Car Issue from Long Ago

 I remember one of the worst times of my life.

I lived in a shack outside Corvallis, a tiny little house with massive issues from lack of maintenance.

While living there I wished so much the place was mine.  I would have fixed it up to be so functional.

I also was having physical problems and ended up having a hysterectomy due to severe endometriosis that had given me pain for decades.  I was told it was all kinds of other things that gave me such pain, even that it was really mental.

In the end, I had exploratory surgery when the doctors were convinced I had ovarian cancer.  But it turned out to be endometriosis.  Because they had not gotten explicit permission in writing from me to do a hysterectomy, they only removed one very fouled ovary.  So later I had the hysterectomy.

What a pain, after surgery.  A wall heated up the next night, in my place.  I called the fire department who declared the place illegally wired, with only one circuit, which had over heated.  The city gave the landlord three days and I was given a notice that it was a dangerous dwelling and I needed to vacate immediately.  I was so stressed and yelled at the city man I'd stand outside naked and yell rape if they came to evict me.  I was given reprieve.

But because of my surgery, I wasn't supposed to drive or lift for like two weeks.   I had to though, because I didn't have enough food and nobody willing to take me to the store.   It was foggy when I went and the car acted up, suddenly becoming unbelievably loud.  It was a crappy old toyota wagon.  

I was scared when I got home because I saw the muffler had fallen off.   There had been some story about someone hitting a fallen off car part on the freeway causing a wreck that turned fatal.   Oh no, I thought, what if someone hits that muffler in the fog.   So I walked the road, and found the muffler and part of the tailpipe about a mile from my place, and drug it home, holding my stomach "together" with one hand.  This was a  couple days, maybe three, after surgery.

My brother in southern Oregon said to come on down, we'd put on a new tailpipe and muffler.  So I drove down, I think on the 4th day after surgery, in the night, to try to avoid a ticket for the loud car.   He had a car lift in his contractor shop.   We replaced the tailpipe and muffler with parts from a car part shop.   I drove back home that night, sleeping at the Elk place outside of Reedsport for awhile.

My other brother, who then lived in Portland, when he heard what I'd done, and right after a hysterectomy, said maybe his company needed to rewrite their time off policy for hysterectormy surgery.  At that time, women got three to six months off after such a surgery.  Great, I thought.   Ruined  other women's chances of getting some rest.

In the end, my slumlords had the tiny house rewired.  The one fuse in the electric box had been rigged with a penny or something some way so the circuit wouldn't break when it overheated.  Just plain slumlord city.  The saving grace was their greed.  They wanted rent money and they would never get rent again on that place with it labeled a dangerous dwelling.

When I left it, being evicted and called the worst tenant they'd ever had, I stopped at the end of the driveway, headlights on the little slumshack, got out, stood in front of the car and raised both hands each with a one fingered salute and yelled "Goodbye Slumlordville"!  Felt good.

The car broke down completely not long after the exhaust system fell off, transmission toast.  The transmission was bad when I got it from a sleazy used car dealership in McMinnville.  I didn't know that then.