Coffee heat rising

Angst

Siri, RESET!

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Hallelujah, brothers and sisters! A junket to the Mayo Clinic, halfway to Payson from my house, has reset the computer where the blood pressure neurosis is concerned.

In fact I went in to discuss a different issue, which by the time today’s appointment rolled around had resolved itself. However, I decided to traipse out there anyway, because there were other things to chat about. Because I’d made the appointment on short notice, it was with a physician’s assistant and a nurse-practitioner (yahoo! two of ’em) rather than my regular doctor, who having just returned from maternity leave is maxed.

Number one headache (and today that was a literal term) had to do with the blood pressure conundrum. Took the pills out there and explained why I do not want to take the damn things, but also fessed up that yesterday I enjoyed yet another spike in numbers, into the 140s. In fact, the NP got a first reading of 159 over somegawdawful thing, though that came down considerably.

I hate doctor’s offices and I hate medical facilities and I hate having to explain myself to doctors and I’m not there unless stress and pain push me there, so of course whenever I get into one of those places, my blood pressure hovers near the ceiling.

Fortunately, a pair of the Chinese academics sent a new paper to edit yesterday, so I took the laptop with me so I could read copy while cooling my heels in the waiting room. That meant…lo! I also had my whole neurotic log of daily blood pressure readings, complete with weekly averages, an overall average, and a percentage breakdown of figures by high, medium, and low ranges.

I expected this elaborate spreadsheet would just confirm that I’m crazy, so hesitated to show it to her. But to the contrary: she was delighted to get the data. A-n-n-d…she was not at all fazed by the occasional spikes into the 140s. She said it’s the average that matters, and that under 130 is not very threatening, although one would like to keep it as low as possible to protect the kidneys and heart from potential damage.

I pointed out that the American Heart Association (which is partially funded by Big Pharma…) insists that ONE reading in the 140s or above is enough to put you on pills. (The British Health Service, in contrast, states that a consistent pattern of 140+ readings over time is the criterion.) I also pointed out that AHA guidelines recently changed; what used to be designated “moderately elevated” (readings in the 130s) is now considered to be “prehypertension” that must be treated, that readings in the 120s are now the “moderately elevated” range, and that the desired range is now in the 110s. She shrugged that off: clearly not impressed.

She said with an overall average of 128.4/83.3, she probably would not prescribe medication at all. However, she did agree that some of the startling spikes were a concern. And she also agreed that the drug Cardiodoc prescribed (or any of them, for that matter) had the potential to cause some serious dizziness since my BP is often in the low 120s…and even, of late, in the teens. On the other hand, she thought there was a good chance the very small dose would have no side effects at all. She suggested that I simply try the drug on a day that I don’t have to drive anywhere and see what happens. In fact, she proposed that I try it during a time when the numbers are spiking.

I said I’d been told it takes two weeks to take effect. Not so, said she: it’s a 24-hour pill, and if it’s gonna work, it will work within that period. She said it isn’t necessary to get “on” it for any length of time to see what it will do. And if we don’t like the results, the obvious response is simply to…well…stop taking it.

Wow!

So relieved was I that I decided to stop in my favorite mega-supermarket, which is on the way home from the Mayo, buy a bottle of Cabernet, and take a flying leap off the back end of the wagon. Then, go to bed and sleep away the remaining half the afternoon.

Last night was pretty terrible: after coming home around 10:30 from a choir shindig in a restaurant (nothing like a club soda instead of a glass of wine to make you the life of the party…), the evening BP readings were in the stratosphere. Then — perhaps consequently — I slept badly, woke up at 5 with a hot flash, and found readings that were still elevated by the light of dawn.

Well, the Mayo Lady pointed out that scarfing down a basket of salty French fries after having had nothing to eat since about 2 in the afternoon would tend to jack up one’s blood pressure numbers. I thought that was a long-term effect, not a one-off sort of thing, but apparently restaurant food will do the job on your BP readings right now. Yes, I do know better than to eat that kind of junk, but by 9:30 last night I was too hungry to care.

So I fly in the house, grill a lamb chop and some asparagus and serve those up with some leftover polenta and a tomato and a couple glasses of cheap red wine. Yes!!

Then I stagger into the back of the house, fall into the bed, and sleep for a good two hours. Phone rings; chat with friend; fall back to sleep.

Roll out of the sack along about 5:30. Feed the dogs, pick up the kitchen. Break out the Omron. And this is what happened:

Holy mackerel! And think o’ that: 108/74? 110/72?!!?

