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$hingles Vaccine: WOW!!!

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AFTER treatment of skin with Herpes Zoster (Shingles)

So when I went to get the first of the two required Shingles (make that “$hingles”) shots, Safeway’s pharmacy dinged me $160. Shee-ut! That was in spite of what I believe to be pretty damn good Part D coverage. I was led to believe it would cover both of the two required shots.

Not so much.

Comes the time to trudge back in for the second shingles shot: they gouge me ANOTHER $160!!!!!

Like…hey, dear GSK Global (Glaxo Smith Kline)…you couldn’t make a zillion bucks by charging five bucks apiece for every baby boomer who needs and wants this shot you’re manufacturing? Noooooo…you  had to get greedy. And by greedy, we mean fuckin’ greedy.

Over $300 to get shots that are supposed to be covered by Medicare D. Why, I asked Dear Pharmacist. She said “that’s Humana’s deductible.”

When I got home, I called Humana and asked why their Part D coverage didn’t cover the shingles vaccine, especially given the savings to Medicare and to the society in general if shingles could be eliminated or at least much attenuated in the Baby Boom generation.

“Because,” their representative said frankly, “there’s so much demand for it.”

Yeah. Because everybody over 65 is responding to advertising and PR campaigns and because no one who has ever seen anyone with shingles wants to get it, they feel justified in gouging.

And that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Turns out $160 is an average — maybe even a fairly modest — ding for a single one of these goddamn shots. Consumer Reports explains: the bastards have managed to get Shingrix, an ordinary vaccination, deemed a “prescription drug,” and therefore not covered as an ordinary vaccination. Therefore: eligible to qualify as a gouge, of which GSK takes every advantage. Scroll down in the comments section of this post, you find some people have paid as much as a thousand bucks to get both members of a couple vaccinated!

If you doubt that Big Pharma is corrupt and greedy…well, let’s be frank: you’re a damn fool.

DogUpdate: A kind of reprieve

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Well…the (formerly) Fatal Vet Appointment got put off till mid-afternoon, because they had entered the Doomsday Appt in their calendar as the 19th, not today (???????? Not easy getting competent help, is it?). Can you imagine how I would have felt if I’d shown up there at 9 this morning expecting to shove Cassie’s raft out to sea, only to be told wooopsie! come back next week!

Argha.

At any rate, I took both hounds up there to get their claws clipped at the same time I confer with this vet about Cassie’s fate. Because it’s been almost three months since either of them has had a walk on asphalt and concrete (which keeps their claws sanded down), they both had scimitars sticking out of their toes.

So along about 2:30, it was off to the vet on the northeast side, a little easier drive than the junket to MarvelVet’s and, as I’ve designated her in my mind, an opportunity to confer with a source for a second opinion.

This vet felt Cassie was, of course, on the decline, but not as bad off as the Senior Drama Queen has thought. She thought it was best not to subject the dog to any more treatment, since it seems that Cassie is even more hypersensitive to drugs than her human is. She got her hands on the report from the guy who did the ultrasound, who also works for her practice, and said it indicates the little pooch does have a large growth on her adrenal gland but it probably is not malignant. That notwithstanding, the dog does have Cushing’s disease (a manifestation of the tumor’s interference with the adrenal function). She certainly thought the dog’s days are numbered, but not in the single digits. When I remarked that MarvelVet estimated she has about 3 months, she visibly restrained herself from wincing and then said she does not emit predictions of life expectancy because the risk of being wrong is extremely high.

She also thought it was a positive sign that in Cassie’s ups and downs, the ups tend to return to 9s and even 10s, if for brief periods.

She did a fairly involved inspection of the dog’s joints and concluded that she has arthritis in her hips and shoulders and that probably explains a) her tendency to drag me backward while Ruby drags me forward and b) the episode of obvious pain that occupied several days earlier this week.

They clipped the scimitars off both dogs’ feet. Ruby, still being mostly a puppy at heart, is always effervescent and so if this made a difference to her, it was impossible to discern. Cassie seems A LOT cheered by being able to walk around more comfortably. So presumably those claws’ deforming her gait contributed to her arthritic discomfort. Just now, despite a long car ride, a mildly stressful vet visit, and a long wait in the car while I made a run on the mega-Fry’s at Tatum  & Shea, she seems pretty perky (comparatively). She’s barking conversationally, walking around, merrily crapping on the flagstones, and in general appearing to still be alive.

