Man! I have been so stunned by all the sh!t that has come down during the past two months from Hell — week after week after week in which every single day has brought some new nightmare — that I just completely let the budget go. There’s a limit to what I can think about, and I’ve been way past that limit for a long time.
By today, though, things have been quiet long enough for me to catch my breath and try to figure out how much this has cost. And how I’m going to pay for it.
•The cost of the vet bills alone has come to just about $1,000 since September 15. •As of October 21 — with 10 more days to run this month! — I was $575 in the red. •I retrieved $381 from Social Security by cutting the planned monthly transfer to Emergency Savings by about 60%; this left me a mere $228 in the red.
With 10 more days to go in October.
Yeah.
And that was extremely lucky: no large bills to repair the car after the fender-bender, thanks to Chuck’s guys wrestling and bolting the thing back into place, and because by some miracle I didn’t have to replace tires.
A thousand bucks on the dog in six weeks. Think of that!
Dare one speculate that a substantial part of that resulted from a wrong diagnosis? Well…probably not. We really don’t know whether Cassie does or does not have Valley fever. She may. But she’s one helluva lot better than she was, that’s for sure. Not back to normal. But not stepping over Death’s threshold, either.
There’s money in savings to cover a couple hundred bucks’ worth of red ink. Just. There’s no way I can sustain even one more unplanned expense. And Christmas, obviously, is now a lost cause.
God only knows what the potentially life-threatening skin cancer diagnosis will cost me. Despite the supposed joys of Medicare and Medigap, there’s always some amount that isn’t covered. Where the cash will come from to pay those bills, I do not know. Out of investments, I expect.
One message from this: unless you still have a job in “retirement,” you can’t afford to keep a pet. So forget that. After Cassie and Ruby are both gone, there’ll be no more doggy companionship.
Today — Monday — nothing on the calendar. Thank God. With any luck, no lunacy will occur today.
Cassie the Corgi is getting a lot better. She was already throwing off the cough when Second Opinion Vet put her on doxycycline for the urinary tract infection MarvelVet opined was negligible. Whether the antibiotic is making a difference, I couldn’t say…except since she’s been on it, she’s improved markedly. This morning she endured being lifted off the bed without a coughing frenzy. It looks a great deal as though she’s going to recover and also as though the alleged adrenal tumor was something I didn’t want to know about. Or need to know about: at 12 years of age, this dog is going to pass on to her furry fathers pretty soon, and something has to spirit her away. If that’s the something, then that’s just the something, and there’s not much anyone can do about it.
Late last night, I remembered that you can polish grocery-cart scratches off your white car with one of those wall-scrubber sponge things. Duh! Why did I not think of that before? So I ran out to the garage and tested it, and lo! It did rub off some of the lesser “scratches,” which actually are paint from the flatbed. There are a couple of real-life gouges in the bumper’s paint, but most of it is not gouges but black stuff scraped ON to the finish, not scraped into it. It was dark out there last night, of course. Whenever I get my act together this morning, I’ll try this by light of day and an open garage door.
The car is running fine. Its bashed tire is not going flat.
Speaking of flat, I’m flat broke, budgetwise, and the economy, as predicted by a certain skeptic of your acquaintance, is about to go down the tubes. But what the heck…it’s not the first time. 😀
I still do not have a new AMEX card. Looks like the post office once again delivered the mail to Manny’s house: Manny and Josie live one street to the north. Stupidly, our streets bear the same name, and so postal workers and various service persons routinely go to the wrong address. And Manny will NOT forward misdelivered mail! They just throw it in the garbage, far as I can tell.
So now presumably the garbage scavengers (of which we have a-plenty) have had access to my name, address, and a brand-new AMEX card. 😀 Today I have to call American Express and get them to send me a new one. Again. Meanwhile, I still have no credit card!
Nor do I have a card for my Medigap insurance. Today I’ll have to jump through that set of punch-a-button hoops, too. Together, those will absorb some time and create some more unwelcome aggravation. Oh well.
Speaking of unwelcome aggravation, the alleged squamous cell carcinoma is looking somewhat better today. I suspect Young Dr. Kildare’s pronouncement — that I have skin cancer, not ringworm — was yet another misdiagnosis. It takes about two weeks for the antifungal cream to kick in…and last Friday was the start of Week 2. It may be that not enough time had passed, by the time I saw YDK for the gunk to start to work. Last night I was NOT awakened at three in the morning with frantic itching and burning. And the lesion looks less inflamed than it did. In the “looks” department, I have to say it sure does look a lot more like images of tinea manum (ringworm on the hand) than like images of skin cancer. They are, in some ways, similar. But…well…we shall see.