Clearly what is missing from my life is red wine…

Seriously: at 10:30 last night the average of six figures was 144/85.8. Less than 24 hours later, all but one of a similar set of figures is under 120.

You can guess what would happen if I took a blood pressure drug when the underlying blood pressure was in that range. I wouldn’t even be able to stand upright.

Do I have a conclusion to draw from this?

Well, yeah: One conclusion is that obsessing over the blood pressure is probably driving my blood pressure up.

The other is, I need to go to the Mayo, not to a doctor in the wild. Mayo Clinic physicians are salaried employees: they have no incentive to overprescribe treatments and medications. Not to be driven crazy or bullied into unnecessary treatment is worth the endless drive through the homicidal traffic.

And finally, what is needed is an occasional glass of wine.

Prosit!

 

Ouch!

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The honored Back has been out of commission for a week, taking a hip with it. This, I think is the worst back outage I’ve enjoyed since Anna the Ger-Shep was a pup, when she put me in the hospital by charging a passing mammoth pick-up and trying to bring it down by the oil pan — dragging me with her. Yesterday I was in so much pain I could barely walk around the house.

This predicament is not helped by the allergies to aspirin, acetaminophen, and ibuprofen… Nor, we might add, by the stress-inducing blood-pressure conundrum.

So crippled up have I been that I’d pretty much decided this must be It: the osteoporosis in that hip has decided to assert itself, so now must be the time for a hip replacement. Holeeeee shit! Just what I need to make my life fun.

This conclusion: especially because if I did anything to hurt myself I don’t know what it was. Or it wasn’t very credible. The pain started after I walked three miles one afternoon: two alone, and one with Ruby the Corgi, who goes right along at a fast clip. But that puts us into the “not very credible” zone (not to say the Twilight Zone…): I walk three-mile stretches all the time and never induce any back or hip pain. That is the proximate event…but we have no evidence that it was the cause.

WhatEVER! Yesterday I was seriously crippled up.

That didn’t stop me from accepting a last-minute dinner invitation from my son last night. Managed to get the pooches into the car, but he had to get them out and, later, put them back in.

And herein lies the interesting development:

Over dinner last night, I fell off the accursed Water Wagon with a resounding thud. Lost track of how much box wine I swilled, but it was plenty. At least three glasses, but when you’re refilling a few drops at a time, it’s kinda hard to judge.

By the time I got home, the back hurt a little less. Yes, I had done a set of physical therapy exercises at his house, whilst he was cooking. But…they haven’t helped one little bit over the past week or so. So there’s no reason to think they would have helped then. Probably the grape-derived anaesthetic was what did the job.

Meanwhile, let us say I happened to acquire a little jar of herbal pain-killer. You’re supposed to rub the stuff on your bod’ to evince a magical mystery rheumatiz cure. Right.

Welp, any port in a storm. So I smear this stuff on around the sore joints.

This morning, I roll out of the sack, spend an hour or so fiddling with the dogs and killing time, and then take my blood pressure — an annoying procedure scheduled twice a day. I expect to spike high, because alcohol does jack up your BP.

But…..lo!

Now, I’ll say: yesterday the BP was relatively low (not on target, but not alarming) throughout the day: Average 128/79 despite one reading of 136/84. But still: that was after three weeks of booze-free living. And…in the absence of the, uhm, analgesic herb.

It’s unlikely that said herb’s active ingredients will be absorbed into the bloodstream through the skin. Human skin is fairly impermeable. Although nicotine is absorbed readily, most chemicals that we come in contact with — detergent ingredients, for example — are not. Nevertheless: an average systolic below 120? And two readings at 116/7n? Shortly after ingesting a different chemical well known for its capacity to inflate blood pressure score?

To coin a phrase: holy sh!t.

Throw open the Hypochondriac’s Treasure Chest (i.e., the Internet) and google the active ingredient + blood pressure. And damned if there isn’t a study — in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, which has an impact factor of 12.5(!) — showing that the stuff did in fact reduce blood pressure in a small test group. The authors theorize that the result was caused by the ingredient’s tendency to reduce stress.

Yeah.

The back is somewhat better this morning — still hurts, but walking up the hallway no longer requires bracing oneself against the wall. The fact that it’s getting better suggests (maybe) an injury, rather than crumbling bones. This morning after a hot bath, I rubbed a bunch more of the magical  mystery cream into the hip joint and lower back, and also into the mastectomy scars, which are fine during the day but in the wee hours hurt enough to wake one out of a sound sleep. If the active ingredient actually does absorb through the skin, presumably by this evening I’ll be relaxed enough to reproduce those figures — preferably without benefit of the vino.

In herbi veritas?

