Short Story: January Part 2

NOTE:  This is Part 2 of a 6-part piece.  Part 3 will appear next Friday.  To read Part 1, click here. 

I haven’t answered that letter from a week ago.  Yesterday, I made my weekly phone-call to Aunt Millie, my Mama’s elder sister.  She and I have always been close, especially since Mama’s death a few years ago.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said.  “I feel paralyzed.  I haven’t had a man take notice of me like that for years.”

“Oh yes you have, honey,” she said.  “It’s just that you’ve always brushed it off.  This is the first time in a long time you’ve let a man get to you.”

“But why?” I said.  “I like my life as it is.  I don’t want anything else.”

“Now, honey,” she said.  “Are you sure that’s true?  You do look a little forlorn sometimes when you’re hanging around John and Chantal and their kids.  Are you sure you wouldn’t like a family of your own?”

“Well I don’t know”, I mumbled, momentarily taken aback by her directness.

“You see, honey?” she exclaimed.

“But wait, Aunt Millie,” I cut in.  “I haven’t said –“

“No you haven’t”, she agreed.  “But think about it honey.  Please.  I’ve always thought it so sad that you never did have a family to call your own.  Especially as you so good with kids.  You have a natural talent for handling them”.

“My co-workers wouldn’t believe what you’re saying”.

“Well now,” she replied.  “That may be so.  But from what I understand you’re quite a different person at work.  You don’t allow people to see how kind and loving and warm you really are…Strange, how you seem to hide yourself away.”

“What do you mean?” 

“Well ever since you went away to college, you’ve never been the same.  It seems like something happened, something you never did get over…”

I sat down suddenly as the sound of humming filled my ears. A memory intruded of a wintry afternoon in late January. I was walking across campus to visit my professor to discuss my senior thesis.  

My professor was a tall, handsome man in his early fifties.  He greeted me with a warm smile.  “How have you been?” he asked sitting beside me, and turning to fix his gaze on me. “Let me look at you. I haven’t seen you in a while…”

“Caroline, Caroline.  Are you there honey?”

The scene faded from my mind.  “I’ll call you next week Auntie Millie,” I promised, before hanging up.  

Top image:  Lady at a telephone c. 1910, meant to convey Caroline’s old-fashioned nature, wikimedia commons. 

Bottom image: wikimedia commons.

–Cynthia Haggard writes short stories, novels and poetry.  During the day, she is a medical writer and has recently opened her own business.  For more on her creative writing, go to spunstories.  For more about her medical writing services, go to clarifyingconcepts.  (c) 2008. All rights reserved. 

Travel: The Perils of Renting a Car

Last summer, I went online to Travelocity or Expedia to rent a car because I was visiting family in England and my husband and I decided to take a motoring tour of the country.  I spotted what looked like a great deal.  My memory is that we could rent a car for about $500 for the 3 weeks that we were planning to tour. It seemed almost too good to be true.

It was. Insurance agencies in the US provide NO coverage for car rental in Europe.  So you are really at the mercy of the car rental agency unless you do your homework.  In our case, we showed up at a rental agency near Heathrow with reservation in hand only to find that when you added taxes, insurance and other charges in, the cost was closer to $1000!  What a nasty surprise!

This year, my husband and I are planning to spend a week doing a motoring tour of northern France.  So I did much more careful research. Here is what I found:

1. Most credit cards cover the collision damage waiver (CDW) and theft protection (TP), so you DON’T need to buy that insurance when you pick your car up at the agency.  All you need to do is pay with a card that has your name embossed on it, be sure to decline the CDW and theft protection and make sure the other drivers you have listed are authorized to drive.  The credit cards provide numbers to call if you run into difficulties.

2. You DO NEED liability insurance, which covers the medical expenses of another person injured as a result of an accident involving yourself.

3. Personal accident insurance (PAI) covers the medical expenses of the occupants of the car including the driver, so if you have a good health insurance plan, you probably don’t need this.

4. Don’t expect to see this all spelled out for you on Travelocity or Expedia or the other large conglomerations that book rental cars.  If you really want to find out what you are paying, you have to go to the rental car site.

