In June of 2016, Catherine found herself in an appointment at the PEI Cancer Treatment Centre with Dr. Cipperly pinch-hitting for her regular oncologist. It happened to be his last appointment on his last day at his job, and we found him helpful, patient and kind. I wrote about the appointment in my book:

Sleep turned out to be a topic of discussion otherwise as well: Dr. Cipperly used the appointment as a general sort of cancer check-up in addition to reviewing the CT results. Catherine’s been exhausted for a long while, even more so in recent months. Her protests about her exhaustion to our family doctor, and to Dr. Champion, have gone unheeded, as though there are bigger fish to fry.

We’d been working under the assumption (read “I’d been working under the assumption”) that this was simply a side- effect of living with cancer. It turns out, in fact, that cancer, in and of itself, unless some major energy-involved organ like the lungs is under attack, doesn’t exhaust you.

And so, being a guy with answers to questions, Dr. Cipperly rhymed off the list of things that can make you exhausted: anemia (Catherine’s okay here), thyroid issues (she’ll get tested before her next visit), blood sugar issues (another test) and sleep apnea.

Dr. Cipperly wasn’t sure that he had the power to refer someone to the sleep clinic, but as it was a slow afternoon and no nurses were guarding the forms, he grabbed one and made a referral. So, with luck, Catherine will be seen by the sleep lab and they may trace her exhaustion issues back to something that has nothing at all to do with cancer. Which would be terrific, inasmuch as it would be something treatable. Catherine would love to not be exhausted all the time.

Catherine did go on to get a sleep study, and was diagnosed with sleep apnea. We bought a CPAP machine for her, and it proved an excellent investment, as her sleep immediately improved. She used the machine until she died, carting it to Spain and back with her because she couldn’t imagine sleeping without it.

CPAP machines are expensive and aren’t covered by public health insurance; we had to dig deep. To help those that can’t afford a machine, the PEI Lung Association has a refurbishment program:

The PEI Lung Association is actively looking for pre-owned CPAP and BiPAP machines. An increasing number of Islanders are being diagnosed with sleep apnea—a condition that causes people to stop breathing when they sleep. This condition can cause a host of other health problems including heart arrhythmia, diabetes, stroke, depression and more. Therapy can be very expensive, with CPAP and BiPAP machines ranging in cost from $1,000 to $5,000 - and many Islanders cannot afford them.

Students from Dalhousie University’s School of Health Sciences work to refurbish the machines for distribution to patients who could not otherwise afford therapy.

If you or someone you know has a CPAP or BiPAP machine you no longer use, please consider donating it today! Ask us about tax receipts for newer-model machines! To donate a CPAP or BiPAP machine, or to donate another respiratory machine (e.g. pre-owned nebulizer or oxygen concentrator), please contact Julia Hartley at peilungassociation@gmail.com or by phone at (902) 892-5957 or at our toll-free number (888-566-5864).

Having seen how profound an improvement having a CPAP machine was to Catherine, I’m delighted to see this program in place; it was the destination for her machine after she died, and I’m happy it’s found a new life helping someone else.

My personal COVID risk calculus, admittedly arbitrary, determined to see me come back to Laurie Murphy’s improv class tonight. I’m excited and nervous: it’s been two months.

Over the weekend, L. and I cleaned out the end of the upstairs hallway, carting the blanket overspill to the thrift shop and finding new organized places for everything else.

In a bold move, L. suggested removing the dark curtain that had been hung impromptu there, as a placeholder, 20 years ago. The result: a hallway of darkness has been illuminated into a hallway of light.

And, this morning, gave me a view of the six year old sugar maple in front of the house, and realization that the careful arborists at City Hall honoured our Georgian house, with its “symmetry and proportion based on the classical architecture of Greece and Rome,” by centring the tree on the house. Thank you. 

From the “Note to Reader” in East West Street:

The city of Lviv occupies an important place in this story. Through the nineteenth century, it was generally known as Lemberg, located on the eastern outskirts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Soon after World War I, it became part of newly independent Poland, called Lwów, until the outbreak of World War I, when it was occupied by the Soviets, who knew it as Lyov. In July 1941, the Germans unexpectedly conquered the city and made it the capital of Distrikt Galizien in the General Government, known once more as Lemberg. After the Red Army vanquished the Nazis in the summer of 1944, it became part of Ukraine and was called Lviv, the name that is generally used today. Exceptionally, if you fly to the city from Munich, the airport screens identify the destination as Lemberg.

