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Health care

Covid Prophylactic?

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So earlier today, I came across a British doctor who was holding forth, on his own site, to the effect that vitamin D works to protect against respiratory infections and to reduce severity of those that you do catch.

Riiiiggghhht! thought I. If that ain’t woo-woo, I don’t know woo-woo when I see it.

Well.

Maybe I don’t know woo-woo when I see it… Started exploring around, and discovered that lo! The research is actually out there, to the effect that indeed, a hefty level of vitamin D in your system does improve your resistance to a number of viral and bacterial agents and, holy mackerel, the stuff actually does help you withstand and fight off a respiratory infection.

Here, for example, is an article in Clinical and Experimental Immunology, which appeared in 2009; the authors, Hughes and Norton, report findings that support the likelihood that vitamin D is protective against lung infection and inflammation. This is not the Journal of Woo Woo Fantasy — CEI is a peer-reviewed medical journal published by Wiley-Blackwell for the British Society for Immunology.

That appeared way back in 2009. In 2017, the British Medical Journal reported that “Vitamin D supplementation was safe [but see below before buying this assertion] and it protected against acute respiratory tract infection overall.” Regular daily doses proved to be more effective than a single walloping dose.

In more down-to-earth layman’s language, Medical News Today interpreted the BMJ study: “if 33 people took vitamin D supplements, one acute respiratory tract infection would be prevented. If these results are confirmed, vitamin D supplementation could potentially prevent millions of respiratory infections each year. . . . [T]he positive effect was more pronounced in participants who took daily or weekly vitamin D without additional large doses.

The World Health Association, in 2019, called for further research into the matter, expressing some skepticism about the 2017 study.

Interestingly, we seem to have had no panicky runs on shelves of vitamin D nostrums. This morning, the nearest Sprouts was richly endowed with the stuff. Taken in moderation, it’s harmless. If there’s a chance it might protect you from the worst effects of the present contagion, it’s certainly worth trying.

Don’t overdo it, though. Taken in excess, vitamin D can lead to bone loss, abdominal discomfort, kidney problems, and other harms. Toxicity arises when you dose yourself in the range of 60,000 IU a day. I think I would not take more than one 5,000 IU capsule a day, especially if you live in a sunny climate or you eat a balanced diet rich in fatty fish (such as salmon, tuna, or mackerel), vitamin D fortified products (dairy, fortified orange juice, soy milk, cereals), beef liver, cheese, and egg yolks. Nor does it seem wise to take vitamin D supplements indefinitely.

Vitamin D supplements may (or may not) be helpful to ward off the threatened covid-19 viral infection. But once the scare is past, it’ll be time to lay off the stuff.

Adventures in Panickland

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Be afraid. Be very afraid…

The Old Folkerie where my dear friends are dwelling these days has locked itself down. Staff are so terrorized by the covid-19 scare that you have to pass a test to get in the door!

Welp, they needed some grocery items and their cat was out of food, too. So I added a side trip to Safeway onto my planned junket to AJ’s.

Holeee maquerel… Shelves were empty in every department. For every rack of shelves, at least one shelf was empty.

Couldn’t get the cat’s preferred cuisine, so bought something else and then searched for it at AJs. Not carried there. Thank gawd I know how to cook Ruby’s food, though plenty of the commercial stuff is presently in-house. And thank gawd my roommate is a dawg, not a cat.

AJ’s, because it’s a spectacularly overpriced specialty store, was not overrun. But the Safeway was maxed. At one point the manager came on the intercom and announced that they were running out of bags and would people please forego bags if they could possibly just put their purchases in their car or if they didn’t have many purchases. I have a lot of grocery bags in the garage, because I use them to pick up after the dog. So I’ll probably take a few fistfuls up to the store for them to re-use.

All public schools in the city are closing (which may not make much difference for the kids’ education but does make a difference for the poor little guys and gals who get their only full meal at school). Some churches have closed. I believe (but do not know) that All Saints contemplated whether they should close in this week’s emergency meeting, but so far they have not done so. Apparently they’re going to move most or all of the school’s instruction online. The church itself is staying open, though.

