No Complaints Today. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

While I stared at a giggling Stanford cardiologist twirling a wheeled office chair as he opined that I could take my heart medicine or not, as I determined, a nineteen-year-old with a legally purchased semi-automatic AR-15 massacred seventeen people in a Florida school.

I learned of the latest shootings while I rested at a Denny’s in Antioch, California.  I had gotten within 35 miles of home and been unable to go another moment without a restroom and a hot cup of coffee.  My son the writer told me about it.  I asked how his day had been, knowing he’d been facing a deadline.  Fine, except for yet another shooting.  I asked what he meant, and he told me, while my coffee cooled and the eggs sat unnoticed in front of me.

I know suffering is not a competitition, but the doctor’s lack of clarity on the issue of whether or not I need the two medications prescribed by my Missouri cardiologist suddenly seemed inconsequential.  (Do I need these drugs or not, I had asked.  He shrugged.  Maybe, maybe not.  Today’s EKG is normal.  I pried further, Because of the medicine or because nothing is wrong?  Another shrug.   I studied his face.  One or the other, was the unsurprising response. )

But my heart still beats.  My blood, thinned by Warfarin, rushes through my veins, flooding my limbs, feeding a brain which still crackles with electricity however imperfectly.  The fluttering in my chest, unexplained and mysterious, still wakes me in the night.

And this:  Unlike the sons and daughters lying in a morgue in Florida, my son still breathes at the other end of the telephone, in a one-bedroom walk-up in Evanston, Illinois.

So:  Here’s the weather report in Isleton, California, at Park Delta Bay:  Nothing about which to complain.  Nada, zip, zilch.  

It’s the fifteenth day of the fiftieth month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues.

3 thoughts on “No Complaints Today. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

  1. Brenda

    I wasn’t going to comment on the shooting, but I will just contain my fury enough to say that those who point to mental health issues, as opposed to gun availability, should be advocating fiercely for more support of mental health support from our government. They aren’t.

    Reply
  2. Corinne Corley

    Brenda: (a) he wasn’t joking; and (b) Agree totally. Gun control does not preclude mental health treatment availability reform.

    Reply

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