5. I found that I preferred Avis, because it disclosed all costs to you in a very clear manner, and offered an easy way of opting out of insurance coverage you did not want.  It was the only car rental company I could find that specifically offered personal liability insurance.  The other car rental companies that I checked -  which included Hertz, Alamo, National, Budget - only offered CDW, TP and PAI.  

So let’s see what happens when I show up at the Gare du Montparnasse in Paris to pick up the car.  Will Avis stick to the price they gave me over the internet or not?  Stay tuned.

Top image:  rental car and lodging in Dorset last summer:  Personal collection.

Bottom image:  Hotel de Cluny, Paris, home of the Lady and Unicorn tapestries: wikimedia commons. 

–Cynthia Haggard is a medical writer and editor and lives in Washington DC.  She is about to go to England to take care of her mother for ten days.  Then she plans to take a short holiday in France with her husband before flying back home.  To see more about her medical writing business, please go to clarifyingconcepts. (c) 2008 All rights reserved. 

Fiction: Sitting Down to Dinner with the Mystery Writers of America

I went to my first dinner at the Mystery Writer’s of America yesterday. This is a storied organization, founded in 1945, that gives out the Edgar® awards each Spring.  I wondered what it might be like, meeting people who spent so many hours of their lives thinking about crime and intrigue, and undoubtedly knew a lot about poisons.  When the name-tags were handed out, they were done in gothic script – a nice touch.

These people turned out to be a friendly crowd who were very willing to talk about murder-mysteries and the various subgenres of thriller, suspense, and gothic romance.  Tonight we had a delicious sit-down dinner followed by David Ignatius talking about his most recent novel Body of Lies, which has been made into a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Russell Crowe.  Body of Lies is about a person from the CIA operative who goes to Jordan to confront a terrorist. 

Ignatius summarized his career, by talking about how he came to write his novels.  He told us that his favorite novel is A Firing Offense about an ambitious journalist who gets caught up in a huge moral dilemma when he tries to uncover the power dynamics behind a pending French-Chinese communications contract.  As he talked about his novels, he interspersed his narrative with observations on craft.  Noting that he had spent a great deal of his life editing as well as writing (he is an associate editor and columnist for the Washington Post), he observed:  “The reason editing is good for writing, is that it makes you ruthless.  It’s really amazing how attached we can be to bad writing.”

Image of Edgar Allan Poe:  Wikimedia commons

Image of David Ignatius:  Wikimedia commons

–Cynthia Haggard writes short stories, novels and poetry.  During the day, she is a medical writer and has recently opened her own business.  For more on her creative writing, go to spunstories.  For more about her medical writing services, go to clarifyingconcepts.  (c) 2008. All rights reserved. 

Medical Writing: The Health-Care Patchwork Quilt

Something needs to be done to fix health-care.  As a medical writer and citizen of this country I am truly appalled by the way some people are treated.  The Washington Post is currently running a series of articles on what happens when people accused of being illegal immigrants are detained in the various jails and penitentiaries around the country.  Today, they covered health care or rather, what can go horribly wrong when you have the patchwork system we have today.  A person with schizophrenia was not given his drugs for six months.  When he finally won his immigration case and his wife came to pick him up, he was raving mad and she had to drive him straight to a psychiatric facility.  Another person - a young woman from Somalia who could not speak English - collapsed with shock after being tied up and a doctor incorrectly diagnosed her with psychosis and forced her to take Risperdal.  She was lucky enough to acquire a lawyer who pulled strings on her behalf.  After five months of this terrible treatment, she won her political asylum case, and her attorney was allowed to pick her up. 

Reading this made me think of a problem that I know many readers have experienced: When something goes wrong and you try to get customer service to respond, you are often thrown into a loop between two or three people who treat you as a ball to be thrown to someone else, without ever taking responsibility for your problem or bothering to engage with you directly.  This happened to me last year when a brand new range refused to work.  I had to spend hours with various companies (who had outsourced their customer service) trying to get the problem straightened out.  So imagine what it must be like if you are foreign, don’t speak English, and happen to have the bad luck to be marched off to custody.  You are thrown into a seemingly unending loop of guards, nurses, doctors, and personnel, you are given very little information about your situation, and you have no idea if you are ever going to get out again.  Is it any wonder that so many of these detainees commit suicide? 

