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Editorial
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COLUMNIST Editor’s Page
By Victoria A. Schmidt
Insurance Miseries
They sit there glaring at me from their pile
in my inbox. It seems no matter how hard I try they won’t go away. Insurance claims. At a time in my life when I should be healing and mourning my husband’s passing, they consume my time with unnecessary and repetitive questions. A friend whose husband passed shortly after mine did expressed the same feelings.
I try to call the companies and they just play round robin with their menus, music, and announcements of other products. When I finally get an answer, a real human being, they cannot hear me, bad connection. Please call back. “Do you realize how long it has taken to get through?”
“Would you call back, the number is:” “No! That is a Mexican number! Use our 800 number or the website? “
“No!?” They don’t talk to one another by USA numbers. Ha!
I am lucky to get this far into most conversations because I get disconnected because they can’t hear me. Or the phone just disconnects, and I had to attempt another time.
I’m down to one company. Two people, my attorney and I, two telephones, and the internet. We spent four hours yesterday and we are still not done. I understand they are just pre-printed forms. But there are two pages dedicated to the funeral. After the death certificate, they want the funeral home bill, and the cremation certificate. By my way of thinking the death certificate pretty much proves death. Then where was the funeral, when, they want a prayer card or copy of the printed obit. Did I attend the funeral, and if not why not? Send copies. I have written COVID on the forms. There was no funeral. Oh, and if there had been a funeral, I would have to include the name, address, and signatures of two witness not related to the deceased.
So, every morning I start with the pile just for this company. I’ve used up a reem of paper with all our correspondence and copies.
So be prepared. And there are more pages if you send the body and/or cremations to the USA. They want to know flight numbers, etc.
I know they are screening for fraud. I get it. I’m the one filling out the forms. But I’m not liking it.
Other widows have shared other horror stories. One in particular was about her home. Her husband and she shared joint tenancy. But because of the use of ONE wrong word in the title, she had to go through probate. It didn’t automatically go to her just because she was his wife. This was in Mexico. My experiences above are USA companies. Be diligent if you own property. Thank God we rented.
Disclaimer: I don’t like completing any kind of forms. Bet you haven’t already figured that out.
Victoria Schmidt
PART TWO
By Janice Kimball
The incessant pushing of air into the lungs of helpless children, then sucking it back out, in mechanical death-
defying beats. ‘Phew-Whooh, PhewWhooh’ continued through the days and the nights when I was thirteen years old and laying on my back, feet strapped upright on a board at the foot of my bed in the hospital’s pediatric ward.
The heartbreaking cries of seemingly endless children housed in tight rows that filled the inside of the gymnasium echoed up the walls and pierced my soul. I internalized spatters of conversation from parents who lived in the northern part of the state, and those who lived in Upper Peninsula, saying goodbye to their children knowing it might be forever.
My adult size bed was conspicuous among the cribs and junior beds that surrounded me. It sat near the entrance to the gymnasium next to where the bank of iron lungs began. Mother came alone to visit me that first day in the pediatric ward, as she had every day since I had been admitted. Once wild, pretty and curvaceous, with the added weight of a hundred pounds, she became a doggedly unrelenting woman. Her stoic gait, tough and indomitable, gave the effect of a tank rolling in ready to do battle.
Mother’s look of suffering was even more expressive than usual. I turned my head away. I could not bear to see Mother’s expression of martyrdom on my behalf again. In a display of affection that I knew was the best mother could offer, she patted the back of my hand. At the same time Mother furtively assessed the bleakness of the gymnasium setting. Although I was angry that she seemed unable to make any rational decision, indeed was a master at making any situation worse, I did not blame her for my Polio.
Not acknowledging the existence of other children in the ward, Mother paced up one aisle and down the other in a demand for attention. As her anger grew, the screaming of babies became louder. In frustration her aggression grew. As if she were Godzilla, she shook a stack of sheeted metal partitions leaning against the back wall. She requisitioned them, and complying with her orders in a desperate attempt to keep the entire ward from turning into mayhem, the staff stopped what they were doing to construct a private wall around my bed.
