Coffee heat rising

Angst

Of Bums and Dogs and Homes

by

CharleyCharley the Golden Retriever is here visiting, whilst his human travels to Colorado to visit Granma (104 years old and still kickin’ vigorously, believe it or not!) and then spends a few days at his favorite fishing hole.

Charley is utterly, totally, completely harmless. He is not a German shepherd or a Doberman pinscher or a Belgian malinois, no. No, indeed. He will not remove your foot, no matter what nefarious shenanigans you get up to. Holy mackerel, you could even be a President of the United States elected with the collusion of an enemy foreign power, and he still would not remove your foot. He would, instead, love you into submission.

But he’s big. Very, very big. And something there is about a very big dog that is satisfying.

For, after all…

The human does not live among the harmless. Sooner or later (probably sooner) the human is going to have to decide whether to continue to den among the feckless and the criminal, or to move itself and its tribe far far away, to another galaxy in another time.

Yesterday I’m sitting here snarfing down breakfast when I hear thunk twang whack coming from our lovely alley. These interesting noises have become so commonplace that Ruby the Corgi Pup, who fancies herself a watchdog, no longer even bothers to bark at them.

This goes on long enough that I wonder what the f*ck, haul myself to my agèd feet, climb up on a landscaping rock, and peer over the wall.

Yep. There’s a bum out there.

He’s big, he’s white, he’s red-headed, he’s filthy, and he’s pulled all the trash out of the big communal garbage bin. He’s going through every, single, tiny bit of it, piece by piece, apparently deciding what to keep and what to throw back.

A bum fishing expedition, as it were.

He has a big plastic bag on the ground next to him.

It looks a whole lot like the garbage bag containing two weeks’ worth of junk mail and garbage recently discarded from my house.

I think…oh shit! What’s in that thing?

Nothing that contains an account number or a Social Security number: all of that trash gets filed in the Bottomless Trash Collector that is my office. BUT…

Yes. BUT every piece of effing junkmail has my name and address on it. No, I do not shred every piece of incoming effing junkmail. To do so would take half my lifetime. And even though I have a heavy-duty shredder that will consume a defunct credit card, the bastard junk-mailers try to force you to open their envelopes by stuffing them with so much paper they’ll jam the heaviest-duty shredder you can buy. I do not have enough hours left in my life to open every piece of trash that’s sent to me and run it, page by page, through the shredder. So…if it’s not stamped First Class Mail, it goes directly into the trash, without passing go and without being opened.

Claro que this is not the brightest idea…

After another stretch of time, it dawns on the agèd mind that the recycling and the garbage were picked up on Thursday. Our bum guest has come visiting on a Friday…a day late and presumably quite a few dollars short.

The relief is short-lived, of course. because the message remains painfully obvious: never throw out anything that has anything personally identifiable on it!

Between that and the day-before-yesterday’s reminder that we do not live in the safest of all possible neighborhoods, once again I find myself wondering: is it time to pull up stakes?

And if so, Where would I go?

I do not want to move. I love my home. I love my yard. I love my neighbors. I even love my (somewhat questionable) neighborhood. I love living close to my church. I love living close to my son. I love being more or less in the center of what passes for the city’s cultural life (snark!). I love living close to a mountain park. I love having an excuse to carry a pistol or a can of Bear Spray with me when I go out…oops. Oh. Not so much that latter. Oh well.

So. What to do about the immediate problem: thieves sifting through the garbage looking for anything they can use or sell, including identifying documents?

Well, the trash goes out about once every two weeks. One thing I could do is collect a week’s worth of dog mounds (that is quite a lot…corgis are actually big dogs on short legs) and, before tying off the trash bag. dump the whole accretion in on top. That would probably discourage most guys from pawing through the bag’s contents.

The gent I saw yesterday? Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on how desperate he is to stay current with his fixes, I imagine.

Then we have the larger problem: Despite all the good-hearted jawing, these derelicts are NOT harmless.

Most recent obvious case in point: the young father who was sitting in Southern California restaurant when some homeless mentally ill nut case walked up to him and stabbed him in the throat.

This is not as uncommon as you might think. When a person’s voices tell him to do something, it’s just not that easy to say “no.”

One of the immediate causes that led my ex- and I to sell our very lovely home in the historic Encanto District — this happened after the ax murderer chopped our 80-year-old neighbor to pieces, donned her tennis shoes, and drove away in her car — occurred when a local bum noticed a woman who regularly appeared early at her employers’ dirty-shirt law office to fix the coffee and use a few quiet moments to catch up on her tasks. His voices clued him to the fact that she was actually Satan, and advised that he should kill her. Understandably, that’s exactly what he did: stabbed her to death.

