Pot calling the Kettle

I only talk about it once in a while, but my wife suffers from chronic pain issues. She's been seeing a number of doctors for a number of years, some better than others, trying to keep her going. As the years have gone on and the pain has gotten worse, she's ended up on gradually stronger and heavier doses of narcotics. And she hates it.

She's always been intelligent. She used to catch on immediately to the most subtle nuance. And then, as the cloud of narcotics around her head got thicker and heavier, she found it harder and harder to concentrate. She couldn't easily focus her attention on anything.

The tradeoff between being less intelligent and not being in pain was difficult for her. It was a different kind of pain, but there it is.

But New Mexico, unlike many more "civilized" states, has medical marijuana laws. And after our daughter suggested medical marijuana, she started doing her research. (OK, technically, our daughter suggested Marinol - she didn't think there was a chance in hell that her mother would smoke.)

New Mexico issues licenses to its known users, and the process for getting a license, while not particularly complicated, is rigid, structured, and annoying as hell.

We gathered all the documents that they wanted: the completed five-page application, a copy of her driver's license, her medical records, and certification from two different practitioners (her primary care guy, and her Pain Management guy).

(Weirdly, we also got a call from the Department of Health asking permission to contact a third doctor - she had an x-ray in her records, and they wanted to contact the radiologist who read it: possibly as evidence that she had cysts where he said she did - we've never really been certain.)

We had different problems getting the two medical authorizations. The first one, and easily the strangest one, was from our primary care guy. We've been seeing this short, elderly guy, and he wanted us to make an appointment with him. He'd apparently reviewed her records, and he sat down with her, looked her in the eyes, and asked her if she was aware of the possibility of the drug causing severe schizophrenia?

Yes, that's right. A medical doctor, concerned about Reefer Madness. (That was actually the incident that caused us to reevaluate our primary care provider.)

The second problem was came up later. It seems that the Pain Management doctor's paperwork didn't meet their requirements, and we'd been back-burnered for three weeks before we found out.

After a long and angry phone call with the Department of Health, I got them to finally explain what the problem was: the doctor's Physician's Assistant (PA) had filled out the paperwork for him - that, after all, is what PA's do. But she wasn't a Board Certified Pain Medicine specialist - the doctor was.

The next day, I overnighted updated paperwork from the doctor to them, and my wife now has a bright, shiny green card from the New Mexico Department of Health. It has a fascinating statement on the back: "card holders are legally permitted to use and possess up to six (6)ounces (170 grams) of usable marijuana." As opposed to all that unusable marijuana that people are caught with every day?

She also has a list of all the non-profit pot stores certified by the State of New Mexico (I think they should call them "dealerships"), along with an admonition not to disclose their locations. My wife is now a state-sponsored stoner.

So there's the trick: the government has a program, but they don't have a lot of inclination to help you themselves. You have to push them into doing their job, and you have to keep resubmitting anything they have a problem with - all it takes is one comma out of place, and everything comes to a halt.

She has a vaporizer (smoking irritates her throat, so we avoid that), and the store has some fairly high-quality pot, with names like "Wow" and "Shiska-berry", along with information on which of the various cannabinoids each brand contains.

And while she spends most days mildly buzzed, she no longer feels like her head is wrapped in cotton. She can concentrate on things for an extended period; she can read books again, and not have to go back over the same page three or four times.

There are conflicting theories regarding the use of marijuana; I just know this. It helps my wife, and that's what matters to me.

Honor thy Father and Mother

Sometimes, the rules that people want to force everybody else to live by are just complete bullshit.

Anybody who's been reading my stuff for a while would assume that I'd be about to embark on a rant about the current mangy pack of theocrats, or the anti-abortion crew, or some other group of modern-day fascists. And you'd be wrong.

Somewhere between taxes and the random family crisis, I haven't had a whole lot of blogging in my life for the past few weeks. As a hint about one of them, I'm going to have to give you some background.

I have been known to occasionally babble on (endlessly) about my wife, because she's one of the only truly admirable people I have ever met (and I've met a lot of people - not all by choice, but that's neither here nor there). But the fact that this is true is practically a miracle.

My father-in-law was also a good person, and probably the source of the Trophy Wife's awesomeness. The record isn't clear about when he realized that he'd found himself trapped in a loveless marriage with a crazy woman, but he stayed in it for the sake of the children, until my wife was in her late teens (16 to 18, if it matters - I don't remember, and I'm not going to ask her).