Life’s Daily Vicissitudes vs. Blood Pressure

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Or, we could say, vicissitudes vs. your health…

Okay, so here’s what happened:

1) A friend noticed the post in which I whinged at great length about Cardiodoc and the crazy blood-pressure reading in his office taken, after a nightmare drive down there, by a clerk who didn’t know what she was doing and…oh, hell, on and on and freaking on. She remarked that stress indeed does jack up your blood pressure, and that you can often bring the numbers down by deep-breathing for a few minutes before allowing yourself to be subjected to the test. If you’ve ever taken LaMaze or yoga or voice classes, you know how to do this breathing technique.

2) I think…oh, yeah? That sounds like woo-woo. A brief Google search shows it is not woo-woo and that indeed, a study has been done that shows a five- to ten-minute period of controlled breathing indeed can lower blood pressure numbers. Yea verily, no less an authority than Harvard University reports the results of said study. Indeed, there’s a gadget — which the Mayo approves(!) — that can help with this scheme. Alternatively, silently repeating a mantra about 100 to 150 times will also do the trick. One such mantra is the Ave Maria, in Latin (not the English version), which I can rattle off as easily as my usual mantra, “Quit that damn barking!”

3) Izzat so? think I. Okay, let’s test that little fucker. Why ohhhh why do I not believe it? So along about 5:30 in the afternoon, I take the usual series of three readings, one after another, as instructed by the cardiodocs who have harassed…uhm, seen me. Then I try a brief period, about three to five minutes, of deep breathing, the kind I was taught to do in LaMaze classes and then later by a yoga instructor. And… God help us, here are the results:

Got that? Systolic pressure — the one that really counts — dropped from 136 (on the high side of “moderately elevated”) to 129 (on the low side of “moderately elevated”) after just a few minutes of relaxation exercise. That’s seven points. Diastolic, interestingly, rose a point…

4) I think that is batshit crazy and prepare to disregard it. But still: I’m kinda impressed.

5) A night goes by and the next morning SDXB shows up at the door with NG (New Girlfriend). This alone is enough to raise my blood pressure, but, as usual, that’s another story. We go out and walk for an hour or so behind North Mountain. Then we go to a restaurant, where I have a cup of iced tea and they reveal their right-wing tendencies. Which is OK, but…blood-pressure enhancing. On the way, we have been discussing the craziness that is Phoenix-area traffic…and…just as we’re all agreeing that given our choice we would stay off the roads here, the sounds of brakes and a CRASH erupt behind us. The woman behind us has been rear-ended by the chucklehead behind her. By the grace of God, she was far enough behind us to miss rear-ending SDXB’s car. But it was a close call, and it was evident that her passenger was injured. In the Suspicions Confirmed Department: charming.

6) So I am stressed when I get home. Also very hungry. I fix a fairly hefty meal of a couple lamb chops, grilled potatoes, tomatoes, and spinach braised in butter with almonds and pine nuts. And I have two glasses of wine and a fistful of chocolate chips. (Bad!) Then I start to tear around to pick up the backyard, the kitchen, and the house, test the pool, cope with barking dogs, dodge the daily cop helicopter buzz-over, pay the bills and…and…

7) As all this controlled chaos is going on, I think “What would happen if I tried the deep-breathing thing with the BP monitor, right now in the middle of all this hectic racing around?

Hmmm…. As noted in this spreadsheet, I did not wait several minutes to “rest” before running the BP monitor. Between the first and second test, I did about three or four minutes of deep breathing. The second test, interestingly, registered a 10-point drop in systolic pressure; five points for diastolic. Trying again without the fancy breathing maneuver got a rise in PB of four points. That notwithstanding, 125 is within the permissible range for an old bat like me.

Average BPs were 132/80.8 last night and 125.7/81 this afternoon. Last night: after sitting quietly before testing, and including one (1) test with deep breathing. This afternoon: no rest before the first measure but with deep-breathing before the first and second measures; with no deep breathing between the second and third measures.

Normally, if I did not sit and rest before the first measure, my blood pressure would be several points higher. I simply hate, loathe, and despise the blood-pressure test — not because it’s uncomfortable especially, but because it’s a damned time-suck and because it makes me nervous. I just really, really do not enjoy this procedure, whether done at home or in a doctor’s office. It stresses me out every time, and I suspect that alone elevates my blood pressure.

So what is implied here is that deep breathing before the first effort this afternoon, done — against all advice — directly after eating a large meal, after drinking alcohol, and after hassling around physically, probably pushed the first measure down significantly, to 131/80. Since my average blood pressure readings over the entire month of December was 133/83, always taken on an empty stomach and after resting, that is very probably a nontrivial difference. Certainly 121/75 is nontrivial.