Encanto in the 1970s was enjoying the same influx of “homeless” bums and drug addicts as North Central is today…occasioned by the same influence: Our Honored City Parents, who do not give a damn what happens to your neighborhood as long as it enriches their already wealthy patrons. Then we had downtown redevelopment. Now we have the light-rail — locally known as the Bum Express.

I do not feel safe visiting the grocery stores in the neighborhood, which are overrun with lightrail-riding transients. To do routine shopping,  I drive out of the area, sometimes way out of the area. Nor do I feel very safe carrying the trash out to the alley garbage bins.

Driving my trash to some other neighborhood is not very practical, so I have to be careful to check the area before unlocking the gate, and never go out there after dark.

The German shepherds used to provide some protection in the trash-dumping department. But these little corgis? Not so much.

Should I buy another shepherd dog?

Not a chance. The fact still remains that I no longer am physically vigorous enough to handle a large, powerful, high-drive dog. Nor can I afford the concomitant vet bills. A big dog costs big money. And without a salary, I just don’t have it.

I could get one of those outdoor fire pits and use it to reduce the junk mail to ash. This of course is illegal in Phoenix. But if you did it after dark, when the City’s air watchdogs are home burning trash in their own fireplaces, no one would catch you. Especially not if you dumped the ashes as soon as they were cool enough to dispose of.

The fact is, it’s not very safe to go into the alley. And the fact is, the only place to dispose of your trash is…yes. In the alley.

As a practical matter, it’s beginning to add up to one conclusion: Pretty soon I’m going to have to move someplace that isn’t being actively trashed by our City Parents and their deep-pocketed backers.

And I don’t want to.

To know or not to know…

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…Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them.

Or, in the present case: by opposing, end yourself…

Exeunt, pursued…

To live in a big city is to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous…behavior. Just yesterday the cops pursued some nut case who led them across-town, driving on the light-rail tracks at some points, and finally ended up barging into some hard-working couple’s home, whereupon the cops destroyed the place and the perp killed the cops’ Belgian malinois.

So: yeah. That’s this evening’s wallpaper.

Day is over and the dogs — the corgis, that is, not the fierce police dog — wish to go for a stroll around the neighbors’ lawns. I’m just strapping on a pair of sandals for the purpose when

ROAAAARRRRRRRRR!

Cop Copter! They tear over the house and skid to a stop (as best as a pilot can skid through the sky) over the end of the block, just this side of Conduit of Blight Blvd.

For crap’s sake.

Searchlight glaring, they circle around for fifteen or twenty frantic minutes.

So instead of setting out for Richistan, Bear Spray in hand, the hounds and I hunker down behind locked doors and windows.

{sigh} I am getting very tired of these events. Very tired of having to live behind dead-bolted, barred doors. Very tired of having to dodge bums, panhandlers, burglars, hopped-up drug addicts, thieves, crazed drivers, and wacksh!t nut cases almost every goddamn day of my life. And my dogs’ lives.

Maybe it’s time to move to Prescott. Yarnell. A hundred acres in the middle of nowhere. Enough, already!

See, the thing is: places like Yarnell can’t afford to equip their police departments with helicopters. Hence…quiet.

And hence, the question of the evening: Is it better to know or not to know about the mayhem that’s going on around you?

True enough…I should be thankful to have been warned away from whatever shenanigans were coming down, six or eight houses up the street.

On the other hand, given some silence the dogs and I would have headed in the other direction from the scene of the shenanigans. Chances that we would have encountered the burglar/car break-in artist/murderer/rapist/sticky-fingered derelict were nigh unto nil. And even if we had, I would’ve had the Bear Spray on my belt and a shilelagh in my hand.

(On the other hand, one could ask why the eff anyone would want to go for a doggy-walk if you have to haul a can of high-test pepper spray and carry an ironwood staff with you…)

Seriously: would you not be better off if you didn’t know about these things? If your life were not interrupted every couple of days by buzzing helicopters and whirring sirens? Could the cops not swarm the alley and the yard and the house where the perp is reported to be active, on foot? Without all the random noise, would your nerves not be a great deal less jangled? Would your life not be more peaceful? Would you not get a decent 30 minutes of exercise, instead of parking in front of the computer for that half-hour (and more)?

