Author: heide

The complex my mother lives in has suffered from bed bug infestations before, so as a matter of course they do some occasional checking of the units for any new signs of bugs. A couple months ago, my mother called me to warn me that they’d found something and treated her unit.

Now apparently it was due to finding just a single spot on her sheets, which isn’t definitive proof of anything, but they did the treatment anyway just as a precaution, since it could have possibly been a sign of bed bugs. Since she’d just travelled to Vancouver recently, she could have possibly picked some up on that trip. It could have possibly been a hotel she stayed at, and since I was on the trip and stayed at the same hotels as well, I could possibly have picked some up and brought them back with me, too.

Now that’s a lot of possiblys, so there’s only a chance I could possibly have bed bugs as well (it’s not even proven that she actually had them to begin with), so I started keeping an eye out for any potential signs of them. And now, about four months after the trip and a couple months of checking the sheets and mattress and some traps, I haven’t seen any definitive signs of them yet, so that’s a pretty good indication that I don’t have them, right?

If only it were that easy to convince the stupid brain…

It’s easy to put the mind into overdrive about possibilities and become paranoid. Oh no, I see a spot on the sheets! …oh, that’s just lint; I tend to wear dark-coloured sleepwear. Oh no, I feel an itch at night! …like I always do in the dry winter climate; I get those itches all day long too, but it’s a lot easier to notice them when you’re lying there trying to blank your mind. Oh no, a tiny little egg-shaped speck! …that crumbles in my fingers because there’s a ton of little bits of random crud everywhere, really. Oh no, spots on my skin! …and I’ve long been prone to random breakouts of acne and rashes, especially again in the winter and when I’ve been eating poorly like I have lately. There’s a ton of ordinary things that make that fear instantly resurface, so it’s never long out of my mind.

And then even when I can recognize all of the above as paranoia, there’s still the lingering thought that, logically, it’s still not proof there aren’t any bugs… They’re sneaky little buggers, I might just not be looking hard enough, the signs could just be hidden away, and how would I even tell if there was an actual bite among the acne, and maybe there’s a secret colony that’s just getting bigger and bigger and… Even getting something like a sniffer dog wouldn’t necessarily help; from what I’ve read there’s still enough of a margin of error to leave lingering doubt of a false negative, and a false positive would be a massive expense and hassle.

There isn’t really any way to prove they aren’t there but for enough time to pass, so the mental war rages on…

I recently took a trip with my mother to Vancouver Island, both to take care of some family business out there and to do a bit of sight-seeing. The main challenge of the trip, though, was just getting around; neither my mother nor I drive, and we needed to get to multiple locations around both the island and the mainland, so just how does one get around a place like that without a car? The obvious ways are taxis, buses, rideshare, and good ol’ walking, but it took a bit of planning to make it all work.

When we arrived in Nanaimo, we needed to get to Duncan. There is a bus between them, but it was already later in the day, and I wanted to make sure we got to the hotel before check-in closed, so we just grabbed a taxi. At over $100 this was by far the most expensive option, so I didn’t want to do this too often, but I just wanted to get there ASAP.

My mom’s mobility is a bit limited these days, but fortunately Duncan itself is fairly small, so walking around was perfectly viable for the places that we needed to reach within Duncan. We also needed to get out to a business in Maple Bay though, and that was way too far to walk, but there’s a bus system within Duncan that runs out that way. I never carry exact change anymore, but we could buy tickets from local shops for the bus and use those instead, so that was no problem. We also wanted to visit Chemainus, and the buses even ran all the way up there.

We needed to get to Tofino next, and that was a bit trickier since it’s a good 3-4 hour trip, so the local bus and taxis weren’t an option. Fortunately there are a couple of other bus services that run up and down the island (the Vancouver Island Connector, and Island Link), and we could take those right to and from Tofino. There’s a gotcha, though: they don’t run every day of the week. I had already booked the hotel in Tofino before I realized that there was no bus at all coming back the day we checked out, so I had to scramble to adjust the booking to ensure we’d be leaving on a day where there would actually be a bus. Scheduling these ahead of time is essential just to make sure you can even get a seat; one of my biggest fears was something going wrong with the booking or the buses somehow and being stranded in Tofino with no easy way back.

Tofino is also a pretty small town that’s extremely walkable, with one exception. We were staying close to the ‘downtown’ section, and the beaches are actually pretty far from there. Within walking distance for me, but not for my mom. Normally there would be a free shuttle bus that would be able to take you pretty close to some of them, but our timing was bad: it stops running for the year at the start of September. So, we wound up calling a taxi to get to and from the beach. Turns out that there’s only one taxi in Tofino, just one car operated by one guy, so we got to see him both directions and chatted a bunch about the area.