My mother-in-law, Ann, on the other hand, has never been a good person, and when her husband divorced her, she went completely off the deep end (assuming she wasn't there already).

The Trophy Wife doesn't remember when her mother began threatening suicide, but as they moved from one cheap rental place to another (usually just ahead of the eviction notice), it was often a daily occurrence. And it wasn't subtle, or any kind of hidden threat, either: "If you ever leave me, I'll kill myself."

I won't dwell on the drug-dealer who lived with them for a while, or any of the other multi-layered slices of idiocy that this woman laid on her daughter. I will point out that when I married her, living on a military base was a bonus, because Ann couldn't stand to be inside a fence that was guarded by guys with guns.

Going to Germany for seven years was a great idea for any number of reasons - one of which was the number of phone calls went down after the first few phone bills full of transatlantic calls. (Yes, this is a woman who would call four and five times a day. Not because she had a reason, or anything to say - she just couldn't let go.)

My mother-in-law was (and sometimes is) a self-absorbed, manipulative bitch; her propensity for rewriting her past has blossomed into full-on delusion these days. As her mental capacity has diminished, she has started to believe the lies she has told and the random fantasies she has occasionally imagined for herself.

Ann has hinted in the past that she wants to move to Albuquerque. And aside from the fact that we don't have room for her, there's actually one simple truth that prevents her from coming here - the town is full of Catholics and Mexicans. She can't stand either one (or blacks, or Muslims, or pretty much anybody on the planet).

My wife can hardly stand to talk to her mother - she tenses up so badly that her back starts to spasm, and her hands are often shaking when she hangs up the phone. But she still manages to talk cheerfully to what little remains of this evil woman. She recounts her week, giving all the little details and mildly funny stories. And then hanging up and cursing, or staring off into space. Or pouring herself a brandy.

I don't know how the years spent with that poisonous, hateful woman didn't break my wife, but she managed to become the most important person in my life. She is invariably kind, gentle and loving, even when she can barely move for the pain. When I have been at my best, I still barely rise to the level of her worst.

Of all the idiocy found in the Ten Commandments, I have come to have no use for one of them. "Honor thy Father and Mother," my ass. Respect is earned.

Heroes

I considered writing this for Memorial Day, but I guess even I have standards.

I come from a long line of military men. Hell, I was one of them. (That's not a sexist term, by the way; it's a descriptor. If there were any WACs or other military women in my family tree, I've never heard of them.) My dad did two tours in Vietnam. His brother was an enlisted man, also in Vietnam, and in various parts of the Middle East in some lesser-known mopping-up actions. Both of my grandfathers were Army - on my father's side, he was doing clean-up after Japan surrendered in WWII. Keep going farther back, and you can keep digging up my relatives in both major and minor conflicts around the world (brobably on both sides of the battlefield every once in a while - we're an obstinate bunch like that). My son the Marine has just come back from a tour in Afghanistan.

Screw all of them. My hero is my wife.

She has a condition called polycystic kidney disease. It's the single most common life-threatening genetic disorder in the world. 12.5 million people worldwide (six hundred thousand Americans) are afflicted with PKD - that's more people than Down syndrome, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy and sickle cell anemia combined.

But it's not one of the sexy diseases. It doesn't get the pink ribbons of breast cancer, the celebrity support of AIDS, or yet another "concert to raise awareness of..." like so many lesser problems.

Meanwhile, the cysts, not content to remain in the kidneys, can grow pretty much anywhere in the body. My wife has them throughout her torso, meaning she can't stand up easily, she can't walk without pain, and if she's in the car and I take a corner just a little too fast, she gets hurt.

Plus, her exercise options are limited. Aside from the fact that she can't move easily, if she were to lift weights or torque her body around, or do anything, really, that put enough pressure on a cyst to pop it, then the liquid in the cyst gets to leap out and flood the surrounding tissue. Does the phrase "searing agony" mean anything to you?

So she lives in constant pain, she can hardly move, she can't sit comfortably, and... oh, by the way, did you know that the kidneys handle a number of metabolic processes? Like that whole "dealing with sugar" thingy? Yeah, she's been diagnosed as "pre-diabetic." (Which is less of a deal than you'd think - with PKD, you know that you're going to end up on dialysis at some point, anyway.)

