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A New Day…from Hell

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Nice timing for a Day from Hell. Wouldn’tcha know?

Welp, the day was actually preceded by a Night from Hell. Pup is sick as…well, as a dog. She’s got severe diarrhea, probably brought on by some fancy canned food I gave her. Or maybe by eating bird droppings, one of her favorite delicacies.

Whatever the cause, she got me up every two hours, on the dot, all night long.

Understand: I’m not supposed to be lifting things. But both pooches are now sleeping on the bed. Leave them on the floor and they lobby to get up. So this meant lifting the pup on and off the bed three times during the night, since I went to bed early last night. Or at least, tried to.

Fortunately she only weighs 12 pounds. More about which later…

So the third time she comes back in, she decides she wants to go into her nest, and that’s fine. Next time, she wants back on the bed. And that’s fine.

It’s fine until about 5 a.m. That’s when she barfs.

She doesn’t just barf on the bed. She holds her head over the crack between the bottom end of mattress and the footboard. So she gets barf all over the bedding and spills it down the INSIDE of the footboard!

Holy shit.

So at 5 in the morning I have to strip the bed, wash all the bedding, and remake the bed (which I just paid the cleaning lady to do), and then reach down inside there and scrub the inside of the footboard.

Good MORNING, America!

The dog has the wobbles so bad that she’s getting it all over the fur on her rear end. Fixing that entails lifting her into a bathtub half full of water, scrubbing her down, lifting her out, wiping her down with a towel, draining the tub, and scrubbing the tub with a disinfectant detergent.

That had to be done twice today.

I figure to call the vet’s office about 9 a.m. It being Saturday, if they’re open at all they’ll only be that way till about noon.

Meanwhile, though, Cassie is almost out of food, and you can be damn sure I’m not putting her on any of that canned food that seems to be making Pup sick. Cassie eats real food: 1/2 cooked meat, 1/4 cooked veggies, 1/4 cooked starch (such as rice, sweet potato, oatmeal, etc.)

Yesterday noon I put Pup on a diet of boiled chicken (that being all I had in the house) and rice, a concoction that normally helps dogs get past the wobbles. This morning she laid one almost normal BM amongst the brown puddles around the backyard, so I figured she ought to have more of that. This would entail a trip to Costco. And I needed a bunch of other Costco items.

Costco, as we know, is a species of Hell unto itself on a weekend day. So I figure I’d better get there when they open by way of evading the worst of the mobs. On Saturday morning, Costco opens at 9:30. This obviatea calling the vet at 9:00 a.m.

Meanwhile, it occurs to me that I should buy enough dog-food-making meat to last for awhile, since I’m likely to end up in the hospital some time soon. It also occurs to me that if I’m not supposed to feed Pup kibble (contains ash; promotes UTI) and if canned food makes her sick and is of questionable quality, really…there’s no good reason not to feed her real food, too.

That is going to take a lot of cooking. And it sure as hell won’t be cheap.

But the problem is, Pup is not thriving. She’s skin and bones. Six weeks ago she weighed 11 pounds. She only weighs 12 pounds today.

An entire can of this wet dog food stuff is evidently not enough nourishment for her. I inquire at the corgi forum and learn that a pup her size should be eating about two cans of it a day. One can is 13 ounces (no, a one-pound can of dog food is most certainly not a pound’s worth anymore!). One can costs $2.60 on a good day. If I have to feed her two cans of the stuff a day, that adds up to $156 to $161 a month. Just for one of the dogs. Even at $3.38/pound for hamburger, I don’t spend anything like that much on Cassie’s food. Of course, she’s only eating half as much as Pup should be eating.

I hit the 27th Avenue Costco at 9:45 and the damn place is already mobbed. Trudge through the place. Discover Kirkland’s toilet paper is still the normal size, unlike the now damn-near useless Charmin’ and the likewise Northern tissues. Buy that. Get two packages of hamburg and a giant package of pork country ribs and haul those home along with a pile of other junk. Make that piles of other junk.

The car is almost out of gas. The Costco gas pumps have lines halfway back to the road. Without thinking, I get into the shortest line, which has the pump on the far side of the vehicle from the gas tank. Costco’s gas pumps have hoses long enough to reach around the back of even a pretty big clunk like mine. But then I think…waitaminit. To do this I have to use my right hand and arm to pull and hold the hose and…uhm…I ain’t supposed to be doing that.

Decide to opt the fill-up and  head back toward the Funny Farm.

A-n-n-n-d of COURSE, as usual, Costco doesn’t have two of the things I’ve GOTTA have: converted rice and cornmeal. This means I have to traipse back into town and schlep to the Sprouts.