Lemberg, Lviv, Lyov, and Lwów are the same place. The name has changed, as has the composition and nationality of its inhabitants, but the location and the buildings have remained. This is even as the city changed hands, no fewer than eight times in the years between 1914 and 1945.

The city is again at the heart of geopolitics, reports The Economist:

When Russia’s president sends 190,000 troops to invade your country, which he refers to as “historically Russian lands”, one logical place of retreat stands out. That is Lviv, a city that was Polish from 1918 to 1939 and part of other central European states before that. It is a place of baroque buildings, art academies and fiercely anti-Russian sentiment. Its location, in the far west of the country, could make it the last place in Ukraine that Russia tries to conquer. That makes it appealing not just for those fleeing the rest of the country, but also for those eyeing up a potential seat for Ukraine’s government if Vladimir Putin’s forces manage to seize the capital, Kyiv.

Lviv is four hours drive north of my Ukrainian family’s home place in Serafyntsi (Серафинці).

Here’s what morning sounds like in Serafyntsi—and, for that matter, in much of rural Ukraine, when left to its own devices.

My heart is with my family there, and with all peace-loving Ukrainians.

Elderflower Farm sells pear sauce at the Charlottetown Farmers’ Market. Why hasn’t pear sauce ascended to apple sauce’s equal? It’s very good.

Last night, fresh off a good evening of silliness, I quickly checked my phone before returning home to find that my house had emailed me. 

“Your heating system failed to heat your home,” said the email. Which came from Google by way of the Nest thermostat that controls one of the three zones our oil-fired boiler has:

Based on your local weather and recent heating system performance, your home should’ve become warmer while the heat was on between 10:09 AM and 6:04 PM on February 24, 2022. Instead, the temperature decreased by 4°C.

I didn’t know my thermostat was paying attention to this degree!

While I was on my way home anyway–where I found the temperature, was, indeed, a chilly 13.5ºC–I take comfort from knowing that my thermostat will by watching out for me when and if I travel farther afield.

The extent of my knowledge of my HVAC system is “when something goes wrong, try pressing the reset button on the burner.” So when I got home, I tried that. The furnace sprang to life. The water temperature gauge started to slowly creep from 100ºC to 200ºC, and eventually the radiators started to receive hot water, and the house slowly warmed up.

The house was still warm in the morning, but when I came home around lunch time it was down to 18ºC, despite the thermostat being set to 20ºC.

I called Kenmac Energy and talked to Mike. Mike said he’d despatch someone, and 10 minutes later there was a knock on the door, and two enterprising technicians went down to the basement to see what was up.

”The nozzle and the oil filter were plugged up,” was the report, once they emerged. 

Heat is back to normal. I am chastened: I should have booked a cleaning last summer, but I didn’t. I’ve got a reminder to book one come July.

This was the scene I was greeted with in my driveway the other afternoon. I have no idea what befell horse and rider, and I fear I may have been involved somehow, without knowing it.

Let’s be careful out there.

An unfortunate pen leak caused me to need to empty my Bolstr bag for a wash. Here’s everything that was in it, the 2022 edition of my “everyday carry” kit:

• two KN95 face-masks, one active and one spare.
• Medium Rare-brand cloth mask
• AirPods Pro
• watercolour set
• water brush
• Kaweco fountain pen
• Baron Fig ballpoint pen
• AirTag
• Apple earbuds
• wallet
• two tubes of lip balm
• USB stick
• car keys
• house and office keys

James A. Reeves’ luggage went missing at Heathrow:

Our luggage went missing somewhere in the depths of Heathrow, so I bought a cheap change of clothes at a discount chain called TK Maxx, which has the same logo and chaotic atmosphere as TJ Maxx in the States. Only one letter was different. This minor tweak captures the uncanny sensation of being on the other side of an ocean, yet everything feels more or less the same now that we’re living in the shadow of an end-game corporate colossus.

From Wikipedia:

TK Maxx is a subsidiary of the American apparel and home goods company TJX Companies based in Framingham, Massachusetts. … The chain uses a slightly different name from that of the TJ Maxx stores in the United States, to avoid confusion with the British retailer T. J. Hughes.

A confounding problem for someone like me who swipe-types thousands of words a week on my iPhone: the keyboard capitalizes words after a certain kind of delete, after a certain kind of autocorrect.

Swipe-typing on my iPhone is already a perplexing mix of inconsistency and getting “orgasm” when I want to type “program.”