What if my belly were not stuffed and I had not just scarfed down two glasses of wine and I had been sitting quietly as usual and then had tried the LaMaze/yoga/chanteuse breathing maneuver?  Welp, we’ll have to wait awhile for that part of the experiment. But…it’s interesting, isn’t it?

By the time I got to Cardiodoc’s office the other day, I was in a rage. I’d encountered two truly crazed drivers, one of whom tried to get me to break the law before doing so himself. I was trying to balance a computer and a blood-pressure machine in my arms when the receptionist shoved a bureaucratic form in my face to fill out — one that I’ve filled out three times already, identically every time — and then demanded that I dig out a bunch of Medicare and insurance cards that she also had photocopied three or four times already in the past and that had not changed. Before I could fill out even half a page of the damned form I was called into the back office, where an apparently oblivious underling took my blood pressure incorrectly — clearly had no training (or if she did, it hadn’t registered in her pea brain…).

So, if stress and annoyance affect your blood pressure — and they most certainly do — then it was not surprising the figures elicited at Cardiodoc’s office were outrageously high.

Do they justify putting me on a medication that will make me sick? Possibly, if the numbers were consistent. But they’re not.

Day from Hell: Part II

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Ha haaaaa! It didn’t stop after I sat down for awhile and tried to unwind.

So come eventide, it was dinnertime for the dogs. Cassie goes in a back bedroom to dine, so that Ruby can’t shove her aside and grab her Molecules.

Dogs must have Molecules: every single last flavor molecule left on a dog dish or that might have slopped onto the floor after all the food is vacuumed into the dog.

And this is where the competition between Ruby and Cassie comes in: Flavor Molecule Wars. To keep them from tearing each other apart, I’ve taken to feeding them on opposite sides of a closed door. Since it’s now a bit too cold to put Ruby on the back porch, Ruby gets the kitchen and Cassie gets the bedroom.

While the royalty is dining, I take it into my feeble brain to use the blender in a little household hack: I wish to thin some aging hair conditioner with water so as to use it as a laundry softener — a function the stuff performs admirably.

Haul the blender jar out of its kitchen cabinet, go to set it on the countertop, and WOOP! It slips out of my hand, crashes to the floor, EXPLODES all over the kitchen. Glass flies everywhere, including into the dog’s food dish.

Ruby is terrorized. BUT…ah yes, but Ruby is a corgi. Nothing deters a corgi from eating. She’s shivering in fear, but she’s still trying to scarf down her food, which by now is glittering with sharp pieces of glass.

Snatch her up and carry her away from the chow — I hope before she swallows any glass. We’ll know by morning, I expect. Lock the shaken dog into a different bedroom; then run back there with a fresh plate of food, which she instantly attacks.

It’s been a long time, I reflect while vacuuming up glass, since I’ve broken glass all over the floor like this. Occasionally a wine glass will break in the dishwasher or sink, but dropped jars have become a thing of the past.

SDXB used to drop glasses and jars all the time. This, we thought, was because he had a depth perception problem: it was hard for him to tell exactly how far item X was from counter Y or faucet Z, and so glasses were constantly getting busted. For that reason, I bought a set of drinking glasses in the heavy Mexican bottle-glass tradition. These things are, for all practical purposes, unbreakable — years later, the entire set still resides in the kitchen cabinet. Two prior sets of less rustic-looking glassware were demolished within months.

Luckily, speaking of demolition, I happen to have not one but two extra blender jars. So despite the annoyance, the hassle, and the time suck, not all was lost.

What. A. Day!!!

Day from Hell: Halfway Point…

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Have you ever noticed that when one thing goes wrong, everything goes wrong?

It started yesterday, really: Arriving at the Mayo along about 2:00 p.m. for a CAT scan, I’m informed that the imaging machine has been up and down a couple of times during the day, so they’re running a little late.

How much “little late”?

Ahem…well, about three hours.

Holy fuck. It’s an hour’s drive, one way, out there: two hours through homicidal traffic, round trip. I save an hour of misery by depositing two hours in the Mayo’s misery machine.

Still, I do have other things to do with my time than twiddling my thumbs in a waiting room.

“Look,” say I. “I am not in pain and whatever ails me isn’t about to kill me. Why don’t we reschedule, and then you can move everyone who’s sitting out there looking patient/cranky/miserable up 15 or 20 minutes.”

“Oh, no no. It’s no problem. They’ve been catching up!”

