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Gratitude(?)

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Over at A Gai Shan Life, Revanche is climbing back from her recent shocking loss and, I suppose, from the equally shocking (potentially) good news. Resonating off a theme launched by eemusings, she lists several things she’s grateful for and asks readers to join in.

Just now, I must say, I’m finding it difficult to evince much gratitude.

The modern medicine that recently has made Revanche’s life more comfortable has disrupted my life Big Time. I’ve been cut up, half-healed, infected, bloated with hematoma, ruptured and bleeding, in pain, sickened by drugs, and waiting to be cut up again since the end of June, and whether Dr. P manages to “get it all” on her next fishing expedition or whether she has to lob the boob off altogether, the nightmare is not going to end much before the middle of December. If the surgery ends with success (heh…) on October 15, I will then have to heal up again — a month or so — and then be subjected to at least three or four weeks of radiation therapy, which will be followed by some weeks of debilitating fatigue. And God only knows how long it will take to get over that!

The longer the mess goes on, the more evident it becomes that the disruption, pain, and distress were utterly unnecessary, the result of massive overtreatment of women’s breast issues institutionalized within our  healthcare system. As each day passes, I learn how many more women have gone through some or all of this ordeal. The number is huge, many more than the one in eight who are said to develop breast cancer over the course of a lifetime. That is because women who do not have and probably will never have breast cancer are being subjected to the same treatment they would get if they did have cancer: mutilating surgeries, risk-fraught radiation therapy, and chemotherapy, all in the name of prophylaxis.

Sorry. I don’t feel grateful for that at all. Yes, I’m glad I don’t have cancer, but I very much doubt that an extremely indolent growth that, if you believe Dr. P on the rate at which these things expand, has resided harmlessly in my body for a good ten or fifteen years, would ever have developed into cancer. And if it did, it could have been treated then, in exactly the same way it’s being treated now — only for an actual reason.

I’m grateful this happened while the stock market is up, so I can take money out of retirement savings without totally raping what little remains of my future. Like unto “grateful it isn’t cancer when it clearly was not cancer, is not cancer, and probably never would have become cancer,” that’s a pretty piss-poor target of gratitude. Gee, I’m so glad I had plenty of money to be taken away from me pointlessly by doctors, hospitals, cancer centers, household help, pool help, yard help, dog help.

I’m grateful my business partner was here to cover for me. I’d have lost my shirt three ways from Sunday if she weren’t picking up my work. As it is, I’m probably going to lose one lucrative account, because that project simply cannot be done without my contribution, and I’m too sick to do it. The plan to expand The Copyeditor’s Desk into indie publishing is down in flames. I can’t even get my act together to build the website Jesse established for it, much less actually do any work.

I’m grateful my son has kindly taken uncountable hours of time off work to drag me back and forth to surgery after surgery. But I’m not the slightest bit grateful that I had to ask him to do that, and that I have no other resource to take the pressure off him.

I’m grateful that the corgi breeder who charged me $1,200 for Ruby will probably let me return her, now that I’m too sick to take care of her and that she’s decided to turn Cassie into a doormat. No refund, of course; nor will there be refunds for the astonishing amounts of cash outlay on vet bills, special UTI dog food, dog gates, dog crates, dog leashes, dog collars, dog harness, the wrought-iron gate to keep her out of the pool, and on and on and on and on. I’m grateful my son has taken her off my hands for a couple of weeks. I’m not grateful at all that I’m going to have to take her back where she will be kenneled for heaven knows how long, and that I probably would have had to do so even if the boob fiasco had never happened.

I’m grateful the weather is cooling a little. And that there are no disclaimers to that one.

So… Gratitude? Mixed. Very mixed. Tepid, one might say.

This poor youngling for whom we do sing Bye, bye, lully, lullay.
This poor youngling for whom we do sing
Bye, bye, lully, lullay.

 

 

Damn, I’m Good!

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LOL! Check out my latest tour de force over at Writers Plain & Simple. Feeling pretty smug about it.

