Stare At This BM

Stare At This BM

Fred the Oxygen Man is coming today. He is coming to refill the water heater sized container of liquid oxygen that quietly hisses continually from our hall closet and fills my portable oxygen containers. On a good day the constant sighing is a comforting white noise. On a bad day it is the whispering snicker of junior high girls. And while Fred does not realize it, today marks a dubious distinction. It is the six month anniversary of my doctors’ decision to put me on supplemental oxygen. And by supplemental oxygen I do mean THAT kind of oxygen. The kind with the plastic tubes up the nose (cannula) and the rickety metal canister dragged behind on a cart. The kind you see hanging off the faces of old guys standing outside VA hospitals with cigarettes sticking out of their trachs or on soap opera stars during their “for the Daytime Emmy Academy’s consideration” Terms of Endearment scenes. It’s an awkward device to say the least and while my doctors have gently suggested that I will need to accept this device as a permanent lifestyle accessory I have decided it will be a temporary fix. Just until my lungs get their sea legs back. Because as an accessory it, in a word, sucks. It is neither trendy, nor sparkly, nor slimming. It’s never going to be all the rage, “Seen & Heard” in Star magazine, nor its allegiance hotly debated by tweenage girls (Team Edward! No, Team Jacob!).

When I first started wearing the oxygen in public I knew it would garner some stares. And I was right. What I didn’t anticipate was how good children have become at staring and how bad adults would be. Back when I was a girl there was no technique to staring. No finesse. You just stood there; slack jawed, with eyes glazed. But I am impressed with today’s youth. They have definitely upped their game and elevated staring to an art form. While waiting in line at the post office yesterday I encountered a girl who actually pirouetted around her mother, slowing down almost imperceptibly each time she neared me to stare at my apparatus. I rewarded her ingenuity by taking the portable tank off my shoulder and placing it on the floor in front of me so she could take in the full picture while staying en Pointe.

Surprisingly, I’ve found adult women to be the worst and most obvious starers. The most common reaction seems to be to stare into my cart as though it will yield some clue to the series of undoubtedly poor lifestyle choices I made to earn myself this predicament. Usually the favored method is the glance-look quickly away- then slowly return gaze as though nothing is out of the ordinary all while offering a conciliatory head tilt and sympathetic (no, I’m not going through my mental rolodex of Lifetime television movie plots/TLC show that start with “I Can’t Believe I…”/Anything on Discovery Health ailments) smile. Others swerve their carts out of my path like I’m the monkey from Outbreak. And still others feel a compulsion to blurt out ‘sorry’ for no reason as though offering some kind of cosmic karmic apology as they hustle their carts past me.

A recent trip to the Home Depot garden center proved most telling. I think some people stared into my cart expecting to see it packed with tobacco plants and hydroponic growing equipment. Others, upon seeing my rows of perennials, nodded encouragingly and then quickly turned away as if to say “perennials…so brave…she must be a real fighter”.

Sometimes people are just downright hilarious. Last week I headed to Petsmart for my monthly stock up on supplies for the Hintz herd. When the middle aged female cashier saw me approaching her register, she raced around the register, grabbed my cart and began pulling it to her station announcing “I got it!…I got it…it’s okay…I got it!” like she was helping navigate the landing of a Hope Flight ER helicopter. As I began to unload my purchases onto the belt she again intervened urging “you don’t need to do anything…you just take care of you”. After declining her repeated offers of help out to my car she began a spiral into awkward rambling that, like a newly mobile toddler running, I knew could only end with a spectacular crash. She prodded “well, I’m sure you’ve got a husband at home to help you get these things in the house right? And I’m sure he’s happy to help with this sort of thing. And with other things…like…like” At which point I gently cut her off with an assurances of a willing and able bodied husband at home. Flustered, she continued “but I’m sure it’s fine and he never minds because I’ll just bet he thinks you’re a great cook!” Oh Brenda, I wish I had a spare shovel. It would make this hole you’re digging go so much faster. Anxious for the exchange to end I considered lying but choked and accidentally admitted that he does tend to do more of the cooking as well. Poor Brenda. Her face reddened visibly and she sputtered “well….well…I’m sure you’re good at…I know you’re good at….SOMETHING!” Clasping the receipt into my palm with both of her hands she finally crashed with “have a good day ma’am…and a good tomorrow…I just know you’re going to have a lot of good tomorrows”. The whole thing seemed so bizarre and surreal that once again, I left thinking that a tweaked out Ty Pennington or one of those bland Canadian HGTV hosers would spring out from around the corner to reveal me as the winner of some kind of room/pet/personal/makeover. But nay.

