Coffee heat rising

Health care

No Longer Even Bother….

by

BRRRIIIINGGGGGGG!

BRRRIIIINGGGGGGG!

BRRRIIIINGGGGGGG!

CALL FROM “V….[ETC ETC ETC]

Oh, hey!!!  Turns OUT

it’s from my pal VickyC!  She wants to go out for brunch…lunch…whatever it is!

Yahoo! Now I have less than an hour to get off my duff, wash up, and get dressed.

The heck with that noise: I’m drinkin’ the rest of this coffee, come what may! 😀  😀  😀

And how convenient: I need a new lawyer, my beloved guy having retired. And she DOES know a good one, I believe. I hope…she was hiring my guy, but I think she needed someone who had a slightly different specialty.

Well! We shall see in an hour or so.

Must review the piles of legalistic paper and be sure my will and other paperwork remain set up to cover my son, with the least possible degree of hassle, for when I croak over.

*****

Aaahhhhh SHEEE-UT! 

No, we won’t see any such thing. Turns out my son has made a goddamn appointment with the goddamn Mayo Clinic…on SUNDAY MORNING!!!!!!!

This is not the first time those idiots have done this.

It’s a hour’s drive out there, one-way.

That means if I have choir: cancel choir.

If I have anything else to do: cancel that.

Get in the car and drive and drive and drive and drive and drive and…  Find a place to park in their maze of an underground parking lot. Ride upstairs and wait and wait and wait and…GODDAMMIT!

Just what I wanna do on a Sunday morning. Choir or no choir.

****

And now here we are in one of their draped rooms, waiting for…Gawd only knows what new torture. Presumably something entailing a generous jabbing of needles.

How do I hate this place? Let me count the ways.

One nice thing about it, I guess: if you croak over, you don’t regret it so uch…it would be a bit of a relief.

1:54 p.m.

“Morning,” eh? 

Well, it’s comin’ on to two in the afternoon. We’ve been here for HOURS. I’m still lashed up to a needle and fukkin’ tubes and…HOW can I say how much I hate this?

Yeah, I do recognize and understand how amazing our medical system is and how astonishing all the stuff we can do is and…boyoboyoboy…  And how much I hate this stuff.

Cruising the Internet. Come across a notice of my nephew’s demise. Poor guy. He never was…well…quite right. Short a few IQ points, from the git-go. Just…really sad.

This was the grandson of the woman who became my stepsister when my father married her mother…

2:15 in the fukkin’ afternoon…

Tied down to a couch in the Mayo with a damned needle in my arm for…how long? I’ve lost track of the time. Feels like fukkin’ hours, though. Son is yelling at me..I can’t open my mouth without pi$$ing him off.

One

Bitch

of a

Day

* * *

And now we’re on the way home. My poor son’s mood is not improved by our escape. He’s yelling at me. I just want to get home, get in the house, and shut the door!

And maybe, with any luck, find something to eat. Without having to hike to the grocery store.

Ahhh! And now to LOAF!

by

Dayum, but Olde Age has its compensations. 😀  The biggest is NOT HAVING TO GET DRESSED AND TRUDGE OFF TO WORK!!!

Wheeee! Here we are, dawn’s early light cheerily glowing in the window. The Dawg and the Human stuffed with breakfast. Human lingering over a cup of hot coffee.

Beloved Pool Dude has been here and gone, leaving the Hole in the Ground into Which to Pour Money spotlessly, sparkling clean. Bless that wonderful man!

Ruby thinks he IS wonderful. And weirdly, she seems to know what day of the week it is. On Pool Dude Day, she lurks by the back door, waiting…waiting…waiting for the Moment of Joy when he shows up.

And yea verily, on that morning he does show up. Then we have a Magnificent Moment of Doggy Joy, after which Ruby must tear outside and stand there at the pool fence’s gate, admiring his magnificence.

Apparently many of these guys are ex-convicts. Pool cleaning is one of the…uhm…trades for which Arizona prisons train inmates. So, theoretically, when they get back on the street they’ll have some other way to earn money than by stealing your car, eh?

At any rate, I have no idea what about the guy makes him seem so splendid to a corgi. But without doubt, she thinks he’s about the best Human ever to stumble across the surface of the earth.

Whenever I get off my duff, I do need to trudge down to the neighborhood clinic to…uhmmmm…. wwwaaaaitaminit!

I wuz about to say, to try to get the doc to do something about the constant maddening ITCH in my feet and legs, and as the computer cruises happily across the Internet it lands on a page that tells us...

Vitamin B12: Common Side Effects (Oral Supplements and Injections)

  • Headache
  • Nausea and vomiting
  • Mild diarrhea
  • Itching or a skin rash/acne
  • Dizziness
  • Tingling sensation in hands and feet (peripheral neuropathy)
  • Weakness or fatigue 

And which Vitamin B-gulper do we know who has a mad itch and crazy-making tingling in the hands and feet?

For.
The.
Luv.
of.
GAWD!!!!!

Manufacturers of OTC nostrums should be required to list ALL a drug’s potential side effects on the label! In 14-point type!!!

Man! I just stumbled across that li’l blurb. Wasn’t looking for it. And now know why my hands and feet and lips and gums feel like an electric current is buzzing through my body.

GodDAMMIT. I wish I’d known this two weeks ago. 

Ugh!!! Wonder how long it’ll take for this stuff to wear off… Bare minimum two or three days, whaddaya bet? More likely a week or two.

