HOLY mackerel, what a day!!!
Along about late morning, I started enjoying some breathing and coughing problems. COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGHETY COUGH COUGH!
Pretty much a dry cough — not hacking anything up. Well, actually, once or twice during the night I practically strangled. But…WTF? The coughing wouldn’t stop.
Nothing I tried beat it back one bit.
I’m thinking this does not look good. COUGH COUGH COUGH COUGHETY COUGH COUGH!
Eventually I come to light long enough to take my temperature: 101 degrees.
Holy shit.
My normal temp is around 98.2.
I’ve already been charging from pillar to post out there in the heat. The last thing I wanna do is traipse to a doctor. Way to hell and gone up in North Scottsdale!
Try the mercury thermometer. It’s off the scale: over 106.
Oh, sher…
RE-try the electronic thermometer: 100.8.
Prob’ly not very drastic, after all the crap I’ve been through this afternoon.
Call the Mayo. Nurse Kim gets all anxious. She wants me to drive right out there, or else call an ambulance and have them cart me up there.
a) I do not want to drive halfway to Fountain Hills to get to the nearest Mayo facility.
b) There’s no way in Hell I’m going to our nearest full service hospital and ER: John C. Lincoln, the home of the careless and the incompetent.
c) Nor am I trudging downtown to St. Joseph’s Hospital, where I’ve had a truly hair-raising experience.
d) I suspect these wacky swings represent…well…Looney Toons.
So we decide I should go to a nearby pharmacy or the neighborhood Urgent Care Clinic, which is right down by the Albertson’s. She wants me to get tested for covid-19.
Albertson’s has an excellent pharmacy, and straight across the street, Walgreen’s has one very similar to it. If it weren’t 96 degrees out there just this minute — at 7:20 p.m. — I could walk down there. In mid-afternoon, Wunderground suggests, the high was a balmy 99 degrees, with 19% humidity.
Garden spot.
No, Albertson’s pharmacy does not have covid tests. No, Walgreen’s does not have covid tests.
So I go to the Urgent Care Center next door to the Albertson’s. That fine institution has six people sitting in the waiting room. And outside, the most horrifying, pathetic bum…the poor guy is collapsed on the pavement, in the shade of the pony wall that separates the parking lot from the sidewalk.
Even if I had any cash — which I didn’t — I don’t give handouts to panhandlers. Many of these folks are dangerous, when they’re not making pests of themselves.
Inside the “Urgent” (yeah…) Care place, I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait and I wait, along with all the other “patients” (got that right) who are waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting.
Finally I think oh fukkit! Get up, walk out, drive back home. Gasping for air.
Call the Mayo. They try to get me to drive out there. I bang around trying to manage that…but finally think, once again, oh fukkit!
I just. can. not. bring. myself. to. drive, a half-hour or forty minutes. and then get to a place where I have in the past waited HOURS for care.
If I die, I die. Kulawahed!
Right now the mercury thermometer won’t let me shake it down below 99 degrees. Screw it. The battery thermometer reads 100.8.
So presumably I have a low fever. Or I’m fricaseed in the heat.
Here’s what I’m gonna do:
First, I’m going to set up the steamer to blast
I’m a-gonna traipse into the backyard and take a dip in that cool but not at all cold swimming pool.
Well. Maybe not. Now that the steamer is put together, I feel a little cooler. The headache could go, though….
Reset the electronic thermometer. FRANTIC beee-eee-eep beee-eee-eep beee-eee-eep!!!!!!!
WTF?????
Now it claims I have a temp of 101.1!!!
Make up your mind, ya damn thing!
WhatEVER: my mind is made up: throw on some clothes and head for the Mayo. DAYUM!
********
So…here I am, in the Mayo’s shiny, majestic new ER. Quite a place! The computer’s iOs (or the surrounding architecture??) is not letting me save much to disk, or save copy written in Word or MacMail. My son is in the middle of a dinner party…offered to drive me out here, but that was not necessary.
How could I do without this little horror show? Let me count the ways…
I hate hospitals, to begin with.
Especially, I’m not fond of ERs, which are scary places…IMHO.
A little kid is back there being tortured: screaming her sweet head off.
My head hurts like hell, speaking of heads.
I need to go to the bathroom, but am afraid they’ll ask me to pee in a cup so I’d better not get rid of the present collection.
****
LOL! We’re now all pee’d out, X-rayed with a vengeance, ridden around in a chariot all over the new and old parts of the ER. Zowie! They’re still threatening to drain blood out of me with a damn needle: THE part of this sorta thing that I hate the most. But ohhh well.
This is a nasty li’l cough. I’m as sure as I’m sitting here that it’s GOTTA be a case of covid.
COULD be an ordinary cold, o’course. One could keep on hoping. BUT…I don’t get a fever with an ordinary cold. And rarely get a fever with the flu. So I think it’s pretty safe to guess that whatever ails me begins with a “c” and ends with a “d.”
My computer isn’t working right in here. Though I’m in Funny’s post-building function and it seems to be working…nothing else is functioning. This post is up and the system is letting me type in it, but other pages are nonfunctional. So it remains to be seen whether any of this copy ends up on the Web.
Lordie!!! All these professional folks with tattoos! About every second or third staff member is covered in skin artwork!
Heh… My mother would have been SO abhorred!!!! She thought tattoos were low-class even on men. And on women? Well! It just wasn’t done!
Another thing that would have sent my mother into a spiraling tizzy is the price of gas!
It’s well over $5 a gallon here. Yesterday I did manage to fill up at a QT: a bargain $4.99!
Back in the Dark Ages — this would have been in the late 1960s or early 70s, I think — my mother once remarked, reflecting on the State of the World, That when gasoline reached a dollar a gallon, we would have soooooo-shal-ism!!!
My parent were right-wingers, Goldwater types. My father: even more extreme than that. I recall him sitting me down one day to lecture me about the virtues of bigotry. He was, as you might imagine, an extreme bigot: anyone who wasn’t white like him was less than fully human. Not only white, but American of English and German extraction.
Ironically, though…as we’ve mentioned elsewhere in these precincts, he was a quarter Choctaw.
Soooo….how it came to be that he hated anyone who wasn’t lily-white is a great mystery.
Cultural thing, I expect. It was probably just the way people who lived in rural Texas were.
***
It’s almost midnight. I think they’re going to spring me out of here pretty quick. One of the staff was in here collecting my insurance information.
***
A-N-N-N-D…I was right. The disease of the day IS Covid 19.
Holeee sheeut!