Last Day of the Summer Semester

This afternoon I had my last class of the university semester, which happened to be online because the professor lives in Greece. Three of us students/guest auditors had shown up, so it was a snug discussion about Greek history since the military dictatorship fell apart in 1974. It touched on the triumph of the Socialist party PASOK in the 1980s, the neoliberalism of Kostas Simitis in the 90s, and the debt crisis of the 2010s.

Normally I'd also have a language seminar on Friday mornings, on campus. But it was cancelled this week as the (retired) professor's grandchildren are in town for a visit.

It feels nice to wrap up the semester. I'm curious to know how my applications for bona fide study in the winter semester will turn out, also looking forward to travelling to Canada in September.

I've scheduled a Spanish language test to write on Tuesday morning at one of Berlin's universities, to see if I reach the B1 level. It makes me quite nervous, because if anyone asked me to self-assess I'd claim the A2 level at best.

It's also become clear to me that the programme of self-guided study that I've been doing to help with the test is too intense to keep up for long.

But a levelling self-test online turned out well: so there's reason to believe I might pass the university's test, too.

After watching the films Adú, El Pepe, and La Vocera on Netflix, I'm now watching the series LaLiga about Spanish association football. It's in some ways as dystopian as any of the scenes in the other films.

**

I've felt well enough to go on two shopping trips for dinner, despite the heat. But the menu was constructed around corn on the cob, and I couldn't find it at the three grocery stores that I visited even though it is grown in the Brandenburg region.

So we've eaten leftovers from yesterday instead, and ice cream.

Yesterday I'd boiled new potatoes that were both organic and grown in Germany, and served it with green onions and yoghurt, and bacon.

**

As for politics, I'm a little less convinced that the 45th president will win back the presidency again.

But as an EU citizen I already felt well insulated from his idiosyncratic practice of leadership the last time.

In any case my vague theory is that the pendulum of stupidity is quite unstoppable; it will swing back to rationality eventually, and I'm looking forward to when it does. Perhaps we'll have another, perhaps more successful President Jimmy Carter in the next 10 years, preferably without the subsequent Ronald Reagan.

As for the vice-presidential candidate: If people genuinely want someone who was in the U.S. Senate for 1 or 2 years, seemingly has little if any other real political experience, and seems to be a homophobe as well as an anti-abortionist, to be 'one heartbeat away from the presidency' as Vice President, that's their problem.

(I'm also enjoying the ridiculous quotation on his Wikipedia, said not years ago but this month, that the UK is the "first truly Islamist country with nuclear weapons." There are more ridiculous quotations on a wide spectrum of issues, but I won't go on...)

**

The swallows are chirping through the warm evening sky, voices are echoing from the restaurant below, and tires are rushing over the asphalt outside. I think I'll wrap up the business part of the day and take it easy soon.

A Quiet Monday

This morning I rolled out of bed before 8 a.m. again, a little worried that I'd feel sick later in the day because of a lack of sleep. (Last night I'd stayed up until past 1 a.m., reading the thriller Bad Cree, which is set in northern Alberta — Treaty 8 territory —, which I'd bought in paper form after seeing a television discussion of it on Canada Reads in March.)

But on the whole I've felt cheerful enough.

Waking up early was also justified: the painters rang the doorbell well before 9 a.m. They replaced window frames in Ge.'s bedroom and took out the windows of the pantry. To protect the pantry's floor, shelves, and contents from rainfall, they taped speckled grey painters' felt into the aperture. (Unfortunately, a wind has blown through the courtyard steadily since then, and dismantled their construction.)

Afterward, the wiry experienced painter came into the corner room to report on progress. It was his very last day of work!

We'd worried over the past weeks that we were the ones who'd 'broken' him to the point of retirement: he has vocally complained about being left to take care of the 40 window panes in our apartment largely on his own.

But he complimented us a bit diffidently this morning, saying that we'd been relaxed tenants to work with. 'They're not all like that!'

Mama told him that she wished him the best for his next phase. He looked a bit tentative and thoughtful.

Ge. later explained this enigmatic reaction: he'd heard that rather than retiring directly, the painter had found a new position instead.

I was kind of agog to hear what other tenants had been like...

***

In the meantime I read an old newspaper and finished Bad Cree. After the 1 hour fast after taking my morning iron pill, I ate a bowl of muesli with cocoa powder.

