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Dispatches from Hell

Month from Hell: It gets even BETTER!

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Honest to God. If you wrote this stuff into a novel, no one would believe it. Really: it has been just about a disaster a day for the past month or six weeks. Today’s disaster: cancer.

Yeah. The thing I thought was ringworm? Young Dr. Kildare believes it’s skin cancer. He thinks it’s a squamous cell carcinoma.

Charming.

Mine doesn’t look quite like the things in those images. There are some infections you can get that actually look a lot more like it. Whatever it is: dayum! Another little drama…another PITA.

Truth to tell, though: this is a blessing in disguise. I have not been able to get in the door to a dermatologist since my last dermatologist fell off the radar. In our parts, their schedules are so jammed with skin cancer patients and Baby Boomers seeking rejuvenation treatments (which apparently is where the big bucks are…) that many of them won’t even make an appointment with you. Even at the Mayo, where I’m a patient, the wait list is six months.

He gave me a referral, and incredibly, when I dialed the number…are you ready for this?…a live human being answered the phone!!!!!

Jayzus. I don’t know when I last ran into a human being on the phone at a doctor’s office…not in living memory. 😀

Anyway, they arranged to see me on Tuesday. Not only that, but the doc will do a full-body exam, which will give me a chance to ask is there’s anything she can do about the damn neurofibromas. And of course, get rid of the current crop of actinic keratoses, which anyone who lives in Arizona for many years routinely sprouts.

So I don’t feel like it’s exactly world-ending. It’s just another damn nuisance to soak up time. The drive to YDK’s office takes a good 40 minutes, and this dermatologist is even further west — basically out in the vicinity of Sun City, only further to the south.

Stress and Budget Stress

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As you’ve no doubt noticed, stress overall that has nothing to do with finances tends to put stress on your budget. Looked at the bank balance the other day and thought hooleeee shit! Down 12 grand from last June? Really?

Well, yeah: really. And no: not exactly. But it’s still not great. When you’re stressed out with a lot of extraneous bullshit pressing in on your life, the last thing you feel like thinking about is managing your personal finances. But in fact, that is the time that you need to get a grip on the bucks and the budget. Because when you’re distracted with life’s little tragedies, you tend to throw money at your problems without even thinking about it. And because life’s little tragedies tend to get mighty pricey, throwing money away heedlessly is a less than ideal strategy.

This month, with the endless drama of the sick dog and the bashed car and the leaking roof in the biggest rainstorm we’ve had in any Millenial’s living memory and the Great Flood of incoming editorial work and the key to my office door breaking off in the lock (sealing both computers, the voicemail machine, my glasses and all my money stuff in there) and the AMEX card lost or stolen and the receptionist duty I naïvely volunteered for slicing four indispensable hours out of my week and Cassie pissing Lake Urons all over the house and Charley the Golden Retriever disappearing and a weird scary pox thing developing on the hand of the arm where I had a Shingrix shot and more drives to veterinarians through homicidal traffic than I can count and the new Medicare card (now also lost or stolen) not working when I went to get a flu shot and the stove refusing to light and the HVAC unit busting and the pool water clouding from neglect and a hummingbird getting trapped in the skylight and on and on and fuckin’ ON, I just flat gave up on tracking the budget.

Wasn’t any point to it. Money was flying out my door and into the vet’s at the rate of $1200 a hit, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. So it seemed, anyway.

But really, when money is pouring out like water through a hole in the side of a kiddy pool…that’s the time to keep track of what’s going on.

Having failed to do that, I almost fainted when I saw the bank account’s bottom line, since it looked like there was no way the remaining money was going to see me through to time for the next Required Minimum Drawdown (RMD). Social Security just supplements my RMD; the truth is, there’s no way in Hell I can live on Social Security. But I seemed to be looking at a drop of $12,000 in the bank balance from the end of June, 2018. Four grand (plus!) a month????

Given this moment of panic, it took some study to remind myself that I’d set aside several thousand dollars to pay for the property tax, the car registration (which because the dented Venza is much newer than the long-lamented Dog Chariot, is damned bracing), and the homeowner’s and car insurance. Okay, that was mildly reassuring. But we still had the fact that there simply isn’t enough left in cash flow money to cover another nine months. It might last five…if I’m careful. WTF?

