Ventura Ranch KOA RV Park

Arriving at Ventura Ranch KOa RV Park was wonderful.  The staff were terrific. Driving my Thor Motorcoach is a challenge.  I did 4 hours of freeway driving. Only 2 near misses.  In one I just got lost and was directed by the GPS map to make a U-turn off the freeway about 5 km from where I wasn’t able to get across 4 lanes in time.  The other was definitely more exiting. I was merging back onto the I 5 from a feeder when I cut off this corvette.  Thankfully the smart guy accelerate at the speed of light to avoid being crunched by the ‘assshole’ with Canadian license plates driving a motorhome.  I imagined him later telling everyone he was alive solely because his Corvette accelerated fast enough to save his life.  He’s problably right and I was thankful .  I didn’t see him as I was drifting across lanes to get positioned to avoid missing the separation that had me doing a half hour U-turn .  

I was sick with the flu.  Scarey business.  In Canada I’ve annually since childhood had a bad bout of bronchitis.  Terrible sinusitis.  Sore throats and laryngitis.  Smoking didn’t help but I stopped at 10 years and then was diagnosed as having Tubercuosis when I went to work in the US and was required to get an X-ray.  Nobody would work in the north because of the widespread TB.  The fly in doctor position I took had been vacant for several years and they couldn’t only get myself and a wild Irish doctor to fill. Later my friend Dr.  Moody would follow in my footsteps.  Then AIDS hit and people were dying of lung disease and finally Covid.

We called ‘pneumonia’ an old man’s friend.  It meant it killed him in his sleep and removed him from the misery of suffering and dying.  I was a GP and people brought their elderly to the hospital so they could die.  When I was a GP it was one of my jobs.  Palliative care is a fancy name for it.  I didn’t like the treatment for a year with anitbiotics for TB.  I didn’t like that several friends died of covid and lung diease.  I regretted smoking decades younger.  But I did get Covid in India and felt that if I didn’t pay the closest attention to breathing and didn’t panic I would have died. Funny illness. I simply couldn’t get a breath.  I’d had a scuba dive where I ran out of air in the last under the reef passage and had to surface.  Terrifying.  Not beating abler to breathe.

So that was last week.  I think I was overloaded with work. I always seemed to get sick when I overworked and felt self pity.  I met a fellow who knew my cousin. “Always work.”   I thought ‘he’s a Hay’.  My father and uncles and brothers and grandfather were all the way.  Since I was 6 I had some employment.  There was no ‘free money’ in my family. I had to so something to be ‘rewarded’ so feeding the dog, doing dishes, shovelling snow, in addition to helping my parents of course. I had my first job out of the home at 12.  Now I look back at years of multiple jobs, construction, labor, restaurants, office work, giving blood and cleaning septic systems, I suspect volunteer firefighting didn’t help the lungs.  The dirtiest job was clearing an attic of asbestos insulation.  Then all the sick people

Working with kids I was constantly sick.  Some cold or infection.  I felt for pediatricians, school teachers and nurses.  Today I see kids with fingers in their noses smearing snot on door handles.  I could be Howard Hughes but I have a dog and he’s filthier.  We survived.

But I’m past an age when that’s taken for granted and I’ve known so many friends around me dying.  It was once they were getting married, having kids, then divorces and then grand children and now it’s dying. I’m ’of the age’.  I’m actually blessed and know I’m insane. I have a multitude of irrational fears and anxieties and a severe case of poor me and catastrophizing.

Apparently the higher the IQ the more prone to depression and anxiety. That’s why the smartest computer in the world in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was so depressed.

I pray. It’s hard when your throat is refusing to swallow without the feeling of multitudes of Lilliputians cutting with little razor blades.  I like to think God is telling me to shut up. But even though I’ve worked my whole life and given half my income to the government gang and courts and divorces and felt like life was just work work work and die.  The fact is I have had a wonderful life blessed to know the most beautiful and brilliant women in the world with a family beyond anything I deserved and friends who were the best. I’ve had the greatest of mentors too. But meteors and teachers tended to be a decade or more older so for the last decade they’ve been departing. 