Uh huh. READ “We are check-in staff, not scheduling staff.” Also known as “not my job.”

So I take a seat and wait for an hour or more. Luckily, I brought a yellow pad with which to doodle. I make some notes on the direction in which I intend to take the current mini-project.

Some people waiting there are clearly very sick (that, after all, is why you pay extra to go to the Mayo). I remain convinced that they should get priority, since they should not have to sit around till the cows come home to get attention.

An hour later, two of us get called in to a pre-examination waiting room. She’s one of the folks who is obviously, visibly, very ill. Very sweet, too. I learn, as she speaks through a paper face mask clearly intended to protect her from the contagion of her fellow waiting-room denizens, that she’s from Seattle and she has a husband who has manfully stood with her through a long and spectacularly difficult illness: he “retired” from his job to take care of her. This couple is decidedly not at retirement age. Another is a guy who is less visibly in pain, a sufferer of chronic kidney problems. He does not complain, but what he describes is something that has to be fairly excruciating. He is a Republican, but one with common sense. We get on well and if we were not at the Mayo Clinic would no doubt be solving the nation’s problems over several beers.

Finally I escape: yes, three hours late. Trudge across the Valley through rush-hour traffic (why do they call sitting in miles-long lines of cars a “rush”????). Bolt down a few bites of food, feed the dogs, and fly out the door to choir…for which I am totally not prepared.

BUT… minutes before I must race out, an email comes in from M’hijito. He has put his back out, big-time, and is beside himself a) with pain and b) with frustration that this comes just when he has arranged to take two days off work to enjoy life. Do I still have any of the droggas that I obtained during the Year of the Surgeries?

Well. Yes, I do. What he doesn’t know is that I have stashed them (where he cannot find them and take them away from me) to use as the key to my Final Exit, whenever it may be needed. Which could be…oh, very possibly right now, depending on the results from this CAT scan.

Hm.

I also have certain other chemicals obtained in states where they can be purchased legally.

A first-aid kid assembled, I fly down to his house and find him…not there.

Yeah. So…where the f*** is he? I do not know. The house looks like…well, a bachelor pad. I leave the scene to your imagination, which will have to be fairly vivid to be up for the job. So I deposit the medicaments on the kitchen counter, find a piece of paper and (miraculously!) a pen, and drop a note to him in the middle of the living room floor directing him to the source of first aid. Then fly to choir, worrying that he may be at some “urgent” care center.

Later I learn he’s gone to a movie because, says he, he feels better sitting than laying down or standing up. Read “I do not want you to know about the girl I’m with.” Okay.

Moving on…

The light dawns this morning. If anything it is even murkier than it was yesterday. Hoooollleeee sh!t.

Roll out of the sack around 7 a.m., which is about when it gets light at this time of year.

Go to e-mail to check on the Son’s condition. No clue about that…but lo! Here’s an email from a client in Singapore demanding that I produce an estimate on a project we’ve discussed in passing: by 9:00 a.m. September 22, Singapore time.

By now it’s 10:30 p.m. Singapore time, December 21.

Estimate? On what? To my knowledge, I have not even seen his current project. I search incoming and sent e-mail. On the third go-round, I realize his co-author is another of my clients, and this individual has indeed sent me the article and its associated correspondence… As attachments to an e-mail that is a reply to an e-mail from me (itself a reply) that already contained an attachment. In other words, his attachment is in a message that already contained attachments.

WTF?

I download these and find it is a large project.

It’s 9:00 before I get it figured out and calculate the costs plus the PayPal gouges and prepare a formal estimate that they can present to their institution.

BUT…I was supposed to have my car at Chuck the Wonder-Mechanic’s place at 9:00 a.m.

And I’ve forgotten to feed the dogs. Throw some food down and fly into the back of the house to wash the face,. brush the teeth, and and toss on some marginally presentable clothes. Haven’t had a chance to bolt down breakfast.

Fly back into the kitchen, pour some hot water over some coffee grounds in a French Press, slice a few bits of cheese to munch in transit. Step on a dog dish I’ve left in the middle of the kitchen floor. Twist my ankle, bruise my instep royally, but amazingly enough, fail to break the dish.

Swear like a sailor — a veteran sailor, nay, a pirate. The back door is open. The sweet little prissy little mother now living in Sally’s house hears this imprecation and exclaims in horror. F*** you, you twit, I think while limping back to the office to retrieve the car keys and the credit cards.

Along about 9:10, I leave the house, computer in tow — I hope to get some work done while sitting in Chuck’s waiting room, even though he doesn’t provide an Internet connection for the hoi or the polloi. Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner is already resident in the car, having broken down yesterday: the plan was to get him fixed at Leslie’s on the way home.

