Coffee heat rising

Another Day Later and Deeper in… ??? …

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A day later and early evening. Still sicker than a dawg. Well: that’s not surprising, since the Dawg shows no sign of anything resembling an ailment…whereas I’m banging at Death’s Door. 😀

Well.  At least…at some doctor’s door.

Jeez. Did you know you could get peripheral neuropathy in your damned teeth???  No kidding: my two upper front teeth are buzzing like an electric current is running through them. And as usual these days, the hands are stinging and tingling and hurting enough to make typing freakin’ uncomfortable.

Whatever the hell is causing this, I do wish it would go away. From what I can uncover through  my endlessly brilliant excavations of the Internet, apparently the neuropathy that afflicts the paws can take aim at other parts of your body. The lips and gums are among those parts. I’m not gonna assume that’s behind today’s fun sensations — I are a English major, after all; I are not a doctor — but it does give me something fresh to pester Young Dr. Kildare with.

Or the new doctors down the road.

YDK has moved to freakin’ Sun City — a 40-minute drive from here, through crazy-making traffic. So I’m afraid our relationship has ended. That’s too bad…because I like him a lot and found he had a fine dose of common sense: a rare commodity in an M.D.

But…now we do have a doctor’s office just down the street — within walking distance, even!   Alas, so far I’m not impressed with those folks. Nothing bad about them, mind you…but nothing notably good, either. Personally, I crave a little more than mediocrity from my doctor.

M’hijito perennially wants to drag me out to the Mayo Clinic. Their docs would be fine if they just weren’t halfway to Payson…  Sorry, but an hour of driving through thick traffic to see a doctor for 10 or maybe (if you’re lucky) 15 minutes doesn’t make it for me.

Am I the only one who imagines that medical care in America used to be significantly better 15 or 20 years ago? Honestly: these days, it hardly seems worth burning the gas to get to a doctor’s office. They don’t pay attention to what you’re saying, and even if they do hear you, they seem to miss the point you’re trying to make.

Perhaps I exaggerate, though. Or more likely,  because I’m old doctors don’t pay any more attention to me than they do any other old person. Which ain’t much…

What a culture we live in, eh?

Colder Than a By-Gawd!

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LOL! Well, no: it’s probably not THAT cold.

It was one of my father’s favorite turns of phrase: hotter than a by-gawd! colder than a by-gawd! 

LOL! I never did figure out what, if anything, a “by-gawd” was. As a kid, I assumed he meant “bi-god.” By that, he apparently did not intend the Earls of Norfolk, a modern currency, or a premium British cheese. 😀

My hip and tailbone hurt like a by-gawd. How a bi-god got in there escapes me: he apparently snuck in while I was sleeping.

At any rate, the sun is up, but it’s still passing cold out there. This morning’s doggy-walk is gonna have to wait for an hour or two, at least until the frost is off the palm tree.

How Do They Know?

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…How DO they know when you’ve been awake half the night and want only to flop down on the bed and doze off?

😀

I dunno…but they DO know. No doubt of it. Mental telepathy, maybe?

Just get under the covers. Play a computer game of solitaire. Next: to turn off the light and launch into a nice nap…

WWWWRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGRRRRRRRRR!!!!!

And yeah: how DOES he know? Lawn equipment revs up and roars up and howls and growls and wails.

😀

Incredibly, it’s not even Gerardo! The racket is coming from two or three yards down the street.

Who knew mental telepathy could carry that far? 

I’m IN!!!

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A miracle!  Lost the password for FaM.  And thought…well, that’s it for the blogging hobby.

But nay! called up a magical page, and presto! Here it is! Why or how, I have no idea…

Probably FaM is no longer for this world than I am…which at the moment appears not to be much longer. I’m very, very sick. No sign of help from any doc in any direction. They clearly don’t know what’s causing this ailment or how to treat it.

Nor, we might add, do they care. In America, old people are less than…”people.”

So…I guess it’s…just resign myself to the obvious fact that I’m not gonna last much longer. And…well, once I’ve stopped lasting, presumably FaM will stop lasting.