Arrive at Sprouts. Get the cornmeal out of the bulk bins, but they’re no longer selling converted rice (which they call “parboiled”). Goddamn it.

So I have to traipse to AJ’s. Get the rice and a nice, extraordinarily expensive Porterhouse. As long as I’m mid-town, I go by the Costco in the ghetto mall on Montebello. Price of gas is 4 cents/gallon lower than at the Costco in middle-class North Phoenix. And there’s no line at the pump.

By the time I get back to the house, it’s 12:30. The vet’s closed. Figure if Pup keeps getting worse, I’ll call Alta Vista tomorrow — they’re open 7 days a week.

It’s 110 degrees outside. Pup can’t be left outside to do her thing for any length of time. She lobbies to go out about every 10 minutes and doesn’t want to come inside. Every fifteen minutes, then, I have to go outdoors and coax her back into the house.

Fix lunch/dinner. Start cooking meat. Cook two large pans of burger. Decide I’d better not try to cook the pork in the slow-cooker, because it’ll be too heavy to pick up. Especially considering that I’ve already picked up way too many things since 5 a.m.

Decide to take a nap, with heating pad on back and ice pack on boob.

I’m  not puttin’ that dog on the bed, but decide to leave her out of her crate, figuring I’d rather clean up the floor than have to take apart a cage that’s wedged between the bed and a wall and the bureau drawer and launder the dog bedding and drag the cage parts outside and scrub them down.

I was right.

Roll out of the sack. Clean three puddles and a mound off the floor. Light candles around the room to help burn off the stink. Set two fans to blowing, too.

Dog back into the bathtub. Lift, scrub, rinse, lift, dry.

Cook pork in giant frying pan. Make up rice, defrost and chop veggies in the food processor. Fill every freezer container in the house with dog food; store the pork dog food in ZipLock bags. Freeze. This takes the rest of the afternoon.

Feed dogs. Scrub pans. Jam pots, pans, and bowls into washer.

Puppy emitting foul gas. But she’s not so indisposed that she can’t chase a cockroach around the garage.

Waaack! DON’T EAT THAT ROACH! NO WONDER YOU’RE SICK!

Pup runs outside, finds giant slugs that like to come out after dark and stroll around the backyard. Roach darts out of the garage and streaks away. Pup gives chase. YOU!!! LEAVE THAT DAMN COCKROACH ALONE!

What must the neighbors think?

Flop down in front of Netflix with another ice pack on the boob. Start typing this post.

Made It through the First Trial-&-Trib

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Okay, so the dreaded biopsy, although it had its…uhm, moments…was not as dreadful as I dreaded.

At 9:45 ayem, I presented myself at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center, bearing a hybrid Attitude of annoyance, frustration, concern, and raw terror. And also bearing a laptop computer: my lovely students turned in nine more papers after I went to bed at 11:30 last night. Graded four of these while waiting to be conducted to the torture chamber.

Here’s something that’s kewl about getting treated at a teaching hospital: every procedure comes with a running explanation of what’s going on!

Yes. The senior doctors have underlings (we in academe would call those “graduate students”; doctors call them “residents” and “fellows”). These lovely creatures are allowed to do some parts of some procedures, but overall all parts of every procedure are turned into detailed lessons in medicine. Once again, I learned one helluva lot.

First off, I presented the distinguished professor of medicine and her apprentice with a challenge: one lump in your boob gets four samples excised. Two? Yesh: eight of ’em. And it takes some physical strength to pull this off. So our young thing, who was made to retrieve seven of the eight samples, got quite the workout today.

To my astonished relief, they did not place me face-down on a table and try to thread my boob through a hole in said table. Because of the location of my particular lesions, I got to relax on my back while they messed around with trying to figure out what (if anything) ails me.

First thing they do is pump your boob full of lidocaine. And hallelujah, sisters and brothers! It WORKS. The lengthy, repetitive procedure was almost pain-free. There was a little discomfort (well, we’d call that pain) when they had to enter the second lump that’s very close to the chest wall, but when I whined, they squirted in some more lidocaine.

Apparently, some people experience lidocaine injections as painful. Thank the heavens, I do not.

At every step along the way, the senior physician was encouraging and instructing the young(ish) fellow. This was a) helpful, because I could easily tell how she was doing and how far we were progressing and b) I learned an awful lot about the procedure itself.

They only made one “skin nick” (I would define that as a small incision) to access both “nodules.” The senior physician said she thought they actually were one object, but because others had seen them/it as two entities, she wanted to biopsy “both” of them. Whatever “they” are. I agreed that this was wise.