Turning east into the glaring sun, I cannot find my sunglasses. I search as best as I can while driving, and cannot find them. Sh!t…what could have happened to them? It’s not something I would’ve taken into the house…but failing to find them after much groping around, I figure that has to be what happened. Either that or the damn things fell out of the car in some parking lot.

Headed out of the neighborhood… I follow a route of back streets in order to avoid the spine-wrenching speed bumps and the tooth-grinding roundabouts that decorate the most direct feeder streets. At the corner of Neighborhood Lane North-South and Main Feeder Street East-West, I spot a cop car, lights flashing. Figure one of the locals has driven out in front of one of the crazy fools who speed across Main Feeder Street E-W, so slow down for what I expect to find is a fine wrecky-poo.

Nope. No wreck. Instead, it’s a cop and a civilian car and uniformed cops walking around. And there’s the resident of the rental house on the corner, out in her front yard in her bathrobe (it is a chilly morning), looking exceptionally unhappy.

Mm-hmmm. A Police Situation.

Over the past week or so, neighbors on the Nextdoor social network have reported several incidents where creeps sorry, strangers have shown up at the front door, knocked or rung the doorbell, and when confronted with the occupant, identified themselves in various transparently spurious ways. Painfully clear that these people are looking for opportunities to burgle. So I’m thinking that’s probably what happened here. Either that or one of the spouses took it upon him/herself to wallop the other one. Who knows?

Since I’m running so late, I’ve missed the worst of the rush hour and it takes only about half the expected time to arrive at Chuck’s. Of course, because now I am late, I’m told to get in line…meaning a one- to two-hour wait. That’s OK. Car mechanics are, by and large, convenable company.

Ensconced in Chuck’s …uhm…waiting room after having sponged another half-cup of coffee from the boys, I examine the bruised foot. Hurts, but it doesn’t look anywhere near as bad as expected.

Turn on the computer and consider what to do. Before leaving, I’d typed the notes I’d made at the Mayo yesterday into the work in progress; hit “save,” or so I thought. But don’t feel very creative and am worried about the Chinese math papers. So open the response to the reviewers and start to work on it in a desultory way.

Start to write a comment to Paragraph 2 when…ker-blankoooooh!!!! The file goes completely white and…yes…fucking Wyrd CRASHES, taking down the other two files that were open.

It is, as it develops, a major crash.

Manage to recover the program, but it takes another hour to recover the crashed goddamn files. The one I’d added data to and had saved seemed to have lost data. It “recovered” in several iterations, no two of which were identical — and all free of the most recently added passage. After much despair, I finally found — as by a fluke — a version that contained the data I’d entered at 7 a.m., suggesting it probably had retained the content I had entered earlier yesterday.

The Chinglish response to peer reviewers…not so much.

Fortunately, I’d only sifted through a couple of paragraphs of that thing. But every sentence that you have to do twice is a sentence that costs you money.

Chuck arrives, himself running late because his wife, who is very sick indeed, is having an exceptionally bad morning. {sigh}

Chuck and Mrs. Chuck are one of those fairy-tale couples who still, 50 years later, are still deeply, passionately in love. And when you hear Chuck describe their travails, you know that watching her suffer (unto what, at great length, will be her death) is even more painful to him than it is to her. You wish there was something that could be done, but you know there is not.

Selfishly enough, this does not help your outlook.

The men finish with the car. I search for my expensive prescription sunglasses one more time, before setting out on the roads again. No, I do not find them.

Northbound, the road is under construction (is there any street in Lovely Uptown Phoenix that is not torn up?). Finally make it to the Leslie’s pool store. Search for the expensive prescription sunglasses again. No, I do not find them.

Schlep Harvey in to be fixed. Find another piece of the disintegrating pool brush in his innards. Discuss cartridge filters with the beloved Leslie’s guy. While we’re chatting, he spots a shoplifter exiting.

This is so commonplace he doesn’t even rise to the bait. {sigh}

I do not mention to him that I’ve ordered a new cartridge filter from his competition, Swimming Pool Service and Repair (because they do not gouge me for a “trip charge,” or at least they are not forthcoming enough to admit that’s what they’re doing). Reflect on how extremely annoyed I am that a) they’re ripping me off for $1,250 for the privilege and b) Leslie’s is only charging $799 for such a filter.

Leslie’s, of course, is not advertising the installation charge, and so I feel pretty confident that the bottom line would be about the same. Still, I’m irked.