However, our choir director has told us that choir members who feel they should absent themselves may do so without consequences. And given that I’m im the middle of the allegedly most vulnerable age range, I guess I’ll have to take him up on that. {sigh}

The high hysteria, though, is not surprising, given  the amount of screaming and yelling from the news media. This evening we learn that EEEEEEKKKK! AWWWKKKK! OMIGAWD!!!!! 12 CASES OF COVID HAVE POPPED UP IN ARIZONA!  Heavens to Betsy!!!!! 

Twelve cases. Arizona has a population of 7.38 million, as of 2020. That’s less than 1%. Microscopically less than 1%.

Meanwhile, call up news.google.com and you find 53 stories about the covid-19 flap and 20 (count ’em, twenty) on all other topics. That’s not including the sidebar content, which also is preoccupied with the supposed plague. No wonder people are obsessed with this stuff.

Don’t allow yourselves to be panicked, folks. Humanity has been through worse, and we’ve survived. Just keep clean and stay out of public places.

A Strategy for the Plague?

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Don’t be deceived: I have none. Neither, far as I can tell, does anyone else, other than recommending that people follow what should already be routine sanitary practices.

The coronavirus has arrived in the Valley of the We-Do-Mean-Sun. Nine cases have been reported in the state, five of them in Pinal County, which is just up the road.  One wretch spent time in two crowded nightclubs and 80 people in the state have been tested for the disease. Entertainment venues are closing, and the Democratic debate slated to take place here will have no live audience in attendance. And, always happy to share, we sent two positive cases on a plane from Phoenix to Toronto. In Massachusetts, 72 of the state’s 90 cases occurred in people who had attended a Biogen corporate meeting.

None of this would get me very exercised, except for the fact that I’ve been so sick so often in the past few months. And that I still have an infection where the orthodontist stuck that post that probably will have to be surgically removed. Honestly: I just do not want to see the inside of an ER room again! Not for a long, long while.

And at age 75, I’m smack in the middle of the group most at risk of serious outcome from this fine disease. No doubt made more so from having been weakened by the late series of epizootics and unhealing dental surgery.

Sooo…. Given my proclivity to catch every bug that comes along, I’m thinking maybe I should step out of choir (and concomitantly, church) for the duration of this epidemic. Or epic flap, whatever it really is.  One epidemiologist suggests we avoid gatherings and face-to-face meetings. There’s a limit to how practical that is. But…it would seem that if you don’t have to be at a gathering, maybe you shouldn’t be.

I will say, one year I got splendidly sick when one of my fellow singers plopped herself down behind me and spent two hours coughing at the back of my head and neck. So…yeah. Choir is potentially a sink of contagion. And this is one particular contagion I’d like not to partake of.

Tomorrow I have to go staff the church’s front desk for four hours. Cannot even begin to imagine how I can gracefully get out of that…

Fortunately, though, I scored a couple more canisters of Lysol wet kitchen counter wipes, supposedly disinfecting. My plan is to take some of those in and wipe down the desk and the phone, plus have some to wipe my hands every time I think of it. Not as perfect as putting light-years of distance between oneself and the bug. But one heckuva lot better than nothing.

In the same vein, I laid off the cleaning lady, who was supposed to come by today. I’d already scored the 80 cash dollahs needed to pay her, and offered to give it to her when she’s over in our parts at WonderAccountant’s place. She declined. So this means when she comes back I’ll have to find some gift for her, maybe a Costco or Walmart cash card. That is a figure-it-out for another day.

Cleaning Lady begone, because she now has a LOT of cleaning customers, so she’s rooting around in sheets, bathrooms, and kitchens of many unknown folk. Plus she has a middle-school-aged daughter who will enjoy the predictable exposure to every bug that comes along, and most certainly will bring this one home to Mom and Dad. Since I’m fully capable of pushing a vacuum cleaner around, that’s a risk we can forego for the nonce.

Speaking of the which, the penicillin (recently determined not to be one of my many drug allergies) the orthodontist prescribed seems to have beaten back the infection around the dental post but not completely killed it off. It still aches, and the gum still feels odd near the damaged socket. Dollars to donuts, that will have to be removed…to the tune of an expensive and sterling unpleasant procedure.

The next appointment I have with him isn’t until the 18th; but this penicillin runs out tomorrow. I can NOT get past his front office staff, because I can’t make the woman understand what the concern is — i.e., I do not want to let an infection grow for a week if the penicillin didn’t kill it all off, nor do I want to promote resistance to the penicillin by stopping for a few days and then starting up again. I don’t know whether the woman is too uneducated to understand the issue — highly likely, given the quality of Arizona’s public schools and colleges — or whether objectively there’s nothing to worry about.

