A Minor Crisis of Conscience

For better or worse, these apparently really are the times that try my soul. I suppose that I should be getting used to it by now, but, somehow, I keep getting surprised every time the rug is yanked out from under my feet. And the bitch of it is, it happens with such regularity that I have no excuse for being so surprised when it happens.

I have a friend who, if I were going to be most charitable in my description of her, I would say never met a ponzi scheme she didn't like. In other words, living proof of the axiom that a fool and your money will soon be partners. Although absolutely none of the schemes she's gotten involved in have, to date, paid off - a fact that is hardly surprising - she continues to fork out thousands of dollars and fervently believes that is she only works the internet hard enough, all of her something for nothing dreams will come true. Boundless riches wait just around the corner, ripe for the taking.

Of course, if that were indeed true, everybody in the country would be a millionaire, living it up in Beverly Hills with a cee-ment pond out back. On the other hand, there is a kernel of truth behind her something for nothing dreams: she is, indeed, giving up something for nothing.

Now, being a good shrink, I know this already: addictive personalities will always find something to be addicted to. In her case, having given up both smoking and drinking, she has replaced them with oyramid schemes. In point of fact, there isn't really any difference between that and being addicted to gambling. And, like any other addiction, the fallout isn't just limited to the individual engaged in the activity, but to everyone around them as well.

Heartless as it may sound, if it were just her involved, the best prescription would be to just leave the whole thing alone until she hit rock bottom. You can't reason with an addict - I know, I've tried - nor will an addict change their behaviour until circumstances force them to, and even then it's an iffy proposition. After all, addicts revert to their previous behaviours with frightening regularity, despite what Betty Ford and the other fine people at Trembling Hills would have you believe.

Which brings us to my current crisis of conscience.

My friend approached me this evening with a truly heart-breaking story. She and her husband are currently $8,000 dollars in arrears on their property taxes and, if those taxes are not paid by December 2nd, their home will be seized and auctioned off in a Sheriff's sale. Of course, if we connect the dots, it's kind of easy to see that they're $8k behind in their property tax because that money was forked over to someone else in one of the many get-rich-quick schemes my friend has gotten herself involved in. And now, her problem has become my problem because she has asked me to loan her the money to pay off their tax.

You know, not to put too fine a point on it, but I am poorer than a churchmouse. I am on Disability, which totals a whopping twelve hundred a month, and almost all of the money that I did manage to salt away while I was still working is almost all gone. Do I have enough money to loan her to make up her tax arrears? Yeah, I do. But in doing that, I will become almost completely broke, and my savings account not so much that as just a collection of spare change.

The thing is, I've been down this road before. Almost a year ago, my friend had approached me because they were almost $15,000 dollars in arrears in their Federal income tax. Why? You guessed it, because she had been handing money out hand over fist to internet assholes who promised her fantastic returns on her "investments" for little or no effort on her part. At the time, I gave her $10,000 dollars to help pay that particular debt off.

I say "gave" because I do not loan people money. Loaning implies that the money will actually be paid back, something that, frankly, is unlikely to happen. If you don't expect to be paid back, then you can't be disappointed and there won't be any hard feelings involved. Right?

Which again brings us back to my crisis of conscience. No matter how much I may want to deny this fact, it is very unlikely that I will ever be able to go back to work. Physically, there are just too many things going wrong all at the same time. I can go through mental gymnastics with the best of them, but the reality of it is that I am most likely going to be consigned to living off Disability for the rest of my life. Until it all started getting siphoned off into the black hole of my friend's current addiction, what I had in my savings account was a hedge against that future, a small cushion that I could have used as leverage against a future of abject poverty.

Which is now gone, because I already know what I'm going to do in regard to her current request. Rather than see them go homeless - and myself, too, since I live with them - I'll give her the money, and try to ignore the fact that my savings have gone from $20,000 dollars to almost nothing in just about a year. But it does beg the question of just how far the bonds of friendship extend. The fact that I will never see that money again doesn't bother me nearly as much as the fact that, knowing the circumstances I am in, I was asked for it in the first place. And now that this tap is dry, just what happens the next time? See my earlier point about fools, money and partners.

So, perhaps this isn't really a crisis of conscience, but a crisis of faith. Which, these days, is decidedly lacking. And I have no one to blame, really, but myself.

This Isn't Exactly What I Had in Mind . . .

Hmm. Seems I've been neglecting this for a while. Not that anyone really notices, mind you, and no, I'm not that conceited that I believe people are hanging on my every word. Anyway, aside from pure laziness, I could say that there are some very good reasons as to why I haven't written anything for a while but, of course, that is the same excuse I use on myself when I neglect my real writing - you know, the stuff that is intended to make some money. Oh, well, the road to Hell is paved with good excuses.

At the moment, my groin is the most amazing shade of purple I've ever seen.