Something must be done to set up an efficient system to move people quickly in and out, and to provide them with timely information on their status, not to mention giving them good medical care. I believe the best way to do this is to set up a centralized system for the entire country with a centralized database to make it easy to track each detainee, their history, their reason for being detained AND a list of presenting conditions and medications that they need.

         For more on this story, go to the Washington Post. 

         Asklepios image: wikipedia

         Quill pen image: wikipedia

         –Cynthia Haggard is a medical writer and editor and lives in Washington DC.  She recently opened her own business, Clarifying Concepts, which provides grant writing, speechwriting, technical writing, writing for the public and regulatory affairs services.  To see more, please go to clarifyingconcepts. (c) 2008 All rights reserved. 

Balancing Work with Life: Horse-riding

On Saturday, I went with a friend to visit Trinity Farms in a corner of Montgomery County Maryland that borders PG County.  There on a windy, sunny afternoon, we wandered around looking at thoroughbred horses, standards and ponies.  Eventually, my friend suggested that I have a go at riding a horse.  This is something that I’d never done before, but after watching other newbies enjoy themselves on horseback, I plucked up the courage.  They made it easy for you to get on, by having a mounting block in the shape of three or four wooden steps, so it was easy enough to put your left foot in the left stirrup and swing yourself over.  Or at least it should have been, but my nervousness meant that I actually managed to sit behind the saddle!  Never mind, the horse was patient and I maneuvered myself forward to sit in the saddle. Then we set off, with a willowy girl controlling the horse by means of a leading rein.

If you have never ridden a horse before, all I can say is that it is the most peculiar sensation.  I had never realized before that my mode of transportation had been exclusively on wheels of various sorts, unless I was flying.  Sitting on top of a tall animal with four hooves going down at various different times is unsettling.  I wondered idly how long it would take for me to fall off, because I felt so unsteady. 

However, I managed to survive. As I am writing a historical novel set in the 1400s when horses were common, I am thinking of taking some lessons in riding.  Watch this space for more adventures!

–Cynthia Haggard writes short stories, novels and poetry.  During the day, she is a medical writer and has recently opened her own business. At the end of the day, she meditates.  For more on her creative writing, go to spunstories.  For more about her medical writing services, go to clarifyingconcepts.  (c) 2008. All rights reserved. 

 

 

 

Short Story: January

NOTE:  This is Part 1 of a 6-part piece.  Part 2 will appear next Friday.

I never did like January:  The time after Christmas seems flat, drab, depressing.  As I sit writing this by flickering candlelight – for the electricity has gone out – a howling wind throws itself against the windows making them shake.

My name is Caroline Vere.  I am thirty-eight years old, and I’m the fifteenth most powerful person at the company where I work, and the most powerful woman there. I come from Colbert County Alabama, the most wonderful place on earth, between the Tennessee river and the mountains of north-western Alabama.  My family is close-knit and all living there with the exception of me.  The family home, a white-painted house with a huge wraparound porch surrounded by dogwoods, is now owned by my elder brother John and his wife Chantal.  I miss my family this time of year.  I won’t be seeing them now for many months and my singleness makes me feel very lonely.  I sometimes catch myself wondering if I did the right thing by never getting married.

Lately, I’ve been having dreams about the professor I had a crush on in college.  I dreamt that he asked me to marry him and slipped a ring on my finger. Now what kind of nonsense is that? I haven’t seen him in twenty years.  It is true I was very taken with him: He was handsome and charming and kind to me. He took me under his wing and promoted me.  He was the one who gave me the confidence to apply to for law school.  

Nothing happened between us; for one thing, he was a married man, and I knew even then to steer clear of married men.  

There must have been more emotion attached to that relationship than I realized at the time, for I’ve had several dreams about him over the years.  It’s almost as if I’m haunted by him.  Now that I think about it, we weren’t on very good terms when I last saw him.  We were having disagreements over a paper that I was supposed to be writing and we’d reached an impasse.  So we stopped communicating.  That paper never did get written.  

