Don't die

I think these were the first two words my wife uttered to me last night when she came home. Well, probably after the usual tadaima/okaeri bit (I’m home, welcome back) and then she hits me with the two little words I titled this here post with.

Don’t die. 

Makes me want to look around for the gaping wound, or the doctor’s report, except she’s not full of tears or anything, but this strange energy. It doesn’t take me long to figure out what’s going on. Today she went to city hall to get my card (or I thought it was going to be a card) establishing my official credentials as a kind of tier two handicapped person. It’s because of my stoma, my asshole part II, the ume-boshi/maraschino cherry bulb below my ribs at the heart of my colostomy bag. It’s the thing I’ve long complained about, the lump of shit I have to feel against my stomach, the time it takes to dump the bag, the shit smells I can’t escape around the second or third day, that I have to live with as part of my life. I guess all that counts as a kind of handicap and now I’m entitled, officially, I have the little booklet not card to prove it, to things like free bus rides in the city, half off on trains, the green parking spaces (I actually don’t remember them, but I guess they’re like a second tier handicapped space) and practically free hospital care and medicine.

Yeah, that. No big deal. I mean we have to actually pay. A whole 800 yen max per payment. 800 yen? That’s less than eight bucks in today’s exchange rate. My wife said she was kando suru or impressed. Her eyes were more than a little wettish with tears. We’ve already gotten so much help from the people who love us and from many we don’t even know, and now the offices of city hall, who in the past have often been the pay up menace regarding health insurance, now swoops in to help us out as well. I'm not sure if this can actually be true now. Really? There must be something I'm missing, other fees, loopholes... 800 yen max? Really?

Anyway, if I imagine the problems I face with my stoma and colostomy bag as my handicap it becomes an embarrassingly light burden. By the way, yeah, I’m using that old fashioned word, handicapped. For one I’ve been out of America and don’t know the current acceptable term and two, the word handicap actually expresses everything that words like physically challenged do, but with more elegance and succinctness. As the Online Etymological Dictionary states: Reference to horse racing is 1754 (Handy-Cap Match), where the umpire decrees the superior horse should carry extra weight as a "handicap.”  An extra weight or something you have to overcome, it even carries with it the idea of being superior and that’s why you are given it. It’s hardly calling someone freakish or helpless at all. I know words pick up connotative gunk that drag them down to different if even opposite meanings and I guess that’s what happened with poor handicapped. Still for the space of this writing and talking about official ranks and parking spaces. I don’t think even I would ever call a person handicapped. Unless on myself, second tier of course.