Coffee heat rising

Angst

Blood pressure drama, revisited…

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Those of you who follow Funny no doubt remember the saga that occurred when a doctor’s advice led me to obsess endlessly about my blood pressure.

Well, that stopped when I went out to the Mayo, where a PA in cardiology opined that I did not have high blood pressure and I should quit worrying about it.

I do have what is sometimes called “white coat syndrome,” in which a person with otherwise normal BP spikes high numbers whenever the measurement is taken in a doctor’s office or hospital. I am truly phobic about doctors and medical settings. I so hate going into doctor’s offices that I really do get pretty stressed out when I’m forced to go…so it’s reasonable to assume that nervousness and stress explain what led a cardiologist to try to get me on unnecessary medications for the rest of my life.

Losing ten pounds and exercising, however, seem to have brought the BP numbers down to normal, and down to almost normal in the doctor-office setting.

A few days ago, though, I read a report suggesting that people with white coat syndrome actually do experience elevated rates of cardiovascular events (heart attack and stroke), and so such patients should be saddled with blood-pressure meds willy-nilly. Well…fat chance! This is the sort of thing emanated by big pharma and spread through medical societies and government regulatory agencies whose funding depends on pharmaceutical companies. So I conditionally wrote that report off, pending more credible data.

But it did lead me to wonder what the BP numbers were doing, now that I’m older still and fatter again. And more to the point: now that my upper jaw no longer hurts chronically in the absence of the busted tooth. So decided to repeat the testing routine for a few days.

Hang onto your hat…

Over the past four days, my overall blood pressure average has been 124.64/74.95. The day before yesterday, my average day’s BP (morning & evening) was 119/67.

Heh. Wherever we are, it doesn’t seem to be anywhere near Death’s Door…

Adventures in Dental Science

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One fiasco after another. Old age is definitely no land for the young…

For quite some time, I’ve had a broken tooth, one of the forward molars. We haven’t been able to tell which one, because of the several crowns back there and because it was cracked, not actually busted. The dentist X-rayed that side of the mouth several times and could not find the crack. And I could not tell which of the two surviving upper molars emitted an electric shock of pain when I bit down just right…on just about anything.

Finally, however, the thing split apart. That hurt quite a bit. But interestingly, when the chip fell out a day or two later, the pain stopped altogether. Who’d’ve thunk it?

At any rate, all this meant the tooth had to be pulled. Dentist sent me to an endodontist, who proposed to dig it out, implant a “post” (which far as I can tell is basically a titanium screw).

However, when I told the endodontist about the supposed MRSA infection, he flew into a panic and said he couldn’t do the procedure.

What was I supposed to do about the broken tooth? He shrugged. Finally he suggested that I get a second nasal swab, and said if it was clear he would proceed.

Sooo…I had to trek out to the Mayo — halfway to Payson from my house — to get someone to stick a Q-tip up my nose. Again.

Astonishingly, the Mayo sent word that the MRSA test was negative. So the endodontist relented and scheduled a procedure for last Friday.

Naturally, I came down with a cold on Sunday. Never, EVER fails!

The cold is rather mild and the tooth situation was rather urgent, so we decided to go ahead with it. This meant I got to spend something over an hour on my back in the dentist’s chair, gagging on goop oozing down the back of my throat.

Ugh!!!!!

While it was uncomfortable — mostly because of the cold — the procedure was not painful. It was actually pretty interesting. His office has equipment that allows them to make 3-D X-rays of your teeth, which is amazing. And the amount of work and skill required to perform the trick of extracting a tooth in several pieces really is amazing.

So at any rate, the tooth is out. He insisted that I take a week-long course of clindamycin by way of fending off any potential infection. He remained concerned about the potential for MRSA, but resistant bugs or not, apparently dosing you with antibiotics is S.O.P.

Yes. Well. Unfortunately these days I’m allergic to just about every drug out there. And if a drug has a weird side effect that afflicts one in a million users, invariably I am number 1,000,000. At the risk of repeating myself: Never fails.

Clindamycin has a number of dire side effects. One of them is a skin thing that is incurable and causes your hide to fall off. Another is C. difficile overgrowth.

Right.

SDXB’s former wife died of a C. difficile infection. She died laying on her living room floor, where she was found by a neighbor about two days later.

Naturally, while I was at the endodontist’s having my gum sliced apart and the tooth wrenched out, the Mayo’s clinician Mona called on the phone asking me to call back to talk about that MRSA test. Naturally, by the time I got home it was after 5 p.m. and they were closed. So naturally, I get to worry about that all weekend.