Wouldn’t you think that by now, having arrived in the middle of Olde Age, I would KNOW BETTER????? 

Yea verily, by now shouldn’t I have figured out that just about every damn pill I drop down my throat has some untoward side effect?

Argh!! My Christian Scientist crackpot relatives may not have been crackpots, after all. Maybe they had somethin’ there…

Too Gorgeous to be Miserable…

by

Seriously, this afternoon — along about 3:00 p.m. — is SO mellow, so soft, so clean, and SO beautiful that even the plague of little maladies fails to make one miserable. Just…incredibly…lovely!

Maladies? Ohhh…just a few…

Peripheral neuropathy: frantic buzzing and burning in the hands, soles of the feet, and lips. Hurts. Makes you crazy.

Fingernails: lifting from the nail beds. No indication of why, or of what one can do about it.

Awful sore and itchy spot on the tail end. Dunno what to do about it. Rubbing in an analgesic does…hmmm…essentially nothing.

As of this morning, the hip pain was gone. But now it’s back! No idea why.

Dared to try to sit out on the back porch to take in this gorgeous afternoon.

B-a-a-d idea!

Place is swarming with mosquitos. Forthwith, had to dart back inside. Slam the screen door. Slam the kitchen door. RUN AWAY!!!

###

Thinking about my father: the jobs he had, how hard he worked to support me and my mother.

He was a tanker captain and, when he worked a shore job, a harbor pilot.

Maneuvering oil tankers across the ocean paid him well. But the job took him away from home for weeks on end. And…y’know…weirdly, the man was basically a homebody. A harbor pilot’s job is dangerous and demanding…he must have been exhausted most of the time during the ten years he did that in Saudi Arabia.

When he finally retired to Sun City, he and my mother had…ohhh…about 18 months together until the cancer sticks she’d smoked in gay, stinking abandon since she was 16 years old ganged up on her and killed her. She died horribly of tobacco-induced cancer shortly after they settled into their Dream Home in the suburbs of Phoenix.

They’re both gone now. The only relative I have left is my excellent son. And…heh…that does put some strain on him, the poor man! 😀

Seriously: he works ferociously for the insurance company that employs him. I would go back to teaching freshman comp if I had to work that hard!!! It doesn’t leave him much time or energy for riding herd on an ailing old bat. So…well…I try to keep from belly-aching too much. But he does know I’m ailing…and that the indications of that ailing do NOT bode well.

Oh, well. The sooner I croak over, the sooner I stop hurting. Right? 😀

You Want Me to Pay WHAAAT?????

by

Statements arrive in the mail, claiming to show what is not covered by Medicare. Alarming, because they don’t really say you have to pay the vendor…these outfits often generate a Medicare bill, send it off, and then refrain from charging the amounts Big Brother declines to pay.  Then the vendor drops the amount the statement says they’re charging, so you don’t really owe that. Quite.

But meanwhile, you also have private insurance, which may (or may not) cover all (or some) of the amounts Medicare declines to cover.

You can’t tell from a given statement what part of that is what! You just have to wait — weeks or months! — until the vendor gets around to generating its most recent coherent bill.

Even then, you’re likely to have to guess what’s owed and what’s covered.

Right now Medicare says it’s billing me $1,057 and $658…for services that I wouldn’t have used if I’d known they weren’t covered.

IF they’re not covered. They actually may be covered, but you can’t tell it from these statements.

Ducky!

Hup hup hup hup…

by

Waiting for M’hijito to arrive, collect me, and haul me off to the physical therapist’s gym, there to spend the next two hours going hup hup hup hup hup….  

Wish I knew for sure that a brain-numbing evening of mindless exercises actually works to ease the peripheral neuropathy, or whether the fading of the numbness and the buzz was the result of  Time and the River Flowing. Blowing away three hours on hupping and bupping is NOT how I would choose to spend my time. Seriously!

Well. Either the exercises are working or time is doing its job: dunno which.

The neuropathy is slowly — VERY slowly — getting better, though. So I guess if there’s even an outside chance that the hup-hup-hup routine is helping, it’s worth killing yet another evening on it.

But how many MORE evenings to squish with this stuff are we looking at? It feels like such a painful waste of time… Well, not painful in the sense that it hurts (it does not) but in the sense that I hate boring myself stupid when I have many more interesting things to do.

What would I do tonight, instead of killing an hour in waving my arms around?

* Walk Ruby from one end of the neighborhood to the other.
* Write a post for Funny about Money (hmmmm….)
* Watch the idiot box for awhile
* Cruise the Internet
* Cruise the Internet
* Cruise the Internet

ooohkayyy… So, yeah: I don’t have anything much to do that’s any better. But at least I’d be wasting my time on my choice of time-wasters, not theirs.

 

And Another Evening at the Gym

by

The plug I just posted, a few minutes ago, covered yesterday’s antics. 😀

Now we have today’s…   Which includes, as its high point, this week’s junket to the physical therapist.

Can’t complain about these safaris. After all…

* The therapists are beyond awesome. They clearly know what they’re doing (and then some!). So an evening spent exercising with them and being massaged by them and on & on DOES produce a marked improvement in the pain.

…a-n-n-d…WordPress just deleted about 3/4 of this post. It’s getting late and I am NOT up for trying to remember and rewrite that stuff. And so…

…awayyyy!