Confronting Hobson's Choice

On January 7th, my father was admitted at 0600 to the Ottawa Civic Hospital. Before noon, the surgeons had removed the right leg below the knee and stitched him up. This was done under and epidural because of his assessed high risk under a general (stroke risk, poor heart, bad lung, infection, etc.). The surgery went, according to the vascular surgeon, well. Nonetheless, Robert had one less foot and lower leg by mid-day.

This truly was a Hobson's Choice - antibiotics being ineffective, infection growing, with the possibility of necrosis not that remote, versus a surgical risk, the challenges of learning to walk with a prosthetic, the risk of stroke, and the challenges of healing at 78. Not the sort of choice anyone has to make.

I found myself unable to make a recommendation as both choices seemed perilous and uncertain. My father faced the choice with a certain sans peur sang froid. His calculus was that chronic wracking pain made life not worth living and this offered some remote hope of surcease and some quality of life, however challenging, in the future.

Father is home now and we're into dealing with the day-to-day impacts and trying to get him well and the pain controlled and the house fully adjusted to his needs. That's a big challenge, but I'm hoping we have some luck because he was brave enough to face the surgery and lucky enough to get throgh it unscathed (well, down a lower leg and foot, but that was the plan after all). If we can get his pain moderated, the sutures healed, I think he may well walk again on a prosthesis. He's a tough old bird and so is my Mom who is his support and who enables him to carry on.

He is human enough to have been worn down by the chronic pain, to have fear of this operation and losing his leg, but that was only a few moments and passed. He faced the whole process with an aplomb and courage that I honestly would be hard pressed to match.

At times like these, your mind tends to look for mechanisms to deal with the worry, the stress, the fatigue, and the possibilities. Mine took me down the line of thinking of what I might say at a eulogy for my Father. Grim stuff, but when you can't sleep, sometimes your mind makes up its own course rather than heeding your direction.

I may yet write out that eulogy, both as a preparation and perhaps to let my Father see what I would have said.

My father is no saint; He has flaws and shortcomings and views with which I vehemently disagree in some particulars. Yet, at the same time, he is the man who defined for me the words Integrity, Diligence, and Honour. (In my teens and early twenties, I might have added Intransigence, Provincial Mindset, and Rigidity, but I'm older now and think that assessment at least a significant exaggeration).

My mother has lives her values: Honour, Professionalism, Personal Responsibility, and Compassion. From her, I learned to care about people and to be willing to work hard and do a creditable job of whatever task I attempt. I learned and integrated the credo of personal responsibility. And I learned about Honour over Opportunity and Doing The Right Thing.

But from my Father, I learned about Integrity and Honour in an even deeper sense. By example, he demonstrated that the corruption prevalent in parts of our society, although too large to defeat, can be opposed. His actions showed that because others abuse a trust, even a public trust, to their own benefit, that does not justify you doing the same.

Personal Gain is nowhere near as important as personal ethics and the value of your Word and your Commitment. I often wonder how he resisted the opportunities to become corrupt and profit when it was so easy and systemic, but that is part of the core of his personality.

He sets a high bar of expectation from those with whom he deals (and that included me, to be honest). He expects them to do what they say and follow the terms of an agreement. But he will not cheat someone, even if it were an option and they were naive. His sense of Fairness and Rightness extend to dealing equitably with others as long as they too will do the same.

I've loved my Father and Mother for all of my life; Love is the natural state of a child for the parents. As I have aged, I have cultivated a more balanced, warts-and-all perspective on both of them as people. In doing so, I have come to greatly respect each of them for the things they have done, the stands they have taken, and for the way they have carried themselves in situations where it would have been far easier to do the wrong sort of thing, the easy and possibly profitable thing. But they did not.

And thus, in addition to my Love, they have earned my lasting Respect. And above and beyond that, they have become my Friends. I am very fortunate to have both around and to benefit from their advice (even Mother's reminders 'it's cold outside, better put on some mitts!' and the like). I'm also incredibly fortunate to have had two such exemplary role models to measure my own character against.