Okay: the issue is, I finally realize, that I’ve been setting aside an optimistic $681 a month from Social Security into emergency savings. This was good: much of the expenses I’ve run up will be covered by the amount I’d already managed to squirrel aside before the current Shakespearean tragedy (comedy??) launched. But bad: it doesn’t leave enough in cash flow to cover regular expenses.

So today on the way home from visiting Young Dr. Kildare (yes, goddamn it: another doctor’s visit!!!!!), I’ll need to drop by the credit union and have them adjust the automatic transfer down to $300 a month. I could try to do that online, but since my propensity for screwing up online transactions has given staff there a flinch reflex every time they see me stumbling toward their door, I don’t think that would be wise. Better to get a grown-up who knows what she’s doing to perform this trick, so she doesn’t have to do gymnastics to fix whatever screw-up I create.

If I change the monthly emergency-fund contribution to $300, that will leave an extra $381 in the checking account, which I sincerely hope will help to cover routine expenses for the rest of the year. Kinda doubt it, frankly. But hope springs eternal.

The point is, though: when a barrage of incoming flack has got you stressed out, prioritize managing the budget. Set aside an hour or so a week to keep tabs on what’s going on financially, even if it means you have to roll out of the sack early once a week. This can spare you from a lot more stress on down the line.

Dogruminations…

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Okay, I may be one of two things:

a) Pathologically skeptical; or
b) Grasping for straws.

Lemme tellya…I  think there’s something mighty fishy about all this Cassie Standing at the Gates of Heaven narrative. My sense about this is that either there’s something MarvelVet isn’t telling me, or there’s some part of his story that just plain isn’t straight.

Let us consider what the story is. Or rather, what the stories are. Or were.

First, the dog comes down with a cough. I call the vet’s office and am told not to bring her in because something is going around, they know what it is, and they’ll give me a drug to ease it. I drive over to his place and pick up a bottle of Temaril-P, which is a combination of an antihistamine and prednisone. Its purpose is to suppress coughs.

She goes through the prescription, administered according to his instructions, but is still coughing.

If the human had been a bit less trusting — as it should have been, already, it would have come across this warning:

Do not give Temaril-P to your pet if the pet has a serious viral or fungal infection. Temaril-P can be given in the presence of acute or chronic bacterial infections provided the infection is controlled by antibiotic. Temaril-P may weaken the pet’s immune response and its ability to fight infections.

When I report that she’s still hacking, he has me bring her in. He does a blood panel on her and then, with no evidence in the results to prove this, tells me she has Valley fever. He then tells me to keep her on the Temaril-P and give her fluconazole.

Folks. Valley fever is a serious fungal infection. If he knew what he was doing (or believed what he was telling me…), why would he have me continue to give her a drug that is specifically contraindicated? And if she’s not getting better, why put her on a drug that reduces her ability to fight an infection? Assuming it is an infection.

The fluconazole makes her extremely sick. So much so that twice I think she is about to teeter over into the grave.

When I look this stuff up and discover a list of a half-dozen dire side effects, a couple of them life-threatening, he tells me oh, those are symptoms of Valley fever. By now I know that…well, no. No indeed, they are not symptoms of Valley fever. Not by a fuckin’ long shot.

I take the dog to another vet, who says it’s pretty ambiguous and there’s good reason to doubt that she has Valley fever. But by now she’s very sick, indeed. It appears she’s not going to make it. And by now, too, my skepticism is fully aroused. I decide to take the dog off the fluconazole on the chance — which I think is pretty good — that she doesn’t actually have this dread disease. Show me some empirical proof, and I’ll reconsider.

As the fluconazole clears out of her system, she  slowly improves. You can’t just stop taking prednisone: you have to titre off of it. But before long I have her eased off that stuff, to no ill effect. The incontinence stops. Prednisone, as it develops, can cause incontinence in dogs. Meanwhile, I happen to know that you can give Benadryl to dogs — have done so before. She’s wheezing, as though she has asthma. Of course, asthma has many causes…but one of them is allergies. She gets markedly worse on a day when heavy winds and rains blow through. Why not? think I…

Put her on a couple of doses of Benadryl, morning and night. Within a couple of days, she’s markedly better. Meanwhile the vet has me bring her in for this supposed “free” ultrasound scan.

Free? Really? Hm. Well, whatever.

Not surprisingly, the result is dire: he tells me she has adrenal cancer.

I say, “Well, then. We’d better put her down right now.”

