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Just can’t believe it…

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So up at the Mayo they told me it looks like I may have to have surgery for a torn rotator cuff, in the shoulder that got dislocated when I fell on Easter.

It takes six months to recover from this. At least. One site says it takes up to a year to recover. My arm will be in a sling for four to six weeks! Think of that. My life came to a screeching halt when I had to wear a sling for just a couple of weeks. According to the University of Washington’s Orthopedics and Sports Medicine site, you have to have convalescent help for three months after the surgery, and if you have no one to help you (that would be me!), you may have to go into a nursing home.

At the very least I’ll have to hire someone to come into my home to clean and help me fix meals, and I’ll also have to hire a pool guy. And what’s going to happen to my house and my little dog if I have to go into a convalescent home?

If I can stay at home at all, I’ll have to use my emergency fund to hire help. I do have nursing home insurance, but you have to meet several requirements for it to kick in, and I don’t think not being able to use one arm will fill the bill. A year’s worth of cheapskate living expenses won’t go far to keep me in a convalescent home.

Meanwhile, I’ll lose my teaching gigs. Adjuncts have no sick leave, and no slack is cut: you’re there or you’re not. If you’re not, you don’t get paid. I won’t be able to drive for quite some time after the surgery, and of course, I can’t teach an online course if I can’t type. Funny will go dark, so even the tiny pittance I’m making from Adsense will go away.

They’re going to do an MRI on Friday to see how much damage has been done. There’s only one tiny sliver of hope: the P.A. said sometimes ongoing pain is caused by tendonitis, and if that’s the case, a steroid shot may bring down the inflammation. And that possibility is not out of the questions: the symptoms do resemble impingement syndrome, which is apparently a combination of tendonitis and bursitis, also brought on by an injury. This can respond to nonsurgical treatments, and if you do need surgery, the recovery period is shorter and not so drastic.

On the other hand, the symptoms resemble those of a torn rotator cuff, too.

If the rotator cuff tear is small, he said, some people choose to just learn to live with the pain. In that case, it will never go away—the pain will be permanent. But at least I wouldn’t lose what little remains of my livelihood.

Very nice. But I can barely take care of my house and yard with the arm hurting the way it does. If I choose not to have the surgery—if the injury is minor enough that I can get away with that—I’ll have to sell this place and move someplace that doesn’t require so much work to maintain. And presumably over time I’ll lose more and more function. You can already see the difference between the two arms in the muscle size and tone. If this continues for years, eventually the left arm won’t be good for much.

My God. I can’t believe this!

Found Hound

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This morning in the park, Cassie and I picked up a hanger-on:

Very thirsty and very hungry, she followed us home. She has no collar and no tags, but she’s been spayed quite recently. This leads me to suspect she was just sprung from the Sunnyslope Humane Society, which microchips adopted dogs unless you tell them not to. So I figure if I take her up there, they probably can find her humans.

Or not.

It’s not a no-kill shelter, and so I hesitate to take her there. The staff can be pretty officious, and they could demand that I leave her even if all I do is go in and ask them to check if she’s been microchipped. And it’s entirely possible that the present set of humans took her to the park and dumped her: she’s not house-trained, and her idea of the loo is wherever she happens to be standing. I’ve cleaned up after her three times in the past two hours.

She’s a mellow dog, probably six or seven years old. Claws need to be clipped. She may still have stitches. And she has a spot on one ear that looks suspiciously like the mange.

Her skin is black and her hair is coyote-dust tan. Probably weighs 45 or 50 pounds. She has long, slender legs reminiscent of a coyote’s, too. In fact, when I first saw her wandering in the park looking confused and lost, I thought she was a small coyote, but then quickly saw she was all doggus domesticus. The blue tongue suggests she has a fair amount of chow in her, but her hair is not even faintly chow-like—her coat is so coarse as to be almost wire-like.

What she looks like, to my eye, is a reservation dog. She looks exactly like the mixed, mixed, and remixed mutts that roam the rez in hordes.

She’s a nice dog. Cassie’s not nuts about her—mostly ignores her except for a little competition over the dog chew toys, and except for a few moments of putting her in her place. Oddly, for a female, she’s pretty submissive and permits herself to be cowed by Cassie’s threats. Or at least, so far she has: she hasn’t growled back. Yet.