Cripes. Let’s just hope all she wanted to say was that “negative” in your chart means “negative.”

Believing I would surely be in terrible pain, the endodontist handed me a prescription for oxycodone.

Besides the fact that I don’t take addictive drugs on principal, when I get it home I find it’s mixed with acetaminophen. I’m allergic to acetaminophen. It’s an NSAID. Interestingly, I’m allergic to all NSAIDS.

Luckily, I apparently don’t register pain the way normal people do. Probably because my menses were so excruciating, other pain seems negligible by comparison and tends not to bother me. Although the site where he’d extracted the tooth was sore, it certainly wasn’t enough to send me flying off the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Got to sleep with no problem (so exhausted a jackhammer could have been going in the backyard and it wouldn’t have kept me awake).

Next morning I gaze into the mirror and find my face is swollen, which was not surprising. Then I developed a black-and-blue spot that makes me look like someone socked me in the face. Loveleeee. Both of these are normal, as it develops. But I sure could do without them.

Last night a member of the choir committee called to ask where the heck I’ve been and was I coming back. Of course, I’ve missed several times: last Sunday, and then again Wednesday evening. And yesterday morning: we have a concert this afternoon, which I’m also going to miss because I’m not rehearsed. I’ll be surprised, really, if he lets me sing this morning, since I wasn’t at rehearsal for today’s service.

And in fact, I’m still feeling pretty wrung out, so think I will just go over, drop off my choir folder & hymnal, grab my robes to bring them home to launder and store over the summer, and call it a day.

Or not. We have the annual end-of-season choir party tonight. My friend urged me to come to it. We shall see: by evening I am just wrung out, and by 5:30 p.m. I surely will not be the life of anything like a party. So that’s depressing. But I’ve just been too sick to think about it.

And so away, off to swallow another horsepill and toss some food in the blender. Whee!

A break in the clouds…

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Hallelujah, brothers and sisters, yonder breaks a beam of light through the clouds!

Yesterday developed into surprisingly de-toxifying day.

First off, I discovered the reason the MacBook was throwing out messages to the effect that it couldn’t hold all the data stored on iCloud was…ohhh, wait for it… BECAUSE… The damn computeris somehow CLONING ALL THE DATA FILES ON ITS HARD DRIVE…over and over and over again.

Call up the AppleCare people and reach the first tech there that I’ve ever talked to who hadn’t a clue. She had never heard of such a thing and didn’t know what to do, so she made me an appointment with the Apple “Geniuses.” Like I have nothing else to do with my time…

Whenever I get off the phone with her and calm down a bit, I think to do a Web search. Find an Apple user’s forum where a) some guy says you can get rid of the redundant files by shutting down and rebooting, and b) they will eventually come back. Another user reports that this is a function of the Sierra operating system. Say what????

Well, I’ve had this computer for two years and it’s been running on Sierra for almost that long and I’ve never seen endless strings of duplicate files before. Presumably older versions of Sierra didn’t do that. When the guys in Tennessee replaced everything in this device’s innards, they would have had to reload Sierra, and in doing so, they presumably would have loaded a slightly newer iteration of Sierra. Hence: iterations, all right: thousands of them!

Really, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I just CAN. NOT. DEAL. WITH. THIS. SH!T any longer!

At that point, I about decided to shut down The Copyeditor’s Desk. The computer headaches, the DropBox headaches, the PayPal headaches…all conspiring at once: it’s more than I can handle.

Naturally, the minute I make that decision, a new Chinese mathematician e-mails in a sweat, needing to get 10 (typeset!) pages of new copy edited and jammed into an article that’s already been provisionally accepted. He, however, is at the Great Desert University, where I have spies. And he has a bank account. So he at least can pay me. However, that means I have two book projects in hand, another pending, this math thing, and a computer that is laboring to undercut me.

But… But, indeed: his piping up reminded me that not all Chinese mathematicians, scientists, and scholars of business management labor away their lives on the Mainland! A whole lot of them live in the United States. And they can pay with checks. Or get their universities to pay with checks.

And how hard is it to make nice to these folks and cultivate that set?

He blinked not at all at my bracing  per-word rate, so I will be paid fairly for turning his golden words into publishable copy.

