Just Hilarie

Well, so the good news is…the sun came out today! I saw its bright glow shining on the wall of my bedroom closet doors as I woke up about noontime after I had slept a few hours since arriving back at my apartment around 9am from my all-night vigil at Södersjukhuset’s ER.

The other good news is that I am not dying. My dizziness wasnt because I had a stroke. The wonderful ER doctor subjected me to all manner of stroke tests which you have to do and I passed with flying colors. It was sort of like being back in kindergarten and playing follow the leader. I could touch my fingertips to my nose with my eyes closed; hold my arms up in the air for the required number of seconds also with closed eyes; I could easily move my left heel down my right shin from knee to toe and the same applied to my right heel; I followed her pen as it moved in front of my eyes, going back and forth and up and down. It was sort of fun, if playing games in the hospital qualifies as fun.

I also seemed to pass the test for what is known here as krystalsjuka or benign positional vertigo in English. The doctor did all kinds of tests moving my head back and forth and up and down and it didn’t make me feel worse. I didn’t really think that was what I had anyway since the waves of dizziness and unbalance came on me when I was not really doing much to move my head. The final episode, which sent me to the ER, happened when I was calmly sitting at the kitchen table reading my kindle – no head movement going on then at all.

I told the ER doc about the infection I had 3 weeks earlier, thinking that might be causing the inner ear problem but that infection was now gone due to a cure of antibiotics. She asked if I had any feeling of impaired hearing or pain in my ears. I have no ear pain and while I probably do have a bit of impaired hearing, that is probably due more to attendance at rock concerts long ago and age.

So…what was the result of my spending 8 hours (from 1 am to 9am) in the ER?

Well, first I got to spend some quality time with my programmer son, we got to talk and bond a bit. That was very nice. He stayed with me till the ER doctor told me at just after 6am that she recommended that I stay the additional 2 hours until 8am when the hospital neurologist came on duty. After all, she said I had been there so long already it was worth it to stay another 2 hours and talk to the specialist. So I sent Bevin home and asked the nurse for a pretty, dark blue hospital blanket and with the room light turned, off I settled in for the wait.

At a quarter after 8, neurologist Jonas (doctors here in Sweden always just introduce themselves with their first names. Sweden is very informal that way) came in and turned on the overhead lights. He seemed to have already read the detailed report that the ER doctor had written up and proceeded to ask a few questions of his own. He did a few of the stroke tests with me and shook my head about to test for that positional vertigo thing. And then he told me that in his opinion, I was perfectly fine. I had just had a case of unexplained vertigo and that it would probably be fine. He suggested that it might also have been due to a bout of low blood pressure, which was something I had thought too. In any case, at that point of the morning I had to admit I was definitely feeling mainly just tired and no longer dizzy. So he sent me off with a Good Luck and a paper describing exercises for positional vertigo, just in case.

So the second and probably most important result of my hospital adventure, is that I am fine. I am not dying. Well, we are all dying eventually but I am not doing it today. And that is nice to know.

When I got there, I posted on Facebook that I was sitting in the ER waiting room. My son who despises Facebook and wants to have nothing to do with it, thought my posting was too much public information. But as most of my friends know by now, I’m a blabbermouth. I like sharing about my life (just as much as I like reading friend’s posts about what is happening in their lives. I am not so happy about people just posting impersonal stupid memes, but that’s another story) I have to say that the response I got back from people offering their concern and care was heartwarming. Is that too cliché to say? Whether it is or not, what I want to say is that I really appreciated it. So that was the third result of my ER adventure. I found out that friends actually read my posts and what’s more, care about me and what I write. That was much more effective than “copy and pasting” stupid texts about Facebook restricting my wall to only 25 friends and then asking friends to write something like “hey” to get around that particular algorithm and see them on your wall. To misquote a movie I never really liked, “If you write something, people will come.”

So a big thank you to everyone, family, friends and even the doctors for all you do. And while I am not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions, mainly because I know they rarely get followed up on, I am hoping that this year I do a better job of getting out there and interacting more with you all.

Happy New Year 2019

Coco is found

Coco is found. She is home again, where she belongs. I just thought I would tell you, in case any of you still were concerned.

The next-door neighbor to a friend of mine here on the island called me about a week after Coco went missing, after falling 4 stories out of our window. We had plastered Reimersholmen with posters of Coco, asking if anyone had seen her. The neighbor called to tell me that she was fairly certain that she had seen a cat answering Coco’s description up behind the building next to hers, on the highest part of our island of Reimersholmen, near the edge of the car park. We hadn’t been looking there, so Bevin and I went to investigate. Benigna, the neighbor, came out to meet us when we went up to look and she showed us exactly where she had seen the cat. We were so grateful for her concern. Just at the edge of the car park the ground drops, forming a kind of cliff. I wasn’t able to walk down that steep slope, my mountain goat days being long over, but my son could. He could see cave-like holes leading into the side of the cliff. Small holes, just the perfect size to fit a cat. We started taking turns going up there, leaving food near the biggest “cave”. I would go up during the day, bringing a book and sitting and waiting and calling her name, to see if she would appear. My son went up in the evenings after he got home from work and it was starting to get dark.

