Before I get into how things went this morning, I wanted to share this…
You can click through for a short video I managed to take while doing the evening feeding. Being in the isolation shelter means cat soup treat. Curtis had spent the night in the shelter, came out after the morning feeding, then right back in again later. Then Havarti scrambled his way up to the window. Domino is back with her cuddle buddies, and that helps. She definitely still wants to go out the windows when I do the food and water, but when she can’t get through, she is willing to accept the pets. I know that, once she is out of isolation, I’ll probably never be able to touch her again, but in all the time she was with the foster, she hid and never accepted pets like this.
I sent the video to the rescue chat group we have and they were so happy to see her accepting pets.
They also told me, it looks like Sweetie might be coming back, too. She has not settled in at all. They can pet her, but she is constantly anxious. They sent some photos and video. In the video, she is being petted but not responding at all, other than moving her head, watching with giant, terrified eyes. Poor thing! They are going to try and give her more time, but if she can’t accept the indoor life, she will be coming back here.
After feeding the outside cats, I did my evening rounds, and finally had a chance to go into the fenced off area where the tulip patch is, and the saffron crocuses. For all the mulch I added, the weeds have taken over, and I couldn’t even see the saffron crocuses anymore. I pulled handfuls of weeds until I got close to where I knew they were, then had to be extremely careful. After pulling up the tallest stuff, I had the creeping bellflower leaves covering everything. With those, I basically had to grab a single leaf, carefully follow it down to the ground, then pull it out. Pulling from higher on the stem usually resulted in it breaking.
I couldn’t get everything, but the crocuses are no longer buried. Those are the thin, grass-like leaves in the above photo.
I also cleared enough to access the crocuses and a couple of nearby tulips, but that was all I was able to do, today. I’ll have to go in again and clear around the tulips. That is going to take a while!
My older daughter came out while I was putting the “gate” back and showed her some of the progress in the garden. Then we gathered some fresh herbs for the fish she was about to cook for her sister and herself ( my husband and I don’t like most fish) for supper before I continued with my rounds – pausing to check out the pink rose bush.
The white rose bushes are almost done blooming, and the mock orange is looking like it’s about to explode into flowers any day now. Some buds at the bottom are already starting to show white petals.
I was heading towards the barn to take a peek inside, walking past a couple of my brother’s trucks, when I heard a noise coming from one of them. As I went to check one of them, I heard the noise again, coming from behind me. This truck has a home made plywood cap on it that extends over the cab of the truck. For a moment, I feared a cat had somehow got locked inside, though I didn’t think my brother had opened the doors while they were here least weekend.
I opened the door and found this, looking back at me.
A single baby raccoon!
I would say this is one of the four that had been in the garden shed until my taking things out finally scared them off. The other three and the mama are probably under or in a shed somewhere. I looked around to try and see how it got in and realized the entire wall of the cap by the rear windshield wasn’t there. 😄 There are just small panels on either side, but there is more than enough space for critters to get in.
So no trapped critters. Just curious ones! I was actually happy to see it. I miss them being in the garden shed!
Now to how this morning went.
My daughter and I headed out 2 hours before her appointment, which should have gotten us there almost half and hour early. We did stop briefly at a gas station in the one town along the highway to pick up some drinks for the road and to get the maps app up. If we get it going from home, the app links to our wifi, then basically doesn’t like to switch to data once we’re on the highway, and the app doesn’t work right. I didn’t actually need it until we were well into the city, but it was ready for my daughter to be my Nav O once we got closer.
Along the way, there was a section that we needed to slow down at – the section of highway that got washed out during the storms not long ago. With all the rain we had yesterday, the gravel patch job was a real mess. I noted that they did install double culverts where the highway washed out, so this shouldn’t happen again, once they finished fixing and paving it.
We had to make one more stop at another gas station shortly after reaching the city, but neither stop took particularly long. It was the traffic and road conditions that set us back. Then, once we found the place (the streets being every bit as broken up as I expected) we found the parking lot I’d seen on the satellite map.
The entrance was through a back lane and partially blocked by a truck unloading cargo.