Portugal. For €150,000, one could buy a three-bedroom manor in the Estremadura. Why are we here at all?

Will Portugal take my dogs?

 

Spin Those Wheels!

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Well, really, I can’t complain SO much about wheel-spinning. Even though I managed to evade working on the Big Annoyance of the Day — shoveling a foot-deep stack of accursed paperwork off the desk — a bunch of stuff actually has gotten done. Ditz, it’s true…but stuff that needed to get done.

Do you ever feel like, even after you’ve managed to power through a lot of tasks, that you still have been spinning your wheels half the day?

Done:

🙂 Clean out pool pump pot; clean out pool strainer basket; reinstall pool cleaner, run pump
🙂 Figure out why irrigation system stopped working (FAIL!)
🙂 Water citrus trees manually
🙂 Water other plants manually
🙂 Spray Dawn detergent solution on plants infested with skeletonizing bugs
🙂 Repair back gate latch
🙂 Repair kitchen cabinet pull
🙂 Pick up mess in house
🙂 Change bed; wash sheets & towels
🙂 Cook and concoct dog food
🙂 Clean up ensuing mess in kitchen
🙂 Pick up dog mounds
🙂  Drag trash out to alley
🙂 Post today’s chapter of If You’d Asked Me… (how to handle harassment of cute young teenager)
🙂 Post link to that on Facebook
🙂 Enter comments in FB writer’s community

Not Done:

🙁 Write the next installment of the Drugging of America series
🙁 Iron jeans
🙁 Write more of Ella’s Story
🙁 Cope with gigantic stack of accursed paper

AND…as you might guess, “Cope with gigantic stack of accursed paper” is the chore that all this wheel-spinning has been designed to avoid. I hate, hate, hate dorking with paperwork.

So I put it off. The bills come in. The checks to deposit come in. The statements come in. This nag, that nag, and the other nag comes in from various vendors and doctors’ offices and creditors. They all get tossed on a table.

They’ve been sitting here for upwards of a month now. The table is beginning to groan under the pile’s weight.

Yes. I’ve paid the bills. But all the rest of it is just sitting there.

It is going to take several hours to plow through all that brain-banging shit. And no. I just do. not. want. to. do. it.

Should write the next Drugging of America piece. And could. That also will be a time-consuming and energy-sucking task. If I start on that now, not enough time will be left in the day to fart with the pile of paper distractions. To say nothing of enough ambition.

One thing I probably could do is have the credit union send statements electronically. That would create three fewer pieces of trash to be plucked out of the mailbox. I’m already downloading all the transactions into Excel as it is.

But you just know, don’t you, that whatever form they use to send these proposed electronic statements will not readily convert to Excel. So that will just inflict three more pieces of useless electronic junkmail to deal with. Like I don’t have enough of that?

So little worthwhile stuff comes in the mail anymore, I hardly ever bother to open the thing. Now that the mailbox has to be fortified and locked, the extra effort entailed in tracking down the key, traipsing it out to the curb, wrestling with the mailbox lid, relocking it, traipsing the key back to the house, and hiding it again makes picking up the mail counterproductive. There simply isn’t enough real mail in there to make it worth being bothered to walk out there and wrestle it out of the box.

Consequently, these days I pick up snail-mail about once a week.

Yesterday, it occurred to me to count: EIGHT out of nine pieces of delivered mail went directly into the trash.

That suggests that about 90 percent of mail being delivered by the U.S. Post Office is junk advertising circulars.

And, therefore,  for every piece of nuisance paperwork that arrives here, nine pieces of trash have to be toted to a recycling bin. Ninety percent of delivered mail represents pointlessly destroyed trees, pointlessly polluting paper mills, pointlessly polluting ink manufacture, pointlessly expended gasoline to tote trees, paper, ink, and junk mail around, pointlessly expended power to run those mills and drive the printing presses and operate the equipment to recycle trash that is never even opened or looked at.

That pisses me off. It ought to piss you off, too.

Oh, well. /rant.

I’d better get up and go deal with the pieces of paper that actually do require attention. Of a sort.

 

So much for best-laid plans…

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LOL! Really, don’t you know this to be true? IT NEVER FAILS.

And yes, damn straight: Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.

😀

So you’ll recall I had this Grand Plan to get marginally in shape before tomorrow’s stress test at the Mayo. The 10-day lead time gave me eight or nine days in which to get out into the Phoenix Mountain parks and build up at least a marginal degree of stamina.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Lovely spring weather. Old lady who loves to hike. Good way to run off ginger and orneriness. And maybe even fake out a cardiodoc. Dontcha love it?