Drag the repaired Harvey out to the car, feeling happy not to be panhandled on the way. Search for the sunglasses again, thinking maybe they fell under the seats and got stuck in the exceptionally annoying narrow crevasse between the Venza’s seats and its exceptionally annoying credenza lash-up between the seats.

Back in the ‘hood, I head up Neighborhood Lane NS, retracing my back-roads route toward the house. Naturally I get behind a U.S. Postal Service truck!

Understand: the mail isn’t delivered in our parts until after 5:00 p.m. WTF is this guy doing here at this time of day? There’s not enough room to get around him, so I have to make a U-turn (a fairly elaborate maneuver on a narrow street) and go back down to an east-west neighborhood lane, make my way to Feeder Street NS, and dodge fellow nut-cases and confused workmen to get back to the Funny Farm.

It’s almost noon by the time I get home. All I’ve had for breakfast is a slice of cheese, one decent cup of coffee, and a great deal of caffeinated swill.

Fly into the house, turn on the computer. Find response to early-morning worried e-mail from M’hijito. The high-test addictive drug I delivered scares the bedoodles out of him. He declines to swallow it. I suggest he cut a pill in two or that he try the marginally legal alternative also delivered to his precincts last night. And I cannot figure out how to demand that he return the H-T AD without revealing that I want it for suicidal purposes, having determined not to go through a helluva lot more Healthcare Bullshit in the future. Some things, you simply cannot explain to anyone under the age of about 65 or 70. Especially if they’re your kid.

Drag the computer and Harvey out of the car, let the dogs into the backyard, retrieve two pieces of leftover pizza from the fridge and set them into the toaster oven to warm. Pour a glass of wine.

On impulse, search the car again. This time I finally find my spectacularly overpriced shades: under the choir binder in the passenger seat…where I’ve already searched twice, fruitlessly. The only explanation is that the damn things dematerialized the first two times I searched for them.

{sigh}

So it goes. A long day consisting of annoyance after frustration after socially delicate predicament after grief after annoyance.

Nutter Season on the Roads

by

‘Tis the season to go batshit on the roads of lovely uptown Phoenix!

Running out of dog food; running out of allergy pills; flat out of garlic; need tomatoes. Realizing I don’t want to buy our favorite Christmas dinner entrée — Costco rack of lamb — during the actual horrible hectic week of Christmas, I decided I’d better go after those things NOW, not later. So along about mid-morning — late enough to miss the rush-hour roadblocks, early enough to miss the lunch-hour crowds — I set out.

Only a few stores have Freshpet dog food in the exotic rolls at a reasonable price. Fry’s is one. AJ’s. Walmart — but Walmart is often out of it.

Meanwhile, these allergy drugs I need are highly problematic. In order to safely ingest two 10-mg tablets of Claritin (loratidine, if you want to pay a reasonable price for it) in one 24-hour period, it can not be Claritin D (which contains pseudoephedrine, which keeps me awake all night if I take it after about noon) and it can not be the “extended release” variety. It’s got to be plain, boring, ordinary loratidine in 10 mg tablets.

But I also need a hit of pseudoephedrine (Sudafed) in the morning, to clear the tooth-searing congestion. No, I can not take Benadryl during the daytime hours: it puts me in a coma.

The gummint has decided to make it hard for meth cookers to get enough pseudoephedrine to make marketable amounts of their product (thereby driving the market for the drugs right straight into the arms of the Mexican drug cartel, but that’s another tale). You can only get a limited amount, you have to sign for it, your purchase is reported to the federal government, and presumably a record of your purchase is preserved for perpetuity.

I got the current bottle of plain unadorned loritidine 10 mg at the Fry’s at Tatum & Shea, a long way from here. That Fry’s also carries the dog food. But it’s a frikkin’ LONG drive. I figure if that Fry’s has the drug, then surely the one at 20th Street and Camelback will have it. It’s a schlep, but not as awful a schlep as driving to the outer fringe of Paradise Valley.

Well. No.

They do not have it. What they have is a pharmacy clerk with an IQ in the negative numbers. First, even though I hand him the empty bottle of the stuff I bought at the other Fry’s, he cannot figure out what it is. Finally he realizes it’s Claritin and tries to sell me Claritin D. I tell him no, the doctor said not to use Claritin D. He says they don’t have plain Claritin or unadorned loratidine.

I’m already annoyed as hell, because the roads are effing awash in nut-case drivers. There’s the one on 7th Avenue who gets into the fast lane, slows to 30, and weaves back and forth over the lane markings. Stoned? Or yakking on the phone? The one who will not take the right of way (which he has in extravagant bounty) to make a left turn on the green arrow, so we all get stuck at the red light. The one who cuts me off as she swerves into the parking lot and then grabs the last parking space. (Hope she was duly gratified.) And so on.