{sigh} I reckon the paucity of help or effective care is a function of my personality…which apparently is pretty obnoxious. People have hated me since I entered grade school — before that, really, as evidenced  by the time a neighbor’s preschool brat threw a fistful of sand smack into my eyes.

WOW! Did that HURT! 

Worked nicely, though, to teach me to distrust other people and to stay back from them as much as possible.

Well, WTF. I’m an old lady now — a really old lady, having pretty much outlived my life. A couple of women in my family lived into their 90s. But most died much, much younger than that.

My mother and her mother both croaked over from cancer. I don’t smoke, don’t drink anymore, and don’t f**k every soul who comes up the pike, so you’d think I’d last a little longer than some.

Well, no: “Don’t drink” is mis-speaking. I do love a glass of wine, though lately I haven’t been able to stumble to the store to get any. And I used to enjoy a bourbon and water before dinner. Can’t manage that these days, either. But still…one could figure that a lifetime of pre-prandial swiggling can’t have done the body much good….even if it’s stopped in old age.

At any rate…now that I’m old, I’m so, sooo sick that frankly, I can’t wait for the show to be over. No credible sign that it’s gonna end soon, though…unless I help it along. But that, alas, is not my style.

Ever-So-Slightly De-crippled…

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The spavined hip I’ve been whining about seems s-l-o-o-w-l-y to be getting better. The Dawg and the Human managed to make our usual perambulation around the populated part of the ‘Hood — short version — without crippling the old lady. Still hurts, but at least the leg & hip are now functional.

With any luck, the undercarriage will be back to normal within another three to five days. And then we’ll be back to our usual cavortings. Yay!

Sure as Hell hurts right now, though. 😮

Incredibly beautiful stroll! Lush, gorgeous twilight evening. Most of the kids are inside for dinner, or so it appears. So it was quieter than usual as we strolled around.

Haven’t heard from my excellent son this evening, nor have I attempted to pester him from this end of the phone line. So I hope he’s having a quiet evening…ideally, hanging out with friends.

Meanwhile, also hoping to hit the sack early — Dawg is already conkered out at the end of the bed. Maybe a good night’s sleep will help the spavined hip…with any luck and enough ibuprofen.

sigh! <3  This is such a lovely neighborhood!  I hope I can contrive to stay here until I die. Really: it couldn’t cost any more to have a caretaker come in and babysit me here in my home than it would to lock me up in some dreary old-folkerie.

Well, we shall find out before too long, as I don’t seem to be getting any younger. The longer that exigency can be put off, the better!!

Hurts Like Hell! Down through the ages…

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No kidding. It’s 6:00 in the evening, and the hip pain has been holding forth all day. Not any better as the sun goes down.

Seriously, this thing DOES hurt like the dickens. Won’t say I’ve never had anything hurt this much…but it’s close. Very close.

Contemplating the ancestors and the family history… 

Here’s my grandmother, who never met me and never met her fine Arizona grandson. That, as it develops, is because her cancer killed her before either of us came along. Apparently her promiscuity (so we’re told by the more prudish set in the family) was what did her in: fu*king every guy who came along gave her cancer. Right?

Or not: Ancestors.com tells us she died in 1979…

WHERE do people come up with this stuff? 

At any rate, no matter what caused it or when, my mother’s story was that the woman’s gut filled up with what apparently was a reproductive cancer, and that was the end of her. My mother, then a young teenager, was made to attend her on her deathbed, an experience guaranteed to instill horror in the kid for the rest of her life.

Didn’t stop her from smoking, though….

I incline to believe her story about Olive’s death over the one on Ancestors.com. After all, my mother was not an Internet page. 😀

But seriously: her recollections of what she saw and did while tending to Olive were vivid and gawdawful, not something she would have made up. At no time was it necessary to invent some wild story about being present at the woman’s deathbed — all she had to do was say, in the simplest of phrasing, that her mother died of uterine cancer. Period.

That’s quite horrifying enough.

But…BUT…. It gets a whole lot more horrifying when you contemplate the possibility that my mother may have been lying about Olive’s death. Altogether. That Olive did not die of cancer in the 1930s and that she may have been living when I was born. Yea verily: she could have still been living when my son — her great-grandson — was born.

And that, my friends, is what we call bizarre….