MarvelVet may be right about the 3 months. But that’s a lot different from 3 days…

Tomorrow I’m going to start trying to walk Cassie just a few yards up the block in back; then retrieving Ruby and doing the regular 1-mile walk with her. The vet didn’t think Cassie would ever get back up to a full mile-long junket but thought she might be able to build back up to a block or so. She thought this might help her.

So it goes…

The things people eat…

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More to the point, the things Americans eat. I suppose it’s only us old people, the ones who remember what food is supposed to taste like, who notice how truly dreadful most American food is. It far exceeds British food now, in terms of its awfulness. Unless you restrict your shopping to farmer’s markets and the supermarket’s fresh produce and butcher departments, about 90 percent of what you buy in a grocery store is…well…dreck. And about 99.7% of prepared food fits that description. Ugh!

The genesis of this rant? The other day I succumbed to an impulse buy: picked up a package at Costco containing two plastic (that should’ve been a tip-off) containers of “baked potato soup.”

Mmmmmmmmm! Doesn’t that sound great? Baked potatoes narfled around to make a fine reheatable tasty soup. Just think of it: delicious baked potatoes and delicious sour cream and delicious little green onions and some delicious crumbled up bacon and butter and…. Yum, eh?

Well, not so much.

I take this stuff out of the fridge, taste it, and find:

Ah! It’s salt with a little food attached!

Yuch!!!! The stuff is so effing oversalted it makes your whole face, not just your mouth, pucker up!

What is the matter with us that we allow ourselves to be fed this kind of garbage? Is it possible that most Americans really think food has to be mostly salt to be edible?

Well, I’d suggest that the problem is we all eat way too much restaurant food, which in general is by definition processed foodoid. And processed food is, in general, highly oversalted. And laced with all sorts of irrelevant and not necessarily benign chemicals.

If you get used to cooking your own food — as most frugalistas do — you grow accustomed to eating foods that contain much less salt than the guck you get in restaurants and from packages. When you eat a lot of processed food, you get used to eating stuff whose primary flavor is salt, and you forget what real food is supposed to taste like.

It’s not that I don’t put salt in my food. I certainly do. Hell, I’ll sprinkle salt and pepper over a slice of honeydew melon! But not so much as to make your mouth hurt…

The Brits noticed that some 75% of dietary sodium in Europe and the US comes from salts added to processed foods, putting thousands of consumers at risk of early expiration dates… They ran a study to see if sodium levels could be reduced in processed foods, and it worked, to a degree. America being the Land of the Free and the Home of Big Money, of course, it’s highly unlikely any such program could even be tested here, much less applied across the board to the toxic stuff served up to us every day.

In America it doesn’t take a government program to change Big Bidness’s evil ways. It takes a freaking CONSUMER REVOLUTION.

Folks. Don’t eat that stuff. If you must eat packaged food (even though it’s just not that hard to cook real food), if you must eat out all the time, exercise some discrimination. Don’t eat food that tastes mostly like salt. Eat food that tastes like food (assuming you can remember what that tastes like…). If you don’t remember what food tastes like, do yourself a favor and spend about six weeks eating only fresh foods that you prepare for yourself in your own kitchen. (Yeah, I know: the fancy new kitchens are designed for looks, not for cooking. But you can make it work!)

Free yourself from the tyranny of the processed food industries!

From the frugalista point of view, real food has a ton of plusses:

  1. Ohhh, yes, numero uno, top of the frugal list: it’s infinitely cheaper than processed food. Especially when you figure in the doctor bills evinced by a salt- and sugar-heavy diet.
  2. And neck-&-neck for the place at the top of the list: it tastes infinitely better.
  3. It’s better for you! It’s not full of salt. It’s not full of sugar. But it is full of vitamins and minerals and such things that make you healthy.
  4. It’s more fun to eat. Making your own delicious food is ever so much more satisfying than standing in a fast-food line or putting up with the racket and nuisance of restaurant life.
  5. You know what’s in it. Trust me: you do not know what’s in processed and restaurant foods. It’s better if you don’t…
  6. You know how it’s been prepared. You know the preparation was sanitary. If the person who fixed it had a cold or a strep throat, that person was you, and you’re unlikely to catch that bug from yourself.

Freedom’s just another word for…a dish of decent food.

 

Black Cloth and Ashes

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Two funerals in the past week or so, and now we have to sing at another on Friday.

California is burning down. Friends who live near or in the fire areas are, if not fleeing for their lives, in an uproar of terror for those whose lives are being upturned.