We also wanted to stop in Vancouver for a bit to see some family, so we took the bus back to Nanaimo and took the ferry over to the mainland. I was initially uncertain how to handle things from there on, since the ferry drops you off at Horseshoe Bay, a ways away from the city proper, but it turned out to be easier than expected. Horseshoe Bay, West Vancouver, North Vancouver, and Vancouver itself are basically one big integrated transit system, and there were buses going right from Horseshoe Bay all the way downtown, where our hotel was. The only glitch was that I didn’t want to drag our luggage through a transfer onto a second, busier bus for the final leg, so we wound up walking through downtown a bit farther than I’d liked. Dragging two pieces of luggage. Uphill. (I’d forgotten how hilly Vancouver is.) I kind of wish I’d picked a hotel a little bit closer to the ‘main’ bus routes, but I didn’t book as early as I should have so my options were limited.

Getting around Vancouver to see the family was also fairly painless. Again, no exact change, but I was able to use my contactless debit card on any bus, and I bought a pre-loaded ‘Compass card’ for my mom so she just needed to swipe it. Way easier than what we’re trying to roll out in Calgary, where you have to manage and activate virtual ‘tickets’ in a mobile app. Figuring out the routes to take was easy enough through Google Maps, which had a surprising amount of detail about exactly where the buses were. And there wasn’t too much waiting at any point, even though we wound up getting dragged across both West and North Vancouver to chase some of the family down (don’t ask)…

And then on the last day we could simply take the SkyTrain all the way from downtown right out to the airport, where we flew home. So, in the end we only needed to take taxis three times, and managed to bus it the rest of the time. Going into the trip I had a lot of anxiety about successfully navigating all of this, but in the end it was actually a lot easier than expected.

I had my little heart incident last year and haven’t really talked about it since, but throughout 2022 I did a lot of exercising, started eating better, and gradually felt better. By the end of the year I was pretty much feeling back to normal (aside from the bout of COVID). And then 2023 started…

Soon after the start of 2023 I started getting those weird trembling-but-not-really sensations in my legs again, but not consistently; they’d come and go a lot. Over the last month or two I started being able to feel my pulse a lot more strongly, where I’d be aware of it a lot more than I normally would be and could feel it pounding away at night and against my skin in more places. Plus, it felt more erratic at times, suddenly speeding up and slowing back down again for no apparent reason. Along with that my head felt a little, well, not really dizzy or light-headed, but slightly ‘off-kilter’.

And then yesterday, at work, it all kind of hit me at once, as besides all of the above hitting a strong point, I started feeling some tension in my chest and some occasional twinges of pain in my left arm. That was it, I was somewhat actually scared now, I couldn’t put it off any longer and had to get this checked out now, and headed to the ER.

Once at the ER there was a lot of waiting involved because, well, as great as universal health care is, we still perpetually underfund it, and I had to stand around for about an hour in line just to get to the triage assessment. While in line I was feeling bad enough that I started to wonder what would happen if I just collapsed right there in line, but I got through it and they immediately did an ECG after registering me (they do ECGs for a lot of cases, but suspected cardiac cases get to jump the line on that). More waiting until I got called into the back, where they installed an IV, took some blood work, and then a lot more waiting interrupted by checks on vitals and a couple more blood draws.

Eventually, about seven hours later, I got to see the doctor, who took more information, did a physical check, and then he had to inform me that…my heart is doing fine. Sounded fine, the ECG looked fine, the blood work came back fine (slightly above-normal troponin levels, but nowhere near worrying), my heart is actually in a lot better shape than I’d expected.

So, that was kind of a wasted trip, but it’s also a big relief. I still don’t know what the actual problems I’ve been experiencing are caused by yet; I’ll have to seek a more general diagnosis on that with a regular doctor to see if it’s something besides general Getting Olditis. But it’s not my ticker about to explode, at least.

(The doc was pretty cool and we talked for a while about general fitness and exercise and nutrition and such and he had some good advice without being judgy about it. To the point where I suddenly realized that oh jeez, I’ve been tying up this ER doctor’s valuable time blathering on about the shift between WFH and returning to the office and such and I should probably let him get back to work…)

Ugh, I know everyone and their dog’s been complaining, but still, it’s too dang cold (-31C right now, with a reported -44C windchill). Not just outside, it’s rather chilly in my apartment too (the thermostat reports 61F/16C, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually lower) since the heat in this old building is kinda…weak. With all of the units having their heat constantly turned on, of course, the boiler just can’t keep up, and if I touch the pipe in the heating register, it’s just lukewarm.

I tried having an element on the stove turned on low for a bit, but although it made the kitchen warmer, it didn’t really seem to have much effect on the rest of the place. And I can’t just leave it on all day or I’ll owe the electric company my firstborn. I should probably get a space heater someday so I can put it where I need it, but still, same problem.

At least the pipes won’t freeze, but I’m still going to be grumpy…