His response is to say that it’s not necessary, because she seems to be doing all right for the moment. (Benadryl is some kind of chemotherapy, is it?) He says we should wait until she seems to get a lot worse, and remarks that she’ll have her ups and downs.

I ask how long she’s likely to live.

He says, “About three months.”

Uh huh.

I now look up this new drama and find a number of things out.

• You can’t know whether something that looks like a tumor on a dog’s adrenal gland is malignant without doing surgery to biopsy it.

• If the dog actually does have a tumor on her adrenal gland (I’m beginning to wonder; see below…), it may be harmless. About half of such growths are what is known as “nonfunctional,” meaning they just sit there and do nothing. Half are malignant and cause the dog to exhibit symptoms that look like Cushing’s disease. This dog does have a few such signs: thirst, vigorous appetite (which she’s always had: a corgi will eat until it explodes!), unusual lethargy. Alternatively, the mass may be an adenocarcinoma: an aggressive malignancy that indeed will spirit the dog away sooner than later. Interestingly, though, when you look that one up you find she exhibits exactly zero symptoms of it.

Hm. Day by day, she gets a little better. The Benadryl — or tincture of time, could be either one — seems to be bringing her back to normal. She still chokes and wheezes when she drinks water…but she’s always choked on water. Corgis do that: Ruby does the same thing. She’s now barking in her accustomed excessive way, and not wheezing every time she yaps. Or even any time she yaps. She’s beginning to lose the “tragic” expression and looks far more normal.

I’ll tellya what I think.

I think MarvelVet made an incorrect assumption on the fly. Chances are his original diagnosis — a bronchitis that was going around at the time — was right. But the assumption that a week on Temaril-P would cure it was incorrect, because of her age.

If you believe those silly dog-to-human-years charts, this dog is the same age I am. The last time I got a cold — apparently a fairly ordinary cold — it took me six months to get over the cough. A 12-year-old dog is not going to get over a bug as fast as a two-year-old or a five-year-old or even a seven-year-old dog. If my theory is correct, the cough hung on because it would take her longer to throw it off. And if she actually has a symptomatic cancer of the adrenal gland, she would not be steadily improving.

If my alternative hypothesis is correct — that she had asthma from the git-go — then what happened was the storms aggravated allergies that were developing and growing more bothersome as she has aged. One way or the other, the reason she did not show signs of Valley fever in the blood panel was that she did not have Valley fever.

I think he realized he’d misdiagnosed the dog, and that the meds he put her on made her extremely sick. May even have caused permanent damage. And between you and me and the lamp-post, I think this scan thing is a diversion.

He probably figures that if I don’t put her down and she gets better over the next three months, he can claim a miraculous cure. Or simply say the alleged tumor is of the “nonfunctional” variety and so, whaddaya know! It didn’t kill her…

Tellingly, his office has not responded to Second Opinion vet’s requests that they send the scan over to them for a look-see.

I wonder, really, if his alleged colleague even did any such thing…if they simply shaved her belly and told me this story. Even though I asked, I was never given a chance to see the scan — and when he was telling me she had Valley fever, he did show me an X-ray that he alleged to be her lung and heart.

Now admittedly: all of this speculation may be the product of a fevered brain. Or some part of it may be and some part may not be. We all know I’m a crazy little woman, and what we see here may simply be a manifestation of that, eh?

BUT…for a dog that’s pounding at death’s door with cancer, Cassie seems to be surprisingly well. Once she got off the toxic drugs, she began to come back to normal. Right now she’s barking without coughing, eating cheerfully, bright-eyed, and alert. Under the influence of 1/2 Benadryl in the a.m. and 1/2 in the p.m. (she only weighs 20 pounds!), she seems kind of sluggish and tired. But lo! Look it up and you find Benadryl has the same sedating effect on dogs as it does on humans:

The most commonly reported side effect is drowsiness. This is so common that many people give Benadryl to their dogs to help them calm down. (Diphenhydramine is even marketed and used as a sleep-aid by many people.)

The second most common side effect is mild disorientation. We recommend paying attention to your dog’s behavior after giving them Benadryl to make sure they don’t experience this before giving them a second dose.

Hell, I weigh more than six times what that dog weighs, and a half-pill of the stuff will knock me out all night! I use it as a sleeping pill.

Dollars to donuts, once she’s off that stuff, she’ll be her same old normal self.

