Orange Fever in the Netherlands and the changing of a name
A couple of months ago I was back in my homeland of the Netherlands. The whole country was drenched in an orange glow, since the World Cup Soccer was starting in a couple of days . To be exact in 12 days 22 hours and 24 minutes at the time I started to write this post. Everywhere you go you would see something orange. Even though something may have been orange before this whole madness started, like the background of your store name, now was the time to exploit your ‘orangeness’. You could buy just about anything in the country’s color and even the receipt at the store would have a chant on it and would be written in orange. Wigs, sunglasses, t-shirts, groceries, shoe covers in the shape of wooden shoes. Anything you can think about.
Since I have been gone from the Netherlands for almost 17 years, I was enjoying it. I do not remember it being this big, but then this was also the first time I was back home to visit when there was a World Cup.
It was good to be back. After my trips to Tanzania and Haiti I did need some mental rest. Especially since coming back from Haiti was very hard. The hospital decided it was better for their PR to pretend they had anything to do with the teams that went. The day after I came back, there was an article in the local paper telling everybody here how great the hospital was in providing help to Haiti. It was in the local news and the hospital’s little newspaper. Suddenly they wanted pictures from me, but only those that had hospital staff in it, even though my team consisted of two people from my hospital and three people that were not affiliated with the hospital. Talking about a slap in the face….
Now it is almost September and a lot happened since. When I came back home to the US I found out that my sweet and beautiful friend Maureen had been diagnosed with breast cancer again. She had just passed the magic five-year mark in February, reason to be happy and positive. Unfortunately this time it had come back all over her lungs and this proved to be too much of a fight for her. No fairness in cancer, it won and she died on August 9th. Since she loved dragonflies I decided to change the name of my website in honor of her.
Maureen and I met when I first moved to the US. When I started working in the Neonatal ICU here, she was one of my preceptors and we became instant friends. I am so fortunate to have had her as my friend, if it wasn’t for her I don’t think I would have made it through my bout of depression that was at it worst when she went through her chemotherapy. As she would say, these were both deadly diseases…So we helped each other. I would go with her and after chemo we would stop at Sonic for food for her. Anything she wanted since she had the fight of her life going on and I really didn’t care about nutritional values, as long as she ate. I would get her the ‘real’ licorice from the Netherlands because somehow that would help with her nausea. We would lay in her bed watching silly movies on the old and weird movie channels that we have so many of here. Our favorites would be the black and white mysteries and scifi ones. She would have restless legs from the medication that stimulated the growth of red and white blood cells so she’s be moving almost the whole time. And apologizing for it. She would let me be me and would not allow me to give up on myself, even with her being this sick.
Anyway, I feel kind of lost without my friend. I miss her at the strangest times, like walking to my car after work. I used to call her and tell her about my day. We had this scale, how bad something was. Our WTF scale, kind of like the painscale at the hospital. So I would tell her, on the WTF, how my day had been. And when she still worked, we could exchange our stories and frustrations from a long day at the hospital.
I miss her smile, her voice and company. She is the one that could keep me straight and tell me what to do and I would actually (usually) listen to her. For those of you who know me personally, quite an accomplisment. I’m waiting to go through the stages of mourning, as written by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. Had to read that book years ago in nursing school. Well, I can tell you that losing somone sucks. And stages, oh well, they look good in a book and it is nice someone wrote them down. However, the way your heart hurts when you lose someone, that is just something you can’t put in stages. How am I supposed to behave? Am I supposed to be crying a lot? Am I supposed to wear black and be morose all the time? I don’t know what I’m supposed to do so I just wait until it finally hits me.
My website now is dragonflyphotography.nl. The nl since the com, org and net where already taken, and it stands for Netherlands.
