It’s not a habit of mine to not give you any news for a year, but since my last blog of January 1, 2025, many unanticipated events were game changers.
WINTER 2025:
Once again, I had a tendency to hibernate like a bear, except for a short pause in the Jamaican sun from January 15th to the 25th with Mamie. The weather was magnificent, sometimes very humid, but who can complain with their butt in the ocean! We took advantage of the restaurants and bars of the club and we even paid a visit to the on-site infirmary and then the Montego Bay medical clinic when Mamie nosedived onto the entrance hall marble floor. Eight stitches later, we were back on the beach drinking margaritas! One thing is for certain: Mamie got back on her feet as fast as it took to nosedive.
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| Place of the incident |
SPRING 2025:
May 16th, we went to Toronto by train to spend some time with Dieter’s daughters, their husbands, children and grandchildren. We had a very nice family gathering. I experienced my first Porsche ride (thank you Philippe!) and our return to Montreal was underlined by a three-hour delay at the Cobourg station in Ontario. Luckily, nuts and gin and tonics were given for free and we received a credit for our next trip.
SUMMER 2025:
To begin the summer on a high note, I relished my Canadian Grand Prix under the sun and my departure the next day for Notre-Dame-du-Portage.
As usual, I spent my first week at Portage sleeping and when I came out of my coma, I went to Sainte-Luce-sur-Mer to spend some time with my Coast Guard family. We even had the chance to get a boat ride on the St-Lawrence River between Rimouski and the Bic. What a joy to find each other once again, the three bozos, on ti-Claude’s Auxiliary Coast Guard boat! I felt like moving to Sainte-Luce and offer my services!
The last evening, Yves, his daughter Margot and I went to eat at Le Ketch restaurant in Sainte-Flavie to examine the beach recharge for the bank protection. We arrived at 7 p.m., time of our reservation. Once we sat at our table, Yves and I took a few minutes on the terrace to observe the colossal work done all along the beach.
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Back at our table, a young waiter took down our choice of aperitif and Yves also asked for water. The waiter brought our drinks and placed a glass of water in the middle of the table. Yves looks at the glass of water, then the waiter with a confused look on his face. I also look at the glass asking myself if the waiter was going to put three straws for us to share, and I asked him, “Can we each have one?” thinking that it was not too much to ask.
At that moment, the tone was set for the evening.
The drinks served, Yves calls back the waiter and asks for ice to put in his hot rosé glass of wine. The ice never arrives, Margot was the one to go to the bar and bring back a glass filled with ice. Time passes and we have not yet given our order to the waiter. The restaurant fills up pretty quickly, so I wave my hands to get some attention before our order goes through after the rush of those hungry customers. My arms get tired of waving like crazy, so like a good school teacher, I raise my hand and wait. Finally, he arrives after stopping at every other table. Once we give our order, Margot takes care of the entertainment with 3 or 4 games of Hangman, then she puts her artistic talents to work by drawing 2 similar pictures on which there are 7 mistakes to find. We have time to play 3 times and we are still not served.
Our plates arrive at 8:30. If we were in a five-star restaurant, maybe, but we are in a micro-brewery. Margot eats a pogo, Yves a salad (ah, how reasonable!) and I a hamburger with fries with the promise that they help themselves to my fries. Starving at this late hour, the tiny container of mayonnaise empties quickly. Our waiter out of sight, Yves asks the first waitress that goes by for more mayo. The young lady comes back immediately to let us know that there is no mayonnaise, because they didn’t have time to fill the tiny containers. Yves’s face drops. “Are you kidding me?” he says sarcastically.
The young lady seems perplexed with this comment and turns away to “check.” Another waitress appears. “Finally, there is no more mayonnaise at all. Do you want ketchup?” she adds with a slightly disgusted look on her face. “No, we don’t want ketchup, but mayonnaise. This makes no sense. How can you be out of mayonnaise?” answers Yves.
The waitress has nothing to add. She leaves.
Now, all we can do is laugh about the situation we’re in. We are almost done when Yves suggests to ask for the check right away not to wait for it until 10 p.m. Being used to grab the attention, I start gesticulating once again and it takes quite some time once again.
When the waiter arrives with the bill, he asks Yves with a big smile, “How did you like your meal?”
Uh, oh! And we’re off!
Yves explains how and why the service was terrible, and the waiter tries to justify, explain and defend himself, but never to say he’s sorry: it’s the rush (not really, the terrace was empty), it’s the kitchen’s fault because the orders were mixed up (and where the mayo was lost!), it’s not my fault…
You could cut the tension with a knife. Yves, credit card in hand, paid the bill. The moment he has the receipt in hand, he leans in the general direction of the waiter to grab Margot’s jacket hanging at the back of her chair, but the waiter seems to interpret the move as an assault and I see from his look and his body language that he’s a guy ready for a fight. Luckily, he calms down when he sees the meaning of the gesture. Fiouf!
When we arrived home, Nadine, Yves’s wife, tells us about a similar horror story she also lived through at Saint-Lambert. What the hell! Are we becoming more difficult with age or are today’s young waiters less attentive to the customers’ needs? No one explained to them that all customers sitting at a table have the right to a glass of water… each?
When I returned from Notre-Dame-du-Portage, I had a new terrace installed. Magnificent!
FALL 2025:
This fall, I am more and more implicated in the Parliamo Italiano Club Committee. I work with my colleagues to organize activities and to update the web site which is now trilingual (parliamoitalianoclub.com).
