Schadenfreude... the Pleasure of Misfortune

Schadenfreude... the Pleasure of Misfortune

/ˈSHädənˌfroidə/

I discovered the word schadenfreude, a noun meaning pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune.  I smiled at finding a word that exactly described my mother's general and parental attitude which had been difficult to explain to people.  An example of schadenfreude is your response if you see someone cruelly kick a dog and they badly stub their toes.  Most people will be angry that the person kicked the dog, but might smile at the inflictor's pain. That kind of smile and attitude, of "good, they deserved that... instant karma," is an example of mild schadenfreude. 
Some people might ask the kicker if they are alright, but the concern is usually not completely genuine.  Anyone who observes your smile understands your true feelings, because the smile is not a smile of heartfelt regard.  Children, of parents with the trait of schadenfreude, also understand the parent's smiles and true feelings.    

 

Although normal people may exhibit schadenfreude depending on the circumstance, my mother, quite possibly a psychopath, or simply mentally unstable or ill, exhibited it consistently. 

 

One major difference between "normal" people and my mother is that although normal people may have witnessed something that brought about rightful misfortune to others and a sense of schadenfreude, my mother would sometimes deliberately do something to cause misfortune to others and revel in the adversity. For instance, the neighbor's little dog squeezed through the fence into our backyard.  Over years, she had refused to let me have a dog, but kept the little dog, lying to the neighbors that she hadn't seen the dog, all the while knowing how much they loved their dog. She smugly gloated and smiled with schadenfreude when they asked her if she had seen their dog. Eventually she was caught with the dog, but blatantly stuck to lies and did not apologize. Other than the neighbors knowing what a piece of work she was, she faced no repercussions. She knew she had gotten away with the vile act and never changed her heart.

 

 

Children take their cues on how to react situations by how other people react.  Small children toddle and inevitably fall while learning to stand and walk.  Good parents often naturally smile or laugh, help them or let them regain their feet, and let them try again.  The child learns it is okay to fall, because they can simply try again.  If the child is hurt, a loving parent might still smile with empathy, but gently wipes the tears, comforts until the pain is past or mostly past, and then sends the child on their way.  The child learns comfort exists in the parents, that pain will pass, and they can try again.  In the few photos of me as a baby and child, it was apparent that my father was the loving parent.  I recall him smiling as he taught us the things little kids need to master. Our mother was the opposite.

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My mother embraced schadenfreude.  She would smile and laugh when I would fall, but there was no comfort or genuine encouragement, unless someone was watching.  The comfort was for show.  I knew, but hoped the comfort was real.  She took pleasure in seeing me or my siblings physically or emotionally hurt.  Her smirking expression, riddled with schadenfreude, hid the self-serving gratification of a resentful parent.  She secretly, or not so secretly, never wanted children, especially me, as she would say as she talked to herself.  Ultimately I ended with permanent physical injuries that continue to plague me after decades.

I write this so you can recognize schadenfreude, which can progress to bullying. When someone has a misfortune, such as they do an embarrassing splat fall, drop things, get food on themselves, it is okay to laugh, but only if immediately followed by helping them with genuine help, care, and words of comfort.  Incident responses need to be practiced, so kids can retain a sense of humor and compassion.

  

Proposal for Publicly Financed Elections

Edward Chaplin's  Proposal for Publicly Financed Elections

Chaplin proposes that every registered San Diego voter be given $25 in vouchers, that they could give to whichever candidate they chose, for mayor, city attorney, or City Council.   He said, "It would make every voter in San Diego part of the donor class."  He said the program would cost no more than $6 million per year.  

Although an interesting idea to get voters involved, there are several problems with this scheme.  

First, people, in general, don't respect money they are given, whether in vouchers, gift cards, or cash.  That is why the majority of lottery winners go through any money they win within three years.  People could easily give vouchers to people they know would be willing to give favors of some kind.  (Yes, corruption still exists.)  Some enterprising, but corrupt, person could offer $5 or $10 cash for a voucher donated to a particular candidate, to boost that candidate's coffers.

Second, many people wouldn't use the vouchers at all.  Although the taxpayers have been taxed, the money is wasted.  At best, ends  up in a slush fund.  It appears this proposal is another well-meaning, but deluded way, to fleece taxpayers.  Perhaps I'm wrong.  Is there a way to reimburse tax payers the unused voucher money?  Yeah, I didn't think so.

Third, people who are clueless as to the backgrounds and positions of the candidates might donate to the person who's name is the most familiar, likeable, or simply a member of a particular party, thus defeating the purpose of the voucher, which is to get informed voters involved to elect new blood.

