Coffee heat rising

Angst

Doggy Distress

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Two-fifteen in the morning, and here we are attending to a sick dog for the third time tonight. Poor little Ruby is ailing…has been for some days. Now she’s developed doggy diarrhea! Wants to go outside about every ten minutes. Or so it feels.

In fact, it’s more like about once every two hours. But since I’m sick as a dawg myself…Helle’s Belles! It ain’t good. 

Suspect this is a function of the drugs the vet gave us. Tomorrow we’ll have to drag her back to his office. And that is MORE than “not good.”

Because…my son having purloined my car, I can’t haul her to the vet! He’ll have to take time off his (demanding!) job to drive the dog and me around.

And that is about as not good as it gets.

Meanwhile, I’m pretty sick myself. Whatever is causing this horrible peripheral neuropathy can’t possibly be good. It hurts, and it makes my ears feel like an air-raid siren is going off in my head.

Welp…the little dog is back on the bed and conkered out. Better try to join her!

***  ***  ***  ***

Welp!  THAT didn’t work!  Here we are, an hour later, and the Dawg is up again, demanding to squirt the backyard with more liquid sh!t.

The Human is good & sick: in no condition to be jumping out of bed once an hour.

***

Hmmm….  She’s not wanting to get back in the sack. Probably figures it’ll be ill-advised to put the Human in a position to have to get up AGAIN to let her out.

***

Ohhhhhh GAWD! Now I’ve got the collywobbles, too!

What the HELL?????  Whatever is making the dog sick is making me sick, too??  Is that even possible?

….

Ohhhhhh yeah! Wouldntcha know!  And some of these bugs are drug-resistant bacteria.

Since she’s been on pills for the past two weeks, chances are pretty fair that we’re looking at just that.

Shee-ut! That means I’ll have to go to a doctor tomorrow, which means somehow I’ll have to get myself out to see MayoDoc, an hour’s drive away from here. And do so without a car….

Yay. I can hardly wait for the sun to come up…

Did She Do It On Purpose?

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She killed my mother: no question of that. But…did she do it out of stupidity? Or out of malice?

I grew up in Saudi Arabia, where my father worked for ten years as a harbor pilot for ARAMCO, steering tankers and freighters in and out of the port at Ras Tanura. The country was as Third-World as a country could get, a marvelous incubator of toxic disease.

One of those diseases was amoebic dysentery, a gawdawful and potentially fatal infestation with the local germs that lurked in all the food…especially in fruits and vegetables. Anything that we ate had either to be fully cooked (as in cooked to mush!) or soaked in Clorox to disinfect it.

Well. My father worked with a guy who wasn’t too bright, and said guy had a wife who was even less bright.

And she just didn’t get the message about sanitizing ALL the food.

One evening they had us over to their house for dinner. I was in the kitchen watching and playing around — at the time I was about ten or twelve years old. There, I observed that our hostess didn’t bother to sanitize the cabbage she used to make our salad. She even handed me — a little kid! — pieces of this unclean produce, which I scarfed right down.

Fortunately for me, I had pretty strong resistance by that time, after spending nigh unto ten years in the bowels of Hell. But…my mother did not.

She ate that salad, and shortly thereafter came down with a roaring case of amoebic dysentery.

She damn near died of it. Years later, I learned that there was a moment when her doctors thought she very probably would die.

But she didn’t. After weeks in the hospital and then in bed at home, she eventually recovered.

Sort of.

She never really fully recovered. But she went on with her life.

A truncated life.

The upshot of the unholy infection and its ungodly treatment was that some time later she did develop an abdominal cancer.

And yes: that killed her.

Understand: The wives who were brought to Arabia with the men working for the Company were required to sit through a lengthy course in how to prepare food safely, and how otherwise to protect their families from the diseases to which simply living out there would subject us.

That idiot woman knew not to serve up unsanitized produce! Yea, verily: She knew to soak those greens in Clorox and rinse them well before making a salad of them. 