Yesterday I made an appointment to take Cassie the Corgi in to the vet to be put to sleep. Monday morning. She was in such bad shape she could barely walk, and could not step up over the threshold of the back door without being lifted over it.

Forthwith my son appeared, to argue against it. She was in such terrible shape, though, that I couldn’t take very seriously the argument that she might not be so bad off. He actually offered to pay the $1,000 it would cost to do surgery to remove the supposed tumor on her adrenal gland (without realizing, I think, how complicated and iffy that surgery is).

But…

But today, she’s sprung back! The limp is almost gone (she’s always had a little limp, but yesterday she was crippled). She’s barking again. Though she still has a bit of a tragic expression and she’s still bloated (a sign of Cushing’s disease), she seems relatively…cheerful, I suppose. She’s about 80% of normal.

So…now I don’t know what to do. It’s possible she was injured…maybe her back got twisted while she was being lifted onto and off of the bed. Or maybe something happened that I didn’t observe.

If she continues at 80 to 90 percent, I suppose on Monday I’ll have to cancel the appointment. Or maybe take her in and ask the vet if she can come up with something to treat her. There are a couple of drug treatments for Cushings that can extend a dog’s life. But they have nasty side effects that probably will make her plenty miserable in their own right. So…what? I substitute one horror for another? Why?

Meanwhile, the effort to freeze the supposedly benign tumor off my hand seems to have failed. It’s healed up and the scab has fallen off and it still itches frantically. At night along about 1 or 2 in the morning it starts burning, awakening me with pain radiating up the arm. Lovely. So I guess we’ll have to jump through that hoop again…or actually do surgery on it, after all, which probably is what should’ve been done in the first place.

So…helle’s belles. Who knows?

Dogsters, Copters, Costco, Pool…oh shit

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Arrrrghhhhh! I come stumbling in from an eye exam at Costco (they’ve made eye exams one HELL of a lot better, having got rid of the cursèd eye dilation drops for most of us), and then take it into my feeble little mind to fix a very nice late lunch/early dinner FREAKING FEAST:

• Grilled marinated scallops (thankyouverymuch, Costco!)
• Steamed sweet corn
• Grilled asparagus (is that asparagi?)
• Avocado
• Fresh Campari tomatoes (which actually taste like tomatoes
• Bourbon admixed with, yes, healthy and wonderful water

What a beautiful afternoon! Weather exceeds gorgeous here today. The pool guy came by and fixed, once and for all, the problem with Harvey the Hayward Pool; Cleaner, and in his absence I figured out all on my little girlie own how to eliminate the pool pump’s motor from laboring and shut UP the damn noise without shutting DOWN Harvey. So the plan was to spread this feast out on the patio table and enjoy this magnificent day.

Well.

Not so much. Shortly before the food is ready to go on the grill, it’s…

RRRROOAAAAARRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!

Goddamn cop helicopter takes up its position over the street just to the north…and parks there.

Welp. You can bet that after the Great Garage Invasion Episode, I do not spend any time outside when the cops are circling overhead. Even if I enjoyed the serenade of laboring helicopter engines, I really do NOT want to meet a fleeing perp face-to-face.

So. Every door and window in the house is shut and locked. I dodge outside every few minutes to flip over the food and dodge back inside, locking the door behind me, until finally the dinner is cooked. Fly back inside, lock the door, serve up the chow on the dining room table. Far from the beautiful outdoor afternoon. Far from the beautifully refinished pool.

Fuck.

These are the times that make Fountain Hills, Sun City, and Prescott look mighty good.

Well. In fact, rural Arizona is even more drug-ridden than the urban areas. But a little town like Yarnell or Patagonia or probably even Prescott cannot afford cop helicopters, and so is in no position to buzz your dinner. What you don’t know can’t drive you batshit.

Dog: very sick.

Cassie the Ailing Corgi has been even more miserable today than ever before. She does have her ups and downs, over the past couple of weeks swinging from a 1 to a 9 on a scale of 1 (at death’s door) to 10 (back to normal). But today she developed such a limp she has barely been able to make her way up the hallway. She’s visibly in pain.

And of course…

Yes…

A limp is a symptom of Valley fever.

But of course…

No…

If you believe all this bullshit, she hasn’t had the disease long enough for it to have disseminated into her bones.

But on the other hand, she’s always had a transient limp on the right side. Maybe she’s had Valley fever for lo! all these 10 years since I rescued her from the pound? Ohhhhh shit! Gotta stop overthinking this stuff.