One of my clients emitted a newly plotted Book I of his sweeping historical epic, complete with reimagined characters and richly researched details. As I was reading one section of it, certain baleful habits in verb use struck my eye. Naturally, since I never can keep an opinion to myself, I held forth at length about how to fix these. He claimed to like the result (at least he hasn’t thrown a frying pan at me yet). So I got his permission to use a few examples from that section as the basis for a post at the writer’s blog.

The result, I think, is kind of informative for people who want to be Writers with a Capital W.

Might be useful for bloggers, too. 😉

Car to Chuck’s: Pray for a LONG Life

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Toyota_Sienna_--_07-09-2009Welp, the car is (belatedly) down at Chuck’s Auto Service, there to be refreshed for another year of survival.

Very nearly missed my chance: the ole Dog Chariot was supposed to arrive in his precincts at 8 a.m. But…a disadvantage of laying flat on your back day after day is that your computer is plugged into a bedroom outlet. After I let the dog out at dawn, I crawled back into the sack and started working on a client’s work.

The nose stayed on the grindstone till about 9 a.m., when I got hungry. Stumbled out to get the paper and was reminded of the leaking sprinkler head in front. Staggered back to the phone to call Gerardo and ask him to come fix it. He asked cuando? Looked at the calendar… Uh oh!

Called Chuck’s: Pete answered; said to bring it right down.

Flew toward the shop; turned around, flew back to the house to check to be sure I’d turned the fire off under the water kettle (whose contents I had imagined would be used to make coffee…); jumped back in the car; flew toward the shop.

Chuck drove me home and will bring the car back later today. This was good, in its way: it allowed him to get an earful of the squealing brakes. They just DID a brake job a few months ago.

Sort of. I think it was last in for an oil change in…uhm…January.

I’ve been putting off service because I thought I would buy a new car this summer. Then when all this medical sh!t  fell on my head, shopping for a car was out of the question.

And now buying a new car this summer or any time in the near future is out of the question. All the money I’d planned to use to buy the car is going to the Mayo Clinic.

Driving homeward, I said to Chuck that I need for the thing to run at least another two or three  years; possibly another five.

I’ve never owned a car this old! It is 14 years old. Still running like a top, though.

Well, that may not be true…the Mercedes may have been older. The number that sticks in my mind is 13 years; but it could have been longer. It also was running (expensively) well. The only reason we traded it in was the switch to unleaded gas. The thing ran on leaded, and we were told that unleaded would wreck the engine and we eventually would have to install a new one, which would cost as much as buying a new vehicle.

CeyBenz1972What a shame! It was SUCH a wonderful car, so beautiful…and holy MACKEREL the power that thing had! It was slow from a standing start, but at 65 mph all you had to do was breathe on the gas pedal and suddenly you’d be at 85. You have  never seen such acceleration in a big old galumphing sedan with walnut and leather trim.

Heh. We traded it in on a Toyota and never looked back.

Whatever. This year there’ll be no RAM  1500 with four doors and a six-banger for me.

On the other hand, every year I can put off buying a new car makes it more likely that the next vehicle will be the last one I’ll ever have to buy. So that’s good. I’ve got cash to buy one more car, but not enough to spring for two.

Hm. Maybe the next car should be a Mercedes…

 😉

 whoa there! Wait. a. minnit.

For less than it would cost to get this:

ChevyExterior

ChevyInterior

I could get this:

CeyBenz

CeyBenzInterior

Well, by golly. Every cloud has a silver lining, doesn’t it?

😆

So, Where Were We?

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Where were we, indeed? I’ve lost track. But this morning a tiny  bit of normalcy trickled back into life: My accountant friend and I drove out to the weekly meeting of the Scottsdale Business Association, the business group that we’ve taken to calling “The Breakfast Club.” Business leads do get exchanged, but in such a low-key way as to be virtually unnoticeable.

Really. They do! Today I gave Francis the Gardener, who runs an upscale concierge service, leads to two of the Valley’s highest-end Realtors, one of whom went to graduate school with me. She quit at the master’s level to take up the practice of real estate. Some punkins are a great deal smarter than the rest of the vegetables in the patch.