But I don’t think that’s what the dream was really about.  When I got home from work yesterday evening, I found a letter addressed to me from Sanford Dole, the gentleman I’d met at the country club at Christmas.  He’d sent me a newspaper clipping that he thought I’d be interested in, some story about my family’s early days in Colbert County.Then he asked me when I was coming to Alabama, and whether I’d like to go out for lunch.

This innocuous little message really stirred me up.  I couldn’t sleep, I tossed and turned.  I think I’m afraid.  I’m afraid of being invaded…

 

Frosty morning image:  Wikimedia commons

Colbert County Courthouse:  Wikimedia commons

–Cynthia Haggard writes short stories, novels and poetry.  During the day, she is a medical writer and has recently opened her own business.  For more on her creative writing, go to spunstories.  For more about her medical writing services, go to clarifyingconcepts.  (c) 2008. All rights reserved. 

Balancing Work with Life: Meditation on a Hacking Cough

I placed my cheek against the soft pillow, 

closed my eyes, 

breathed languorously as the soft muzzy moist air from the fan brushed my cheek.  

I saw colored shapes of painted landscapes drift before my closed eyes, 

skirling gently down down down 

when, 

a muscular spasm 

gripped my chest, 

ripped at my throat 

and I coughed coughed coughed.

 

NO SLEEP.

Though I was exhausted and willing, 

every few moments I was racked by this cough.  

I’d tried pills and syrup, 

the pharmacist had assured me 

it would get rid of this hacking cough.  

It was three in the morning, 

I was standing in the dark, 

HACK, HACK, HACK, 

it had been going for three hours.  

I was in the spare bedroom, 

so as not to disturb my husband, 

a dark shape 

snoring peacefully. 

 

Through a muzzy haze 

of muscular spasms, 

of the sandpaper-soreness 

of a sore throat, 

it suddenly came to me:  

MY BRONCHIAL TUBES ARE BLOCKED. 

I went to the cabinet 

to find an ointment

to rub on my chest.  

Its mentholly scent rose 

in the dark air 

as I rubbed the oily paste 

on my breast bone.  

I lidded the pot, climbed wearily to bed and finally drifted… 

drifted…

drifted…

to sleep.

 

The moral of this poem is that if you have an uncontrollable cough, you may be better off massaging a vaporizing chest rub into the skin above your breast bone and bronchial tubes than taking various pills or syrups.  If you are tired of the taste of cough syrups, try a mixture of tea, honey, lemon and bourbon (or brandy).  To all those people currently suffering:  May you get well soon!

Images:  Delsym cough suppresant is a syrup that cured my cough by day, but had no effect at night time when I needed to lie down to sleep.  The vaporizing chest rub, that I rubbed into the skin around my breastbone and bronchial tubes cured an uncontrollable cough within minutes. 

–Cynthia Haggard writes short stories, novels and poetry.  During the day, she is a medical writer and has recently opened her own business. Recently, her schedule has been thrown into chaos by a hacking cough that has caused her to lose several hours sleep.  For more on her creative writing, go to spunstories.  For more about her medical writing services, go to clarifyingconcepts.  (c) 2008. All rights reserved.  

Balancing Work with Life: Images

Here are some new things I tried in my meditation practice recently.  I closed my eyes and tried to note any images.  Did they grow, fade, move closer, stay the same or dissolve?  My images are static: they don’t seem to move at all. They get covered up by others.  But I don’t just experience images, I spend a great deal of time hearing things and feeling things through the sensations. 

When I am sitting there trying to see the images, do I have particular types of thoughts as “planning,” “remembering,” “judging,” “loving,” etc.?  When I get lost in a thought it is almost always because I have started to plan something.  I get so caught up in it, I don’t even notice I am caught or when I’m caught or how I’m caught.  The other type of thought is the “I must not forget” thought.

Can I create a compassionate, humorous label for an insistent thought? We call repetitive thoughts the “Top Ten Tapes,” because like songs on the radio, they play the same themes over and over again. There is “The Martyr Tape,” “The I Blew It Again Tape,” “The Fear of the Dark Tape,” “The Great World Teach Tape,” and so on. I experimented with this technique.   My tapes are the “I MUST PLAN IT NOW” tape and the “I MUST NOT FORGET” tape.  When I am able to label it that way, the thought gradually disappears.  This is fine with the planning tape.  Not fine for the I must not forget tape, because now I’ve forgotten what I was trying to remember!