Serendipity

Serendipity, for those who don't know, is the wonderful ability to find things unexpectedly.   Sometimes called happy luck or happy accident, a few people have more than normal amounts.   This is a true story of one of those people.

As an eleven-year old girl playing in a barn, I jumped from the top of a barn hay feeder railing  that was about four feet high.  I was very near sighted.  Everything looked fuzzy and soft to me.  However, this time I landed on uneven rock-hard cow clods. Pain coursed through my feet, which immediately began to swell.  I tried to stand, but couldn't.  I crawled on my hands and knees to the house, where my grandmother found me and helped me inside.

Shortly after, my mother came. We were supposed to leave immediately to travel several hundred miles to the city where my mother moved us from our farm.  My mother was furious at both my grandmother and me to discover that my feet were in dire condition.  Although she would drop me at my grandparents' farm, sometimes for months at a time, this was only for a few days. 
My grandmother said, "She needs to go to a doctor."  

My mother protested, "No, we need to leave."  

My grandmother pleaded, "She should be carried to the car. Look at her feet!  They are badly injured."

My mother didn't want to take the time to get my uncle, who lived nearby.  The two argued over the care for me for a few minutes.  In the end, my mother forced me to painfully hobble to the car.  She did not take me to a doctor.

When we reached the city, my sister was waiting. She was shocked to see my feet and ankles.  She also insisted I needed a doctor.  Our mother refused, even though we had military benefits with medical coverage.  Instead, she told me to sit on the sofa and put my feet up.  Over the weekend, the swelling subsided substantially, but the pain remained.

That Monday, the first day of school began.  Out mother told me to walk to school, which was a mile away.  I did not understand street signs or traffic.  My mother had never driven me on the route and I  had never even seen the school, which looked different from any school I had attended.  My sister eventually convinced our mother to drive me to school, but my mother said nastily, "You'll have to walk home."  She could have easily picked me up from school, but she wouldn't.

That afternoon, I walked home, my feet aching with each step.  Our mother had not taken me along the route in reverse, I couldn't see the signs to read them, due to my near nearsightedness, and worried I would become hopelessly lost.  I made it.  My feet were once again swollen and excruciatingly painful.  Over night  the swelling of my feet went down.  The next day, I walked to school and back, as I did from then on.  Each afternoon my feet would swell and hurt.  Each night they would reduce in size.  Over time, my feet swelled less and reduced faster.  But, then, several weeks into the school term, P.E. classes began.

P.E. classes required jumping and running, starting with several hundred jumprope jumps.  An hour after each class, my feet swelled.  Worse, the classes had "gang showers," which I dreaded.

Earlier in the preceeding summer of my injury, my mother abandoned me and my siblings on our family's farm.  Our mother moved to the city without us, returning only to drop off food on the weekends, and immediately leaving.  My brother remained for a short time, but then was sent to work for our mother's married boyfriend, leaving us two girls alone on the rural farm.  Word quickly spread through the community, to no good end for us girls.  After enduring a summer of predators, I would do anything to avoid undressing around anyone.  I quickly discovered that, if I jumped three or four times a couple of hours before P.E., my feet would swell and I would be excused.  In the long run, it did less harm than the P.E., which was an hour of impacts on my feet.

And, so it began.  Over the following months, the swelling came, went, and gradually improved.  For a few years, it wasn't too bad.  But, I never was able to have pretty shoes, my naturally wide feet  distended from the injury.  At times I felt cursed.  Shoe store windows displayed beautiful shoes, however the only shoes I could get on her feet were plain and ugly.  I disliked wearing dresses, because the ugly shoes showed.  They hurt my feet, even sitting.   I mostly wore pants, a little on the long side to hide my feet.  Being optimistic, I appreciated I had feet, even if they were ugly feet, although I longed for nice shoes.  Serendipity hadn't entered, yet.

Decades later, swelling to my feet returned more frequently and remained longer as I stood, worked, and aged.  Doctors said it was lymphedema.  The swelling was no longer limited to my feet, but progressed up my legs.  Eventually it became too great for me to control.  At age 61, I was given pneumatic pump sleeves that covered my entire feet and legs.  As the fluid was pumped from my feet and legs, my abdomen expanded.  Instead of the fluid being expelled, it would tend to remain in my abdomen, making me appear to be very pregnant, only to seep back into my legs and feet.  Doctors and therapists were a bit perplexed, but this is where serendipity happens.