In exploring the Hypochondriac’s Treasure Chest That Is the Internet, I learned that an outbreak of ringworm can be brought on by prolonged stress, which can weaken your immune system.
That would explain a lot, eh?
Coccidioides…the causative organism?
And speaking of aggravation, I remain convinced — nay, I’m more and more convinced — that MarvelVet misdiagnosed Cassie grievously — and possibly deliberately. I think this dog picked up whatever bug was going around, the one his staff told me at the outset she probably had and for which they originally prescribed the Temaril-P, which acts as a cough suppressant. I never did learn what that bug was…whether it was viral or bacterial. But its signal characteristic was a cough. Cassie may not have thrown it off as fast as expected because it either progressed to a bacterial infection or started as one.
She was slowly getting better by the time 2Ovet prescribed an antibiotic for what she says is about as bad a UTI as a dog can get. But two days on doxycycline and voilà! The cough has subsided to the point where she no longer hacks and wheezes when lifted off the bed and even sometimes can drink water without choking and wheezing. Doxycycline is a broad-spectrum antibiotic — meaning it acts on the two broad classes of bacteria, gram-positive and gram-negative. What this means, if my speculation about the cough is correct, is that it would attack the cause of the cough (assuming it’s not viral) as well as the cause of the UTI.
There are some serious risks to broad-spectrum antibiotics. On the other hand, there’s a serious risk to pneumonia, too…
I wish I were not such a damn cynic…but I am. I cannot get past the suspicion that the “misdiagnosis” I sense was deliberate misdiagnosis. MarvelVet’s claim that Cassie’s UTI was negligible and did not need to be treated was just plain false. I saw the results; the numbers were as high as they get. The dog had a serious UTI, and that is why she was bleeding into her pee. He may have realized that treating her with an antibiotic likely would clear up the cough. And that would take me and my dog and my credit card out the door.
Valley fever is a huge profit center. The cost of treating the disease is bracing, and the treatment goes on for a minimum of six months but often for the remainder of the animal’s life…which can be years. One of my friends, who says she’s lost four dogs to Valley fever, said she was spending $300 a month on the drugs. MarvelVet has a link to a compounding pharmacy (a remark he made suggested he owns it or has an interest in it), and so he was giving me a month’s worth of pills for $40. But…either way…just think of that.
At $40 a month, that’s $480 a year. Just 10 doggy patients diagnosed with “Valley fever” — correctly or not — will bring you $4800 a year. But if you can get $300 a month, that’s $3600 per patient per year, or $36,000 a year if you can diagnose 10 dogs with it. Holy shit! That doesn’t even include the $500 he charged for the tests.
MarvelVet has a large, active practice — he is a very busy man, indeed. And one could argue that he’s so busy that of course he makes an occasional mistake with an off-the-cuff diagnosis.And you certainly could figure that 10 cases of Valley fever would be on the low end for that practice.
I’d like to believe this was a mistake. But…man! The money motive is there, in a big way.
As for the adrenal tumor? Well…the dog is 12 years old. She’s not going to get out of this world alive. She’s near the end of her breed’s average life span. It would be surprising if she didn’t have some life-threatening ailment.
Just now, though, she surely isn’t behaving as though her life was threatened. Half of adrenal gland growths are benign. So she does have a 50-50 chance of staying well. At least for awhile.
Nothing on this earth is there like a Young’s Double Chocolate Stout for unwinding purposes. All of about an hour remains in which to rest. I’ve done (endless!)_ battle with not one but two computers to get a $28 check deposited; finished proofing edits and returning the third of three sections of a P&T review sent over by one of the Chinese academics; met with the appliance repairman, who cleaned the stove burners, examined it carefully, could find nothing that would have caused two of the burners not to work after the recent brisk storms, and charged me sixty bucks; driven to the Costco to return the worst coffee I’ve ever tasted; driven to AJ’s to buy some of their reasonably acceptable coffee; gone back and forth with two veterinary offices; transferred funds (on a wing and a prayer) from PayPal to my corporate checking account; negotiated with the pool company’s dude for a date to resurface the hole in the ground (having decided there’s no need for expensive repairs on the car); talked with the vet at Indian Bend, who finds Cassie has a urinary infection (surprise!); arranged to take Cassie to Arcadia for an ultrasound; explained to both vets that she seems to be returning to health in response to the Benadryl I gave her (good luck with that!); talked to a nurse at the Mayo about an interesting new lesion, (probably unsatisfactorily); cooked up a little spread for lunch and served up said Young’s with it.