Interestingly, neither her husband nor her young son would eat the stuff. “Don’t like cabbage,” we were told.

I believe she deliberately tried to make us sick.

She could not have not known that the produce had to be mightily sanitized before it could be served to people who were to eat it.

Given that fact, it’s my belief that she purposely served us unsanitized cabbage in the hope that it would sicken us.

And it worked. It sickened my mother enough to do her in, ultimately.

Did she do it on purpose?

Could be. But…on the other hand, there’s an outside chance that she truly didn’t know what she was doing. My father regarded her husband as one of the stupidest men he’d ever met. So…who knows? Maybe they were a matched set. Maybe she really was so stupid that she didn’t bother to sanitize the produce before serving it up to her guests.

Maybe.

Doesn’t matter: Stupid or cunning, the upshot was the same. She killed my mother.

Another Swampy-Dampy Day

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The sky is clear. The air is WET and SOGGY out there. Horrible, horrible place. Almost as miserable as (un)lovely Ras Tanura, the Saudi Aramco encampment where we spent ten unholy years on the shore of the Persian Gulf.

Man, do I hate the Arizona desert. If there were any way I could afford it (and…if my son weren’t ensconced here…) I would be SO outta-here!

Ruby and I just came in from the morning dog-and-human constitutional. Ugh! Thought I was gonna melt into the pavement before we got back!

Well…one good thing about it was that there were hardly any other people out there.

Most folks have better sense than to charge out in this kind of sh!tty weather.

Now we’re waiting for the babysitter my son hired to show up. I told him that I am NOT going to opt the daily exercise hike — it’s the only thing that keeps the spavined hip from freezing right up — and so these women either have to show up an hour later than they normally might or they’ll have to wait in their damn car for me.

I did leave the dear lady a note saying we’d soon be back and suggesting she repair to the local supermarket for a nice cup of coffee (they have an awesome coffee bar there!). No sign of her, though.

Awwwwwwwwww…. What a shame, eh?

Whoever was in the house a day or so ago babysitting and puttering ripped off a lot more stuff than I thought. One of the phone’s handsets is gone, as are a few other miscellaneous desk-top items. Plus the entire phone that was in the living-room desk.

Busy folks, eh?

Anyway, now I’ll have to figure out how to get extensions to replace those phones. And that may be a challenge: they were pretty old. I may have to replace ALL the phone handsets. That would be seven of them.

And you don’t even wanna know how much that’s gonna cost.

I sure don’t….

Seriously: it looks like replacing two of them will run around eighty bucks.

No wonder the dear soul wanted to steal mine. 

A Pleasurable Way to Die

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Can’t stop thinking, this a.m., about my mother’s demise: essentially a form of suicide. One that she inflicted on my father and me and anyone else who happened to be around her.

She smoked herself to death. 

When I say “inflicted,” I kid you not. She engineered a particularly gruesome way to die — one that she had watched as it killed her own mother — and she deliberately chose habits that she could not have NOT known would do her in, too.

The habits?  

Endless puffing on cigarettes. And guzzling bootleg booze.

She KNEW what either of those fine traditions would do to her. And she not only went right ahead and indulged them, she kicked into high gear.

Literally: if she didn’t have a cigarette in her mouth, it was because she wasn’t awake. I knew when she woke up during the night because I could smell the stink of her wee-hours cigarette. And in the morning? The first thing she did, before she lifted her head from the pillow, was light another fuc*king cigarette.

She and my father had learned to brew their own booze while we were in Arabia — where alcohol was illegal. They had a hidden still out there and cooked up their own hootch. When they got to Sun City, here in Arizona, my father thought it would be fun (and cheaper!!) to brew his own. And so they indulged in a daily swiggle of high-test booze…every afternoon, before their dinner.

Not surprisingly, this habit caused some chaos with their health. It helped lead my mother to a fine, high-octane case of cancer.

She’d had to care for her own mother as the wild-a$$ed mother lay dying of cancer induced by wild promiscuity and repeated back-alley abortions. So she knew what was involved. And she knew that cancer makes for a mighty hideous way to die. Hideous for the victim, and hideous for everyone around her.