On Mother's Day, at 2 a.m., I awoke with dreadful abdominal pain.  I tried every over-the-counter and home remedy in the house for relief to no avail.  After hours of being doubled over in agony, my elder son came to take me to the emergency room.  A scan showed what appeared to be something the size of twin babies, but it was really serendipity.  The diagnosis was ovarian cancer, which tends to be deadly, because it usually detected too late.  I was rushed to surgery.  Expecting the worst, surgeons gutted me like a fish, removing multiple organs and organ pieces.  The surgeon later said, in amazement, the tumors weren't large... they were huge!

In an odd turn of events, the childhood injury to my feet, which caused subsequent swelling to the disfigurement of both my feet and legs, which led to the pneumatic pump, which pumped fluid into my abdomen, which distended my ovaries to an excruciatingly painful level, which caused the cancer to be found, saved my life.  That is pure serendipity.

Our Hogwarts House Adds On

"I want to... ," my husband virtually whispered, his voice trailing off, as he ran out of breath.
"What do you want?" I asked.
He tried several more times, each time running out of breath.
I told him, "Sweetie, say only one word at a time.  I know you said, 'I want to...'.  What is the next word?"
"Go," he said slightly louder.
I asked, "Go where?"
"To," he answered. He took another breath.  "The"... and then something indecipherable.
I repeated what he had managed to say to that point.  "You want to go to the... where?"
With another deep breath, he said, "Basketball court."  Success!  He managed to say two words.
I repeated what I thought I heard.  "You want to go to the basketball court?"
"Yes."

"What basketball court?  Where is it?"  I was quite confused and curious, because not only had he never, in our decades of marriage, shown any interest in sports, but we are, to put it bluntly, short.
He tried to point towards the back of the house.
"Sweetie, the only thing back there is the bedrooms and a bathroom."
"No, it's there."
"Honey, where?"
"In the bedroom."
"I don't think a basketball court would fit in the bedroom."
"Yes, it would," he answered with difficulty.
"Sweetie, think about it.  A basketball court would take up our entire lot.  It would be bigger than our house."
"No, its there."
I asked, "How do people get to it?"
He motioned towards the closet in my office/sewing room, where he believes there is a staircase that sometimes changes locations.
Logic could not dissuade him.  The basketball court joins the invisible apartment, which he discovered a couple of years ago, over the house. The only explanation is that we have a Hogwarts house, with expansive hidden rooms and moving staircases.  Of course, there is the Lewy Body Dementia.

The Doctor Cut Off His Legs

October 17, 2018

Late one afternoon Terry asked, "Is he going to sue the doctor?"

I replied, asking, "He who?"

"Clint."  (Clint is our oldest son.)

I asked Terry, "What doctor?"

"The doctor who cut off his legs!"

"Sweetie," I said, "Nobody cut off Clint's legs."

"Yes, they did!"

"No, dear.  Clint is fine.  He has his legs."

"You're wrong!  The doctor cut off his legs and replaced them with marble!"

The disagreement continued for a minute.  I wasn't making headway.  I called our son and asked him to stop by on his way home from work.  Clint arrived at our house, surprised to learn of the amputation of his legs.  He pulled up his pant legs and showed Terry his two dead-fish-white shins, so Terry could be certain Clint still had legs.

Terry smiled and shrugged...another delusion blown out of the water.  He didn't have a leg to stand on.  (pun)

New Marijuana User's Experiences

New Marijuana User's Experiences

None of our family ever used marijuana, ever.  We never felt the need.  Our mind set was that if other people wanted to use it, fine, as long as it didn't affect us directly.  When the rare disease my husband and son share advanced, the need to alleviate symptoms pushed us to try the previously illegal drug.

Our care giver, Manny, took my husband and son to a clinic for a medical marijuana evaluation.  Although they carried documents to confirm their diagnosis, the doctor simply asked if they needed cannabis and signed off, giving them the required certificates.  Based on this experience, in my opinion, doctor evaluations for pot are a farce, providing a rubber stamp and charging money.  They weren't even given a receipt.

The next day, Manny took my guys to get their medicinal pot supplies from a reputable and licensed shop.  When they went to enter the establishment, Manny was told he couldn't enter without a certificate of his own.  He explained that while both guys were in wheelchairs, my husband couldn't control his chair very well.  If they wanted the inside of their shop to remain intact, they may want to reconsider.  They did.

Because their condition causes breathing problems, due to diaphragm weakness, smoking wasn't an option.  Their neurologist concurred, saying he couldn't prescribe the drug products, but wouldn't object.  My guys chose some edibles.  My husband got THC infused chocolate bon bons.  My son got CBD Gold capsules.  A salve to rub on sore spots and a spray (two squirts per day in the mouth) rounded out their purchases.  The shop gave each of them a small bag of gummies, a pipe, a lighter, and a sample Gold capsule of THC.