And since then I've finished listening to a non-fiction book about Burma/Myanmar, chatted with Ge. (Mama set off for university fairly early), listened to a short Greek news report about a politician who's been jailed in Albania for a while, and begun the Spanish language practice programme for today by writing out a conjugation table for the irregular verb ser.

My next fast read experiment, since I have at least 20 books in progress and it's a little much, will hopefully be Jennifer Croft's translation of Olga Tokarczuk's Flights. 

It's 28°C and sunny, but/and I've decided not to go outdoors until tomorrow. Yesterday was exhausting and, as mentioned, I didn't get the full quota of sleep.

Helping Hands of Friends, and Thundershowers

Yesterday I met up with friends from the former work team. We ate ice cream together: strawberry mascarpone and peanut ice cream for me (admittedly with the medical thought that the strawberry flavour likely had lemon juice with Vitamin C, and the emergency room doctor had advised eating nuts for iron). Then we had a round of coffee and sparkling water. The temperature was over 30°C, at least at first, but I didn't feel dizzy except mildly, when standing for a longer time; and it was nice.

Then, later on, it turns out that the paper bag a friend was carrying (despite her having injured her foot herself, and still recovering) was full of things for me to eat that have iron in them, and that the group had organized this together. I was deeply touched by the gesture.

And it's helped me out a lot since then.

I hadn't felt up to grocery-shopping again but didn't want to be a nuisance by asking my brothers. I was beginning to worry about running out of fruit juice to take with my iron pill in the morning, as we were down to one banana: so the net of oranges was one of the most welcome sights I could imagine.

Besides, I'd run out of fresh ideas for fresh food with iron in it: there's only so many times I can eat spinach, pistachios, and my makeshift lentil recipes over the course of weeks without their beginning to feel like medicine.

Many of the things I had no idea were a good source of iron before: hempseed in a bar of white chocolate, amaranth to add to my usual breakfast cereal, dried apricots, pumpkin seeds that I've just been snacking on in front of the computer, etc.

Anyway, I feel very lucky.

*

Today the painters came by again, to switch out another group of wooden frames that they're repainting — badly needed since we've lived here for over 15 years and had never had the frames repainted before.

There's an elder painter, tattooed and wiry, who's still in his 50s but has to retire because of a bad shoulder and feeling overworked. And a younger one, who didn't say too much today: per his colleague, he was tired and just wanted to go back to sleep.

Because of the weather forecast, they left outer windows in place for now.

And indeed, later, a thunderstorm brewed.

Now it's raining again from a slate-grey sky. I'm hoping it'll reduce the temperatures back down. The temperatures were over 30 again earlier today in parts of Berlin, I think. Then they plunged to 22. And they climbed again. Needless to say, I'm not a big fan of the heat.

Tales of the Not-So-Imaginary Invalid

I've ridden a medical roller coaster of sorts since my last post:

On Saturday I made the interesting choice to take a slow, but two-hour-long, walk to the allotment gardens, since I was feeling better. It was 29°C weather, so warm although still enjoyable, and I was quite happy about finding dried sage and rosemary that a gardener had thoughtfully placed in their fence basket for visitors to take.

At home I was rummaging in the pantry for a container to hold the sage. Then I nudged a glass water bottle.

Whether it was the fall, or the high pressure of the carbon dioxide gas as well as the hot weather, or both, I don't know. But it burst apart at the top, and left a gash in my leg.

I was eager to leave the pantry. But as I stepped back, my foot landed on a few glass shards; fortunately they were convex. Water was splashed everywhere, and I began leaving bloody footprints. And I lost most of my sang-froid.

The gash became longer as my muscles pulled on the skin, and the edges were no longer meeting. I felt like I was going to vomit and started pouring with sweat. My two youngest brothers were nearby and came to help.

Ge. gave me a glass of water, and I felt better. And at least the blood clotted rapidly; blood loss wouldn't have been any concern at all, in fact, if I hadn't already had anaemia.

We disinfected and bandaged the gash. But we didn't have the sterile strips that could have held the edges of it so that it would heal together. Going to the general practitioner wasn't an option, either: they aren't open on Saturdays. Going to the emergency room felt like overkill, and impossible given that walking around so much would split open the cut further. I awkwardly kept the leg elevated as well as I could to immobilize it, for hours...

To 'fast forward,' I asked the doctor about the injury on Tuesday.