I cringed each time the screen had to be clumsily unfolded then refolded when a nurse came in or left. They would trip on the stand of my makeshift screen, almost knocking it over, as they scurried around in exhaustion taking care of the needs of suffering children, like it was a never ending game of musical chairs.
I played possum faking deadness, an effect that was to get me through many hard times in my life; I turned, emotionless, to face the wall when asking for a bedpan. I had dreaded buzzing for one because of the nurses’ hatred for me. Once I waited too long and wet the bed. The nurses cleaning it up had such contempt for me that I felt their disgust as they lifted my limp body, feet trussed to the footboard, to change the sheets.
The overhead lights had been dimmed to simulate darkness. I laid awake that first night in the pediatric ward, in spite of the sound of babies crying, not imagining what was to come next. That quiet period became what I
now think of as the ward in mourning.
Crisp shadows backlit from the wall lights behind the iron lungs cast eerie, stencil-like images against the curtain that circled my bed. I lay awake listening to the sound of feet tied in blue paper wrappings as they shuffled against the gymnasium floor. The doctors and nurses were so close to me that if the soles of my feet were not strapped down, I would have been able to reach out and touch their uniforms. Although I had been separated, I felt a party to the hard decisions they whispered about: which children should be left in the iron lungs and which should be taken out to die, to make room for another child who maybe had a better chance to survive.
I desperately needed to see what was happening in the tragedies of which I had become a part. Staring at my sheet room-divider out of the corners of my eyes, as if I could miraculously look through them, was fruitless. My stiff neck kept my head flat on the pillow-less mattress. Soon, however, the discussion would end and I could hear and the doctors shuffle out, followed by a period of silence before the gurneys arrived.
The aides, almost silently scurrying about, bumped against my curtain as they removed Polio victims from their mechanical tombs. One less whooshing would be heard from the bank of iron lungs as a child pumped their last breath. I could hear the wheeling of a gurney leave the room as it was pushed down the long hall. I would strain to follow the sound of it and when I could no longer hear it, then silently cry.
“… I supposed the gurney entered a room somewhere down the long hallway. Maybe it had a delivery door, like the one through which I arrived. Maybe a hearse was waiting for the body. Maybe one had not been ordered; maybe the children weren’t dead before they reached that room. Maybe, the hospital needed to wait until the child’s heartbeat stopped. Maybe it still pumped after taking them off of their breathing machine. Maybe they were conscious when they were rolled down the hallway, maybe…” I thought.
I had never been so alone. I wanted to communicate with another person who understood this tragedy. I needed to share a tear, share the hopelessness of what I had heard, and help me pay recognition to the children’s suffering, pay homage to their deaths. I needed to do something, anything, even if it was to cry out. But I was ashamed to call attention to myself, my needs, have my sounds heard in this secret midnight tryst that I had so much became a part. Night after night, as I lay mute, this life and death scene played out.
Scorned by the staff for the extra attention mother had demanded they give me, no one said goodbye when at last I left. I heard their snickers and sighs of relief as I was wheeled out, accompanied by my mail order catalogs. I wished it could have been otherwise. I wished I could at least have had a paralyzed arm, or some other disability to alleviate my shame for leaving the other children behind crippled and suffering. Mother, through her most grand efforts, was never able to get me transferred to the adult ward. Possibly it was in another building. For her, it was a bitter defeat.
A whippoorwill called out. It was a fall day as I waited at the curb in the wheelchair for Mother to bring the car around. I breathed in the fresh moist air, felt it fill my lungs, a sensation I had never remembered feeling before. That short span of time laying in the polio ward ended my childhood. Incredibly, I was encouraged to continue to make my own decisions, and I continued to make bad ones. That is, until I reached the age of 59 when I moved to the paradise of Lake Chapala, twenty two years ago.
Janice Kimball
By Linda Steele
February 12 of 2021, a record-breaking winter storm hit the Texas Hill
Country in Central Texas. The folks living in this part of the country were not equipped for such a cold and long-lasting storm. Wind generators froze, livestock and wildlife succumbed to the cold. Once electric services were all shut down, water pumps froze and suddenly the homes and ranches everywhere in the area lost heat and water!
