I re-took the tests, and after I’d bitch-slapped it for still claiming I was in the ‘overweight’ category, I found that thanks to breastfeeding, Sir Fartsalot had gained almost exactly the same amount of weight that I’ve lost. Ooooooh.
My child is eating me. I adore the chubbiness that is my thighs recycled.
Atkins my arse. The cannibalism diet is working well for me.
Barefoot bandits
They say that when you get what you want, you don’t want it anymore. But what if it wasn’t yours to begin with? What if you took it as your own and used it to its full potential, then discarded it like a used condom… bound on its path of decomposition with no regard to how long that may take? Some people call that rape.
This is an arial view of the area of Knockree, Co. Wicklow. I can’t describe this place because no english word would fit properly. Past the prettiest Youth Hostel in the world lies a parking spot marked by a horizontal barrier. Once you’ve debarked yourself from your wheels you’ll find yourself on a path lined by mysterious darkened faerie paths and wild honeysuckle and you follow this for ten minutes or so until you come upon a bit of wood with an arrow painted onto its top. Follow this arrow, lep over the turnstile and then…
The wee hours of morning time are the best. A haze floats below your view and hugs the river like a firstborn so that you feel like you’re either flying, or are standing on the tallest mountain in the world. It is the start of one of those downward slopes that beckons you and casts a spell on you to make you forget the fact that you’ll someday have to climb back up again on the homeward stretch.
At the bottom of this path lies a river which shimmies through goblin groves and tree-filled troll hideouts. On the banks of this river are various camping spots and tiny beaches for your freed sock-smothered toes to dangle from, with ropes hanging from branches (possibly put there by aforementioned trolls), so that you can swing into the centre of the river on a hot day and let go, to plunge into the guinness-coloured water below.
I walked there today with Puppychild and Sir Fartsalot and found this:
Heaven raped. Small children denied from splashy footplay because of broken glass. Human shit wrapped shamelessly in skidmarked bogroll and empty crisp packet carcasses gathering algae where fish should leap. Shit from shit.
How can a nation can gather arms and unite as a proud nation against some random French fucker on a football team, yet at the same time vomit all over this same nation’s natural wonders and rape it of its purity?
Shame on whoever partied here. Shame on you assholes. You don’t deserve this country.
You’re gonna die
Sometimes when I’m walking around and talking to myself, as you do, I like to rehearse possibly awkward conversations I’ll hopefully be having with my kids someday. The facts of life mainly… it’s important to practice these things so that when the time comes I’ll be cool and nonchalant and not a giggle-suppressing wreck when explaining what a vas deferens is.
Then there’s the question of life, death, and that whole afterlife thing, which Puppychild blindsided me with last night.
Out of the blue, she asked me why my grandparents were dead. Then she asked me when her own grandparents would die and asked if they wouldn’t rather stay alive forever instead.
“Everybody dies.” I explained, in a roundabout way.
The information sank in slowly and I watched as she bonded with the rest of humanity and the millions who have gone before us, fearful enormity plopped onto her shoulders like a big bag of spuds and I felt sad for her. Her teddybear’s lip began to quiver. I explained to her that she must try to stay happy, to love every minute she has with her Grandad and Granny instead of worrying about their demise. The information was absorbed and absolved.
“But what happens to you when you die?”
I told her that we dissolve and turn into skeletons and get chewed into dust and soil. There seemed no point in mincing words, I figured it was better for her to learn it from me, rather than learn it from maggotty dead roadkill at some point in the future. I softened the blow by telling her that flowers and trees grow from soil, life from life, life from death, that sort of thing. It seemed to work.
Then I explained about Buddhist theories of re-incarnation and she chose that she should return in the next life as a puppy. No surprise there then.
I didn’t get to explain about heaven, for she had fallen asleep by then. I’m not sure whether this is a pity or not, she didn’t mention the subject again until lunchtime when I mentioned we’d be visiting Grandad.
“Grandad’s gonna die!” she said cheerfully.
This means she’s now either a psychopath, or she’s figured out the meaning of life. Either way I become famous, which is nice.
Nerds in pieces
I’m one of those rare people who has the patience for jigsaws. They’re a brilliant invention, perfect for manual dexterity and logic exercises in kids, great for distraction from addictions, a box full of tiny bits of cardboard. Individual quiet ‘yippee!’s for when each slots into its impossibly detailed place.
I got a 500 piece jigsaw of a bunch of Alsatian puppies for Puppychild recently. Who am I kidding… it’s really for me. She watches with mild amusement at the torture I seem to love so much but soon goes back to her kennel to thread beads. She’ll be there for that final twenty pieces, we have an understanding.
One of TAT’s spurious friends was visiting last week and asked if I was going to glue it to a frame, a lot of people do that. They don’t understand the point of jigsaws.
Jigsaws are one of the few things you can make which are designed to be smashed up again. Yeah you can leave it on the dining room table for months but people eventually get pissed off that they’re not allowed within five feet of it, so all those long hours piecing the whole thing together will have to be undone, destroyed and wept upon, preferably during a seance. That’s the whole fun of it!
Here for your amusement is a cat-in-the-box just in case you’ve mentally diverted from all the nerdy jigsaw talk:
Frankenboy
This rather complicated picture is of Laughingboy in his new stander, on loan to us during the school holidays. It arrived with a fanfare and took several grown men to manoeuvre into the house, coming to rest in the sacred junk spot in his room. I had moved the sacred junk into a parallel dimension the evening before, which was lucky.
With more straps than a Jimmy Choo and more velcro than a truck load of nappies, the stander needed a demonstration which was provided by Laughingboy’s physiotherapist shortly after its arrival. As she and I battled with limbs and folds and hoists and elbows and gaiters, The Accidental Terrorist walked into the room.
“Jesus.” he said. “Frankenstein’s monster’s after moving in!”
Laughingboy’s physiotherapist raised her left eyebrow subtly, and began to turn the winch that moves the table into its upright position from flat.
“It’s alliiiiive!!!!” shouted TAT, as Laughingboy flapped in delight at the shift in gravity.
Laughingboy’s physio scowled. Was she scowling at the inappropriate joke? Was she concerned over Laughingboy’s potentially hurt feelings? Maybe it was a scowl of jealousy because she has been itching to crack the same joke for the last five years of working with these standers but couldn’t.
All I know is that Laughingboy is going to have thebest Halloween costume ever this year. Now where did I leave that Hannibal the Cannibal face mask?