I like to think of Rainbow Bridge.  That’s my portal to heaven.  I liked Moody’s work on NDE’s and I have had many close encounters with divine. I’ve had the sense of the ‘presence’, the experience of ‘guardian angel’s’, communications of relatives and of all things dogs. I have marvellous dreams what I presume is the after life .  I liked Robin Williams Movie what dreams may come and Mark Twains Captain Storm get to heaven.

I thought it very rude that when I a doctor felt earth was imminent and I couldn’t work I had to fight to have space.  I love Zorba the Greek for that Image. I’m as narcissistic as the next person.  So I love. I forgive and then I slip into self pity my go to mood. Thank God for AA and Church and Mystical Teachers. Brother Lawrence is the best.  But I stop sucking on the tit of despair the second it raises its naughty head.

That was the old ‘pour me, pour me, pour me another drink’.  “Look at me mommy.’  All that attention seeking one downmaship stuff.  CBT teaches thought blocking so before I even get a run going I repeat All shall be well, All shall be well. All manner of things shall be well. I also do a lot of thank you’s .  Gratitude is the ultimate answer to despair. Not easy. Especially with pain and not getting air.  I especially like the Monty Python ‘Look on the bright side of life sung from the crucifixion.  Don’t know what happened to three days and night. I suspect a little delirium.

I have a closet of antibiotics and I’ve the best travel insurance but I thought it was ‘just a flu’. The last time I was sick a few years back my neighbour Nicolina cured me with chicken soup she made. “It cured my husband s flu’ she told me.  A simple random act of kindness when I wondered if i was going to die and thought no body cared.  

Everyone cares but we are all busy with our own living.  But three days, brain fog, fever and chills, sore throat, headache , full sinuses, cough and phlegm and the dog thankfully needed to be walked and when he wasn’t pooping and sniffing he’d cuddle up beside me hoping his can opener carried on.  

And just like storms at sea I got better.  We’d actually had severe rain and wind and cold and a terrible couple of days of storm. So of course my microcosm was alliogned with the microcosm.

It didn’t help to read that Carney was serving his own Brookfield interest getting rich like the PM before him, something that didn’t happen in the ‘good old days’.  Now the PM goes into office with a million and come out with hundreds of millions. Meanwhile all my work is going to pay rich dictators overseas and Liberal buddies in the ‘foreign affairs’ game of money laundering .  Meanwhile the Climate Change Barbie has lost a few billion dollars and no one can account for the missing money in Canada and there’s no accounting overseas.  Pakistan is the bet Bermuda Triangle for my tax dollars.  See the creeping poor me.

So gratitude. I really do have all I need except life is slipping away and my relationship with God always needs work. I tell people I play peek a boo with Jesus and whack a moll with the devil. 

Thank you Jsusus.  I’m looking forward to Mel Giblson ‘s new movie and am delighted he got into the Coptic Christians. I just saw how much love the Copitic Christian Nurses gave my dying mom.  So I went off to Ethiopia and visited the Balack Jesus scrolls and the ARck and the places of worship.  I like the sacred and holy. I loved being in Bethlehem even if I had to walk thorough a block of snipers.  Makes the hair go up on the back of your neck.  All these guns pointing into this squared.   Best to think positive.  Hope no one is going to twitch. 

Nothing i could do about it.  I love the Serenity Prayer.

Yesterday I felt better. I’d stopped coughing My throat wasn’t sore. I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t read. I wrote precriptions to keep the ball rolling thankful to be part of a team then.  Worried always about making mistakes. Perfectionism.  I could ‘argue’ like I do for disability and insurance and legal forms. I wrote a draft for a court case. There were all these unreasonable deadliness. Patients being told they need a psychiatrist opinion in weeks or months when the dying are doing it daily on waitlists and Carney has reduced health care to euthanasia .  And I’m like the guy living in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers. How can they vote for someone who’s given away our gold mines and now our pensions.  See the ‘poor me’.  I support the opposition. I’m a conservative. 