A strange and unexplainable thing happened at 5:00 on that first morning. The security alarm on our front door sounded! We hurried to the door, quietly looked out the peephole, but we could see nothing. Next, we turned on the porch light. What did we see? Only a tiny, fuzzy, white being bumping against the door so we opened it.
There, standing right in front of us, was a tiny newborn kid goat, white, with big droopy brown ears and the sweetest, innocent little brown face you have ever seen! He was so new that his little umbilical cord was still attached and he was crying frantically.
We quickly wrapped him in a bath towel and searched for his mother, to no avail. He was inconsolable.
“Maybe he’s hungry,” my daughter suggested.
“Maybe he is,” I agreed as I searched the cupboards for a suitable piece of equipment for feeding a baby goat.
At last, I located a condiment bottle that looked like it might fit the bill, so I warmed some cow’s milk and he gulped it happily, tail wagging, as I dripped it into his mouth.
Soon as he emptied the bottle, he cuddled up in my daughter’s arms and slept soundly. He was safe and secure!
How did he manage to get through our tight, barbed wire fence and walk half a mile in from the road and how did he manage to set off the alarm? I have never seen any goats anywhere close to us.
“We asked two ranch families if they might want a nice, healthy little goat. Apparently, no rancher finds a newborn orphan goat that will have to be bottle fed for six weeks with expensive goat milk replacer a welcome gift. It appeared that we had just adopted our very own house goat!
By the second day after “George” came to live with us, we realized that he would need to have a house. Every house goat should have his own little house, so we searched through our storage building until we found a collapsed doggie carrier that was just the right size. George loved it right away! After he had his own home that had several bath towels folded inside, he slept through the night and enjoyed long morning and afternoon naps.
By the time we had George for three days, he was already potty trained. He seemed to know exactly what he was supposed to do when he was placed on grass and we had no more accidents in the house!
The internet was invaluable for teaching us the care and feeding of baby goats. One malady we read about put great fear into us. It was called, “floppy goat syndrome!” Oh no! How could it be avoided? Apparently, it comes from overfeeding the baby! That information was the impetus for our feeding chart posted on the refrigerator door! Georgie was only allowed six ounces, carefully measured, of goat replacer milk every four hours. The time of feeding was marked each time and all formula was carefully measured into a plastic soda pop bottle with a goat nipple installed at the opening. We warmed each bottle to 98 degrees so it would be like mother’s milk and George loved it!
One day George learned how to jump! What fun! He would run a few steps and jump, sometimes giving a little kick at the same time. Sometimes he would jump so high that he would land on his little bum! He didn’t mind. After a few days, our George could jump up on the coffee table. He could stand on his little house and jump onto our daughter’s bed. One day he jumped up on the coffee table and then did a spring jump over to my husband’s lap and up to the back of his chair.
Hmmmm, this was beginning to get serious. Maybe he needed a nice, big field with special fence for goats and a few goat friends to enjoy. The internet told us that he was a Boer goat and that eventually he might weigh as much as 200 pounds. It might be that having a house goat was not going to work out. Georgie was three weeks old and had gone from a seven-pound infant to a fourteen-pound kid. He was growing up fast. We had to find a good place for him where nobody would turn him into a tamale.
After searching for a week, we found a rancher who was interested in bringing new blood into her herd. He was just the guy she needed! She has a nice big field for her goats and a 10-year-old girl who loves all of them. The storm had caused many of the new mothers to be unable to feed their babies so feeding one more was no problem. No, they would never eat our George, they promised.
We felt like we were taking a fiveyear-old to kindergarten on the first day when we took George to the ranch, but he immediately checked out the other goats, was welcomed, fluttered his tail happily, and didn’t seem to mind when we left him.
Now, we are regular visitors at the ranch and George comes running when he sees us. He always jumps into my daughter’s lap, happily. He thinks he is still just a little kid, you see. He likes his new goat friends and his little ten-year-old human girlfriend, but he still loves us.
I think we’ve got a good thing going here!
