I Want to Know If I Got to Get Married by Miles Frankel

Author:Miles Frankel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flanker Press
Published: 2015-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

A woman who could have been any age, with a big, round face and features blunt to the exclusion of all teeth. Her body had the form of the sacks of flour and potatoes that were nine tenths of her diet, and she complained of backache, front ache, side ache, and pains anywhere I cared to mention. Her husband had died “last fall twelvemonth,” possibly from neglect, and now she had let herself go and looked as if she would soon join him. “Shoot me like an old dog, I ain’t fit regard o’ nuthin’.” It was so easy to miss depression, because the symptoms of misery and wretchedness were so often related to the inability to work or to physical symptoms. There was little or no vocabulary for introspection except for generalizations like “low-spirited” or “bad nerves,” and the pathways to the psyche were overgrown with somatic brambles that snared the unwary. We admitted this woman to St. Anthony for treatment by the psychiatrist, and under his care she did well.

A man of forty-two, limping in to shake my hand with a firm, thorny grip. I knew that he had crushed his left leg last year when an engine he was lowering into a new boat had come adrift and landed on him. Now he had a big effusion in the knee joint and crepitus on all movements. He had returned from his rabbit snares and reckoned that he was “working against himself,” labouring all day in rackets (snowshoes) in the deep, wet snow. “Catch any rabbits?” “Five,” he said cheerfully, “but not sure that ain’t enough ter fill the insides of a she-capelin. Rabbits makes poor eating.” We put an elastic bandage on the knee and told him to rest, although we knew the impossibility of that.

A woman with a letter for me to take to her daughter who was away in St. Anthony waiting for her first baby.

Yet another “aunt,” only this one was born in 1885, and in her case she probably was everyone’s aunt. She had a healing burn on her forearm to testify she still made her own bread, and she sported a very ripe black eye, caused when she fell off her grandson’s skidoo going to a wedding a few days back. She was anxious that she would be disfigured for life and seemed doubtful when I reassured her, going over to look at herself in the mirror. She told me she had shaken Dr. Grenfell’s hand and that he had saved her first-born who had fallen in the brook and caught “the pneumonia.”

The daughter of the previous woman came to have me check her hypertension, which in recent months had been high enough to give alarming symptoms. She had been having morning headaches, “picks of light dancing in her eyes,” and had been getting short-winded at night. Her blood pressure was 220/130 millimetres of mercury despite treatment with reserpine and a diuretic, and since the last time I had examined the fundi of her eyes, she had developed a retinopathy with exudates and one small flame hemorrhage.

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