This sounds sooo weird, but I love copyediting these Chinese scientists’ copy. The beauty of a math paper is that if its author says something stupid, I don’t know it. That, alas, is not true of work in just about any other discipline. 😀

And most of the stuff is strangely interesting, at base.

He wants to meet next week and trudge through the new content, face-to-face. That’s a new one for me, but it should be interesting. I figure if I can make nice to him and not persuade him that I’m a complete idiot, he may refer me to colleagues.

Whiled away part of the day with another new client’s effort at science fiction writing. That was light and amusing and did not leave me in a rage. Which is good. Always good.

In the morning, I tested the blood pressure again — still obsessing about whatever it was that happened in the wee hours the day before yesterday. Back down into to fairly normal range: average 123/77. One reading was an amazing 115/75. Not bad for a 74-year-old, eh?

So I think it’s safe to assume the episode in the night was a stress attack, not a life-threatening cardiac event.

That alone relieved a whole lot of stress. So did the idea that I might simply fold The Copyeditor’s Desk and really, seriously retire retire.

And in the evening, we — the Women’s Schola — sang at Compline, a particularly lovely end-of-the-day service that, being absent the hoopla of a mass and all that, is a lovely, contemplative moment entirely sung and presented by candlelight. Meditative, it is. And a very fine antidote to crazy-making stress.

This service — Compline — is in my opinion the most lovely and spiritual event in the church’s entire repertoire. Hardly anybody seems to know about it: attendance can be numbered in the single digits. This is too bad, because a whole lot of people are missing out on something that ought not to be missed.

And now…away! Off to pick up the Old Folks, the first traffic-traipse of the day.

The Chaos Hangover

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The older you get, I think, the harder it is to deal with stress. And this past two weeks of unending techno-chaos have been nothing if not hideously stressful. Last night I enjoyed a fine hangover from that stress-storm…again, I think.

Along about 2:30 in the morning, a bright flare of pain and sweat woke me up. Gut pain, chest pain, shoulder ache…hard-to-tell pain.

Heart attack? Certainly could be. Chest pain and sweating are classic heart attack signs.

On the other hand(s):

  • It was 80 degrees in the house and I was under three layers of blankets.
  • The pain seemed to be on the outside of the ribs, not inside, not under the ribs, not under the sternum, not under the clavicle. Earlier this week I wrenched that shoulder again, wrestling the dog around the ’hood — the same shoulder I dislocated a couple years ago. Damn thing has been hurting for a couple weeks, every time I wake up.
  • The mastectomy scars hurt, in a low-key way. All the time. On the outside of the ribs. Press anyplace around that area, three or four inches to the north or south of the elegantly disguised scar, and it hurts. So if I’m sleeping in some kind of odd position, likely I’m going to wake up with my chest hurting. On the outside of the ribs, not inside, not under the ribs, not under the sternum, not under the clavicle….
  • Stress invariably creates some sort of malign hangover, usually of an unpredictable nature. And stress, frustration, time suck, and anguish have haunted every waking and sleeping moment of my existence for the past two or three weeks. I’ve lost 2/3 of my business base, my computers are a jumble, I can’t figure out how to use iCloud effectively (and don’t believe it can be used the way I need to have it work), and I feel generally f*cked over. In a big way. No wonder I’m having some kind of little tizzy…
  • Interestingly, sitting up eventually elicited a fine burp: gas! Maybe…ya think?…just maybe I shouldn’t have swiggled down that half-a-cup of cheap red wine right before turning off the light and pulling the pillow over my head.

Yes, I could call 911. They would not take me to the Mayo, where my doctor practices and which is the only local hospital in which I have anything resembling confidence. They would take me to the hospital of their convenience, where I decidedly do not want to go. And want or no want, I have soooo HAD it with doctors and doctoring, I would rather die right now today than go through any more of that. And no, my friends, I do not exaggerate.

Get up; repair to the hall closet. Chew a couple of vile Gaviscon tablets. As usual, this stuff has no effect other than to make me hate my taste buds. Remember the ranitidine stashed in the closet. That’s Zantac. Drop one of those. After about 30 or 45 minutes, this stuff seems to work.

Evidently not about to die, climb back into bed around the sleeping dog.

Resolve…

a) Quit drinking as a stress control strategy.
b) Test blood pressure sometime after sunrise; if systolic is over 140, call the quack on Monday. Maybe.

Well, come the dawn, the BP numbers are a little high: average 137/86.