But…I did just get through to my regular dentist. He’s going out of town tomorrow, so they want me to show up in his precincts in…about an hour and 45 minutes. Yeah. Schlep through the rain over streets infested by lunatic drivers who don’t know how to drive in rain, and do it right this minute.

And so…away!

Covid-19: Hysteria or Common Sense?

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So, yes: some of us are wondering how much of the squealing and the yelling about the coronavirus is justified and how much of it is clickbait. Okay…I shifted into science writer/tech editor mode and took a look around. Here’s what I found out:

As far as we can tell to date, Covid-19 has a death rate of about 3.4%, although among the elderly that figure jumps to 15%.

Let us compare these figures with the mortality rates of a few other famous dread diseases.

Swine flu: .5%
H1N1: .01% – .08% (one strain of swine flu is a sub-type of H1N1 influenza, but since 2017 the dominant subtype is H3N2)
Spanish flu (responsible for the 1918 pandemic): 10%
SARS (also caused by a coronavirus) 9.3%
Ebola: 58.5%
MERS: 9.4%

Several of these ailments are spread most commonly by contact with certain animals, such as pigs or camels. At least one, Spanish flu, is thought to be extinct. What seems to make Covid-19 so terrifying is that it spreads much the same way the common cold or seasonal influenza spreads: by direct contact between humans or by contact with surfaces recently contaminated with fluids from people who already are sickened by the disease. And of course: it’s new. We don’t know exactly what it can or will do, so of course we’re scared. We do know those who have an underlying illness are most vulnerable. And, for reference: 60% of adult Americans host at least one underlying health condition, according to Tom Frieden, former director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Now that we have the mildly alarming facts — Covid-19 is more deadly than swine flu, one helluva lot less deadly than the Spanish flu, and one whole helluva lot less deadly than a horror like Ebola, but the older you are the more at risk you are — let’s take a look at what some experts have to say.

STAT, a science magazine that focuses on life sciences, convened a panel of Harvard scientists to address the question of just how worried we should be, and about what, specifically. Although we know there are similarly dangerous or worse diseases out there, most of them haven’t affected Western countries, with the exception of Spanish flu, which struck over a century ago. As epidemiologist Michal Mina observes, the present issue is that “We have an entirely susceptible population. The potential for this to burn through a population very quickly is very high without extraordinary measures.”

The experts are alarmed because this virus has some odd characteristics not seen before in similar flu-like ailments: younger people are mildly affected, but the disease’s severity grows with increasing age of the victim. The older you are, the sicker you are likely to get. The death rate among the elderly is apparently around 15%.

By way of background: in China, 78% of cases occurred among people aged 30 to 60; 2.3% of these patients died. However, among patients 80 or older, the death rate leapt to 14.3%. This is thought to be a function of  the strength and health of one’s respiratory system and the presence of other conditions.

For other age brackets, the death rates were 1.4% among people in their 50’s; .4% for those in their 40s; and .2% among ages 1-30.

Among patients who were hospitalized, about half developed acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Half of these people died (note that this implies about a quarter of people who land in the hospital with this disease die of it). ARDS fills up the lungs’ air sacs with fluid, restricting the intake of oxygen. Patients who developed ARDS had an average age of 61. Those who did not develop it had an average age of 49. Fifty percent of ARDS patients died, as compared with 9% who did not get ARDS.

You understand: 9% is almost 10 in 100. That is…well, alarming.

“We’re in the response phase, Juliette Kayyem told STAT. “Our measure of success is not containment anymore. Our measure of success now is, will fewer people die or get severely sick because of our efforts?” Kayyem is the faculty chair of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s homeland security program and a former homeland security official at the state and federal levels.

Dr. Mina added, “Part of the problem is the fragmented state of US healthcare system. . . . “[T]he way we have privatized everything about it for the most part, is going to seriously impact our ability,” he said,“[W]e have no ability to create out of the blue new hospital beds. We can’t even test appropriately.”

Helen Branswell, STAT’s infectious diseases and public health reporter, observed, “I’m really concerned about people living in long-term care facilities. If this virus gets into long-term care facilities [as it has in the Seattle area], it will be really bad. I’m worried about people who stay in homeless shelters. I’m worried about people who work in retail. I’m worried about people who don’t have the money to stockpile food because they don’t have extra money. I’m worried about the fact that there isn’t much social cohesion right now. People seem to be really angry at each other a lot and this is a time when we’re really going to need to help each other.”