After several days of this, my son is up near the cave area and we are WhatsApp texting to each other – I am at Stavsnäs, our country house and he is in town. It is evening but still light enough to see and he finds a cat sitting in one of the caves and sends me a photo of it. We discuss whether this is the other cat that has gone missing here on Reimers. Suddenly he writes “She’s back” and then sends me a picture of our Coco as she calmly walks up over a moss-covered rock towards him! She goes over to him, rubs across his leg and looks up at him as if she is asking, “What are you doing here?” He gathers her up in his arms and brings her home. Her week and a half vacation out in the wild is over.

It’s been four days now since she’s been gone. We weren’t really paying much attention. It wasn’t that we were so busy. We were just tired. It had been a busy week.

A week and a half ago, on a Sunday afternoon, my son and I went to an apartment viewing. I had seen the 44 square meter apartment announced on Hemnet and immediately felt it would suit my son very well. He had been talking about wanting to have his own place for a while now but hadn’t gotten around to starting the process of actively looking yet.

I told him, “On Sunday we are going to look at an apartment.”

I sent him the link, so he could look at the pictures of the place. He liked what he saw and was excited about going to look at it. So on Sunday afternoon we took the bus and subway over to Kungsholmen to take a look.

There weren’t that many people at the viewing when we were there. Mostly young people, like Bevin. We walked around the apartment investigating the bright livingroom and small but adequate bedroom from all angles. The kitchen was clean and modern with a small dishwasher and a nice gas stove, plenty of storage for a young man with not much in the way of kitchen utensils anyway. The bathroom was small but very well designed and it even had a small washing machine. The bedroom had good closets and enough room to walk around in even with a 140 cm wide bed.

Bevin fell in love with it and on Monday put in a bid for it. Unfortunately so did someone else. The bidding war went on till Friday. And for various reasons the other bidder won. My son was disappointed but, hey, how often do you actually get the first and only apartment you look at and like. There will be more to look at and he learned a lot about buying an apartment.

At the same time as the nerve-racking bidding war was going on, our friend Gayle was visiting us from New York City for a few days. Håkan and I took her out to Drottningholm that Wednesday and we took a tour of the theater there. Then we got her settled in, in our co-op’s guest apartment.

Thursday was spent doing chores while Gayle tried to put back into her suitcases all the stuff that had exploded out of them in the week and a half she had been in Stockholm. While I made a very late dinner of home-made Swedish meatballs with sauce and potatoes, Håkan had to dash down to our so-called office to finalize a sale of some photo equipment to the guy who was coming by to pick up the stuff. Dinner for all of us, was finally on the table just before 10pm. Phewwww.

At 3 o’clock early Friday morning, I helped Gayle drag her suitcases down to the street and said goodbye as she got in her cab. Then I went back to bed.

Friday evening, Bevin texts us that he didn’t get the apartment. A feeling of gloom envelops our home. Bevin texts us again, saying he will be meeting some friends right after work. He comes home late. He acknowledges me as he passes by on his way to his room but that’s about it.

I honestly don’t remember much of what I did Saturday morning – probably got up late. As I said, we were tired.

Around 2pm Bevin asked us if anyone had seen Coco. We do a half-hearted search around, looking in all the usual places our cats find to sleep in. We can’t find her so we start to look in the unusual places. Still no little brown cat. We look harder. She is nowhere to be found in our apartment. We’ve all been home all day so the door to the hallway hasn’t been opened. Slowly, we start to realize she must have fallen out of one of our two slightly ajar windows. We know (because we’ve seen her there) she sometimes pokes her head outside, putting her front paws on the slanted outside window sill, sometimes more than half her body is outside by the time we notice and pull her back in. Saturday we weren’t paying attention.

She must have fallen out.

Coco the cat

Our windows are four stories up. We rushed outside, looking under all the bushes below our apartment. No dead brown body. But no cat either. We looked all around calling her name. Nothing. After dinner Bevin sat outside on the park bench, watching till almost 10pm, in the drizzling rain. He had his umbrella.

It’s now been four days since she’s been gone. We covered the island with color posters of her and my telephone number. I placed an announcement with her picture on the Reimersholmen Facebook page saying she is missing. And another on a missing cat website. While Bevin’s at work I go around the island looking for her, talking to all the dog walkers, asking if she’s been spotted on their rounds. People recognize my name on the posters and come up to me, asking if she has been found yet. They put my number in their phones, for, you know, just in case.

While Coco has never been outside, here on Reimersholmen, she is not totally unfamiliar with the outdoors – she spent all summer at our country place running around outside, proving herself to be a very able huntress. But Reimers is not the same as Stavsnäs. There’s a lot more danger here; more strange cats, more cars on more streets, more people with dogs. I hope she’s savvy enough. I hope she finds her way back to our building. I hope we find her.

We miss her.