If you’d like to see how the 1 percent lives, check out her featured listings.

Okay, that was a distraction. Where were we?

So it was pleasant and soothing to see my old bidness friends again. It’s a convenable and cheering group to spend time with, even when we’re grutching about the sad state of national and international affairs. Being too sick to go to those meetings or to choir has pretty much isolated me from humanity and that alone is demoralizing.

Yesterday the cough that prevented The Surgeon from doing the work she needed to do with me under a general anaesthesia got lots worse. So I betook myself to the precincts of the high-powered pulmonologist who treated the bronchitis I enjoyed two years ago; got in on the very day with his partner.

This guy diagnosed what ails me as a viral bronchitis. He wrote a prescription for codeine with Phenargan.

In the course of telling him how I came to this pass and why I was swallowing the pills I carried in to his office, I mentioned that I’m on cephalexin for a supposed breast infection that The Surgeon says is not an infection and allegedly proved it when she vacuumed out my boob.

He said, “If you don’t have an infection, why are you still taking an antibiotic?”

I said, “Because she told me to take the rest of it.”

“Why?”

Why? Trust me, dude, I was in no condition to ask questions! “I don’t know. Maybe she meant it prophylactically.”

“I think you should stop taking it. Don’t take any more of this.”

Oh. God. All. Mighty

So now once again we’ve got two heavy hitters dispensing diametrically opposite advice.

The Phenargan in the cough med he prescribed dried out my mouth and throat so much I couldn’t swallow. At all. Thinking my tongue was swelling, along about 11  last night I called 911. The paramedic felt that it could not be an allergic reaction because it had been so long since I took the drug; she thought it was a reaction to the Phenargan and so connected me with Poison Control, whose CSR opined likewise.

Lovely.

I’m prone to laryngeal spasms, a peculiarly disturbing quirk. They block off one’s breathing so that you can’t even gasp out your address to the 911 set, to say nothing of telling them what’s wrong. If you relish moments of sheer, unadulterated terror, try one of those in the dark of the night when you’re all alone.

So I decided I’d better not lay my head on the pillow or dast to go to sleep. So worked until about 3 a.m., when exhaustion won out. Then it was up at 6 to feed the dog and get ready to shoot out the door for the meeting.

At any rate, I got through 13 pages of a client’s project before accursed Wyrd did one of its infamous catastrophic crashes and lost two pages of it. Probably the re-do of those two pages was better than the first effort.

Just got a call back from the pulmonologist’s office; he wrote an Rx for Robitussin with codeine, which should do the trick. Still waiting to hear from The Surgeon’s underling on the question of why I’m being asked to take five more days of a powerful antibiotic if I never had an infection in the first place.

§ § §

In the absence of Ruby the Corgi Pup, Cassie the Corgi has come back to life. As we scribble, she’s in full Ball Pestering Mode, to her great delight. Pup had brought a stop to playing with Ball — in the first place because she grabs it away from Cassie and threatens to kill her if she comes anywhere near the thing, and in the second because I had to pick all the balls up and put them away (i.e., lose them) because she chews mightily on them — tennis balls are very dangerous to dogs that want to chew them up. Cassie does not chew balls, nor does she hold them in her mouth for any length of time. She picks them up and throws them (no joke — she actually can pitch one of those things clear across the room) at the sucker who gets started with her.

Cassie is eating her food in peace. Cassie is getting unmolested doggie walks — the last couple of days I’ve been able to crawl around the neighborhood, which I’ve not been able to do while trying to manipulate Pup with a boob that hurts at every tug and hurts even more every time I have to bend over. Cassie is resting beside my chair again (she was relegated to the back bathroom, where she went to hide).

She’s still not back to normal. She may never go back to normal.

What to do with Ruby remains to be seen. My son still has her, but he has said he doesn’t want to keep her permanently. I can’t deal with a puppy in my present condition, and it appears this isn’t going to get better for quite a long time. So I suppose she’ll have to go back to the breeder. And that is a whole ’nother difficult and depressing project to launch and see through. Just haven’t had the strength or the heart to get in touch with the woman.