So yes: when all Hell is about to break loose (at least, so it appears), it’s easy to get worried.

So what can we as individuals do to protect ourselves from this ailment, and what can we do as a people to try to contain its spread?

  • Number 1, first and foremost: WASH YOUR HANDS! And keep washing them. Get some hand wipes containing alcohol or, if those are not available, sanitizing countertop wipes such as the ones marketed by Lysol. Carry these in your car.
  • Whenever you go into a store where you’ll be pushing a cart, rub down the handle with one or two of these sanitary wipes.
  • As soon as you get back in the car, wipe your hands, your car keys, and your car’s steering wheel with an antiseptic wipe. If you have kids or other passengers with you, pass the wipes and be sure everyone wipes their hands thoroughly.
  • When you get home or to the office, wash your hands promptly and thoroughly with soap and water. Take your time. You should scrub actively for at least 20 or 30 seconds.
  • Stay out of crowded places. This includes restaurants, crowded stores, stadiums, rallies, and any other venue that draws large numbers of people together in close proximity. Try to allow at least three feet and if at all possible about six feet between you and the folks around you.
  • Avoid travel on public transit and airplanes if at all possible.
  • Stifle your sneezes and coughs in a jacket, handkerchief, or Kleenex.
  • Wash your clothes after each wearing.
  • Wash all fresh produce thoroughly, in detergent water (rinse well, of course).
  • Eat healthy meals, stay hydrated, and try to get enough sleep to avoid becoming run-down.

One thing you don’t have to bother with is wearing a face mask. These do nothing to prevent exposure to the virus.

Indeed, we are seeing a lot of hysteria out there. We’re also seeing some valid concern. The best way to deal with it? Common sense.

Gaaah! One Thing After Another

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Is there an explanation for the one thing after another phenomenon? Clearly, it’s very common. So common that we have a variety of folk terms for it: never rains but it pours…damned if you do, damned if you don’t…Houston, we have a problem…out of the frying pan, into the fire…all part of life’s rich pageant…

Argh! With pageants like this, who needs Mardi Gras?

In the background, we have, as we all recall, the lamp fiasco, the driver’s license nuisance, the raccoon/coatimundi question, the foisting of the raccoon nest upon the Yard Dudes of the Century (more about which, sooner or later), income tax prep, the busted deadbolt, and similar bidness as usual. And in the further background (please, God! Make it as far in the background as possible), the endless series of visits to the Mayo’s ER.

To begin at the ending — or at the latest, because you just know this will not be the end of the infinite cosmic jest — last night as I was flying around getting ready to go to choir, I peered in the mirror to paint myself and saw…WTF?  Some kind of ZIT in my eye????????

Yes. It looks like a little blister or pustule on the white of an eye. It doesn’t hurt. But it’s bloodshot around the damn thing, and it looks potentially ominous. Whaaaa? Infection? Injury? Allergic reaction? Some new fiasco incident upon the dental implant (right below it) that refuses to heal up?

Call the Mayo’s night line. Wait and wait and wait and wait  and wait and wait x 10²²… Paint face, paint face, paint face, comb hair, comb hair, comb hair, pull on clothes, pull on clothes… Finally a nurse gets on the line.

She listens to the sad story, asks a few questions, opines that it’s nothing to get hysterical about (but of course she does so in far more professional-sounding terms), and advises me to douse it with some artificial tears and call back if it doesn’t get better.

Ohhh god. It’s time to leave for choir practice, which won’t end until after 9, when everyplace in reach will be closed.

FLY out the door and, astonishing luck being on my side, zip into the Albertson’s parking lot without a traffic jam and without undue driver nuttiness. See with pleasure that Albertson’s has posted an armed guard in the parking lot, THANK you verymuch (this is a store that I do not enter after dark, not on a bet…not under ordinary circumstances). Race in the door, find a not-very-distracted pharmacist, ask where the “artificial tears” are (whatever those are), and am swiftly directed to the product. Not only that, but she agrees to take my money, so I don’t have to stand in line interminably at a check-out register.