In 30 minutes, I’ve gotta be outta here again. Any question why I never get any of my own stuff done?
Cassie continues to revive. As we speak, she’s barking her little furry head off, in her former accustomed manner. And she is NOT wheezing after each attempted yapfest. She seems a little weary, but you would, too, if you’d been as sick as this dog has. This noon she shot out the side door after Ruby, just like a turbocharged little rocket, something she hasn’t done in weeks.
I think if we can get her treated for the UTI the Indian Bend vet just diagnosed, she’ll be just about back to normal. Yes, I do understand that prednisone and fluconozale both cause incontinence. But also understand that cloudy urine is suggests an infection (lo! I was right…). But I also understand that corgis are prone to UTIs and that the incontinence should stop when the drugs stop.
It is much better. But she’s still given to a certain embarrassing urgency. I think if we treat her for the infection this vet says he found, she’ll soon be back to her old self.
Can’t believe it! Truly…there were two occasions when I truly thought she was going to die. Then when the vet proposed to put her on that monstrous drug for upwards of six months, I told him I would put her down before I would do that: occasion #3.
•I can’t believe my 12-year-old dog is still alive and seems to be on the mend…
• I can’t believe I spent upwards of a thousand dollars to do nothing for a doggy ailment that seems to have resolved itself pretty much on its own…or with the help of an over-the-counter allergy pill.
•I can’t believe I crashed my car in the middle of all this.
• I can’t believe I was able to get the car repaired without having to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars for the privilege.
•I can’t believe I managed to get through six assignments from clients while all this shit was going on.
Dammit, I just dropped the external backup drive on the floor. Presumably broke it, because every time you drop anything electronic on the floor, you break it. The other external drive doesn’t work, either. It broke a long time ago. As nothing, though…
What’s really broken — that matters — is the dog. And my budget.
Today I took Cassie to my son’s vet, who’s only about 10 minutes away (well…when every route going in that direction isn’t dug up and blocked to one [1] lane, which is not the case today…) to find out about the “abnormal” results of her recent urinalysis.
Is there a reason why we have to make such a fuckin’ drama of this stuff?
Oh yeah, sure there is: it’s called a rea$on.
They now want to do another urine analysis, in which they propose to culture the bacteria they found in her urine. Uh huh. And was there a reason we didn’t do this on the first try?
They propose, all told, to charge me almost $700 for the various tests and treatments they foresee.
Understand: I just paid MarvelVet $500 for treatment that has done nothing to help the dog.
Twelve hundred dollars is the sum total of my monthly income. Well, that’s not true: Social Security amounts to about $1211 a month. So this is more than just grocery money. This is more than half of what I have to pay all of a month’s bills. And that’s without repairing the car and replacing the tires after the fender-bender incurred in driving home from the last visit to this vet.
This is just crazy.
One thing is sure: here in our lovely 21st-century dystopia, if you are retired, you cannot afford to own a pet. In the near future, I’ll have to have this dog put to sleep. And that will be it in the doggy department for me: I simply will not be able to have another dog or cat around the house. Because I can’t afford it.
Ruby will still be here, but I’d probably better find another home for her while I can — while she’s still healthy and some naive dummy wants her. Because if I can’t afford Cassie, obviously I can’t afford Ruby, either.
Sooo exhausted. Haven’t slept more than a few consecutive minutes in the past month.
Tried to take a nap this afternoon. If I don’t put the dogs on the bed, they lobby — by whacking the bed and trying to climb up — until I capitulate and lift them up here. Trying to wiggle out of Ruby’s way (she being in full pester mode), I found myself in another cold, wet puddle.
Yesterday I ran FIVE LOADS through the washer, plus had to clean the washer out with the shop vac and then unclog the shop vac. Now the washer is laboring away with another entire set of bedding including a blanket. Literally, I ran the goddamn washing machine until 10 o’clock last night.