But I guess that’s gonna have to be done pretty soon.

 

Rain?

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Lordie, it’s hard to sell newspapers! Or news websites… Local Play-Nooz has been whipping up hysteria over a HURRICANE (eeeeeek!) about to SLAM (yowwww!) Arizona and FLOOD PEOPLE’S HOMES AGAIN (auuuuugggghhh!).  They’re making as much hay as they can over Hurricane Odile, which is weakening as it passes over BATTERS Baja. This blather is great for sales just now, since folks are a little sensitized by the recent record rainfall. Three inches qualifies as “record” in Arizona…

And in fact, because the infrastructure isn’t designed to handle a real rain, three inches does max and overwhelm the roads and the drainage systems. There’s also the fact that Arizona homes aren’t built for rain, either. If your slab is at or below grade, then your door’s threshold is going to be….yup! at or below grade. My friend La Maya’s pretty office flooded during the late, great Deluge. It has a sunken floor and a pair of exterior French doors that look out onto an enclosed courtyard that lacks sufficient drainage to handle three inches of rain.

One of the few small mercies that have visited me of late has been here all the time: A slab built up about four inches above grade. I did get water on the patio, as I do every time it rains. But when I stumbled out, in a stupor, to see what was happening, it wasn’t anywhere near the door. In fact, the puddle rose less than it did the last time Lake Patio filled.

The other day Money Beagle, wondering whether changing habits and changing tastes signal the onset of decrepitude, mentioned a couple of alternatives to radio, streaming off the Net. One is Slacker and the other is Freegal. Checked them both out. Freegal I dunno about, because it requires you to set up a userid and password, which I hate and avoid when possible. Slacker, however, is free and uncomplicated. No annoying demands that you divulge your name (real or fake) and e-mail address. No advertising. And (so far) nonstop streaming of more music than you’d ever imagine existed.

Right now a bonanza of outlaw country is flowing into the MacBook’s tinny little speakers. There is, of course, a Slacker app, which I intend to download to the iPad. Then, I figure, a couple of cheap Bluetooth speakers in the Dog Chariot will free me from the vicissitudes of commercial radio and NPR’s endless talkathons. And begathons.

Actually, with this you could listen to the NPR shows you like on the car’s radio (assuming you have a superannuated car, like mine, that doesn’t have an entire computer lab in the dashboard) while letting the genre of your preference play as background.

Welp, it’s time to return some phone calls and then get back to reading copy. And so, to wyrk…

 

News of the Day

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Been enjoying the dispatches from GoogleNews, the NY Times, BBC, NPR, and waypoints? Amazing stuff, isn’t it?

Lately, since I’ve been flat on my back in the sack most of the time, I’ve been spending altogether too much time reading news reports. Whaddaya think of some of this stuff?

US sends 3000 troops to fight Ebola in West Africa

No kidding? The civilized world is under attack from the most vicious, pernicious enemy we have faced since World War II, and we’re sending the army to try to fight a disease?

That’s all very civilized and humane, of courses. But one wonders what, exactly, armed troops are supposed to do against a hemorrhagic virus? Confine the population to their homes and see to it that none of them ever pokes their noses outside their doors?

Okay, we’re going to build hospitals and provide treatment and training. Again, that’s altruistic and good. More to the point, it’s self-defensive: sooner or later this disease is going to cross the Atlantic and end up in the US. To say nothing of Europe and Asia.

That of course raises the question of whether Europe and Asia are sending troops to help out in this effort, and if not, why not?

Fox Play-Gnus quotes Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey as saying, “The Department of Defense’s number one priority is combating Ebola.”

Izzat so? When did that come into being? Shouldn’t our number one priority be trying to control the spreading cancer that is ISIS? What part of “we are at war with this bunch, not just in the Middle East but all around the world” are we missing here?