Normally, this disease is diagnosed in older people. So, at the age of 30, when she was diagnosed with both PKD and osteoarthritis, it was like she won the retirement home lottery.

Oh, remember how I said that this was one of the most common life-threatening genetic disorders? Yeah, a parent with this little problem has a fifty percent chance of passing it along to their kids.

Kids. Of which we have three. Do the math.

Not that she feels any guilt about any of this. Not at all.

So, faced with all of these problems, a normal person might become a trifle bitter, right? See, that's where things get a little unusual.

Annette is one of the only truly good people I've ever met. She's generally cheerful. She doesn't judge people. She doesn't like to complain. Where most of us have a little dark part of our soul where all the evil feelings fester, she's got a brightly-lit room filled with kittens and puppies.

She has a giggle that I've always loved that dances across the room, and she uses it all the time. Life dumps crap down on her, and she just wonders if she should make a bigger garden with all this new fertilizer.

So if, once in a while, faced with debilitating pain, she might get a little cranky, she doesn't let it show much. And, faced with all these other problems, she's also beset with entirely too much of me. And she really doesn't complain about that, despite what a big pain in the ass I am.

I don't know what I did in a previous life to end up married to her, but I'd do it again. Twice. She's worth it.

Sadly for her, she's stuck with me.

The Parable of The Weasel and the Music

A little story. It has no bearing on real life. It's just something to consider.

My wife is both the spiritual one in the family, and the musical one. For many years, she has been supplementing our income (sometimes very well) by directing church choirs. When I was still in the military, she often directed choirs at the base chapel. And, in fact, when I retired, she was already directing the Catholic choir on base, so she kept right on doing that.

Now, understand that she is not Catholic. However, she has often attended Episcopalian churches, which she likes to say is Catholic Lite: all the liturgy, but none of the Pope. (OK, technically, that last bit is mine. She does call it "Catholic Lite," but she's always careful not to say anything that could be taken as derogatory toward Catholicism, especially when she's working with Catholics. But I'm not as careful as she is...)

There are actually two Catholic services on base: the traditional service on Sunday morning, and a more "contemporary" service on Saturday evening. (If you can call anything "contemporary" that's based on almost 2000 years of tradition, anyway...)

Now, here's one place that military chapels differ from a regular church. A lot more military people go there. (Gee, I'll bet you could have figured that one out on your own, couldn't you?) And the Saturday service was directed by a colonel who we'll call "Col. Moon."

OK, in the interests of full disclosure here, let me explain that the choir directors are contractors, and by law, contractors to the military cannot be active-duty military. That's just how it is. So, technically, Col. Moon was not the choir director. His wife, a fairly drab woman named.... um... we'll just call her "Alice"... anyway, Alice was officially the director, but her husband was one of those pushy, annoying military types. He also, for no obvious reason, thought that he was musically talented.

In fact, let me just rant about Col. Moon for a while. In the course of 21 years in the Air Force, I worked with a number of officers, and he was definitely one of the worst. He was always confident in the absolute correctness of every thought that wandered quietly through that dark, empty place he called a brain. He was positive that he knew more about Catholicism than the priest, and he was also positive that he knew more about music than my wife, an operatically-trained spinto soprano with 41 years of training in every variety of music.

A quick aside about my wife: aside from her incredible voice, she can play piano and guitar, and she taught herself to play organ for a traditional church-sound in the services. She has played folk music, rock, jazz, classical music, gospel (she's pretty white, but she tries), opera (obviously), and in fact, two decades ago, she stage-managed for a jazz-bluegrass fusion band that is still touring (but without her, obviously). She even played backup for a kathakali troupe at one point.

So maybe she knows what she's talking about musically. What'd'ya think?

But none of that mattered to Col. Moon. Basically, he had two problems with my wife. The first was, obviously, her lack of papal attachment. And secondly, she is obviously much more musically talented than he is, and his tiny little ego couldn't take it.

Moon is not a popular man, incidentally. If he outranks you, he is dismissive with your opinions and vaguely abusive, so his subordinates don't like him. The computer people don't like him, because he can cause system-destroying errors in electronics merely by sitting in front of the keyboard. And the people who work in the chapel don't like him because he thinks that, by being a colonel, he is in charge of everything around him.

Just so you know, even though, as a colonel, Moon is relatively high-ranking, that's not how things work. An officer is only in charge of what he has been assigned as a job. But somehow, Moon has picked up the same opinion that a lot of scientists get - since he's an expert in one field, he must obviously be an expert in everything.