Fly back out, dodge the damn light-rail tracks, circle back through the ‘Hood, and fly down Main Drag East to the Cult HQ, where I arrive just in time for choir practice. Just. Barely.

Two & a half hours later, apply this gunk to the affected eyeball. It’s soothing. But does nothing to clear the bloodshot look. Condition unchanged this morning.

I have receptionist duty at the church this afternoon — which happens to be where this missal originates, right this minute — but before I get out of the house I have GOT to finish the latest Chinese mathematician’s paper, proofread the damn thing, generate visible edits from my copy, and disgorge a statement.

This takes several hours.

Now I’m running late to get ready for the front-office gig.

Send off the edited copy and bill, fly to the back of the house, and start painting my face. The eye thing looks…certainly no better, possibly worse. I’ve looked it up on the Hypochondriac’s Treasure Chest and now believe it to be something called a pingueculum. Apparently it’s not considered very serious, at least not at this stage…but sometimes it does need to be treated with surgery. Godlmighty…here we go again!

Not only that, but there are tumors that can look suspiciously like that. gaaaaaaaa! c -a-a-a-n-c -e-r!!!!

So after I’ve sent off the client’s work, while I’m getting dressed to come down here to the HQ, I get on the phone to the Mayo again, by way of asking: does this thing actually need to be seen by…you know…a DOCTOR? A person with the letters “M.D.” after their name?

My beloved ophthalmologist passed away a long time ago. The guy who took his place was a raving fruitcake. The guy who took that one’s place, a study in overkill. I’ve been getting my eye exams and glasses prescriptions at Costco, whose contract staff do the job with one whole of a helluva lot less hassle and expense.

So I call the Mayo while painting, combing, and clothes-throwing on. And wait and wait and wait and wait  and wait and wait x 10²²… 

Just as their nurse picks up the phone, it’s BARK-BARK-BARK-BARK-BARK-BARK-BARK-BARK-BARK-BARK-BING BONG!

ooohhh shee-utt! NOW what?? I’m half-dressed and it’s almost time to go out the door.

Run to the front of the house: it’s SDXB…sur-PRI-I-I-ISE!ˆ

He wants to socialize, just having come away from coffee with one of his oldest cronies. Ruby is having a yap-fest. The nurse is on the phone. I dodge down the hall trying to find enough quiet to explain the issue and ask: is this something that should be seen by a doctor?

“Not yet,” says she. If it hasn’t gotten better in about two weeks, call back and make an appointment.

…godlmighty…

Then…yes: The raccoon/coatimundi/Creature from the Black Lagoon issue…

Ah, I see I haven’t blogged about this one. How could I have let such a juicy story lapse?

So a few days ago, I stumble out into the back yard behind the dawg and find these weird pawprints. Something with very long, strong claws has been digging at the surface of quarter-minus top-dressing in the backyard. Quarter-minus, for the uninitiated, is finely crushed granite. After you lay it down and it gets wet and dries out a few times, it packs down to form a practically weed-proof surface. Unlike gravel, it’s comfortable enough for you and your dog to walk around on barefoot. Also unlike gravel, it looks a lot like the surface of the Sonoran desert. And it doesn’t make your yard look like it belongs in Sun City, home of the green-gravel lawn.

What ARE these? think I

Welp, the locals have spotted both coatimundis and raccoons in the ‘Hood. Our resident gadget enthusiast has set up cameras in his backyard and captured images of a coati cavorting around out there. Other neighbors have caught pictures of raccoons visiting their yards.

A raccoon, I could do without. They make a big mess and can be destructive. A coati, however…ohhh yeah! A pet coati is exactly what the Funny Farm needs. They eat bugs. That scratching behavior reflects an attempt to scruffle up some slugs and such.

However, the foot seems not to be shaped quite like a coati’s. Ultimately we conclude it’s probably a raccoon.

And where do raccoons like to nest? In woodpiles, that’s where. And what do we have in the backyard? Uh huh…

Shortly after I moved in here — 16 freakin’ years ago, for hevvinsake! — SDXB decided to move to Sun City.

SDXB just loved his fireplace. He was very, very fond of sitting in front of a roaring fire. This, apparently, is characteristic of Michiganders and Minnesotans. 😀  To supply his habit, he used to scavenge for firewood hither, thither, and yon. Understand, as a Master Cheapskate our SDXB would never in a million years pay for firewood. Whenever someone would chop down a tree, the remains would be stacked by the curb or in an alley for the trash pickup guys to haul off, once every four months. So he would grab this miscellaneous stuff off the side of the road, whenever he found it.