Well. Today’s mound doesn’t include the bed pad…this time she managed to pee on the piddle pads that protect the under-bedding. Hope I managed to get all those out of the wad of cloth I hauled out of the garage.
I just can NOT keep on doing this.
Meanwhile, two new jobs came in. When exactly am I supposed to find the time and the physical strength to edit these things, given that it’s impossible to sleep and the dog is so sick she has to be schlepped to a vet every second day and the car is wrecked and the stove is broken and the roof needs to be repaired and…holy shit. To say nothing of the fact that the country is going to Hell in a handcart.
The car is still running. I haven’t had time to get to Costco to find out how much it will cost to replace the tires. Whatever it is, though, between that and the vet bills, I can’t get the pool replastered this fall. Haven’t called the pool guy yet to let him know that deal is going to be off. The brushed metal things that I thought were some sort of fancy wheel covers are…not. They’re the wheels themselves. God DAMN it. So that means I need to buy a whole new wheel for the right front whateveritis on the damned car. God only knows what that will cost.
Still can’t find my credit-card holder with my AMEX card in it. I’m now beginning to suspect, against my better angels, that the locksmith guy must have lifted it. Really: that is the only explanation. I’ve searched all over the house.
There are a limited number of places that I could or would have set it down. We were near the front door when he handed me his bill. I signed it and handed him the credit card, which he put in his Square. He would have handed it back to me, I would have put it back in the case, and I would have — could have — done one of only two things:
I would’ve put the case back in my jeans pocket, where it resides whenever it’s not in its accustomed home; or
I would’ve set it down on the lamp table next to the sofa, the only flat place available.
Since it’s not in either place…well…
That day I was wearing the only pair of white jeans I own. I’ve checked the pockets repeatedly: the thing is not in the jeans, not in the laundry bag, not in any other pair of pants, not on the table, not in the table’s drawer, not on the other table near the door.
Am I mistaken? Were we in the dining room or kitchen when this transaction occurred? In that case I would have put the card in my jeans pocket (no…) or on the dining room table or on the kitchen counter.
It’s not in any of those places.
Did I do the responsible thing and carry it back to the office and put it where it belongs, in a small purse hanging from a hook on the wall in that room?
No.
Did I take it back to the office and drop it on my desk or the file cabinet?
No.
Did for some unimaginable reason I put it in the car, in the consoles or on the passenger seat?
No.
Did I leave it on the kitchen counter or dining room table?
No.
And that’s about it. There really are no other places that I would, by the wildest stretch of the imagination, have carelessly placed it.
Soooo…. Reluctantly, I’ve just about arrived at the conclusion that it was stolen. We were chatting merrily and I was distracted by our conversation. If I’d set it on the sofa table, he could easily have lifted it while I was entertained by a dog or by my own mouth going.
Well, if that’s the case, it was more trouble than it was worth for our Nimrod. That card is now canceled. The Social Security number printed on my SS card was blacked out. And as we have seen, the new number on the new Medicare card doesn’t work. I need to contact Medicare and ask them to send me a new card, but frankly, that bureaucratic runaround is more than I can cope with just now. Fortunately, I made several extra copies of the damn thing. Whether they’ll want to cut a new card with a new number, I do not know.
While Cassie was locked up at the vet’s, I took Ruby for a walk, all by her little self. You know, I think that’s probably the first time this little dog has ever been on a doggy walk without the Boss Dog.
Dog interactions are weird. Maybe human interactions are, too…we’re just not aware of it, being humans. She was like a different dog! No dragging, no wackiness…just trotted right along as though she knew how to heel. Which…she doesn’t. 😉
Day after day after day after day has been yet another Day from Hell, lo! these several weeks. Why don’t things get better? Why does everything break, bust, explode, crash, or die? Finally figured out the explanation. These are not days from Hell. We are actually in Hell. Hence: these are not blog posts. These are Dispatches from Hell.
Case in point: The least of today’s hassles, only because it’s a hassle left over from a week ago…I’ve tried twice to re-up my subscription to The New York Review ofBooks, one of my favorite broadsides. First time was my fault: I used the credit union’s bill-pay function, but paid for it from my personal account (which, oddly, did have the the NYRofB’s listed as a previous payee). Of late I’ve been making the S-corp pay for it.
