Friday 21 December 2012

Blessings and Felicitations.

The boy sits on beds edge ferociously  strumming his  guitar, his eyes channelling something feral and intent  when I tap his shoulder.  But he is content.  All he wants for Christmas, sorted. A good  camera for shooting wild life , in the bag.  Subscription   to  an  X box site, not.  But he is working  on it. .  A copy of the Beano Annual, yeah,  granny Oonagh never fails him. .  Presents for family, done.  CDs all round from the  bargain basement and first burnt onto his own  I pod.  So,  OK,  made to contribute some of his cash  for the camera, and some serious lectures from the boss about the CDS, but, you know, Duck's Back. Water and  God 's in his heaven.

                          The gorgeous girl whirls through the house on her way to choral performance, girl shopping, hanging in the Vault listening to music, eating talking dancing with her friends,  dressed in dark teeshirt, black jeans encasing giraffe limbs and a mere  hint of jacket  against the winter, because everything is shiny and speeded up as the great day approaches and there is no time  to waste on  chill  or rest..

                                              My husband and I watch the Boss in a row of hopeful soulful teens, as they bounce and thrill through all the Christmas carols at her school concert.  Her eyes shine,  her beautiful  face  serene. She has wrapped and tagged every Christmas present in the house for us, written and posted  all the Christmas cards, given and received cards from a multitude of girl friends.  In the wardrobe her fine  new outfit hangs for her (first) teenage dance tomorrow night, white lace, brief black skirt,  silver pumps (and stout seventy denier  black tights at my insistence.)

                                                        I wrap  a  frozen limb  around   my  good  husband's sturdy Cavan legs    afterward, as we chat under the duvet about missing  addresses  for cards recipients , vegetables still to be got for Christmas dinner, whether we might get Port as well as Sherry for the great day,  when oh when he can decently remove the flashing garish Santa clause the boy has proudly placed in our front window, and he tells me  that he is this year  truly happy,  and will be so on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day.

Tuesday 18 December 2012

Doctors prosper/ Patients die.

"DO YOU KNOW I have,  (A) , a MORTGAGE  to pay, (B),  THREE  children to support,  (C),  a household to keep afloat, and this is.... this is... is......"  words fail  me.  Earlier  I stared  stupidly at a  snotty faced minion  in the blood testing department when  she  advised me that I had better hand over €110 euro, or no blood test for me. I have a medical condition which, while it can be treated,   can' be neglected.  Having in fact neglected it for some time, due to the expense, I had submitted my self to scanning and consultant, a few weeks past,  paid €500  for this,  and he, the consultant,  decided on a cunning plan to put me on a regime involving fortnightly visits  to  a nurse to titrate medications upwards, following on a blood test.  I learned, after the first visit that the NURSE  cost €50. On this the second visit,  I learned that the preliminary  blood  test was €55, and that they forgotten  to tell me last time.

A total then of €155 this time, and €105 hereafter, with a further €50 for medications, EVERY TIME.  The figures danced about in  my brain as I scrambled over to the nurse, who harangued me for tardiness. (I had rushed to the hospital during my lunch hour)  leading to the above outburst ( spluttering, as you see  to an exhausted and disgusted halt)

The thing is that I have no choice. I have medical insurance,  rapidly becoming unaffordable, which offers no contribution to this. My salary is  average, I am not eligible for medical cards or any  other sort of contribution.  These people simply milk you for cash for necessary treatments. Doctors fees were always high and they have reduced not one whit in this recession. There is no attempt to look at a financial plan for the unfortunate sick person. . Payments for doctor visits, tests, are applied without discussion or estimate. The stark  fact of the matter is that medical doctors accept a far smaller fee for patients with medical cards, place these at the end of the list when it comes to necessary hospital  treatments, and hold the rest of us to ransom, with medical care that is unaffordable.. Or at least I would like to know how it can be afforded, and who can afford it?

There is no attempt by our quite quite hopeless government to rein them in, to control prices, and working folks skimp on necessary medical care, because it is over priced. This information  is perfectly clear and available to they medical establishment when they apply these prices.   A case of indifference then  or good old fashioned opportunism. .

Anyway, I dismissed the nurse, I intend to thrash something out with my GP  re prescription and surgery blood tests in the future, and will return to the consultant when I can afford it. I am saving up.

And as to value, the nurse was patronising, adopted a one size fits all approach.  In fact you might have been eight or eighty and a little slow to boot, for all the distinction she made. And repetitive, with  largely redundant advice. To justify the cash extraction?  I left each time feeling diminished, worried, broke and extremely irritated. The consultant will charge the same sum every three months if we adhere to the cunning plan. It is hard indeed not to feel frisked, turned over, mugged almost, and that, my friends is so not therapeutic.

Thursday 6 December 2012

Barbarians. Love/Hate.

Sometimes its hard to be a teenage boy.

Ours is under siege these days. On a daily basis almost,  his sisters shop him to management. The boss: "Three hours of doing homework! huh! he was on the INTERNET". The elder "help him with his maths? NO ONE could help him with his maths, he is rude and unwilling!".  A sisterly duet: "Chocolates, whole packets of biscuits vanished,  devoured,! milk mess in the kitchen!, electronic stuff damaged! it was him, it was him,  IT WAS HIM."

The boy keeps a limped eyed persona in reserve for when taken to task, and he has an interesting line in excuses/rationalisations. My husband particularly enjoys these, and he tells me on Tuesday, smirking, that the boy now appears to have discovered on line porn. "Whaa, but we must, I mean, I must.." "You must WHAT, exactly?"  "Dunno, um establish what kind of eh porn he is looking at and..and.."  "To see if its tasteful you mean?" sniggers my life's partner. So anyway, we should be concerned with quantity rather than quality he assures me, and the web has joined the X Box on the  restricted list. And the boy is fast assuming an injured, harried air.

Sometimes its hard to be a second husband.

Mine took raging refuse in the bedroom on Sunday evening, after being  torn from the living room where he was watching  a programme on Barbarians  in the Middle Ages, to mend,  for the umpteenth time a TV cable for the recreation room TV yanked loose by careless young people. The fearsome threesome descended, as he laboured, to watch X factor raucously and interactively in the living room on full volume. He loathes X Factor with vim and bile along with boy bands, trash TV, the twilight movies and yes, blithe teenage insouciance when it comes to Good Manners, Doing your Chores and Waste. It's been a baptism of fire for the poor man, who begins to see that he is a captive audience.

I lure him downstairs later on with tea and apple tart to watch Love/Hate. (Barbarians dispatched to their quarters). Something in the car crash  events  unfolding around the hapless and mostly witless characters is irresistible. It is a comedy of  horrors. It is punctuated by some quite devastatingly unglamorous  and authentic looking scenes of ie, a rape, a man's brutal slaying, a woman's experience of being slammed, poked and pushed into by punters over a day in  brothel.  Its brow moping, shattering, insane, and hysterically funny TV. And it is NOT the sum of its parts. But it IS  guaranteed to put pesky teens in the halfpenny place.://www.hotvsnot.com/">web directory!</a> for free Find sites like this in the <a