When the quarrel with Tony the Romanian Landlord erupted — Tony was living in the place right next-door to SDXB — SDXB decided to flee to Sun City.

I was not goin’, though SDXB tried to persuade me to sell the place and move out to Mausoleum West. Even though the judge wouldn’t let us leave the courtroom. Even though my terrorized lawyers begged me not to return to the house and to vacate the place right this goddamn minute. I ain’t a-scared of no Romanian mafiosi!

Reluctant to leave his priceless collection of dead wood behind, he toted it over here and stacked it neatly in my backyard.

And there it has sat, for lo! these 16 years. I tried it a couple times in this house’s fireplace and decided I really, truly HATED the stink it poured into the entire house, and that I really, truly do NOT want to spend my time cleaning out a fireplace. So…I’m pretty sure that’s where both Rattie and the Raccoon have dwelt, on various occasions.

It’s too heavy for me to move en masse, and besides, I don’t have a pickup. But after Rocky the Raccoon arrived on the scene, I figured I was just gonna have to get rid of the rodent habitat.

So my latest plan was to slip the stuff into the alley garbage bins, one piece a week, from now until the end of eternity. This had many practical disadvantages, not the least of which is that it’s illegal. Soo…I was at a bit of a loss as to how to dump it. Stacking it in the alley for the bulk trash guys was not very practical: I don’t have the physical strength to haul that many partially split logs, and I don’t wanna, and if you put the stuff out there before The Time to put out bulk pick-up you’ll get a fine, and…did I say I don’t wanna?

Yesterday, however, I finally prevailed upon the redoubtable Gerardo to remove the stack of rotting, termite-ridden firewood so generously deposited in my backyard lo! these many years ago.

The trick was to ask one of his barely English-speaking cousins to do the job before the boss showed up on the scene. So his guy Tony agreed to do it, in his sweet naïveté. By the time Gerardo arrived on the scene, it was tooo late to wiggle out. 😀

He asked for the usual 50 bucks to haul the debris to the dump (which is a long, LONG drive from here). I gave him 80.

Good riddance to that mess!!

Back to this morning: SDXB hangs around telling me about his buddy’s (very trying) recent Troubles of Old Age (and of landlordship… Mothers, don’t let your children grow up to be landlords!) while I’m pulling on clothes, wrangling the dog, rassling up the things I need to bring with me to the church.

Finally get him out the door, splash some of the drops onto the suspect eyeball, grab the keys and the credit card, and shoot out the door.

At least for a change no aspiring burglars were lurking around the house trying to suss out the easiest way to get in. That’s something. I guess.

Later — tonight, tomorrow, whenever, as long as it’s LATER — I’ve got to get on the phone to the Apple Support gurus and put them up to helping me figure out how to fix the Mail program.

Apple computers have a feature that computer geeks apparently think is passing Kewl but that normal people find aggravating, annoying, and infuriating: you can set it so that when you change windows or switch to different programs, instead of just going “clickola” over to the page you crave, it does this goddamn “slide-show” thing! Like a slide on a slide projector slimpsing over to the next picture to view. It’s time-consuming, it’s irritating, and it screws iup the menu in the bar at the top of the screen. I hate it, hate it, HATE it.

The computer, therefore, is set not to do that.

But apparently there’s some accursed keyboard command that will switch it on, within a given program. And apparently as my hot little fingers were jetting across the keyboard, I unknowingly hit that command, in typo mode. Suddenly, MacMail starts with the car sick-making slide-show mode.

Now I cannot for the life of me find out what that command is, nor can I find, on the Web or anywhere else, how to undo the damn command.

Soooo…there’s another time-sucking hassle waiting to be coped with.

See what I mean? Never a dull fukkin’ moment!

 

Hallelujah! Another miracle…in spite of it all

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A couple of sweet little miracles occurred today…

This morning I had to traipse to the Mayo for yet another allergy test. We’ve ascertained that, despite earlier indications to the contrary, I am not allergic to ibuprofen.

Said earlier blessing has relieved Yrs Truly of substantial pain from the bunged-up wrist, elbow and shoulder. Yea verily, it is like unto a miracle.