I may have inherited Stubborn, Intransigent, Independence from both sides of the family, along with the "Gift of the Gab". But along with that, I inherited a firm sense of Integrity, Duty, Responsibility, and Compassion.

I'm no angel either, as my parents before me, but whatever I am, I owe to them. And I'm very, very glad to still have both, in whatever decrepit form, around to share their wisdom with me.

My cup runneth over with blessings and I try hard to remind myself of this while tossed too fro on the Sea of Troubles. Most people will never have such good fortune at any point in their lives.

Have a good weekend. Hug the people who matter to you - never take them for granted. our spans are finite and our duration unpreditable.

Visiting Missouri

 
I just returned from visiting my dear cousin Alan and his lovely and talented wife Linda in Clinton, MO.

There was a trip to the Truman Dam and the man-made (huge) Truman Lake.

There was a birthday cake, carrot with coconut pecan icing.

There was beer. Never to the point of regret, just a steady flow of 2-4 drinks a day (some were Rye Whisky after I found a 26-er for $10 US and that was a mid priced brand... if I lived in Missouri, with a 40-oz vodka bottle for $7, I'd fear for my liver). The drinks were just pleasant accompanyment and aided in significant unwinding.

Missouri was a bit too hot most days (very humid mid eighties) and a bit too wet (torrentially so) a few others, but the day everyone had off work was nice as was the last weekend.

There was some really good pizza including a visit to Imo's in Kansas city. Also a visit to the StackShack for some excellent BBQ. There was also a good pizza or two from the local Dominos in Clinton (good!) and El Sombre's enchiladas and tacos and so forth. All in all, I ate well.

There was much XBox... a first for me. Red Dead Redemption (cowboy RPG/shooter) was a scream - some out of place tech (M1998 broom-handle Mauser or the M1911) and was easily the most fun shooter I've played in a long time! FIFA (soccer) was frustrating but fun. Worms (casual game involving worms using various weapons to whack the other team) was funny. Modern Warfare 2 was graphically impressive, but gameplay was a bit silly - when a bunny hopping CT operator leaped round a corner and blasted me with a Barret .50 in mid-leap, that more or less defined the game for me.

There was karaoke - one day Alan and I scorched and abused a variety of tunes (many Scots pop hits and folk bits I hadn't heard) and another day it was Linda and I (she has an excellent singing voice) doing the Eagles and some similar material. I know I personally exterminated Loch Lommond, some CCR, and did a quite passable job on Billy Joel's We Didn't Start The Fire (that's a fast tune). And yes, before you ask, me and karaoke - their WAS alcahol involved.

Mostly, me and Alan just hung out. That was spiffy. I quite enjoy my cousin even when he's gone off his noodle with his theories about the moon landing, the pentagon crash on 9/11 and some other oddities. I assume he was hit in the head with a fitba' one time too many during his days as a young soccer hooligan.

A totally enjoyable trip, I look forward to visiting again. Linda and Alan were excellent hosts, and Charlie and Winston (the cats) were both affectionate as well.
 

Rural Broadband arrives...

I was just out visiting the prior generation at their lovely Lanark Highlands redoubt. Upon the occasion of my visit, I supervised the installation of a wireless broadband system including a squarish dish antenna outside and the cable to bring the system into the living room. The dial up 26.8 kbps link is replaced by a 3 Mbps link - allowing all manner of new options including remote support from yours truly.

Yon new wireless connection to the Internet was itself connected to a Linksys WRT610 multi-frequency Wireless Access Point. This unit also can act as a connection point for network attached storage, a 4 port wired gigabit Ethernet hub, and can do streaming to a media pc via the dreaded UPnP. For file serving, it can dish it up via http, ftp or as streams.

Step two appears to be the acquisition of a computer and software and me configuring all sorts of stuff upon said computer, the router/firewall, and various remote tech support technologies. And all of this has to take into account the limited physical capabilities of my progenitors. Dear old mum just couldn't handle the weight of a full fledged laptop on her jigsaw-puzzle of a leg.

So, the challenges aren't over, but the parental units should be entering the Internetz without adult (ie me) supervision within the next couple of weeks. Clearly, Vint Cerf never saw this one coming.