That payment bounced. Why, I do not understand: what do they care which account pays for it? Ohhkay… Eventually they sent a desperate “Don’t Leave Us” ad in the snailmail. I replied to that by filling out the form and entering the S-corp’s AMEX account number. This no doubt would have worked if I hadn’t indulged in a moment of stupidity.
As you know, the ‘Hood is not the best of all possible neighborhoods. We’re inundated with drug-addicted transients, who support their habits with petty theft. Including mail theft.
The payment envelope in hand, I raced out the door to run a bunch of errands and get someplace on time. In a hurry, I really did NOT want to drive to the Post Office to deposit the thing in one of their mailboxes. That would entail waiting half my lifetime for the blightrail signal at the interesection of Conduit of Blight and Feeder Street E-W to turn green, then waiting the rest of my lifetime to get back across the damn blightrail tracks to get to my various destinations. So instead of traipsing to the PO for this one small item, I stuck it in the outgoing slot of the Fort Knox Mailbox and flipped up the red flag.
Bad move. Very stupid indeed.
Two or three days later, I went out to get the mail (it’s almost all advertising now, so there’s no hurry to pick it up) and noticed the red flag was still up. Whaaa? Did the mailman not come by? (He often doesn’t….)
Check to see if he’s failed to pick up the outgoing: no envelope in there. Days go by. A couple weeks go by. No payment at NYRofB’s.
Shit. That means someone has stolen the thing and now has my name, the name of my business, its address, and its AMEX credit card number. I wait a few more days to see if the payment goes through. Today I call NYRofB’s phone reps and they say they never heard of it. I need to pay the thing on my corporate AMEX card over the phone. Then I need to cancel the card and order a new one, ASAP.
But ASAP ain’t very AS…because I’m waiting on the PostalPerson to deliver a new personal AMEX card. Yes. Somehow I managed to LOSE a whole cardholder full of cards!!!! The personal AMEX card, the Safeway card, the new Medicare card with a new Medicare number on it (the one that doesn’t work at the pharmacy), the old Medicare card bearing my Social Security number….GONE, every one of them.
I believe they’re somewhere in the house, because I paid the AC guy to fix the thermostat and the leaking roof with my personal card, and I did not leave the house between the time he drove off down the road and the time I realized I couldn’t find that cardholder. Since I’ve habituated that locksmith for a good 12 or 15 years and Steven (locksmith dude) has worked for them for 7 years and he’s a fine upstanding workingman, I don’t believe he walked off with it. Without a doubt, I set it down in the house somewhere and managed to lose it…same as the pair of prescription glasses that got tangled up in a knitted bed throw and disappeared for three months.
Fortunately I have photocopies of the Medicare cards. And fortunately, I had the sense to black out the SS number on the old Medicare card. The AMEX card has been canceled and a new one is on the way, but the weekend coming up, I don’t expect “tomorrow” (no kidding: that is what she said!) to arrive much before Monday. And fortunately, my debit card, corporate AMEX card, and Costco cash cards are in a different card holder. Which is not, after all, lost. Yet.
The dog got better off the fluconazole, then worse.
Dog continuing incontinent, I ask the new vet if they’ll test her urine for a UTI.
Wednesday after volunteer receptionist duty, I race the refrigerated pee up to 40th Street and Thunderbird and drop it off there. I drive up there through the rush-hour traffic, drive back in even worse traffic. Changing lanes to maneuver into place to turn right into the ‘Hood, I misjudge the length of a flatbed trailer being towed behind a pickup in the lane next to me and clip the goddamn thing. The driver doesn’t even blink. He doesn’t slow down, he most certainly doesn’t stop…I think he may not even have noticed that I bumped his trailer. My car sure did, though. Pulled over to find the front bumper was half pulled off, scratched and gouged, flying in the breeze. Shee-ut!
Back here, I walk in the door and find…NO Charley! He’s freaking GONE! A worker has been here in the afternoon; I’ve left strict orders not to let that dog slip out the back gate. But he can go in and out the dog door…dollars to donuts that’s exactly what he’s done. He’s old, he’s sick, and now he’s LOST. Try to reach said worker: no answer. Totally, utterly panicked. My son is supposedly in Colorado, which is why his dog is here. I think maybe he got back while I was out and picked up his dog, but he won’t answer his phone, either. Neighbor texts him (I have no cell phone). No answer. I am in utter despair. After a bit I calm down enough to notice that even though the dog’s food is still sitting on the kitchen counter, the dog’s leash and collar are gone. SOMEONE took the dog on purpose…at least he’s not roaming around the neighborhood and ambling across Conduit of Blight Boulevard.