After the frolic was done, the elder physician volunteered (because, I’m sure, she realized I would have liked to ask her WHAT DO YOU THINK, DOC???) that she couldn’t speculate on whether the things were benign or malignant. However, she said, they are so small that if they are cancer, she thought they would not yet have metastisized into the lymph notes.

She said the element of most concern is my age: When you’re pushing 70, you don’t usually develop benign growths.

I said that about a year and a half after I had that last mammogram (with which they’re comparing the present results, three years later), I lost 30 pounds. My boobs had already started to shrink with age, but when I went on the diet, they reduced big time. And all my adult life, I’ve had “dense” and “lumpy” breasts.

“Ah!” said she. It’s possible, she opined, that the things are fibroadenomas and only became visible as the surrounding tissue became less dense and lost fat content.

So that upped the possibility that the damn things could be benign.

I think, from what I’ve heard from the other quacks, that the odds are not good. But if you go by what this woman says, even if it is cancer, I may not be checking out very soon.

LOL! She advised me to take ibuprofen for any residual aches and pains. I pointed out that I’m allergic to that, too. She was shocked.

I said by and large I just have to gut out whatever little pains come my way.

She said, “Well, then..plan to gut this one out.”

I said, “My preferred analgesic is whiskey.”

She laughed.

Flying into the Cloud Bank

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ooohhh-kayyy….. Tomorrow St. Joesph’s radiology department is supposed to puncture my boob to see if I have cancer. It’ll be the middle of next week, at best, before the result comes back; a miracle if it reaches the Mayo Clinic surgeon by the time I’m supposed to meet with him for a second opinion. I’m pretty well decided that if surgery is needed (as seems increasingly likely), I’ll have it done at the Mayo, simply because their safety level is much higher. However, if several weeks of daily radiation treatments are required, I will ask if that can be done at St. Joe’s, which at least is within driving distance. From my house, the Mayo is halfway to Payson; even if Medicare covers this entire flying circus, I still couldn’t afford the gasoline to drive out there every day for five to eight weeks.

Meanwhile, students are turning in papers today. My assistant is junketing in China, so the entire task of reading these golden words falls to me. I’ll have to read frantically, well into the night, to get through the stuff. Eight (of twenty-five) classmates have posted their papers so far. The things aren’t due until midnight, meaning the bulk of these things will have to be read when I’m in pain, scared, and definitively NOT of a disposition to spend my time on student drivel.

I’d resisted reading the radiologist’s report myself, preferring to just fork it over to Young Dr. Kildare and the beloved Old Guy at the Mayo. But yesterday I thought I’d better take a look at it.

Googled the terminology she used to describe the two lesions and discovered exactly why YDK disagreed with beloved OG@theMayo about the urgency of moving forward. Holeeeee shit! The radiologist’s alleged 50-50 chance of the things being benign (read “50% chance of malignancy”) appears to have been very optimistic. The probability that these things are cancer is higher than 50%. Possibly much higher.

Picked up paperwork to make my son a signer on my credit union accounts. This will make it possible for him to pay the bills if I’m incapacitated, whether for awhile or permanently, and it also will make it a great deal easier to access what will be his funds should I croak over. He’s already listed as a beneficiary for those and for the Fidelity IRA and brokerage accounts. Fortunately, I’ve dawdled endlessly on withdrawing the cash value from my semi-defunct whole life policy, so the insurance payout is still in force; he’ll get 40 grand from that, in the croaking-over event. So he’ll have enough to dispose of my remains and then some. Quite a bit some.

Unless he’s been reading this blog (which I doubt), he doesn’t know about the current flap. I’d prefer not to enlighten him until I know what the real story is. His dad, a notary public in addition to his corporate lawyerness, has refused to notarize the credit union documents. How the hell I’m going to persuade the kid to drive out to the credit union on Saturday to get his signature enrolled with that outfit without having to tell him what’s up escapes me.

At any rate, when (and if) that’s accomplished, all that will remain will be to figure out what to do with the dogs. I think my son will take them temporarily — for a week or two — if I  have to have part or all of my boob lopped off and endless radiation or chemotherapy administered. But after that: ????  I can’t imagine he’ll want to take on two corgis, now and forever, in addition to his marginally manageable adolescent retriever.

Why the fuck do these things ALWAYS happen when things are finally going smoothly and you just start to think you’ve got a grip on your life and you’re going to be preternaturally happy for awhile?

 

The Delicious Illusion of Being in Control

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LOL! I’d got myself tricked into thinking things were more or less under control again. Of course, things are never under control. But isn’t it nice when the hallucination that you’ve got a grip kicks in, no matter how temporarily?