Will she die within three months? Maybe. But that wouldn’t be surprising: I’ve never had a dog that lived longer than 12 or 13 years. And she’s at least 12 right now.

 

Doggy Doom?

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So we’re told this afternoon’s abdominal ultrasound of Cassie the Corgi shows a large tumor on an adrenal gland. So that comes under the heading of “the last act.” The vet proposes that we not put her to sleep just now, since she seems to be doing fairly well — except for the cough (which she started with), all the other symptoms (which I still believe to be induced by the Valley fever drug and the prednisone) are going away. He says these symptoms will come and go, and he thinks she’ll last about three months, at the most.

I remain skeptical. Why? Because…

a) Cough and wheezing are NOT symptoms of adrenal gland tumors.
b) The symptoms she’s had that could be explained by an adrenal tumor also are classic side effects of fluconozale and of prednisone.

So what do we have here? The following potential symptoms for adrenal cancer:

  • Excessive water intake (polydipsia) Cassie: yes. But it’s also a prednisone side effect
  • Increased urine output (polyuria) Cassie: yes. What goes in must come out.
  • Increased appetite and food intake (polyphagia; affected dogs are often ravenous): Cassie: Yes: she lost two pounds in the coughing episode, so I’ve been feeding her more.
  • Weight gain, frequently to the point of obesity: Cassie: no
  • Abdominal enlargement (pendulous, distended abdomen; “pot-bellied” appearance) Cassie: no
  • Hair loss (alopecia; usually patchy and symmetrical on both sides of the body): Cassie: no
  • Darkening of skin (hyperpigmentation): Cassie: unknown
  • Excessive panting; often when lying down and appearing to be resting quietly: Cassie: yes
  • Skin bruising: Cassie: unknown
  • Clitoral enlargement in females (clitoral hypertrophy) Cassie: unknown
  • Testicular enlargement in males (testicular hypertrophy) Cassie: n/a
  • Loss of normal reproductive cycling in females (anestrus) Cassie: n/a
  • Infertility (males and females) Cassie: n/a
  • Weakness: Cassie: possibly
  • Lethargy, listlessness Cassie: no more than usual
  • Exercise intolerance Cassie: unknown
  • Muscle atrophy Cassie: no
  • Thin, fragile skin that tears easily Cassie: no
  • Poor coat condition Cassie: no
  • Lack of coordination (ataxia) Cassie: no
  • Neurological signs (circling, aimless wandering, pacing, bumping into walls or furniture, falling down for no apparent reason) Cassie: no
  • Poor wound healing Cassie: no

That’s pretty ambiguous. Yes, she does have some of the signs. But she also doesn’t have a lot of the signs. Some of the signs can be explained by whatever sickness caused the coughing, which was severe (and is now, finally, gone). Some of them can explained by her age, which is rather advanced. Two can be explained by the effect of the prednisone.

There are two types of adrenal tumors in dogs: functional and nonfunctional. This squib is a little clearer. A functional tumor is a malignancy, but a nonfunctional one is not. Apparently there’s really no well to tell without $urgery. Nonfunctional tumors need no treatment. If the thing is “functional” and it hasn’t metastasized, you can operate and get from 16 months to 3 years of extra life. I’ve already spent almost a thousand bucks on this. Looked at the bank account and almost fainted when I saw the balance. At this rate I’m going to run out of money for living expenses LONG before the end of the year that this year’s RMD covers. I’ll have to get a job. And at this age: fat chance!

So I’m going to try to get a second opinion, as a kind of last-ditch thing. Because, to tell the truth, after my Adventures in Medical Science I’ve learned to always get a second opinion every time some doctor (or vet) delivers a dire opinion. But I don’t hold out much hope. She is old. And obviously the vet saw something on her adrenals. Whatever it is, it ain’t likely to be good for her.

A Quieter Day in Hell…

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So things are looking a little less devilish today. Believe it or not…

Cassie seems much, much improved. She still chokes and wheezes when she drinks water (a lot of it!), but she’s always tended to do that. I’m easing her off the Temaril-P, because Son’s Vet remarked that the prednisone is probably the cause of the incontinence. So far, she seems not to be suffering from removal of the drug.

Meanwhile, Ruby has started sneezing, snorting, and coughing, suggesting that MarvelVet’s staff’s first guess — an infectious disease — was the right guess from the git-go.