Eventually the kid calls and says yeah, he picked up the dog but was too tired from driving in from southern Colorado to bother to leave me a “thanks for keeping my dog” note.
Now late for choir, I feed the dogs and fly out the door without any dinner of my own.
Get home about 9:15 p.m. and go to enter the (locked) office.
It’s been raining for a day and a half. The solid-core door is swollen tight. The key goes in but I can’t turn it. I get a wrench, try to open the thing, and…SHEAR THE KEY OFF level. with the fucking deadbolt! All my computers, all my financial stuff, all my credit cards, all my cash, even my cheesy little clamshell phone are locked behind that door.
Call the locksmith’s emergency line. He says he’s sure he can fix it. For a hundred bucks he’ll do it right now (pushing 10 p.m.). I say if he’s sure it can be opened, I’ll be able to sleep at night and so can wait till tomorrow. Otherwise I’ll be wanting to break the front window and climb in to get my computer, which I’d druther not do.
Next day have real difficulty getting them to come over — but because I’m an old customer who’s spent a lot of dollars at their shop, they squeeze me in.
Steven comes over, takes a screwdriver to the thing, flips out the stump of the key: takes him all of 30 seconds. I’m in love. This love affair costs me 70 bucks. And now I have to go take the fancy key over to the shop to get a new one made. That’ll be another 20 bucks. Later. But not much later.
Somewhere in here I lose my credit-card holder. I search from pillar to post, empty out the trash cans, go through drawers, look under the furniture: no luck. I’m sure it’s in the house, probably, but when I can’t find it the next day figure to be safe I’d better cancel the AMEX card. Two or three days without a personal charge card. Yeah.
Insurance guy says I’m in luck. Because he bought me a “prime” policy, I have a one-accident-no-fault deal: get out of jail free. AND because I haven’t tried to kill any of my fellow homicidal drivers lately, I also have a zero deductible. He asks me to get estimates from a body shop but suggests that if it doesn’t cost much it may be better to foot the bill and not let the company know about this little fender bender. My son, also an insurance guy, recommends taking the money and running: he thinks I should go to the best body shop in town (which is 20 miles from my house) and have them do a decent job fixing it.
The vet’s office calls to say something’s out of whack with Cassie’s pee and they want me to bring her in Saturday morning. I say “wrong”? Like what? Well, like it might be a UTI. Ooookayyyy…
I take the car to my mechanic to check for damage under the hood. They find no structural or engine damage, AND they manage to wrest the bumper back into place and secure it with the car’s clips and a few extra bolts. It now looks dead normal except for a scrape on one side, as though maybe I got too close to a guard wall. The men of Chuck’s Auto also opine that it would be best to hide this incident from the insuror. However, they do find a nick in the tire’s sidewall and recommend replacing the tire soon.
I call my insurance guy with this report and with the advice from my son. He reiterates that his thinking coincides with the mechanics’ but he will support me whatever I decide to do. (He’s not a sales agent: he’s a broker.)
Cassie seems to be getting better. By yesterday I observe that she’s about back to normal and surmise I must have been right that she didn’t have Valley fever.
At 3:30 this morning she wakes up and pees in the bed before I can set her on the floor. In doing so, she manages to miss the double layer of pee pads I’ve laid down on the bed: three more loads of laundry!
In a flash I haul off the sheets, the bed pad, the blanket, and the dog blanket. Fortunately this five-layer barrier keeps the dog pee off the mattress. Dazed with exhaustion, I toss the sheets and blanket into the washer and start the thing running.
Cannot sleep, so go back to reading 8000 words of Korean-accented scholarly writing.
Somewhere in here it dawns on me: this lesion that developed on my hand, the one on the same arm that got the ferocious Shingrix shot, is not a zoster pox. Noooo….Y’know what that is? THAT little fucker is ringworm. Look it up and find ringworm image after ringworm image that looks just like it. And ringworm being not a parasite but a fungal infection, y’know what the treatment is? Ohhhh yes! Fluconozale, the same damn stuff that made my dog so sick I thought she was going to die! TWICE!