The driving this bus though takes total concentration.  I’ve ridden my Harley across the country to Sturges. I loved Kid Rock  It was great to hear him at the alternative half time show for the NFL.  I bicycled across Europe. I’ve driven cross Canada and the US in trucks and cars. I drove to Napanee and back with my truck and camper last year. I drove this route with the truck and camper. But the bus is so much bigger.  Riding my motorcycle if I don’t pay attention I die. The trouble with this bus is that I’m not at all likely to die if i nod off or become distracted. But I will munch the car or motorcycle in the lane beside me .

I almost did that. I’m a doctor who’s committed his life to service,  Silly shit.  And here I am trying not to kill people with my bus.

Thankfully the Hound of Heaven taught me God’s chasing me like I’m chasing him. The guy with corvette beside me today hit Mach 1 to avoid me. His life wish was great.  I was just overwhelmed with the limited time between seeing the sign and having to get 6 lanes over going at 70 mph.

I have this incredible IPhone that has a Map and I chart my route and look at this IPad type thing on the console and it tells me what to do. I can’t see it because of the sunshine and it’s one of those things I have to change . The iPhone speaks to this screen but if I turn then the cameras for turning come on and I lose the navigation page.  Fortunately my Apple Watch has the tiny direction which I look at or feel and I somehow stay on track.  It’s a steep learning curve and I was so tired and so fatigues and so weak and when I pulled of for gas there was literally no room and I was hoping for a truck stop. But I got it done.  Pick up more orange juice.

I survived.  I’m here for 2 nights.  Minimum stay on KOA Holiday weekend.  I’m shaking when I pull in . I’m ecstatic when I park and hit the automatic jack then put out the slide.  Then I hook up wanted and electriciticy,. 

All the while I was doing this peacocks were interested in me and walking buy.  I gave them some bread when I set up the Starlink. It was roadrunners in Palm Beach and Quail in Yuma and humming birds in Niland.  I love the birds.  Evolution of dianoaurs.  Great sex lives.  Weird behaviour. Amazing survival skills

Madigan was anxious about Big Bird and watched them from inside through the door and didn’t even bark.  

I watched Star Trek Acadmy and was disappointed in this episode but Boston Blue with Whalberg was worth the watch.  I ate microwave chicken pot stew.  Drank looks of orange juice. I’ve been doing aspirin and teaspoons of apple cider vinegar and bottles of listernine.  Otrivin got me through a couple of nights.  Now I’m must up at 2 am and writing nonsense.  

I was worried about Danny and thinking of my brother and parents and then all those night vigils I did in intensive care.  All the fights with administration for oxygen or IV’s or nurses.  I don’t know why I remember the negative. I was married to the greatest girls in the world but rather than remember the joy and wonder of love my mind goes to the divorce.  The ugly months out of a decade of alright with ecstasy and love blooming in beginning.  I really have been blessed. 

Life has been good. I ‘m enjoying JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy.  I remember seeing white poverty in the north and maritime and how no one talked about it. Now it’s DTES and drugs and overdosages .  

I’ve a meeting in the morning. I enjoy the fellowship. I’ll try to go back to sleep again.  Usually journalling gets the puss out my head and I can sleep.  I coughed and cleared my lungs so don’t have that breathing challenge that woke me up.  I’m rallying.  Just enough work and movement and concentration and the systems coming back on line. If this doesn’t work I can have the peanuts butter and jam therapy. All those decades of on call I’d use peanut -butter and jam and milk with morning coffee to look forward to and somehow got through the nights.  I’d worry about a patient and God would give me an answer and a miracle would occur.  

Thank you Jesus.  The peacocks were a real reward for today. Well worth the struggle and challenge.  Thank you Jesus.