Now, here's where it gets weird. The priest was very happy with my wife's ability as a musician, and since Moon was leaving, Father Tim wanted her to take over the Saturday Mass, too. Nobody's sure why - maybe he just wanted to get good music in that service, too. It's hard to tell. But he set up the new contract so that one person would be in charge of both services.

To take this contract, you had to submit a résumé, and then a panel selected by the Parish Council questioned you. But we weren't too worried - my wife had years of experience, and a proven track record.

This wasn't news that Moon wanted to hear. His ego couldn't take it, apparently. Now, remember, he was leaving, and so he wouldn't be around to see her anymore. But the strain of using logic was too much for his little reptilian brain.

Moon wanted so badly to keep my wife out of "his" service that he started lobbying for another member of the congregation to take over, a woman who we'll call Nadine. And then, as a form of insurance, he brought in a ringer, a guy with no connection to the military, who'd never even attended the base chapel.

(Technically, that didn't work out too well for him. Take a note here - if you're going to bring in a ringer, the best choice would be a reliable ringer. Somebody, maybe, who will show up for his interview. It's just a thought.)

Anyway, back to our story. In his desperation to screw over my wife, Moon tried to get on the panel to appoint his successor. But that wasn't going to happen. The chapel manager, Don, saw from the beginning what Moon was trying to do, and was having none of it.

So Moon's next trick was to explain that he needed to act as an expert witness for the panel, essentially. He tried to explain that he was the only person who could understand that highly-technical musical jargon that my wife was going to start spewing. That didn't work either.

So, in desperation, Moon did what any reasonable person would do. He cheated.

We're not sure how he did it - whether he stacked the panel, threatened them with his lofty colonel's rank or what. But after extensive talking to the members of the panel, suddenly Nadine was selected to take over both services, and my wife was out of a job.

Oh, well. That's the way things work sometimes, right? Luck of the draw. This is all just sour grapes on my part, right?

Not so much. You see, when I went looking for Don after the panel interviewed everyone, I noticed that he had left the results on his desk. And you know how they voted?

A whole lifetime of music on my wife's part, and wide-ranging levels of experience at composing, directing, teaching, scoring, and playing instruments; she has literally been directing choirs for decades (two of them, but "decades"), and has sung in choirs for even longer. Nadine had a degree in music, and she taught in the elementary school system some years back. But Nadine scored higher than my wife in "Experience."

My wife had worked with both the Protestant and Catholic sides of the chapel. She'd organized a number of ecumenical services. (Ecumenical - a fancy word that just means "all the services working together" - you know, that whole mythical "spirit of Christian brotherhood" thing.) Nadine admitted that she might have met a Protestant at some point in her life, but she didn't socialize with any of them on a regular basis. But in the rating for "Plurality" ("How well can you work with other faiths?"), she scored top marks across the board, and Annette was marked down.

And here's the kicker. My wife, figuring that this was a job interview, wore a skirt, a nice blouse, some tasteful jewelry. Nadine went to see them in jeans and a tee shirt. And guess who scored higher in "Appearance"?

Are you starting to see a pattern here?

My wife was pretty upset for a day or so. She'd gone from having a job, to needing to go find work. Her talent had been ignored. Her music (which is a large part of her self-image) was ignored, for petty partisan reasons.

However, do you recall that old saying about "the best-laid plans?" See, Moon had subverted at least a few members of the panel, but guess who he hadn't turned to the Dark Side?

Nadine.

It seems that Nadine had no interest in conducting two choirs. She just wanted to work with one of them. So she subcontracted Annette to continue directing her own service. But, as the primary contractor, it was Nadine who had to go to Parish Council meetings, do paperwork, sign forms, and generally do all the administrative details that my wife hates.

So, as all this boils down, my wife is doing the same job, for the same amount of money, but with less stress. Moon has shown himself to be a vicious, backstabbing weasel. And when Nadine goes on vacation (as she does for several months out of the year), you know who's going to be directing "Col. Moon's choir"?

My wife. Now I've just got to make sure that he knows that. (Not that I'm petty or anything.)

Of course, you realize that none of this actually happened or anything. It's just a parable. It wasn't an example of God looking down on his people (not that I really hold a lot of truck with that anyway). Not anything remotely related to reality.

What's that newly-popular word? Oh, yeah.

Schadenfreude.