As an idea, it is lovable.

As reality? Well…

So I got several two-hour-long walks in, three times up Shaw Butte (about four miles in a fairly steep round trip) and a couple times around the back of North Mountain, on the flat (a little under four miles RT).

Then it rained. Used that as an excuse not to go out: very convenient.

One day down.

Then I realized I had to get off the dime and write the next chapter of Ella’s Story if I’m gonna keep posting stuff in the current long-term give-away scheme. This is a time-consuming proposition. Unlike journalism, unlike blogging, copy for works of fiction does NOT just pour out of the ends of your fingers.

Two days down.

Saturday, I eat something that I should have known better than to eat. Not surprisingly, it inflicts a roaring case of Montezuma’s revenge. Not only am I enjoying the collywobbles, but before long I’m in a LOT of pain. Like…should I go to the ER??? type pain.

After the fun surgery for the intestinal obstruction (kindly occasioned by scarring from an old appendectomy), the surgeon’s PA informed me that sooner or later the obstruction would recur. And the next time, fixing it will be a lot more involved and will not lend itself to laparoscopy.

Welp: several considerations:

  1. First, I would rather die than go through that again.
  2. Second, when you have the collywobbles, your innards are moving, indicating they’re not blocked.
  3. Third, I would rather die than go through that again.
  4. Fourth, the pain is not the same kind of pain evinced by the adhesive blockage. It’s all over the place instead of localized in one spot.
  5. Fifth, I would rather die than go through that again.

With this calculus in mind, I drop an Imodium. Then (it’s always then with me, dammit!) I reflect that might not have been the best of all possible ideas. Ohhh well.

The diarrhea ceases, not surprisingly. The pain continues. I crawl into the sack with the two annoyed dogs.

Three days down.

Next thing I know, it’s Sunday morning.

Our pastor has cooked up a tradition that he calls “Switch Sunday,” in which once a month the 9 a.m. service is a full Bells & Smells performance. The early service, which caters to families with kids, is the usual much more boring modern version…and it engages the services of the volunteer choir, which on other weekends  sings at the later service.

I feel slightly better (though the gut still hurts) and decide to chance showing up at choir. If worst comes to worst, I can always leave.

This means it’s out of the sack at the crack of dawn, feed the dawgs, bolt down breakfast, get washed up, paint face, throw on clothes, and fly out the door. I’m not happy, but neither am I terminal: manage to get there and stick out the whole shindig.

Back at the Funny Farm, I fix lunch/dinner, a halfway decent (read “time-consuming” meal), diddle around, waste time…and eventually realize…holy mackerel! I am really, REALLY sick.

But: the gut (now bound up tight as a drum, thanks to the Imodium) is marginally functioning. That being the case (sort of), I decide against yet another goddamn run on the Mayo’s ER room.

I’ve been up there so often they have a special cubbyhole reserved for me.

Note that during these escapades, no work is getting done. No exercise is getting done. But by about 9 p.m., I do feel enough better to take the hounds on their mile-long circuit. This was not what you’d call one helluva lot of fun, but I figured that if my theory is correct (i.e., I’m not really dying), a walk should help kick-start the innards.

Oh well. At least it doesn’t seem to make things worse.

I crawl back into the sack with the dogs.

Four days down.

Not altogether down. Sunday afternoon whilst I was huddling in the sack, I did manage to draft the last part of the current Ella’s Story chapter, providing a sequel to the chapter that I slapped online this morning. Was kinda pleased with the images that surfaced in a few searches. This great old guy looks a lot like I imagine Dorin the Overseer to look. I’m sure he’s actually an aging Romanian. But what the heck.

This image is yet to be used: the passages I wrote yesterday will describe the exotic landscape of Zaitaf, which sports a methane lake. And what might that look like? Probably somewhat like this:

😀 Can you believe I found that thing?

Now, just think how magical it would be if I could figure out how to make WordPress lose the goddamn fucking extra nonbreaking line spaces!

Oh. Well, that’s the sort of thing that keeps me from doing any creative work: killing time trying to force the code to do what I want it to do.

So, four days of eight were lost to the planned get-fit scheme. Tomorrow morning I will show up that the Mayo fat, flabby, and probably still sporting a bellyache.

Never. Effing. Fails.

Annoyance, Anxiety, and Pain?

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This stuff has gotta stop.