Shit. Well, you can get a topical treatment over the counter. The standard course of treatment, if you believe the Internet (yeah!), is first to try to get rid of it with an OTC ointment. If that doesn’t work, then you move on to poisoning yourself.
Eventually I go out to move the bedding from the washer to the dryer and…can you guess? Somehow I’ve missed two of the pee pads! The inside of the washer is now chuckablock full of shredded, wet puffed-up paper stuffing crap! HOLY shit!!!!!!!!!
I go inside to finish reading the client’s paper.
Eventually go back out to the garage. Realize I can’t put this stuff in the dryer. Haul each piece out into the driveway and shake, shake, shake, shake, snap, shake, snap, SHAKE, shake, shake. This covers the driveway with snow-like stuff but doesn’t get all the crud off the bedding. Hang the sheets, blanket, and mattress pad on the clotheslines, hoping most of the rest of the stuff will shake off when it’s dry.
Clean out the washer. Yeah, right.
Take the shop-vac to the washer. This clogs the shop-vac but apparently gets most of the crud out of the washer, except for the stuff I have to dig out with a coat-hanger wire. Use the rest of the vacuum’s capacity to pick up the white snow off the driveway and the garage floor.
Haul the vacuum tub and two baskets of garbage out to the alley trash bin. On the way, pick up a bum’s fast-food cup out of my yard. On the way, observe that the mess the city water guys made of my front landscaping is pretty well fixed, after I shoveled and broomed gravel back in place. Hope they didn’t fuck up the plumbing under there. But don’t have much hope.
Brush out and wash the shop-vac’s clogged filter; set it aside to dry.
Finish the Korean professor’s paper. Interesting guy, interesting subject. Learn a lot about international law on freedom of expression and journalistic privilege. That’s good, anyway. Run it past a prospective intern, am impressed with the kid’s response. Ship the edits & clean copy back to the client.
Decide I cannot bring myself to do the Costco run that was planned for today.
Realize that isn’t gonna do me any good, because I still have to go out to a Walgreen’s and try to find the anti-fungus stuff (miconozale) to treat the frantically itchy lesion on my hand.
And so, away. Let’s see what I can do to my fellow homicidal drivers on the way…
Well…the metaphorical rain, that is. The real rain, of which we’ve had a fair amount the past couple days, can hang around for awhile. The storm that blew in from the Sea of Cortéz has broken the heat, saturated the earth, refreshed the plants, cleaned the air… And in the micro-bargain, filled up the swimming pool for free! Other than saturating the wiring that runs the AC system (which just now isn’t needed anyway), it seems not to have done any damage here at the Funny Farm.
Roads were flooded. The usual contingent of morons drove into flooded washes and had to be rescued from their cars’ roofs. One moron even walked into a flooded wash.
I haven’t gone down to my son’s house to see if everything’s OK there. If it’s not, there’s little I could do about it. And he’ll be back in a day or so.
Meanwhile…
It was one thing after another yesterday. Among the highest of the many low points: Medicare.
Jayzus Aitch Keerist!
So while I’m at the Walmart buying pee pads to protect my floors from the sick dog’s ministrations, I decided to get a flu shot. Medicare has just sent a new card. Somewhere in Washington — after HOW many decades? — it registered with a bureaucrat that maybe it wasn’t the smartest idea since the creation of Adam and Eve to make everyone in the country over the age of 65 carry around a card bearing their name and Social Security number in order to get medical care.
Ya think?
So they decided to issue new Medicare cards with new computer-generated numbers. That’s good.
Many days late and a dollar short. But good.
Mine came in the mail a couple days ago.
At the Walmart, the pharmacist asked if I had a new Medicare number. Yup. I fork it over so as to get the shot covered on Part D.
It won’t work. She struggles and she struggles and she struggles. She can NOT make it work. She gets on the phone to Medicare — this involves the usual frustrating punch-a-button hoop-jump and yakathon/obnoxious Muzak heel-cooling routine. Time passes. NOTHING that they tell her, nothing that she does will make it work. She’s still wrestling with it when, after about 20 or 30 minutes of watching her try to get through, I say “Look. I’ll just pay for it. Any day I’d rather be short 40 bucks than get the flu.”
So I ended up paying for a shot that was supposed to be covered by Medicare Part D, for which I pay.
When I got home, I called the number for Medicare shown on the back of the card.