Okay, I’m now really mad and thinking I’ll schlep up to Tatum & Shea but by the time I reach the car on the far end of the adjacent parking lot have cooled off enough to think I do NOT want to drive that far. The Walmart has the dog food (maybe) and the Walgreen’s at 16th Street and Glendale is usually well supplied and is sort of maybe on the way to the Walmart.

So I drive up there, encountering the one who swerves right out of the west-bound middle lane, cutting off the guy in the right-turn lane next to him. They missed colliding: how, I cannot imagine.

The bright spot of the day is the Walgreen’s clerk, who has got to be one of the cutest young men I’ve ever seen, in 72 years of male-gazing. He’s handsome, he’s manly, he’s got a sweet expression, and…he’s dyed a streak of his coffee-brown hair aqua. I love him. I want to bring him home. Will he get along with corgis?

With a great deal of earnestness, he searches for the desired variant of loritadine.

No, Walgreen’s does not have it.

“Can you buy OTC pharmaceuticals from Amazon?” I ask him, on a whim.

“Sure! Bet you can get this there!” He whips out his iPhone and discovers a gold mine of plain ordinary unadorned loritadine at Amazon, much of it cheaper than Walgreen’s would sell it for, if Walgreen’s had it. While he’s at it, he also discovers Costco has it.

Well, dang: I have to go to Costco anyway, so WTF? I’ll ask for it there. Maybe I can get a lifetime supply.

Speaking of lifetime supplies, The Boy with the Blue-Green Hair sells me a box of 96 pseudoephedrine pills, about three times as much as I’ve been able to get before and plenty to make up a  Mountain Dew bottle full of low-grade meth.

I drive down to AJ’s to pick up the dog food, AJ’s being on the way to the nearest Costco.

People who shop at AJ’s are by nature Entitled, and so their attitude toward their fellow drivers is “Get Outta My Way, Ya Crazy Fool!” But today they’re not only entitled, they’re full-out nuts. One guy tries to cut me off as I’m turning left across three lanes of oncoming traffic into the parking lot. He fails. There’s a point at which even the craziest of crazy Phoenix drivers will back down when confronted with an obviously lunatic woman. Careening into the parking lot, I meet another one who tries to cut me out of a parking space. Give it to him and grab a better one, screw you very much, bub!

AJ’s has the dog food — $2 more than Walmart and Fry’s charge, but at least they have it. Pony up the $4 gouge so as to stock in enough to be sure to have enough to last the hounds over the holiday.

Onward to Costco, past the public park that serves as a flophouse for spaced-out addicts. The grass is littered with sleeping derelicts. Thank my lucky stars I don’t have to live in the grungy apartments that surround this garden spot. You wouldn’t dare let your child play there. I wouldn’t even take my dog over there.

As usual, the Costco parking lot is full of nitwits who are SO determined to get as close to the door as humanly possible (god FORFEND that they should have to walk ten extra steps!) that they drive around searching for someone loading their car, park in the middle of the aisle, and hold up the traffic until the target parking space is vacated.

One avoids these by parking at the far end of the lot, but today even that area — which is usually half-empty — is full of nut cases. One of them cuts me off in his hurry to grab a spot three spaces closer to the (very distant) door.

The Costco’s pharmacy clerk is even dumber than the Fry’s nitwit, if that is possible. He tries to persuade me that the box marked “24-hour” is not “timed-release.” This is after I’ve told him that I do NOT want Claritin D. The 24-hour Claritin is Claritin D; it contains timed-release pseudoephedrine. That’s what the “D” stands for: “decongestant.” And the “decongestant” is pseudoephedrine (Sudafed, for the brand-name acclimated).  Even if the Mayo’s quack had not specifically told me not to use Claritin D, I would not buy it because I cannot take pseudoephedrine after about 11 in the morning and still sleep at night. It jacks up your blood pressure and turns you into the Energizer Bunny.

Honest to God.

By the time I get home, I’ve been on the road for almost three hours. I’m starved and I want a glass of wine — of which, as you can tell, I’ve now had a couple. The homeward drive has entailed getting behind an airhead who will not turn right on red (eventually he does, showing he knows it’s legal) — at a red light that lasts half your lifetime.

Fly in the house, order up a package containing two bottles of loritadine from Amazon, and wish I’d thought of that first.

But at least I’ve got the chow for Christmas Dinner. What I’m going to do for the Christmas Eve potluck escapes me. But I’ll figure that out…later. Much later.