A new doc’s appointment coming up on Friday, I’m wrapping up a blood pressure/events diary by way of discussing the blood pressure conundrum. Fack, what a Pain in the Tuchus, caps and lower-case.

By way of trying to infuse some sense into ream after ream after ream of brain-banging numbers, I took it upon my little self to mark each arguably hypertensive event with a tag relating to any concomitant circumstances or emotional states that might be relevant:

  • Pain, headache
  • Pain, other
  • Annoyance
  • Anxiety
  • Alarm
  • Hot flash

That’s about it. There really aren’t that many things that unnerve my cardiovascular system. but I guess those six are quite enough.

So today I’m organizing 575 entries (yes, you did read that right!) and it strikes me that I’ve entered “Annoyance” an awful lot. Like…oh…at least once a day. Often lots more than once a day.

Indeed. If you believe this little transcript of miseries, I am “annoyed” every single goddamn minute of my life.

Huh! Think o’ that.

Well, “annoyance” runs a fairly wide gamut: from mildly peeved (more junk mail in the postbox!) to irritated (Trump news, computer hassles, driving the homicidal roads of Phoenix) to freaking enraged (Cox makes a hash of things, Mac crashes and loses a sh!tload of data). But what that’s saying is that I traverse a spectrum of emotion that runs from ever so slightly ruffled to mad as a cat…every day. Every freaking day.

No wonder my blood pressure hovers near the ceiling.

And therein lies the issue: That, whatever it is, has gotta stop!

Exactly how one makes a steadily flowing tide of rage come to a stop escapes me. Really: I have no idea. But one expects that recognizing something makes it possible to deal with something.

So one hopes.

Today:

Ah, yes, Today: it began with five hours of wrestling with intransigent computer hardware. An hour on the phone with a Cox tech (Cox has recently taken a page out of Apple’s book and now, mirabilis! offers a service that allows you to talk with a tech in real time). After much thrashing around, he fixed one issue (re-connected the [ever-annoying…] new MacBook to the [unhappy, cranky] Brother printer. Then realized, in short order, that the wi-fi card on the stegosaurus-vintage Mac had crashed.

Finally get breakfast and a couple cups of coffee along about 11 a.m.

Feed the dogs and feed myself. Post a new chapter from The Complete Writer at Plain & Simple Press. Realize it’s a bit too bloggish and…come to think of it, out of date. Rewrite it. Add new material, expanding its scope a bit. But find myself a bit too tired after the morning’s marathon Annoyance to go on at much length.

Decide to take a full half-hour (it expands to 40 minutes) to unwind preparatory to running the last BP measure I intend to commit, by way of finishing off this diary to present to her Doc-hood. Use the time to draft a little bit of the Ella story. Don’t get far.

Numbers: Not too bad. Average: 122.4/78.1. Craziness factor: intense…

Consume afternoon in cleaning up the data I’ve collected and trying to make sense of it, the morning having been blown with trying to make the computers and Internet connection work.

My friend calls to say that her mother has passed. Not unexpected — she was very elderly and not well. But sad. We agree that she should refrain from going to the planned concert this weekend…especially since it happens to fall on her sister’s birthday.

Out the door like a rocket, running late as usual.

Naturally, Missouri Road is blocked down to one-lane-in-both-directions, preparatory to new lane-painting. Not a paint truck in sight, as far as the human eye can see. Takes for fuckin-ever to get through that mess, but fortunately I left not quite so late as it felt. Get to the Apple store right on time.

There we learn that the MacBook cannot be fixed, because Apple considers a nine-year-old computer too superannuated to be bothered with. But given that I dropped it and dented one corner of the thing pretty badly and yet it STILL kept on running, I can’t complain.

Peruse Apple’s present offerings and realize that really…seriously…I should have bought a MacBook Air. It would have cost a fraction of what this MacBook Pro cost; it has enough memory and power to do the main jobs I do; it lacks the annoying touchbar; and its keyboard has not yet been stupidized.

Mistake.

Peruse the iPhones. Learn how to get ahold of refurbished versions and how to recognize the ones that probably will run for a few years. Think the price, even on the second-hand models, is stupidly obscenely fukkin fulminating outrageous.

Oh look! ANNOYANCE!

Drift out of the Apple store. Drift through Saks, check out the Eileen Fisher racks, miss my crazy friend who could spend more money just thinking about it than I can spend working at it. We loved to shop there, which was…crazy, where both of us were concerned. Once in her presence I bought a pile of Eileen’s I couldn’t afford. Took them home. Looked at them and thought holeee shit i can’t afford this. Dropped them back in the bags and returned them.