On the other hand:

  • It’s hot.
  • I drank half a bottle of wine yesterday afternoon.
  • And then I spent half the night wrestling with the question of how to copy data from DropBox and from iCloud to Documents, whence we know for sure that Time Machine will copy it. It appears very likely that TM does not copy iCloud. Wouldncha know it. There is a LOT of data stored to these two fine thunderclouds…so much, in fact, that the MacBook just informed me that it doesn’t have enough space to absorb another gulp of this trash.
  • I hate loathe and despise taking my blood pressure, almost as much as I hate loathe and despise watching some underling in a doctor’s office do it wrong. That sentiment alone is enough to drive up one’s numbers.

Jayzus!

At any rate, planning a strategy for organizing and transferring all this data was quite the little project…as in “took two hours to figure it out in any rational way.”

Most of my stuff is now deleted from DropBox. It took two full days and then some to transfer this data over to iCloud, an apparent exercise in futility. Copying from iCloud to the MacBook’s hard disk only took a couple of hours this morning…but of course I can’t get it ALL on the hard disk, because the MacBook is now chuckablock full.

Next: run Time Machine to back up the MacBook, thereby saving this data in perpetuity. In fact, do a TM back up to not one but two external hard drives…hope to God the hard drives are large enough. Once this stuff is saved, delete all the really old, “archived” debris that no one, myself included, cares ever to see again. This should free up some space on the MacBook.

Then get into iCloud and delete sh!tloads of data, which has about maxed the space I’m paying for. A lot of this stuff is archived business and financial documents, which really need only to be saved in a couple of places — a backup drive and the MacBook. But other than that material, much of the remaining detritus can be deleted without much risk.

How do I hate this sh!t? Let me count the ways.

I am soooo sick of technohassles! Once again, another entire day is going to be spent watching machines grinding away. No work, paying or otherwise, is going to get done. I am going to be frustrated and angry by the time the day ends, and once again I will go to bed frustrated and angry. Which no doubt contributes to things like waking up at 2:30 in the morning with a hair-raising bellyache.

Please, God: send me a patient little quarterhorse, about 50 head of cattle, and 2000 acres of upland grass country.

And now i want…

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a beer…

Just a beer. And a plate of pasta: comfort drink, comfort food.

Finally finished shoveling away the layers and layers of paper that have floated in the door and come to rest atop my desk. Interestingly, the desktop seems to be made of wood…huh! I’d forgotten that.

So gawdawful much paper comes flying in the door or gets dragged into the house in a purse or stuck on the bottoms of my shoes…God only knows how it all it all makes it way in here. I tend to drop it where it arrives: on the dining room table, on a kitchen counter, on the passenger seat of the car, on my desk…on my desk…on my desk….

It took the entire morning to dig the desk out from its current burden of paper, some of it dating back to 2018. About 90% of it is stuff that either needs to be kept or needs to be shredded, so less than a trash-basketful goes to the recycling. {sigh}. Well, except for the stuff you run through the shredder…that, actually, can be composted, if you’re careful to avoid grinding up any of the plastic “envelope windows” that come with some mail.

At any rate, after several hours of sorting, file-folder stuffing, and shredding, boyoboy does that desk look CLEAN. Who’d’ve thunk it was possible?

That notwithstanding, the overall hassle never, ever stops.

This morning the DropBox hassle developed a new twist and turn. I called to tell them I don’t want them to renew my annual subscription for extra space and was horrified to discover that despite my having spent two and a half days transferring 87 berjillion kilobytes to iCloud and deleting said kilobytes from DropBox, the damn stuff is still on DropBox!

That’s right. They keep it as a “back-up” stashed away where you can’t get at it to kill it off.

Augh!

Getting rid of it takes an elaborate techno-hoop jump, following instructions that might as well be in Martian. I tried to reach a techie friend to see if I could hire him (please!) to help, but he’s not answering.

So…what alternative?

American Express, I guess. This is why I persist in using AMEX: like Costco, like Apple, they have superlative customer service. I call and reach a patient CSR. Explain the situation: DropBox is not about to let me off the hook, and I do not want to pay for the extra server space to accommodate data that they will not simply reach out and delete or explain to me in simple terms how to erase.

N-o-o-o-o-o problem, quoth the AMEX dude. He put a block on the next bill from DropBox.