So I’m not real sure what to do with her. I’m sure the Humane Society isn’t open today. We are totally out of food. Tomorrow is the first day of the new budget cycle, and because I have to spend the entire afternoon tomorrow getting the damaged shoulder examined again, I’ll have to spend the whole morning running after groceries. I’m not comfortable with leaving her outside (although I suspect she’s been an outdoor dog all her life, given her toilet habits)—yesterday the thermometer in back read 110 degrees. It’s 94 now; supposed to be cooler today, only 104. She probably will get the gollywobbles from the human food she had, which I’d just as soon not have to clean up off the floor. It was clear from her mound that she’s been eating an inexpensive dog food. No doubt the switch from kibble to grain, veggies, and meat will give her a passing case of enteritis. In fact, I can hear her gut rumbling now. 🙄

So, I guess my choices are to lock her in a bedroom while I’m gone, so that I won’t have to search all over the house for puddles, or to leave her in the backyard and try to get home as quick as can be.

Actually, Anna’s old crate is still out in back. It’s been sitting out there rusting and collecting leaf litter for the past 10 or 12 years, so it would take some doing to clean it up. Probably not worth the effort, without knowing whether this dog will go in a crate.

Meanwhile, I’m printing up a few flyers to tack up around the park. Don’t have much hope that whoever she belongs to will respond…people dump dogs in this neighborhood all the time. They think because the place is affluent, some rich person will take the dog in and give it a good home. In fact, the rich persons just call Animal Control and have the critters hauled away.

If nobody claims her in a day or so, I guess I’ll have to take her up to the Humane Society. {sigh}

Funny on the Radio!

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Cary Lockwood, proprietor of Your Auto Network and host of his own radio show on Phoenix’s KXXT, kindly invited Funny to do a segment on his program, Calling All Cars. It aired yesterday, June 19. You can listen to it by clicking here… Or check out Cary’s podcasts over here.

Cary, as you’ll recall, was Funny about Money’s first interviewee for the Entrepreneurs series. That post went over so well it eventually surfaced at the Wall Street Journal site, mostly because Cary’s enterprise and energy are so creative.

It was great fun talking with him. I hope you’ll enjoy the podcast and check out his show.

Thanks, Cary!

Welcome to Calling All Cars Listeners

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Hello! If you came here from Cary Lockwood‘s Your Auto Network Calling All Cars, welcome to Funny about Money.

Funny is about Life, the Universe, and All That Money. We talk about subjects having to do with frugality, personal money management, and the real values that matter in life. You might enjoy these posts:

Entrepreneurs: Your Auto Network
What Is Frugality?
We Don’t Need No Steeking Laundry Detergent!
Olive Oil: The Ultimate Hair Conditioner
Who’s That Comin’ Down the Street?
Figuring Out What You Want to Be When You Grow Up: The Prioritizer
Mormons to the Rescue!
Personal Finance Nerds 2, Spendthrifts 0

You can subscribe to Funny about Money—free!—through an RSS feed or by e-mail. Links are to the upper right on this page.

I hope you enjoy Funny and will visit and comment often. 🙂

Balancing the Budget on the Backs of the Vulnerable…Again!

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What is it about Americans and American politicians that we think it’s OK to let the rich and the corporations get by with low or no taxes and then cover the deficit on the backs of the most vulnerable people in our society?

Our government, much reviled by the right for its new “progressive” leadership, is going to cut Medicare reimbursements to doctors by 21 percent!

Medicare reimbursements already don’t cover a doctor’s cost of doing business. Many doctors here won’t see patients who are on Medicare, and many more won’t take on new Medicare patients. The Mayo, where my doctor moved after “managed care” by HMOs first started making physicians’ lives miserable, will (for the time being) keep seeing you if were a regular patient before you were switched to Medicare, but it will not accept new Medicare recipients. One branch of the Mayo here in the Valley, a practice on the west side, fired all its Medicare patients and now sees no one who doesn’t have private insurance.

I expect that will be the way the main Mayo Clinic will go, too. Even though the present cut may (or may not) be temporary, the message is clear: expect a permanent version in the near future.

{sigh} The level of medical care here in Arizona leaves a lot to be desired. No doubt there are horror stories in every state in the union, but I’ll bet in many states not every single resident has a story to tell. In Arizona, unless you’re lucky enough and stubborn enough to stay away from doctors and hospitals, you’ve got a war story. The Mayo is one of only three hospitals (the last I looked) that has a top rating in national rankings of clinical care and safety.

So, when you find a decent doctor, you want to hang on to that doctor. The last thing you want is to be bounced from doctor to doctor, or to be forced to see someone whose competence you mistrust or who is too overworked to spend more than five minutes speaking with you.

