Mary has a buggered shoulder.

There are people in the world who live with injuries a lot longer than her but this has not been an easy stretch for her. She fell in February, while on a vacation and tore her rotator cuff along with dislodging her bicep from her bone. What does all of that mean? Essentially, she cannot lift her right arm higher than her hip. It’s no way to live your life asking for help to reach the cereal, needing someone to lift your arm to grab the mouse or trying to take your bra off with one hand (although that is a skill I mastered at one point of my bachelor life…).

Tomorrow Mary goes for surgery to repair this damage.

For months we debated the merits of the Canadian medical system. Should she pay for private medical to fix the damage in a world where you pay big bucks for instant help. Or should we wait it out for an appointment to see a specialist and hope to have it repaired in the next 18 months? It brought me back to the old days when we used to receive those extended insurance and dismemberment forms back in elementary school. You remember the conversation with your buddies where it listed the various body parts you could lose and how much it was worth if you lost it. The debate raged on whether it was better to lose an eye for $10,000 or lose one of your hands for $25,000. When you are older or injured, you debate what you will pay them to hopefully get it back.

Mary got lucky, with some dogged perseverance in chasing down various doctors who could hopefully help an active woman get her am back to full use. She was able to get into see a specialist after 7 months with a hope to get a surgery date before Christmas. Last week, her ship came in with a cancelation on the surgery and she is up for a new arm tomorrow. Suddenly, the reality kicked in. She actually has to have a surgery done which means real anesthetic and real risks.

We have had some strange conversations in the past day. Where is my living will and do you know what is in it? What do you mean I can’t drive for 4-6 weeks? How exactly are we getting the kids to all of their different sports with only one driver? The instructions even say she needs to take a pregnancy test prior to the surgery! These aren’t  exactly topics that we have spent much time talking about in the past while so to say it was eye opening is an understatment. I suppose all the legal battles raged through hospital mishap have led to the days where no stone is unturned prior to an operation.

I am confident that she will be better than ever, sooner than even the doctors think. She will have a tough 8-12 weeks of recovery and at the end her “bionic” arm will be a great story to tell. If this is the worst of the hospital visits we see in our lifetime, we will be very fortunate. In the meantime, you can stop wondering why people have to wear that bar that holds your arm out on an angle. Her name is Mary, so say hi to her when you see her.

Good luck baby! Your career as a major league pitcher is over but here’s to being able to drink a beer with your right arm again!

Marco

This morning you could hear the cheers of parents from around Alberta as the majority of students went back to class. It has widely been recognized that parents have that relief on their faces as Labour Day rolls around that the challenge of entertaining their kids, all day long, has finally come to an end. Now I know that the summer is designed to give kids (and teachers) a break from the grind of education and it also give parents a chance to reconnect with their children. For some fortunate families, they can spend the entire summer travelling and vacationing across the land. That lifestyle can take the edge off the summer grind of entertaining the youth, while the rest of us look for ways to get our kids away from their electronics for a day. The answer all along was the almighty school, and it’s back!

Not so fast parents! The return of reading, writing and arithmetic poses all sorts of new (age old) problems for families. Here’s my Hateful 8 list of why school is not necessarily the gift our parents always used to think it was:

1. Kids hate to go to bed when the sun is up.

You know this is the biggest struggle in week 1. Kids traditionally have broken from their traditional bedtimes through the summer and reforming them to the standard is no small task. If you could bottle the energy being put into yelling “GET TO BED!” across this city tonight, you could power the oil sands.

2. Lunches.

Some parents have this down to a science where their kids make their own lunches. Others of us bang our heads against the wall to find the perfect combination of healthy and something that the schools will allow them to eat. If you are “lucky” enough to have teens you know that battle. They can’t take a lunch because it’s not cool yet they will eat everything and anything when they dig for it. Give up and let them fend for themselves.

3. School supplies.

It’s an amazing industry. They manufacturers of pens and pencils have made an art out of putting the cool in school. The days of school lists and foraging through stores looking for the correct duotang and correction tape have changed but make no mistake. If your kid shows up with some foreign notebook or pencil sharpener that wasn’t approved by the teacher, someone will know about it.

4. School fees.

I get it, the school board has no money. They have no way to fund all of the creative classes that your son or daughter has slected from their options list. Ultimately, we can do nothing about the machine that the school system has become but we are allowed to complain about it during the first week. Rage against the fees!

5. Homework

It’s a necessary evil to education and the schools have tried to curtail it but nothing turns your evening around more than to try and re-learn stochiometry, the parts of a flower or how to dissect math word problems. Why the hell do I care how fast a train is going if it left Chicago at 4pm Saturday? Because we want our kids to get into Harvard and this might come up on a SAT exam 12 years from now.

6. Clothes/shoes shopping

If you were one of those families wandering around the mall with that dreaded look on your face, I feel for you. I don’t know who came up with the rule that all kids should have new clothes to start school but they must be related to the Walton family of Walmarts. That propaganda has been haunting families for years. Is it to make them feel better against the new kids they will meet or so we as parents feel like our kids aren’t the little creeps they showed us all summer? I say we all send our kids to school with no socks as a show of force.

7. Crazy school schedules

Whatever happened to the days where school started at 9am sharp and kids rolled home at 3:30? Now we have kids in class before 8am and home early on Friday’s. How can any parent be expected to organize a work schedule around this schedule? Don’t even get me started on the way kids are bussed to school in this city. We aren’t going to change it people but I’m choosing to send my kids in late once a week as a way of telling them I simply can’t get my ass out of bed on time…

8. School borne illnesses

Yep these are back too. Ask yourself why doctors take 8 weeks off every summer. It’s because by mid-September they will be so busy raking in fees with runny noses, barking coughs and if you are really unlucky, the dreaded lice, cleaning process. You can’t stop these bugs from attacking your kids, you can only hope to contain them. Prepare to hose down your kids nightly to give you the best chance to avoid malaria.

I ask you again, why are we thrilled that the kids are back in school? The truth is they do actually learn stuff that will serve them well in life. They grow from social interactions and actually meet some pretty amazing kids. Do yourself a favour and stock up on beer and wine this weekend. You will need it at some point as it’s a long way until June. Hang in there parents!

Marco