She took a look, rinsed it, reapplied iodine salve, and re-bandaged it. I'll have a definite scar because we didn't have the tools to match up the edges of the cut, and she'd have been happier if I'd had an up-to-date tetanus shot. But it's healing.

My battered state began to suggest Oscar Wilde's line in The Importance of Being Earnest: 'To lose one parent may be accounted a misfortune, but to lose two begins to look like carelessness.' I always thought it was brutal in the original context, but as a metaphor for my ailments it's not too callous.

***

Tuesday evening was the next anaemia drama.

I'd been back and forth more than I'd really planned, because the pharmacy had to order in the iron capsules that my doctor had prescribed, so it was two trips.

I was running late to choir practice and walked rather quickly, i.e. my usual pace when not ill, to get there. At the end, of course, I went up four flights of stairs to the correct room. But ... during our warm-up, I began to feel that something was off. I couldn't get much breath, and I stopped singing and start clutching the back of the chair in front of me just in case I started fainting.

At the end, the choirmaster said that we could take a break if we needed, and that he hoped he wasn't pushing us too hard. We started learning our songs. Then we were asked to try singing one standing up. For the first time in all our rehearsals, I kept sitting: when I'd begun to stand, I noticed that my legs felt too noodly to bear my weight.

The lady beside me asked if I was OK, because apparently I looked extremely pale. She offered to open more windows. (But a few were already open, so there was no need.)

After taking it easy during our practice intermission, I fortunately recovered throughout the second half of the practice. Then I went home again extremely carefully and slowly.

It was, at least, a relief to figure out why my vague headachy symptoms before the bicycle accident had been stronger during choir practice: holding my breath while singing a phrase, makes less oxygen available to my blood cells.

And of course the choir ladies were very kind. But from a personal health perspective it was generally perturbing.

*

The next day I was more or less swimming in a jelly-like pool of wooziness. Standing up from a chair made me woozy. Walking briskly from my room to the kitchen made me woozy. Playing a faster Beethoven piece at the piano made me woozy. I saw stars twice when I made a sudden movement.

It was probably also the same yesterday: the two days are melting together. Only today do I feel fitter.

*

It's not like I can't enjoy some of the drama retroactively. Also, it's a valuable if small insight into the coping strategies that elderly people or people with disabilities develop all the time.

But I'm beginning to feel a little defeated.

I dreaded the federal job agency video call today a little bit because I have so little energy.

It feels like I can't make any plans to look for work because what if I faint on the way there, or can't face any other minor physical demands? Fortunately I'm not being paid anything by the job agency right now, so the obligation is lower. But remote work is beginning to look like a more realistic option.

I've been putting off plans with friends because I can't face the logistics of making sure I'm presentably dressed and not taking a nap or floating in a haze the whole time. I think most, but not all, are convinced that I'm not giving empty excuses.

The feeling of being sick extends to sleeping.

It has often been deep, rather like the kind you have after a very long walk.

But one evening I also 'woke up' out of a doze because I felt like a weight was pressing on my chest and I couldn't breathe. I talked myself through it, telling myself that this could be a panic attack symptom rather than a physiological symptom. Right or wrong, it worked, and then I was able to sleep.

And I already hate taking the iron capsules. Each capsule is tiny and sticky, and the first day it was hard to tell if I'd swallowed it down. I do feel mildly nauseated after taking it, as warned. And I have to wait a full hour before eating breakfast. The doctor said that the full effect of taking the iron supplements will only be detectible after 3 months...

And I'm still not sure how to balance exercise with being respectful of my anaemia. My solution for now is to cut down my exercise from at least 30 minutes medium-intensity exercise (or 1-hour low intensity, like a walk) 6 days per week, to an upper limit of 20 minutes and 50 minutes respectively. And I've been doing arm instead of full-body exercises to help my cut leg heal properly.

And this is the kind of thing that I feel ideally I should be figuring out on my own, not something to share with others. But if it's so large a part of my day right now, keeping things to myself is very isolating.

On the positive side, I have sent off a second university application. Besides it's still a consolation to have so much time for reading and studying. Even if I haven't attended protests there are a few that pass under the apartment window and besides I've been watching discussion panels from the Aspen Festival Ideas, as well as following the UK elections and an episode of PBS NewsHour. And watching disappointing Euro Cup matches!