Sending US citizens into a plague zone and then, shortly, bringing them home guarantees that the disease will soon arrive on our shores. Now it’s true, it will be here eventually, anyway. But the puzzled news consumer is left wondering why hurry it along? In fact, there is some evidence that in some circumstances Ebola can already be transmitted by air, even though it is not presently airborne among humans or from other species to humans — that we know of. All we need is to have a US citizen exposed to a slightly mutated Ebola virus and bring it home.

Okay, that’s a “maybe.” What’s not a “maybe” is we have a homicidal enemy with increasingly deep pockets that sooner or later, speaking of crossing the Atlantic, will bring its hate-saturated war against the West to our shores. It has already done so in a small way, with the World Trade Center and the Boston Marathon attacks. It would be naive to imagine that these maniacs are incapable of building a nuclear device. (It’s really quite easy — see, for example, John McPhee’s Curve of Binding Energy…but don’t do it unless you’re into alarming reality checks. In light of current events, it’ll scare you sh!tless.)

Poverty Rate Drops for the First Time Since 2006.

It’s a miracle. Actually, it’s the result of a few full-time jobs coming available. And about time it is.

But…uhmmm…take a closer look at this. We’re talking about a drop from 15% (say what? more than one in ten Americans lives in poverty?) to a mere 14.5%.

A half-a-percent change is not exactly cause for a ticker-tape parade, eh?

Okay, it’s better than a .5% increase. But still…

Interesting. The median income in this country is now $51,939. I hardly know anyone who earns that kind of money, except maybe for a couple of professionals and some affluent choir members.  My income is about 61% of that, long as we’re revealing our paychecks. Possibly that’s explained by the fact that “the wage gap between men and women showed no change. Women on average had an income of $39,200 last year compared with $50,000 for men — meaning they earned 78% of what men earned.”

Moving on.

Scots  to Vote on Whether to Peel Off from England

Where do people get ideas like this? For sheer shoot-yourself-in-the-foot élan, that one takes the cake. And other than demolishing the country’s economy for the sake of a nationalistic ego trip, one wonders what is the point?

Dump Your Hubby to Profit from Your Ex’s Social Security Bennies

The definition of bureaucracy is “bizarre.”  Well. Assuming you buy everything Larry Kottlikoff says, o’course…

Thai Woman Flings Self into Crocodile Pond

Here’s an original new way to off yourself. I have no imagination when it comes to this sort of thing. About the best I can come up with is collecting all these Oxycodone Rx’s and enjoying them with a nice bottle of wine.

US Religious Extremists Continue War on Women

One thing’s for sure, we have nothing on the Moslem crazies: our home-grown version of religious extremist is just as virulent, even though they haven’t started chopping off people’s heads. Yet. Firing the head of St. Joseph’s Hospital because she OK’ed an abortion to save a woman’s life is comparable, though: let her die for our beliefs. That seriously is the stance of the religious group that runs one of the largest regional medical centers in the state of Arizona.

 Net Neutrality Back on the FCC’s Table

As of September 10, the FCC has received over 3 million comments about the net neutrality issue. In case you’ve been napping with Rip Van Winkle, the FCC proposes to allow ISPs to charge users for faster speeds, leaving the rest of us to crawl along at a land-line pace. “If net neutrality is completely done away with,” we’re told, “then it means that companies with deep pockets will be able to get their traffic moving along at a fast pace. Meanwhile smaller companies will languish in the slow lane, unable to grow their traffic because they don’t have the funds available to do so.”

So much for American ingenuity and entrepreneurship, eh?

MIT Faculty Gets Paid to Build Erector-Set Cheetah

Okay, it’s toooo easy to make fun of this bouncing fake cheetah. But it is entertaining to watch. Compare the gait of the mechanical “cheeetah” with the real thing, which comes out on the other side of “entertaining” to enter the realm of “fearsome.”

It does have some practical applications: in the design of better prosthetic devices, for example. And think of how it could chase those ISIS crazies around the desert!

Republicans Say “Yes” to Obama

Aw…say it ain’t so, Politico!

Well, anything’s possible, I suppose. Could the cheetahs be changing their spots?

Too much time spent in front of the computer screen here…it’s time to move along.

What’s your favored News of the Day?