MY GOD, the run-around!!!!!
After a good ten minutes of button-punching, hoop-jumping, waiting waiting waiting waiting waiting waiting listening to aggravating yak and excruciating Muzak, a clueless woman got on the phone.
They train these folks to read a spiel to you. You ask your question, and they get out the spiel and start reading it from start to finish. This one was a lecture on what the flu shot will do for you, what the flu is, why you need a flu shot, and whether Part D would cover it. Believe it or not, she did not KNOW whether Part D covers the flu shot and so wasted some more of my time while she looked it up. I finally interrupted her in the middle of this yak-fest — what’ she’s doing is reading from a Web page and no, this is NOT the first time this fine experience has happened to me when I finally reached a human at a government office — and practically hollered, “I know that! Please don’t read that stuff to me. My question is why didn’t my new Medicare number work when I tried to get a flu shot?!??!?”
“Oh.”
Now that we have that figured out, she proceeds to try to find out. To make a very long story short, she doesn’t know. She insisted that the number I recited to her off the card was correct, that everything was in order, and that it should have worked. Curious, she got into the system to see if the Walmart lady was entering something wrong. A-n-n-n-d she could find no trace of an attempted transaction.
She suggested I go back to Walmart and tell them to try again, because Part D still might reimburse me for the $40 that I had to pay to get the shot.
Right.
See those random, rather poorly written posts you occasionally come across at Funny? The ones that natter on meaninglessly about such topics as “four good stocks to buy,” as though you’re going to take stock advice from a retired professor of English? Those are paid posts. I get paid over a hundred dollars A MINUTE to put one of those things online. Just now a new editing assignment hit my in-box; for that kind of thing, I get paid upwards of $60 an hour. You seriously think, dear Medicare bureaucrat, that I’m going to go stand around a Walmart for another hour or so, grinding my teeth and arguing over forty bucks? Really?
So now I’ll have to find out whether this incident was a fluke or whether something is fucked up deep in the works of Medicare. Whaddaya bet it’s the latter?
At any rate, she said it will be the middle of next April before all the new cards are mailed out. In the interim, they believe the old cards bearing one’s SS number will still work. She suggested continuing to use that for as long as possible.
Yeah.
So there you have it: that was the general tenor of the day. The whole damn day went like that, with the exception of the actual arrival and success of the guy from Liberty Wildlife, who liberated the hummingbird trapped in the kitchen skylight.
not so much…
My stove is acting up. I tried to reach Southwest Gas to see if there was some kind of outage. You can NOT reach a human being at Southwest Gas. Even when you send an e-mail, you get a machine-generated fuck-you-very-much response. Whenever I catch my breath from yesterday’s marathon set of run-arounds, I’m writing a complaint to the Corporation Commission about that.
The appliance guy is booked out into the middle of next week. Fortunately, two of the burners — the small ones — are still working, and I do have a camp stove. SDXB, when told this story, thought it sounded more like a problem with the stove than with the gas delivery and thought I shouldn’t try to use the stove at all. But my propane grill doesn’t have a side burner (the one that came with the last grill I had never worked very well, so I decided I’d rather have a shelf than one of those things on the present model). So without a functioning stove, I can’t even make a cup of coffee without heating the water in the microwave.
The aging microwave…
The afternoon will be occupied with the volunteer work I agreed to do down at the Church. Can’t get out of that, because I had to abdicate last week while trying to deal with Cassie’s illness. Fortunately, it’s so quiet there I can bring my computer and do editorial work…which I’ll have to do because today’s incoming consists 8,000 words of arcana due to the publisher on Friday.
Meanwhile, I’ve got to carry a bottle of dog pee to the Second-Opinion vet, to ascertain whether Cassie has a UTI. On Wednesdays, 2nd-O Vet closes his clinic until 4 p.m., then is open from 4 to 8 p.m. So I’ll have to wring out the dog this morning, store the pee in the fridge, FLY back home from the church, let the dogs out, haul the dogs back in, grab the bottle of pee, and drive across the city to the veterinary office. Yes. Through the rush-hour traffic. Over roads that were flooded yesterday.
Man! I have been so stunned by all the sh!t that has come down during the past two months from Hell — week after week after week in which every single day has brought some new nightmare — that I just completely let the budget go. There’s a limit to what I can think about, and I’ve been way past that limit for a long time.