So I feel a little more positive about my little pal, for whom I was beginning to lose hope.

Many immediate tasks need to be done. But I’m still too tired to attend to a one of ’em. Cassie rousted us all out of the sack along about 2:30, as usual, needing to get down and get out before she exploded. Outside, it’s starting to sprinkle. Will we get another two inch-downfall, like yesterday’s? We run for the side door, she hunkers down on the rosebed, and…and…

KER-BANGGGG!

HOLEEEEE SHEE-UT! A lightning bold strikes so close you can hear it crackle! A blast of thunder rattles the trees and the rafters. Cassie jumps about two feet into the air and so do I. In mid-piss, she runs for the door!

Nooooo!!!!! Stop! Wait! HURRYUPOUTSIDE!

She turns back to the flowerbed and pees a flood. We both fly back in the door.

I try to persuade Ruby to go outside. She’s having nothin’ of it.

Shortly the rain begins to fall. No…to blast down out of the heavens. The dogs are alarmed. I think it must be hailing, but no amount of peering out into the darkness reveals any verifiable flying chunks of ice. No. It’s simply the most ferocious rainfall I’ve seen in many years.

Weirdly, the power stays on.

Usually, we lose the power during these little freshets.

I end up spending the rest of the night editing a Chinese math paper. So much for sleep…again.

From there a sorta miserly breakfast — bacon cheese tomato broiled on toast — and off to choir. I do NOT know how long it’s been since I’ve had more than a couple hours, collated from snippets, of sleep during a night.

Someone compliments our new choir director on the house he and the wife recently bought and moved into. Out of curiosity, I ask him what part of town it’s in. They’ve been posting pictures on Facebook and the architectural style looks familiar, but in my dotage I haven’t placed it.

“The Pointe Tapatio,” says he.

Holy mackerel, think I: that’s a Gosnellerie!

SDXB’s friend Bob Gosnell and his brothers built three fancy resorts here in the Valley, which they sold to…uhm, Hilton, I think. And around these palatial joints they built distinctive fake-Southwestern housing developments, kind of cool in appearance but not so cool on the inside when the heat runs high. They were famed for their shoddy construction — and I remember a conversation in which Bob admitted building them as cheaply as possible.

On the other hand…

Hmmm…

The things are still standing.

I hadn’t even given the Pointe developments a first thought — to say nothing of a second thought — when thinking of where I might go to get away from the accursed Blightrail, the plague of homeless drug addicts, the coming infill housing for said homeless drug addicts, and the City’s various other schemes to turn our neighborhood into a slum.

The Pointe Tapatio isn’t in the greatest part of town, nor is it in the worst part — it’s on the way up 7th Street to on-again-off-again tony Moon Valley, but still in a historically blighted area called Sunnyslope. But…on the other hand… it’s as far away from the lightrail, Conduit of Blight, and the slums of West Phoenix as you can get and still be more or less in North Central, sort of. You can walk from most of the neighborhoods to the Phoenix Mountain Preserve. It’s within easy driving distance of the church, of my son’s house, and…hmmmm…and it’s closer to one of the grocery stores I habituate and to the Costco I prefer. Dayum.

Off to the Internet to do a little real estate shopping!

Interestingly, many of the houses are about the same size as mine, and about in the same price range. They may be $20,000 or $30,000 more than my house…but…y’know what? I really could pay that much more, to get out of here. That would cost no more than making an even trade for a house in Prescott and then having to get a moving company to haul my furniture cross-country.

And it wouldn’t require me to pull up roots.

And I probably won’t live long enough for the thing to fall down around my ears.

Click on the picture for a larger image.

Most of them have those dreadful glass-top stoves. Thanks: done that, not gonna do it again. Gas is non-negotiable for me…and lo! I did find one house that does have a gas stove. So that means somewhere up in there, they have gas service. Oh, yeah, here it is... The kitchen cabinets are just flat gawdAWFUL, but that can be remedied with a couple layers of paint. Just lookit that stove!

Now all I have to do is find THAT in a single-story house. Two stories: also a non-negotiable. Too bad. If it were one story, I’d be on the phone to the Realtor right this minute.

But it’s hopeful. I may ask my Realtor friends to keep an eye out for me.

Why didn’t I think of this?

Well, I know why: because I know Bob. ;-D

Gets worse, if that’s possible

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Bye-bye…

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. 😉