With all the one way streets, it too a bit for me to be able to drive around and back track. I did manage to get past the truck. From the signs, we saw they did have visitor parking for the clinic – a whole three spots. One of them was occupied. Another was “small car only”, and meant it. The third required me driving to the other end of the lot to turn around and drive back the other way so I could pull in, because there wasn’t room enough for me to drive right in, then straighten out, without hitting a parked car – and my truck isn’t particularly big!
As we walked around the building to the doors, the first red flags appeared. This is NOT a safe neighbourhood. We were maybe 10 minutes to my daughters appointment time at 10am, and there were already several people listing about. This is the sort of area that I wouldn’t want to be walking around in broad daylight without something I could use to defend myself.
No surprise, the entry doors were locked. No signs. I finally saw what looked like a possible intercom with a keypad and pushed a button I hoped was to someone inside.
No one answered, but a Purolator guy came through and let us in the first doors, and a staff member saw us and opened up the second set of doors.
They had a sign in sheet for the visitor parking that I filled out so we wouldn’t get towed, then my daughter checked in. Being a first visit, she was given a clip board with a form to fill out, and we sat in the first waiting room. When she handed that in, we moved to a second waiting room. My daughter was called in soon after.
Given what happened the last time she saw a specialist in the city, I offered to go in with her, as a sort of body guard. She said she would be okay. I will say now, from the start, that she was very happy with this appointment. It was an intake appointment, and she came out with a date for a follow up appointment near the end of next month.
Her appointment went quite long, so I had a lot of time to sit there and look around.
This place is a “community health centre”. Being downtown and in a sketchy area, there are some things I would expect that is different from other clinics. Still… there were significant difference that I could see.
All clinics have a few larger posters on the walls, giving health information about specific things. Or with information for people in abuse situations, telling where they can reach or for help. These are clean looking and informative as much as the space allows for.
This place was splattered with small posters all over the place, and they sent out more red flags. A poster about fentanyl, for example, wasn’t giving information on the dangers of fentanyl, but was about the “myths”, suggesting that using it was not all that dangerous. Another poster, instead of, say, giving information on how to get help for sexual exploitation, or cautioning about the dangers of promiscuous sex (plenty of other signs showed they have out free STD treatment kits) instead directed the reader to an app on… how to engage in promiscuous sex “safely”. Other posters basically pandered to all the current identities and ideologies currently trending, written like they were aimed at people with the cognitive development of kids in elementary school. None of them were about how to get healthy or avoid health problems. They were all basically enabling self destructive behaviour. The focus on race in some of them was both creepy and paternalistic.
Aside from all that, the longer I sat there…. Well. Let me put it this way. In my years, I have been stalked, threatened, harassed and physically attacked by a drunk person who wanted to kill me. I’ve walked through downtown city streets in the wee hours of the morning, when the bars were closing down and the drunks were staggering about. I lived in high crime areas. Then there was the situation with our vandal. Not once, in all these years, did I fell as unsafe as I did in the waiting room of this clinic. Everything around me triggered red flags. Even the times I got smiles from the staff felt… wrong.
Part of safety issue was how the staff had to use security key cards to go in and out several doors. Clearly, it wasn’t just the people outside the clinic that was a security threat. From one of these doors I saw two women come out, talking loud enough for everyone in the waiting room to hear. The older (white) staff member was quite angry as she demanded to know how the younger one knew that there was a laptop. The younger (not white) woman said she’d seen the older woman use it for a presentation. As they walked down the hall, I could see the anger in the older woman as she was first silent about being seen using it, then declared that there were two laptops, but only certain people were allowed to use them. This younger woman was clearly not one of them. The conversation, such as it was, continued as they went down the hall.
Shortly after, the older woman came back down the hall alone. I made eye contact with her and she gave me a friendly smile, totally at odds with how she behaved towards the other woman.
I had found news articles about an investigation and report about this place, released last summer. Among the things they looked into were problems of racism and a “toxic work environment”.
I just saw an example of that. Clearly, firing three board members didn’t fix anything.
By the time my daughter was done – looking quite happy – I was feeling my skin starting to crawl from the skeevy creepiness of the place.