DropBox charges $9.99 per month(!) for a terabyte of storage. Apple is now charging the same, for the same amount of storage — having dropped its price by 10 bucks a month. However, I do not need a terabyte of cloud space: for $2.99 I can get 200 gigabytes. Well, even unedited and un-shoveled out, my DropBox files add up to a mere(!) 160GB. A-n-n-d there’s a LOT of stuff in there that could go away. When I get around to it, I’ll move a pile of superannuated debris off of iCloud, which will free up enough space to last for all of posterity.

Weather is starting to warm up a bit. If I felt like jumping into slightly chilly water, I could plunge into the newly resurfaced pool. But I’m too lazy to get cold just now: bad human.

The watering system is on the fritz. I need to call an irrigation guy to fix it, since all Gerardo seems to do is shut off the valves for the parts that spring a leak, leaving my plants to die. He doesn’t seem to understand — or to care — that a potted plant will die in one day flat if it’s not watered daily once the temps are over about 90 or 95 degrees. So that’s yet another hassle to deal with.

And I do need to find a tree guy to remove the devil-pod tree on the west side, which has become a bit menacing. The US weather service expects this winter’s El Niño to linger over the Pacific through the summer. What meant nice rains in the winter, then, will mean heavy winds and violent monsoons this summer, hiking the risk of that tree breaking and falling on my neighbor’s house or mine. Again, Gerardo said he’d do it…but…no action there. Dayum….just what I need to kill some more time on.

The winter’s rain, though, produced some very gorgeous flowers this spring…

 

Unfortunately these look awful. Somehow the new iCloud thing has f**cked up my photo function. Dammit! Am I ever SICK of this computer bullshit! It just simply never stops!

 

Update from Chaos Central

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Slowly, SLOWLY, SLOWLEEEEEE some aspects of the present Chaos Storm are resolving.

DropBox: After three days of downloading, it’s all copied over into iCloud. Now, after one last backup (which presumably will take another 36 hours, if it can hold together that long), I will be able to delete all the DB files except for those dedicated to a couple of clients who freakin’ insist on using it. When they’re gone, DB is gone, done, GONE.

iCloud: Seems to have finally absorbed all the Drop-Box data, after three long days of grinding away. Tried to back up to DropBox Time Machine, preparatory to deleting DropBox Files, and discovered Time Machine wants to copy down BOTH DrobBox and iCloud: all the redundant contents thereof. Jayzus! This will take till the middle of the next century!

PayPal: In the wee hours of the morning — along about 2 a.m. — I woke up and thought…hmmm…I wonder. So, stupidly wondering, I opened the new online credit union account and found a) one savings account containin g $5.59 and b)…nothing.

That’s right: NOTHING. Nooooo sign of a checking account. Four grand has disappeared into the ether. I have vendors to pay, and far’s I can tell, I have no money to pay them.

That was at 2:00 this morning.

Needless to say, I have not gone back to sleep since then. Presumably I will not go back to sleep before 9:00 Monday morning, when I intend to be standing outside the crecdit union’s doors waiting for the staff to show up.

Mentioned this in passing to a friend who’s a legal assistant for a ferocious criminal litigator. She said “eeeek! Call the police.”

Well. Not so much. I do not know whether this reflects hacking into PayPal (no money left = no new checking account) or whether my system is just not accessing the new account. In the immortal words of Zaphod Beeblebrox: DON’T PANIC.

Easier said, o’course, than done.

Pool fiasco: As of this morning, it was about 50% improved, having had two gallons of chlorine applied to its hazy depths. Off to Leslie’s, where for a change the boss was holding forth. He was highly amused by the tale of…whateveritis…and thought Pool Dude’s advice was good as far as it went, which wasn’t far enough. Chlorine, despite adding two gallons(!!!!!) of liquid chlorine, was back down to zilch.

He thought another shock treatment and then keeping the Cl level fairly high for awhile would do the trick. Needing some more of my favorite granulated Cl product, I decided to spring for 25 pounds, which despite the bracing price is far less per pound than what I pay for smaller packages of it.

Computer: ay-freaking-AMAZING! Running perfectly. Effectively Apple rebuilt the MacBook and sent me a brand-new computer. WHY does anyone buy anything other than Apple products?

My (few!) surviving clients: Returned a revised Table of Contents and four edited chapters to one client; two chapters and some writing coaching to the other. Think of that: I’ll never have to figure out what a Chinese professor of higher mathematics is trying to say…ever again. {sigh}

State of mind and body, after starting at two o’clock this morning? Exhausted. Going back to bed, 9:04 p.m.