It’s not “Cadillac care” to have a doctor whose skills are competent and who has fifteen or twenty minutes (or more, preferably) to listen to a patient and arrive at a thoughtful diagnosis.

This vicious slash in Medicare is going to put a lot of elderly people out on the street and yes, bouncing from doctor to doctor. If they can even find a doctor. It will push most of us into low-quality clinics or to hungry young practitioners without the experience and wisdom one needs to see in a doctor. I’m still fairly young—only just eligible for Medicare—and I’m too old to go through that. Imagine the suffering and just plain bad medical care this will inflict on people who are too frail to fight the system!

Inexcusable.

Arboricide

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Cézanne, The Big Trees

My neighbor Sally did in the vast Aleppo pine that she’s hated with verve for many years.

I understand her issue: they’re radically messy. Aleppo pines, which were very popular here when our houses were built in the 1970s, are fast-growing and more or less xeric. They tolerate heat and drought pretty well. But they get to be huge, and in the powerful winds that roar through here in the summertime, limbs the size of a whole tree will snap off and land on people’s homes.

The house that was flattened during the late, great tornado was smushed by an Aleppo.

The other drawback to this vastly shady tree is that it sheds copiously. In the summer when the monsoon winds blow through, a mature tree will cover your yard, your neighbors’ yards, the sidewalks, and the street for half-a-block around in a layer of sharp brown dead pine needles. It’s a huge mess to clean up, and neighbors of the less laid-back variety can get quite irked, especially when the mess falls into their pools.

Sally has wanted to be rid of that tree for a long time, but her companion of many years, Katherine, would have none of it. Katherine finally passed, after an unholy long, slow death from the awful aftereffects of a stroke. Sally cared for her during the decade it took for her to die, a crushing job. Sally used to say that there were many things she wanted to do to improve the house, but she couldn’t, because having workers around would upset Katherine, as would any significant change in their environment. So she’s let things go for a long time.

Tree-killers-at-work

With Katherine gone and herself finally recovered from the exhaustion brought on by caring for an invalid, Sally has gone to town with fixing up the house. She tiled the back patio and pulled out a decrepit hot tub, replacing it with new patio space. And, alas, she got rid of the tree.

The other day three huge trucks pulled up in front of my house, and the forewoman jumped out and started eyeballing Carlos and Inez’s equally gigantic Aleppo. That tree has been well cared for—if you have them thinned once every few years, they pose little threat to surrounding structures—so I was surprised when it looked like they were going to cut it down. Soon enough, though, Carlos and Inez’s daughter came out and chased them off.

They were on the wrong street. This street and the one just to the north, where Sally lives, have the same name; one’s an avenue and one’s a lane. So they drove around the block and alit where they belonged.

At first I hoped maybe she was only having them cut out the dead branches, because that’s where they started. The tree had quite a lot of dead growth. Although they’re xeric, even an Aleppo can’t tolerate the kind of heat and drought we’ve had over the past several years. They do need to be deep-watered when temperatures get ridiculous, as they did last summer when we had a long string of 118-degree days. Quite a few Aleppos in this area have started to die back, because people just can’t afford to let the hose run on the ground for eight or ten hours and then turn around a week later and do it again.

It probably was so stressed it would have died anyway. But it’s too bad. I loved that tree. From my backyard, it filled about a third of the sky. And although it was too far away to cast shade (or pine needles) on my lot, it did soften the glare.

By mid-afternoon, the was gone. And glare was what was left: enough hot, eye-squinching sky to make your head hurt. No joke: it was actually painful to look out from under the patio cover toward the heat-soaked blank spot in the sky.

It’s not cheap to take down a tree like that. One of my neighbors at the old house had two of them taken out of her front yard, to the tune of a thousand bucks apiece. I don’t think Sally is exactly rolling in money…the reason they were living together, from what I can tell, was not that they were lovers but that they had thrown in together to pool their resources so they could spend their old age in a safe neighborhood, a pre-Baby Boom co-housing arrangement. Catherine had been a choir director; I don’t know what Sally did, but it’s pretty clear neither of them earned a lot of money during their working years.

To spend a thousand bucks to lose a big, beautiful old tree…gosh. And wait’ll she sees next month’s power bill! In this climate, a tree like that can save as much as 30 percent on air conditioning. Even at my house, the additional glare and heat pouring in through the empty space where the tree was will probably push the up the bill some.

Wish she’d at least tried cutting out the dead branches before she chopped it down.