 

–Cynthia Haggard writes short stories, novels and poetry.  During the day, she is a medical writer and has recently opened her own business. At the end of the day, she meditates.  For more on her creative writing, go to spunstories.  For more about her medical writing services, go to clarifyingconcepts.  (c) 2008. All rights reserved. 

History of the American Medical Writer’s Association Part 5

NOTE:  This is Part 5 of a 5-part piece. Click here for Part 1.  Click here for Part 2.  Click here for Part 3.  Click here for Part 4. 

Today I’m going to muse about what could happen to suddenly cause medical writing to dry up.  No one likes to think about negative things like business drying up. But on the other hand, people who work for themselves know that the worst possible thing that can happen is for the business to be made irrelevant by a trend that the CEO failed to notice.  So today, we are going to explore two possible trends that could cause medical writing to dry up. 

The first trend is the decrease in the number of senior citizens.  When the current population of baby boomers passes on, there will not be a need for the huge number of medications related to chronic illness such as diabetes, heart disease and stroke.  This relative lack of need for medication could translate into a dearth of work for all the support services needed to inform the public, including medical writing. At the moment however, we are seeing an upswing in the number of people over the age of 50, so this trend is one that is not going to affect us for some time.  People who are now approaching retirement age could be around for the next 30 or 40 years, making it a good time to get into a medical writing career.  But at some point in the future, the pendulum will swing back again, and then times could be lean.  

Another possible scenario – as mentioned last week – is that medical writers may go out of existence due to the fact that young people read less and less.  Therefore, information may have to be packaged in a different way, perhaps by using computer games, or at any rate something more visual and interactive.  The trouble is that the skill set needed to create information that is visual and interactive is very different form the skill set needed to write.  If this transformation really took hold, medical writers could be out of a job. 

Of the two trends, the second one seems more serious to me.  What can we do to get our kids to read more?

         Asklepios image: wikipedia

         Quill pen image: wikipedia

         –Cynthia Haggard is a medical writer and editor and lives in Washington DC.  She recently opened her own business, Clarifying Concepts, which provides grant writing, speechwriting, technical writing, writing for the public and regulatory affairs services.  To see more, please go to clarifyingconcepts. (c) 2008 All rights reserved. 

 

Travel: A Day at the Races

The day was perfect:  Warm sun set off by undercurrents of coolness.  Leaves that were that soft green color of early spring, for they had literally just come out this last week. As I sipped a chilled chardonnay and gazed out over the crowd come to see the Virginia Gold Cup races in The Plains, just up route 17 from Warrenton, I saw three young ladies arm-in-arm walking slowly along.  It would have been a scene out of Gone With the Wind, except that the costumes were different.  The fashion this year seemed to be for women to wear sleeveless dresses that ended just above the knee, showing off plenty of leg.  Nearly all women wore their hair down (as opposed to pinned up) which meant that some very classy hats were sent flying by the unexpected gusts of wind we had, for there was nothing in the shape of a hatpin or coiled braids to anchor the hat down.

I do not know much about horse-racing (this was only the second race I’ve ever attended) so I was interested to notice that a large crowd showed up for the races and also that many companies used it as a venue to entertain their clients.  It was hard to find a place by the railings that hadn’t already been pre-booked in some fashion.  Finally, my friend and I by dint of some walking (she in fashionable flat sandals, I in 2-inch heels) managed to find an unobstructed spot and so I was able to get some pictures of the 4^th race.  

I am surprised to find relatively late in life how much I like animals.  If I am partial to cats and benevolent to dogs, I seem to be developing a passion for horses.  I don’t know what it is about them, but they are just fascinating.  So I hung over the rail, eagerly waiting for my 2-second glimpse of some heavenly being with a braided mane and gleaming coat fly by me.  It was a perfect day. 

 

To find out more about the Virginia Gold Cup, click here. 

– Cynthia Haggard is a medical writer and editor and lives in Washington DC.  In her spare time, she enjoys going out with friends and family to visit the beauty spots in the region.  To see more about her medical writing business, please go to www.clarifyingconcepts.com. (c) 2008 All rights reserved.