A week later, happened to pass through the store again, only to find a gigantic end-of-season sale going on. Bought back all the stuff I’d returned, 30% to 50% off. 😀 My friend never knew.

Hit the road at the height of rush hour. Remember not to turn onto Missouri. This leaves just one option: drive up to 24th and go west on Glendale. Traffic is bumper-to-bumper-to-bumper.

But manage to dodge left across oncoming traffic into the (ever-crowded) Sprouts parking lot. Dart in and grab a few things, among the Pomí tomatoes that you can no longer buy anyplace else in town, not even at AJ’s, not even at Fry’s.

Up 16th to Northern, hit a ribbon-shaped parking lot. Nothin’ going on, except a cop helicopter buzzing a ’hood to the north. Just traffic. Traffic. Traffic.

Home, park in front of the computer again. Numbers, numbers, numbers… Forget to feed the dogs. Forget to feed me. Finally give up.

Feed the dogs. Myself, too tired to eat.

Annoyed.

Here’s a beautiful piece we’re singing during Holy Week, one of my favorites. Said a commenter on YouTube:

I felt so distressed this morning and found this lovely piece of music, and it healed my mind. Music like this is so healing. Thanks for posting. Very grateful.

 

Morning at the Mayo…

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So along about 2 a.m. I woke (again!) with a hot flash and the dim sensation of chest pain and, when I checked the numbers, totally soaring blood pressure.

Usually these wee-hours chest aches appear to be pain from the mastectomy scars. If I shift position, it goes away.

Not so this morning. Indeed, before long the pain migrated into the left armpit and down the arm. Lovely.

The nearest hospital is not one with the greatest of all possible reputations. And indeed, I’ve had less than perfect experience in its ER — granted, it was a long time ago…but still…

If you call 911, they will not take you to the Mayo. They will give you the choice of said nearby hospital, St. Joe’s, or Good Samaritan (whatever they’re calling themselves these days).

St Joe’s is the fine institution whose pathologist called me at 7:00 in the evening, said “I’m sorry: you have cancer,” and hung up. So as you can imagine, I’d prefer to go somewhere else. Good Sam is another inner-city hospital, crowded and over-worked.

The only hospital in the Phoenix area that is consistently rated “Excellent” is the Mayo. If you live in North Central and you want to go there, you either get a friend or spouse to drive you or you drive yourself.

Lacking friends or spouses at 2 in the morning, it was into the Toyota and off in a cloud of dust.

Did you know that when there’s no traffic on the Phoenix streets, you can run a red light with no risk of killing anyone or of getting arrested? Did it twice. 😉

Interesting. I’ve never run a red light on purpose before. Nothing happened.

Ripped up the freeway, flying like a bat out of Hell. A six-banger will do that for you, especially when it’s installed in a rather flimsy late-model vehicle. But the guy who’d hit the on-ramp with me (two lanes) was damned if he’d let some woman get in front of him. Before long he disappeared in the distance. Before much longer, I saw the cop lights flashing: caught the poor schmuck.

Thanks, buster: if you hadn’t been going 90, that would’ve been me, even though I was only going 85. 😀

Four hours later, it was clear

a) I was not having a heart attack;
b) I had not had a heart attack;
c) I was not about to have a heart attack (“a very low-risk patient,” said the Mayo’s cardiologist);
d) yep, the blood pressure was very high when I showed up, and
e) yep, the blood pressure dropped down into the normal range well before I keeled over and died.

When I remarked that I’d like to know what the chest aches are if they aren’t a cardiac problem, especially when they seem always to be associated with high blood pressure and/or hot flashes, the Mayo’s ER doc said high blood pressure itself can give you chest pain.

Holy sh!t.

Thus one theory in the offing is hot flash > jacked-up BP > chest pain. But, ER Doc said, she did not believe it was a heart attack. After a slew of tests, she could find no evidence that I’d had a heart attack or that anything was out of whack with the heart itself. She approved of Cardiodoc’s choice of meds and said to keep taking it.

So that was a fine way to spend the night.

Missed the pup’s appointment with the vet to have her teeth cleaned. Missed about five hours of sleep. Missed some peace of mind.

The Mayo, though, is first-rate. They were exceptionally nice to me and kicked into gear the minute I walked in the door. One can’t say that about my experience with other hospital ERs here…