You know, for the most part I get it. Chronic illness is awkward. Most people aren’t sure what, if anything, to say to me. One common refrain is “I don’t know how you do it…if it were me I just don’t know what I would do”. While I know it is meant as a compliment, I always find this comment curious. Because it somehow implies or assumes that I chose this for myself. As if I overslept on the day of physical trait registration so that by the time I got to the registrar’s office the ‘long legs’ and ‘hyper metabolism’ traits were full and I had to scramble to sign up for something so I didn’t get stuck with some far worse like ‘chocolate allergy’ or ‘George Lucas jowls’. I’ll be honest. Though I don’t consider myself bitter, I’m also not one of those types who goes around preaching about how lupus has changed my life for the better…made me stop and smell the roses…appreciate the little things in life. And if I had to do it over again I’d pick this lot again blah blah. Bull. Truth be told if I could unload this onto anyone I would. A stranger, a neighbor, a friend, a blind nun pedaling a rickshaw full of orphans holding puppies in a hurricane. If I could ‘hot potato’ this thing or fling it randomly like a handful of crap at a crowd of gawkers like those awesome chimps at the Lincoln Park Zoo I so totally would.

As comforting a thought it may be, I doubt God has the time to sit around matching personal skill sets with health afflictions or assigning personality, mood and energy points like a giant game of The Sims. A world where everyone gets to work on time, chats with their neighbors, pays their bills and enjoys aquariums and pool tables bought with Sim dollars. I suspect He’s more of a ‘big picture’ guy, keeping his eyes on the road with a 18 wheeler of genocide and famine rumbling behind him.

I suspect the reality is a little closer to the way that I play the Sims. Which is that I spend great care and time selecting my outfit and the pattern of my sofa, go to work a few times, and then start getting complaints from neighbors for not bringing in my newspapers, lose my job for being late, start a fire in my microwave and eventually collapse into a pile of my own urine because I neglected my ‘hygiene’ indicator while I was busy dancing to my record player. (Apologies to anyone who reads this and has not played the game the Sims. You will have no idea what I’m talking about but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it probably indicates the opposite; you are a high functioning member of society with a healthy pallor and active social life. I bet you used to be into Pilates, but now favor birkram yoga. And you undoubtedly know your red wines.)

Or maybe structuring our lots in life is kinda like organizing the seating chart at your wedding reception. You start out carefully analyzing each guest’s likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses. ‘I think Karen should sit at the same table as Tom because they both went to Northern and are from the southwest suburbs’. But by the end of the night, broken down from a night of reception chess, you just want it to be over so you can watch Letterman and go to bed. That’s how you end up with your cousin Catherine (Sister Catherine) at the same table as the handsy photographer and the guy from your intramural softball league who didn’t even know your first names until he got the wedding invite in the mail (‘Hintz…Hintzer….Hintzer marrying F-Bomb….’).

I think sometimes there is a misconception that by nature of having dealt with illness at a younger age than most, I possess some kind of oracle- like wisdom or insights about the world and its machinations. But I think wisdom comes from time, not just ‘old’ experience. So I probably can’t offer you bucket list suggestions for your creative writing workshop at the COD adult learning annex. Save that for Mitch Albom and Nicholas Sparks. I can, however, tell you confidence is key when peeing into a tiny plastic cup, laughing hurts less than crying and if anyone ever says something might ‘sting a little bit’ they mean it’s going to burn like a salted hemorrhoid .