Both of next fall’s classes are now prepped: the 26-page syllabi written, the calendars updated, the websites rebuilt with assignments posted, grade sheets constructed, and a semester’s worth of canned announcements (we call those “learning modules” 🙄 ) installed and set to go. If I drop dead, the damn things will go online and the students can plod through them.

More to the point, if I have surgery this summer, I should be able to handle the courses from bed or from a chair. If they were face-to-face sections, that would be out of the question. But since they’re online and the endlessly tedious prep work is done, really all I have to do is answer a few emails and get their papers read.

Was feeling pretty good about this — having done all the tedious course prep — until I dropped by the departmental admin’s desk to say hello this ayem and she remarked that the NEW chair must have these documents e-mailed direct to him (there’s a reason you couldn’t have forwarded it to him, my love?). Of course that sets off an alarum, since new guys almost ALWAYS want to define their own empires. I’m concerned that this guy is going to deliver some kind of critique and demand a lot of revisions.

Hope not. But if he does, I may just say g’bye. Enough unpaid labor has been devoted to that chore, and I’m most certainly NOT going to do any part of it over.

I now have an appointment with a Mayo surgeon to get a second opinion about what’s going on in my boob. That’s not until next week. I could go ahead and let St. Joe’s puncture my boob this Friday, or I could call and put it off. Don’t know which looks like more hassle. Since it’s almost certain the Mayo guy will want a biopsy, too (ever heard of a surgeon who didn’t?), I’m inclined to just go ahead and get it over with. Trouble is, I don’t want any procedures done to me unless I’m absolutely, positively sure it’s necessary. I think this probably is, but…that’s different from “positively.”

So. Wasn’t it nice, for those ten or twelve hours, to experience a fleeting sense of order? It’s gone now. But it was good while it lasted.

Cheap, USABLE cell phone scored!!!

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Hot dang! FINALLY I seem to have found a cell I can a) afford and b) operate without needing a master’s degree in engineering and special equipment to dial a phone number.

Saturday I dropped by a nearby Radio Shack to pick up batteries for a couple of walk-around extensions to the land-line. The phone that resides in a cabinet shelf near the floor, where I can reach it should I break a hip the next time I fall on the tile, had about gone dry, and the kitchen phone had keeled over dead.

Radio Shack, as you’ve probably heard, is a moribund corporation, another of the best features of twentieth-century American commerce about to go away. Only one other customer was in the store, and the sole sales clerk was waiting on him. That was fine: it gave me a chance to browse all the strange and silly objects Radio Shack sells. Some of this stuff is great fun, and I’ve found they often undersell the competition on the same brands of Chinese import electronics. Ah…the doorbell thingie that rings when someone opens the door, thereby letting you know when your customer enters or your kid exits! Oh…the 37 berjillion little jackets you can put on your cell phone. Eeeeh…the array of colorful funny-looking Bluetooth speakers… And on and on.

Naturally, I perused the vast array of cell phones they offer, all the while thinking, “But I don’t want to carry a tiny computer around with me! All I want to do is be able to call the roadside service if my car craps out on the freeway.”

Eventually the other guy left and I purchased the batteries. In passing, I asked the sales dude, “Do they make a cell phone that all it does is make phone calls? I don’t need anything more than that.”

The kid recognized a doddering old bat when he saw her. “You want a phone for emergencies only, right?”

“Yeah. That tank out there is almost 15 years old, and sooner or later it’s going to fall apart like the minister’s one-hoss shay.”

“Have we got a phone for you!”

Radio Shack carries TracFone gadgets, and lo! They had a totally dumbed-down flip phone for LESS THAN TWENTY BUCKS! It has real buttons — not stupid virtual buttons that won’t respond to your fingertip and that you have to punch with a stylus, if you can see the damn things, if you can figure out how to get them to come up. And the real buttons are large enough to fit your fingers and for your eyes to make out the numbers on the damn things.

Its main function is to make phone calls. But it also will send texts — convenient, since my son thinks it’s rude to telephone people and, unless the call is made by ER personnel on the hospital’s phone system, will generally respond only to texts. And it even has a little camera on it. Apparently it will download and play music, too, which it will kindly play through Bluetooth speakers.

For another $20, you get 120 minutes or 3 months’ worth of air time, whichever comes first. That, compared to the $35/month I was paying T-Mobile for nothing, is quite the little bargain.

I was tempted to ogle another cheap phone that had more features (momentarily forgetting, in my enchantment, that I can’t figure out how to operate those features…). Amazingly, the guy did not try to upsell me! To the contrary, he insisted that since an emergency phone was what I wanted, the cheaper model and plan were what was needed.

So. Now if the Dog Chariot craps out, I can call the roadside rescue service from the side of the road. 🙂