By the time she landed in their bed, too sick to lift her head from the pillow, my father, pretty clearly, understood exactly what she was doing. When I tried to lay beside her to comfort her, he literally chased me out of their bedroom. And he wouldn’t let me go back.

By then, I wasn’t living with them. They were in Sun City — a bland old-folks’ suburb of Phoenix — and my husband and I had a home in Phoenix’s beautiful downtown historic district. So, I had to drive a half-hour or forty minutes to get to my parents’ house.

Dear Daddy’s beating me away from my mother’s side did not inspire me to go back. Doubt if I returned more than four or five times before he locked her up in a nursing home, waiting for her to die.

You hafta say: he wasn’t the soul of tact. In a less generous mode, one could say he could be pretty damned mean. Not to her: he truly worshiped her. That, though, was not so where his weird little daughter was concerned: the nutty brat who wanted to grow up to be an astronomer.

And just like everyone else in those fine domesticated 1950s when I was a kid, he thought I was crazy. I was supposed to grow up to bake cakes, paint my face with expensive make-up, spawn children, and wear frilly clothes.

When you think about it, it’s pretty damned weird that I never smoked as I was growing to adulthood. My father didn’t smoke as much as she did, but truth to tell, they both puffed stink-sticks with élan. Truly: he must have seen me as some sort of distorted outlier.

WhatEVER. He surely didn’t want me underfoot as his wife — incidentally, my mother — lay dying.

Icky-Sticky Day!

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LOL! This is one of those days that don’t happen in Arizona: hot and HUMID. Very humid. 😀

It feels almost like the weather used to feel in lovely Ras Tanura, where I grew up in Saudi Arabia, on the shore of the Persian Gulf.

Not quite, though. There, I’ve seen it start to rain out of a clear blue sky: that’s how wet the air would get there.

Garden spot, eh?

Anyway, hereabouts we’re told the humidity is 32% just now. And for Arizona…well…that’s more than passing damp. 😀

No clouds, though: The sky is gorgeous sterling blue. And no sign of fugitive raindrops.

Strolled around the park this afternoon…rather later in the day than I should have: it was a little warm for strolling. That notwithstanding, though, it was not excessively unpleasant. And as usual, fun to watch kids playing and grownups lolling around.

I do love our neighborhood and our park. Struggling to stay here: to avoid being moved to an old-folks’ institution. How to avoid that — displacement, I mean — gets more and more difficult to intuit. I’m awfully afraid I’m going to be forced out of my home, sooner or later, on the grounds that I’m too old to take care of myself. We haven’t reached that point yet…but it’s hard to avoid the fact that we’re headed there.

Indeed, my son wants us to visit a place called the Beatitudes, down the road from the ‘Hood. To which I say horrors! I’ve had friends who lived there.

And no, it’s not a bad place, as institutions go. But….it’s just that I absolutely, positively, passionately HATE institutional living. I hated living in the dorms. And spending the next few years living in a dorm for old folks is NOT how I want to wrap up my life.

There simply must be a better way….

Hired Help Humor

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This morning I discovered that someone stole a pair of shoes that I use every day.

I wouldn’t have put them “away” someplace where I couldn’t find them, because they have a standard “away” place in the closet. I would have put them in that place. If I carelessly left them out, they’d be sitting by the bed.

So presumably one of the hired help snabbed them.

Experience suggests that these “care givers” pull little stunts like this — stealing your shoes, spiking a dish of leftovers with ultra-hot chili — because they think it’s funny. Or maybe they think they’re getting back at you for some senile offense they imagine you did on purpose.

… … …

It’s bad enough to contemplate having to move into an institution for the last phase of your life. But dear God!  If this is how those folks behave in order to keep their wards under control, it will turn the last few months — or, God forfend, years — of one’s life into a living Hell.

If you can call that living.

I’m thinking it may be time to end things before they reach that point.