Now, if you haven't fled screaming after reading that, you may be asking yourself why you should care what colour my groin is. After all, I doubt very much that you have any kind of emotional attachment to that part of my anatomy. On the other hand, that statement is not exactly a common way to open a conversation, so there may be, indeed, a kind of perverse curiousity involved.

Okay, some background. Those who know me will recall that, unsure of what to give myself for my 42nd birthday, I finally decided on a heart attack and a quad by-pass. I mean, why not? Think of it as my very own reality-survival show. The fact that it has left me permanently disabled was something I wasn't counting on but, hey, no plan is perfect, right? So let's not quibble about the small things.

Since then, my heart has been ticking away almost like it did before, and after being roto-rootered my total cholesterol was less than 110. So perhaps I can be forgiven for thinking, aside from the diabetes and the kidney disease, that things were proceeding more-or-less alright.

Boy, was I wrong.

The cardiologist I had been seeing decided to up and leave the practice without explanation in between my six-month checkups, so I was assigned to one of the others in the office for my last checkup at the beginning of October. So I go in to see this doctor, and the first thing he does is listen to my chest and my neck with his little stethoscope, and tell me that I have a blockage in my carotid artery. You know, sort of a good news, bad news type of thing - "You don't have to worry about your heart, you just have to worry about stroking out." Oh, joy. Anyway, he writes up an order for a doppler study of my carotid, to determine the extent of the blockage, and also one for my legs (swelling and bad circulation there, too), that he wants done within one week.

Right, so off to the hospital I go to get these dopplers done. Since, between those and the next time I saw the caediologist, a couple of days later, no one called up hysterically screaming that I shouldn't be making any long-term plans, my level of panic had started to ebb, and I was thinking that they couldn't have found anything too serious or I'd have heard about it. Of course, that was before I went back for the follow-up visit.

At which point the doctor gives me another good news, bad news scenario. Right off the bat, he tells me that the doppler study didn't find any blockage in my carotid artery at all, so I can stop worrying about a stroke and shopping for a drool cup. But, he insisted, there must be a blockage somewhere because, after all, he determined that there was one, and the only other place it could be is in my heart. Now, if he were trying to induce a heart attack in me, I can't really think of a better way to go about doing that. But, no, he says, it isn't that bad. He can fix me. He is, after all, a cardiac surgeon. So he schedules me for an angioplast and tells me that he can open any blockages by putting in some cardiac stents. And, hey, how bad can it be? It's an out-patient procedure.

So, last week, after the requisite chest x-ray and labs, I show up at the hospital's out-patient surgery wing, with my little just-in-case overnight bag - meaning my old rucksack from the Navy, since that's the only luggage I own these days - while somehow wishing that I was anywhere else doing anything else.

Now, I have to say that the two nurses assigned to my care - the surgical nurse and the ward nurse - were wonderful. I also feel compelled to say that, while it has always been a fantasy of mine to be lying naked on a bed and surrounded by hot women, that wasn't exactly what I had in mind. And was it really necessary for them to take turns shaving my groin? But I digress.

The upshot of this whole thing is that I spent twelve hours - two in pre-op, one on the table, and nine in recovery - in the hospital for . . . nothing. That's right. They snaked that camera in through my crotch, up through my body and into my heart, and found nothing. No blockages. Zip. Nada. Nothing.

And now my groin is the most interesting shade of purple I have ever seen.

Perhaps I can be forgiven for feeling just a little pissed off over this whole affair. Yes, I know, not finding any blockages is a good thing, and I suppose it is better to know than not to know, but . . . Aside from the complete indignity involved in having a rather personal part of my anatomy examined and shaved by complete strangers, then being tossed naked on a table in a cold room - the shrinkage! The shrinkage! - in front of yet another group of complete strangers and having a foreign body inserted, I went through about a week of panic over whether or not my heart was blinking out on me again. All for, as it turned out, nothing.

And guess what? I have to go through it all again in three more weeks, when they do the same procedure on my legs. I tell you, it just doesn't get much better than this. I have this theory, you see, that doctors would probably have more success if they just stopped pretending and just painted their faces white and waved chicken feathers at the rest of us. But that could just be me being cynical again . . .

Look, I'm well aware of the fact that we're all in a game we ultimately can't win, and that we have to play the hand we're dealt. But I'm getting awfully tired of feeling like I'm bluffing while God is drawing to an inside straight with the deck stacked. Enough is, as they say, enough. Of course, the fact that this doctor is, so far, batting 0 for 2 doesn't fill me with a lot of confidence either. But what the Hell, it's not like I've got anything better to do at the moment . . .

I just wonder if they're going to have to shave me again . . . and if they do, if I can ask them to turn off that funky 1970s-era bad movie music. Not to mention the question of just how much more purple can my groin get?