I’ve also resumed my Italian classes with Massimiliano at the Giovanni Pascoli School in Montreal. I’m a little rusty because of the lack of conversation. I hope to improve not to lose all that I have learned so far.
I also enrolled to a class named “Great novels of Europe and America” to complete my bachelor’s degree in translation. I had to read two novels: Le Père Goriot of Balzac and Anna Karenina of Tolstoï, two beautiful rewarding reads.
In septembre, it was also André's 70th birthday. Good BBQ and a good time celebrating this big day.
The fall was also rough, because Mamie was sent by ambulance to a hospital near us after a fall. A fractured rib. After three nights of monitoring due to her very high blood pressure and to a very low oxygen level, we returned home with a new friend: Gerard.
Mamie hates Gerard, her new walker, but he is now necessary. When we arrived home, she was admiring the Christmas decorations I had put up for a great return and she fell again. A fraction of a second, the rapid movement of her head and she loses her balance. Today, she has another friend, more sophisticated this time: Fred, a rollator that my friend, Véronique, has so kindly lent us. Thank you Véro!
Two weeks later, she returns by ambulance to another hospital on the island of Montreal. This time, she has difficulty breathing. Water in her lungs. The culprit: her weakening heart that causes problems to her other organs.
This second experience at the emergency makes us realize the precarious state of our healthcare system. Take note that the doctors, the nurses and the hospital personnel are not the cause, on the contrary, they are extremely resilient for working in this environment. Mamie was placed in the hallway beside the entrance for the ambulance stretchers where the patient’s transfer was done beside her, where the worried family members gathered and where the personnel moved through this cloud of human beings. Sitting at the feet of Mamie’s stretcher, I almost received a patient’s boots in my face as he lay still strapped on an ambulance stretcher. The patient lying at Mamie’s head suffered from a serious mental health problem. Very confused, she walked in the halls, got close to patients to a point of making them very uncomfortable. I had to intervene between her and Mamie. The nurses had to tie her down with restraining straps, but very skillfully, she managed to wiggle her way down the stretcher and escape. I had to warn a nurse that the patient was about to go out to the waiting room. After a third escape, the nurse was searching for her. Luckily, I was able to show them the way having seen her pass in an adjacent hallway. Even the nurse was swearing under his breath.
The emergency was lined with very old patients, confused, waiting for a bed in a long-term care center. A poor old woman had a fit when two orderlies had to change her diaper. She was yelling that only her husband had the right to see her intimate parts and that they didn’t know how to treat a woman.
When Mamie received her diagnosis, they gave her strong diuretics and she had to go to the bathroom every 20 minutes. I look for an orderly to help her get to the bathroom in a wheelchair, but no one in sight. Five times, I had to do the work myself: run to find a wheelchair (they were rare), get to the bathroom at the other end of a labyrinth of hallways, enter the mini-bathroom with the wheelchair to immobilize it, prepare Mamie to do what she needed to do and all this at lightning speed as the diuretics were very efficient. Despite all by good intentions and efforts, there were a few incidents, a few messes.
After our fifth adventure, I was exhausted. My multiple sclerosis was beginning to send me signals. When the doctor finally came to speak to us, I made her understand that this was hell, that because of my health, I could not run like a mad person to the bathroom with my mother. Her explanation was that when family members were there, the orderlies did not take care of the patients. They have other patients to attend to. Great!
“But if I leave, who will take care of her, in the middle of the hallway with the back and forth of stretchers, confused patients, upset family members and personnel in a hurry? She doesn’t even have an alert button to call someone.”
“Ah, we’ll try to find a cubicle with a curtain and commode chair.”
That was never done.
All night, my mother and I were always looking at each other with stunned eyes repeating, “It’s a zoo!”, “You’d think we’re in an asylum!”, “It’s a bloody mess!”
Finally, her emergency experience of the week before was like a stay at the Ritz in comparison to what she was living today.
I left her late that might, tears in my eyes, and the next morning, we were ready to get the hell out of there. Hugo came to help me, because I am always scared to drop Mamie when her knees give-in. She will need to take all the necessary precautions to avoid another stay at the hospital. Now that the level of care she needs is growing, Hugo and André are thankfully there to help me when I need to catch my breath.
My body and my dysfunctional immune system have been teaching me many lessons in the past few years. When I was beside my father, Helmut, who suffered of organ failure due to Alzheimer’s, my body was covered with blisters from chronic urticaria. When Dieter was sick, my body was covered from head to toe with psoriasis. Now that my mother is sick, my immune system has decided to up the ante by making me lose handfuls of hair. Véro wanted to encourage me by telling me that I had a head for hats, but even if that’s true, it is far from comforting. It is now pretty clear that my body does not manage the suffering of others very well…
YEAR 2026:
The year 2025 was sprinkled with trips, challenges, falls, hospitalizations and finishes with exhaustion and worries, which explains ma absence, the lack of blog publications and Christmas cards, and for that, I am very sorry. I hope to be able to get back to it next year…
But be assured that I am thinking of you all the time and I hope the new year will bring us all peace of mind, calm, strength, resilience and courage. At least, in my case, I really need it! I make no predictions for 2026 as I’ve decided to take it one day at a time to diminish my stress, ma fatigue and to encourage my hair to grow back!
Merry Christmas and happy New Year, my friends, my loved ones,
Diane xxx...