So today I had an appointment, mid-morning, to schlep out there — waaaayyyyy out there — to be tested for the allergy to penicillin that was diagnosed before my son was born, some 43 years ago.

Yes. for the past 43+ years, we have proceeded on the assumption that a rash incident on a prescription for penicillin indicated an allergy to said penicillin. Even though the Little Woman tried to convince the Big Bad Doctor that the rash in question (and the fever, and the array of miseries) looked a whoooole lot like German measles, a childhood ailment she had escaped by being largely isolated from children throughout her formative years.

It’s a long, long, long way from the Funny Farm to the Mayo Clinic. Nevertheless, I figure the effort is worth it. So off I go, shortly after dawn has cracked.

I get HALFWAY ACROSS THE VALLEY on the journey to the clinic — planning to go, on the way back home, by the upscale Costco to set in motion the process to get the glasses fixed (the glasses that were gouged up when I fell flat on my face in the dark over a busted chunk of sidewalk), and then by the upscale Fry’s to pick up enough food for another week — and then it dawned on me:

I forgot my credit-card holder! 

Sheee-ut! The driver’s license is hidden in the car. But…but…no credit card: no groceries. No Costco card: no way to get into Costco’s eyeglass department.

I swear, the older I get, the less competent I get. In particular, the fewer thoughts I can keep in mind at any given time. Admittedly, there were several things to remember:

  • Charge up computer, hope it will last for the time I have to sit around and twiddle thumbs
  • Leave money and a note for cleaning lady
  • Pick up mess so cleaning lady can find a surface to clean
  • Empty coffee grounds on plants outside
  • Wash French press so cleaning lady doesn’t clog the drain by dumping coffee grounds down the sink
  • Write shopping list
  • Dump trash so cleaning lady can haul it out to the alley
  • Wash up, comb hair after a fashion (which is no fashion at all…)
  • Paint face
  • Hide the quarter I use to pop open endlessly annoying eye-shadow and eyebrow pencil cases (otherwise cleaning lady tries to put it “away,” where I can’t find it)
  • Correspond with financial adviser
  • Be sure dog is in house and safe
  • Get credit cards, drop in pocket
  • Find car keys
  • Remember to load computer into the car
  • Forget shopping list

Yeah. None of these things seem to be items that I’m competent to handle anymore… Well, except for the last one.

Speaking of Financial Adviser: I’d asked him if he felt we could spring loose another few thou’ so I can trade in the hated Venza on some older car that still has intelligible controls. And by the way, did he know a car broker?

He wrote back and said the partners there use the owner of Gateway Chevrolet for advice and consent about buying cars. Now…I wouldn’t have another Chevy if you gave it to me…but if he can do actual car brokering, well…maybe.  So asked him to get us in touch. Let’s see what he has to say.

The guys at the Scottsdale Business Association have a fella they like to use…but he gives me the whim-whams. Why? Because he owns a used-car lot. Duh! Guys! That’s not a car broker. That’s a car salesman.

…..

A-N-N-N-D after two hours of cooling my heels in the allergy testing department, we now know I’m not allergic to penicillin or amoxycillin.

No. Not at all.

We’ve proceeded on the assumption that I am allergic, because WAAAYYYYYY back in the day, before the Kid was born, I developed a rash and a fever after taking some penicillin prescribed by the good Dr. Daley. I surmised that I was enjoying a case of German measles (the symptoms exactly coinciding with that ailment). But when I suggested that to Dr. Daley, who hates it when women self-diagnose, he said nooooooooo, gimme a break! You’re allergic to penicillin.

And into the permanent medical record that went.

A few years go by and I decide to get pregnant. Now the gynecologist does a titer test and discovers that yea verily, I had German measles.

Sooooo….it’s unlikely that the penicillin allergy theory is correct, but no one has wanted to take a chance on it.

Meanwhile, last time I was out in the Mayo’s precincts, I learned that I’m NOT allergic, after all, to ibuprofen. Which was a kind of a miracle… On the way home, I bought a bottle of the stuff. Just the first tiny dose the Mayo folks gave me here, by way of kicking off their test, made the sore hand feel soooooooo much better! And a pill a day for about five days made that sprain one whole helluva lot more tolerable. In fact, I suspect the pain relief (or something associated with it) helped the injury to heal faster.

Life is getting a whole lot simpler, really fast.

😀