We didn’t talk about it right away. Just getting out of the parking lot and avoiding people staggering in front of the truck, was an issue and I had to focus on driving. It was around 11 by then, and neither of us had had breakfast, other than sharing a bag of beef jerky from the truck snack stash during the drive in. My daughter wanted to buy us breakfast and I remembered that our route took us past a mall that was convenient to get into. So that’s where we ended up going. We found the food court and the first thing I spotted was a bento place I knew was good, even though I’d never been to this location specifically, before. On seeing the menu, we both ended up ordering the exact same thing. A salmon bento – normally, I would have gotten chicken, but it was tempura salmon – and a taro bubble tea.
It was amazingly good. That is one thing I do miss about living in the city. Having access to such a variety of fast meal choices from all over the world.
While there, I mentioned to my daughter about how I felt while at this clinic, that it wasn’t safe, and that I never wanted to go back there again. She was really surprised, because she’d had such a good appointment. I tried to describe what I was seeing with the posters, which she hadn’t had time to look at herself, and she just sort of … made justifications for them. She didn’t see what I saw and, chances are, she’s not going to get what the problem with them was.
This is going to be an issue.
Her next appointment is going to be more on the medical side rather than the intake side, and seeing what surgeons she needs to be referred to. Hopefully, she’ll be referred to actual good ones.
As for the drive, I was very happy to be getting out of the city – and that Damocles didn’t drop the sword again. The truck behaved. I needed to get gas, but the prices in the city were $1.649/L instead of the $1.599 we saw when we’d stopped at a station in the town along the highway. I had decided we would be getting gas along the way, but there was one last gas station, just outside the city, that was at $1.579, so we stopped there. I am planning to do a Costco run on Friday and will be filling the tank there, so I just needed to top up a bit. I’m glad I did, because when we drove through the town again, the gas prices there had gone up to $1.649 while we were gone!
Once at home, I was curious and looked up reviews for this clinic.
I wish we’d done this before.
Yes, there were some glowing 5 star reviews with comments like “best place ever!” But there were just as many 1 star reviews – and virtually nothing in between. These gave more information. At least one other person commented on how unsafe it felt in the clinic – especially for women – while others commented on the unsafe neighbourhood. People who had been going there for years commented that things had gone down hill so badly, they would not be going back. Some would say the doctors were great, but the nurses were horrible. Others would say the complete opposite. A lot of people talked about not getting the care they need, including being turned away from the walk in clinic, being denied mental health help (counseling and therapy are among the services provided), being pushed to go “trans” instead of getting help with their mental health, and some talking about wanting to take their own lives after going there. Plenty finished their comments with “don’t go. Just, don’t.”
Yes, I tried to bring it up with my daughter.
It just got her back up.
This is going to be a problem. I truly do not think she is going to get the care she needs there. I’m reminded of when my husband tried to be the “good patient” for so long, while his real problems not being addressed, and by the time that was looked at, it was too late and he was permanently disabled.
So… I don’t quite know how to deal with this right now. I just know, down to my bones, that this place is not good.
*sigh*
Anyhow. That’s where we’re at right now.
Tomorrow, I’ve got a day at home, and then we’ll be doing the usual end of month running around, plus my daughter has her blacksmithing workshop. When I have the chance to work around the yard, I have a new thing to focus on. My brother and SIL will be having a large bin delivered about half way through July, and it will be picked up again after 10 days. This will be for hauling away the non-scrap metal junk. My brother will take the metal to a scrap yard himself – he has the trailer and equipment needed to do it – for cash.
They’ll have it dropped off near our current junk pile, which actually has quite a bit of metal stuff in it, so anything we want to have hauled away can be brought over to that spot.
I’ll finally be able to clear stuff away from around the garden shed. I hadn’t wanted to do it yet, because there is so much in the junk pile already. Anything we add to the pile now will be hauled away by the end of July. Judging from the size of the bin they’re having dropped off, my brother has identified a lot of stuff in the outer yard that needs to go!
What a difference it’s going to be, with my brother and SIL able to come out so often now, and with the resources, tools and equipment they have. Night and day, really!! There was only so much we could do on our own and, with all the health issues showing up, it’s getting harder just to maintain what we managed to get done in our early years here. I’ve been feeling like we haven’t been able to hold up our end of the bargain for living here anymore.
Well, it’s certainly going to be a very different summer, this year!
On many levels.
The Re-Farmer
The Re-Farmer 