Costco’s optometry department is infinitely cheaper than the high-rent guys I’ve been using. My daytime driving glasses are now completely fried, having spent several summers in automotively enhanced heat. I decide I need a new pair of shades, but due to protective laws (and here we mean protective of the industry, not, for a change, protecting you from yourself), one must jump through an unneeded and time-wasting eye-test hoop to get them. So it was off to Costco for that nuisance.

Whereinat we learned that essentially nothing has changed, and then we ordered a new pair of lenses for the perfectly fine frames we already have. What a fuckin’ waste of time. And money.

On the way to Costco, stopped by the Walmart, whereinat I picked up a small bottle of low-dose aspirin for all of 98 cents. Chopped one up into little pieces by way of circumventing the enteric coating, which will not dissolve before a pill passes through the canine gut, stuffed it into a chunk of butter, and plugged it into the dog.

An hour or so later, Cassie seems noticeably better. So…maybe, just maybe, she hurt herself. Maybe, just maybe, the limp’s not after all yet another ominous symptom of a fatal disease.

The pool dude showed up as dawn cracked this morning and finally got Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner working. He took the thing apart. Could find nothing wrong with it, essentially confirming the Leslie’s guys’ opinion that there was nothing wrong with it. Screwed around with the pump’s operation and eventually got the thing to work.

He did so by completely closing off the main drain, which caused the pump’s motor to labor to the tune of a loud roaring protest.

After enough of THAT, the old lady went out there and fiddled with it. Opened the drain a bit but far from all the way. This quieted the motor’s roaring, but kept Harvey in motion.

How hard IS this, guys?

Sort of wrapped up the chapter of Ella’s Story that got lost in Wyrd’s most recent crash (in fact, I just arbitrarily ended the goddamn thing) and posted it over at P&S Pressz. So there.

With the new publication schedule — one chapter per book in any given week, not one chapter from each of three books each week — this gives me three weeks to dream up the next installment of Ella’s adventures.

My own adventures will need to slow down considerably if I’m to keep up even with that much slowed-down schedule. Tomorrow we sing at another funeral (of a much beloved friend); Sunday we have a concert (with rehearsal on Saturday); tomorrow afternoon it’s off to try again to meet the prospective new CE Desk emplopyee; and late tomorrow evening it’s off to meet a neighbor who’s trying to sell a twin bed that I’d like to put into the not-quite-a-guest bedroom.

When we say never a dull moment, we mean never a spare moment!

We Need a Party of Common Sense!

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Hmmm…interesting election results. It looks like Americans are just about evenly divided on political issues, doesn’t it? Apparently Trump et al. have succeeded in annoying some folks enough to turn against the Republicans, but it’s far from a serious majority.

What worries me (among many things…) is that these results and the original Trumpite victory are just not getting the message across to Democrats. We have two parties who think God (in whatever form She chooses to take) is on their side — each party thinks it has the moral high ground. And neither side seems to be registering that they need to rein in their most extreme impulses and drive in the middle lane. So…I don’t see things getting any better. All that will result from salting the House with Democrats is that nothing will get done in any direction.

To celebrate the possibility that now the Democrats are in control of the House, they could indeed do in the Orange-Haired One, is to crow in mistaken triumph. Yes, he’s a bad fellow. No, he should never have been allowed to set foot in the White House. But impeaching a President of the United States is not, never has been, and never will be a good thing. No matter how incompetent or crooked the man (or woman) may be, removing a sitting President will guarantee resentment, rage, and chaos.

Let’s imagine the House finds, grâce à Mr. Mueller’s excellent work, that Mr. Trump is the creep, crook, and tyrant some of us think he is. Let us go so far as to imagine they not only prove this amazing revelation, they use it to remove the man from office. Then what?

Then we end up with Mike Pence as President. The man who cannot trust himself to go to a business dinner at a restaurant without taking his wife along to act as chaperone.

In the meantime, the hateful rhetoric continues unabated. Faux Gnus is probably right: nothing much will get done from here on out. Meanwhile, The New Yorker rants ecstatically that the elections were a “rebuke” to Trump…gimme a break. Daily life is a rebuke to Trump…BFD. The man is still in power, he will continue so for at least two and quite probably six more years, and he and his Russian pals will have two to six more years in which to foment hate. The Democrats, imagining that they’ve triumphed, will continue on their own benighted way, enraging everyone who stands to the right of, say, Harry Truman. Whaddayabet they install Nancy Pelosi as speaker?

We need a third party: the Party of Common Sense. So far, it doesn’t look like we’re about to get one of those.