The first time my husband tried the THC laced edibles, he quickly reported his legs felt hot.  The sensation lasted about half an hour.  The next day he tried the same edible with the same result, although the sensation didn't last quite as long.  On the third day, he no longer had the hot sensation.  His body or mind seemed to have adjusted to the foreign compound.

My husband has Machado Joseph's, a rare neurological disorder, and a second, not yet determined, neurological disorder.  The first affects his balance, coordination, vision, and peripheral sensitivity.  The second makes him crazy as a bed bug, with dementia, especially at night.

The marijuana had some effect on his already delusional and hallucinogenic mind.  The THC seemed to make the imaginary thoughts come easier, but make them "kinder."  Previously, he would often "see" people, who he often viewed as threatening in one manner or another.  Or, he would "see" both small or large equipment and vehicles that needed some sort of work to be done to them or by them.  With the THC, he sees things in a more Disney type view, like blue birds having taken up residence in his coat.  He re-enacted the entire pre-flight check procedure for flying a fighter jet, including climbing up the ladder, putting on his helmet, and adjusting his oxygen mask.

A few months later, the top doctor in rapidly progressive dementia, along with Terry's neurologist, diagnosed Lewy Body as the source of Terry's behavioral and cognitive problems.  Lewy Body is a bit like Alzheimer's on steroids.  Key symptoms are delusions and hallucinations, especially seeing little animals and insects, acting out dreams, and mood changes in a heart beat.  His cannabis was changed from THC to CBD to avoid contributing to the hallucinations and delusions.

Update 3/8/2017  A good side-effect of medical marijuana is the minimizing or elimination of the constant feeling of cold feet, even when the feet are toasty warm.

Finding Respite Caregivers for Full-time Caregivers 101

Rule #1:  Before you interview or hire, list the duties of the caregiver in detail, including when and how they are to be done.   A notebook of procedures, medicines, cautions, and responses, beginning with feeding is a good idea.  When and for how many hours will you need help?  What benefits will you offer?  Make the house rules very clear, especially regarding smoking, pets, children, eating, and phone usage.  If you have a "deal breaker," let them know in advance.

Rule #2:  Look for a caregiver with true compassion and an inordinate amount of patience.  Going through someone who already has a wonderful caregiver may result in better references than going through an agency. Some of our biggest failures were "professionals."

I strongly recommend nanny cams.  We tried out a number of applicants, before finding people who were truly caring.  A few of the people who didn't make the cut had drug, personality, or mental issues, which lead them into thievery.  The ones we kept have been wonderful, which the cameras confirmed.

Rule #3:  Finding a caregiver can be daunting, especially when the patient has a rare disease or unusual condition. Of course, it doesn't help to jokingly tell the caregiver that if the patient dies, it's their fault!  Don't terrify the respite caregiver!  Allow adequate time to instruct the respite caregiver in the major issues, expectations, crises, procedures, responses, and treatments that might arise.

Bombarding caregivers with all the things that might kill your loved one might boggle their brains. I've actually had people who were either experienced with my guys, experienced care givers, or nurses, tell me they were afraid to stay with them, out of fear that one or the other might have a crisis or die.  They are very fragile at times.

Perhaps my favorite caregiver memory happened while my husband was in the hospital following spinal fusion surgery. Although I had tried to warn the staff about his idiosyncrasies and his disease, they weren't prepared for what they got. As I entered his room, an experienced older nurse stood at his bedside with a look of utter frustration, confusion, and dismay on her face. As she watched my husband, she lifted her hands, palms up in surrender, exclaiming, "I don't know what to do!"  My husband was flopping around in his bed, naked as a jaybird.

Another nurse quickly joined us. Both explained that he refused to keep any clothes on, not even a gown or sheet.  His room was directly in front of the nurses station. He was placed there, so that every time a nurse passed, they could look in on him, to make sure he was okay. Trying to keep him covered to any degree of modesty or privacy challenged them.  With my husband, there was no gown or clothing on which to clip any of the monitors. The older nurse looked at me and asked, "What do I do?"  All I could do was laugh.

Rule #4:  You will, most likely, be paying out of pocket, unless you were astute enough to take out long term care insurance.  Medicare does NOT pay for long term care.  Medicaid will pay for someone, if you are poor enough.  Caregivers who live-in and are paid through Medicaid do not pay income tax on their income.  Consider having a live-in caregiver.