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Health care

Soo…How’s the Snake Oil Workin’?

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So, we’re a week into the Great CBD experiment, in which we massage a snake oil concocted from marijuana into selected specimens of the myriad lentigos (“sunspots,” “age spots”) that infest my hide. The research question: Does this stuff really fade age spots and help heal actinic keratoses, as its enthusiasts claim?

So far? The jury is decidedly still out.

The Map of Australia, which decorates the finger-flicking digit on my left paw, appears to be slightly lighter. Or…that could be wishful thinking.

The Great Blot on the face: hmmmm….might be a tiny bit lighter, but probably not.

This one already has a lighter area in the center; a week ago, when this image was made, it was uniformly brown across its diameter.

Two large spots on the left leg both seem to have changed for the better, but in a strange way: they’ve lightened to normal skin color in the center, but a brown halo remains around this “normal” patch, in both cases. Other spots on that leg don’t seem to have changed noticeably.

The ominously two-toned blot on the right shin seems possibly slightly lighter, and the dark brown patch within it is blending with the remaining area: little by little, but by now noticeably. Another large spot on that leg is developing a light-colored center, like the ones on the left shin.

One set of relatively small spots on the left forearm has faded significantly. A larger spot nearby: I can’t see much difference.

Others, I would say, seem fundamentally unchanged.

LOL! We have a month to go in Phase 1 of our moment of science. This should be entertaining.

If it doesn’t work, then what???, given that you can’t persuade dermatologists to freeze them off, the way you used to be able to do? Interestingly, Amazon carries hydroquinone creams galore — they’re all 2%, but you could simply apply them more often to get more on the things. You can buy retinoid cream there, too, also at 2%. So I’m going to give the CBD a month. If it hasn’t started to make a noticeable difference, compared to the photos I made, then I’m going to order up one of these others.

Meanwhile, the dermatologist recommended Elta’s 50 SPF zinc sun-blocking cream, which, interestingly, she peddles out of her office. Seeking to buy it for fewer dollars, I ordered a tube of that from Amazon: a bargain at a mere $24.50 plus 10% tax, for a supposed three ounces.

Rip-off, IMHO. The tube that arrived was about 2/3 full, making it appear in the photos that you would be getting a lot more. And of course, as we know, an SPF of 50 gives you about 1% more protection than SPF 30, so there’s really no point in paying more for a higher number.

Over at Fry’s — Arizona’s answer to Kroger — what should I come across but a much larger — and fuller — tube of Neutrogena zinc-based SPF 50 sun screen….which goes from Amazon for all of $8.99. This, I put in my car so that I can smear it on my hands — which are in water so much that nothing I put on in the morning is going to stay put for long — every time I get behind the steering wheel. I must say, the Neutrogena is far superior to the Elta, in terms of use. The Elta is so greasy as to be oily. The Neutrogena, though it’s a little thick and asks for some rubbing to spread it on smoothly, is nongreasy — has about the character of an ordinary skin moisturizer.

Both of them, being zinc products, spread a white film over your skin. Don’t panic! You can rub most of that in, plus if you just leave it alone for awhile, the whitiness of it will melt and fade. Put the stuff on, go on about your business for awhile, then put your makeup on, and no one will be the wiser.

Men: I dunno if I’d apply this stuff directly after shaving, especially if you use a razor blade for the purpose. It might be OK right after using an electric shaver, but try it on a small patch first, before slapping it on like aftershave. It could be that either way, if you shave first, then putter around with feeding the dog, grabbing some breakfast, and getting dressed, it will feel OK having given the hide half-hour’s after-shave rest.

Oil and Water: The Miracle Cure?

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Okay, so here’s my latest quack nostrum: a glass of water.

I’m sitting here the other evening contemplating how bad the hide looks. The arms are not just freckled with potentially precarcinomish sunspots, but the skin is sagging and crepe-papery and realllly ugleee. So…what else? I go online and google how you can treat sagging wrinkly old-person skin.

What comes up, right off the bat, is the suggestion — repeated at various sites and debunked at others — that wrinkling can be caused by dehydration. That’s not of the “smear hand cream on your hide” variety but of the “drink water” variety.

Hmmmm… Whether guzzling water plumps up your wrinkles and erases years from your aged arms or whether it does…well, nothing, the fact struck me that I hardly ever drink water anymore.

What do I drink?

  • About three cups (24 ounces) of coffee every day.
  • A glass or two of iced tea
  • A glass or two of wine, or a bottle or two of beer, or a bourbon & water

Annnddd…that’s about it.

Caffeine is dehydrating, so if there’s any truth to the tale that you need ample water for good skin health, then the coffee and the iced tea might be described as counterproductive. So, one might expect, would alcohol, in whatever form you choose to imbibe.

Sooo…what is considered “enough” water? For a woman, it’s ELEVEN CUPS a day. For a man: 15 cups (of the eight-ounce measuring-cup variety).

Well, of course that’s insane. Eleven cups is almost three quarts; 15 cups is almost a gallon.

On a lark, though, I decided I’d try drinking that much (water, I mean…) just to see what happens. So measured out 11 cups into a clear glass water pitcher and stashed it in the fridge, planning to pour a glassful every few hours. This would allow me to see how much water I’ve consumed at any given time of day and sorta keep “on schedule,” trying to get through half of it by mid-day and the rest by around 8 p.m.

Soooo…. I tried it. The strategy, such as it is, added about three quarts of water to the usual ration of about 3 cups of French press coffee and one or two glasses of wine or beer per day.

And…holy mackerel! What a difference! First off, along about 9 p.m. the first day, it occurred to me that I felt better than normal. Second, on inspection, even on the first evening, the hide looked noticeably better. And third, that night I did not wake up at three in the morning.

Well, okay, the latter may be coincidence. But the decrepit hide issue? It’s getting better every day. Where the skin on my arms was kinda hanging loose in the inimitable manner of Old Age, it’s firmed up and is not sagging or looking pathologically wrinkled near as bad.

Do I look like I’m 23? Hell, no…but neither do I look like I’m pushing 93. The skin looks a lot healthier, firmer, and…almost normal. I mean, normal for, say, a 45-year-old.

A glass of tap water: cheapest med you can buy, eh?

As I may have mentioned a while back, a friend showed up at the Funny Farm bearing a small vial of CBD cream. CBD is a now-legal (amazingly, in crazy-conservative Arizona) derivative of the marijuana plant; commercially, it comes in the form of an oil, a cream, or a waxy salve. The spot where the latest actinic keratosis had been frozen off the back of my left hand still hurt, even though it was ostensibly healed. So, without thinking about it, I slapped a dab of this stuff on it.

Then thought…uh oh! That was dumb!

And then thought…holy mackerel!!!! This WORKED.

Yes. Within minutes the stuff had killed the pain that was radiating across the back of my hand.

Soooo… I started to look it up and found that yeah, CBD oil can apparently ease minor, superficial skin pain and possibly even joint pain (not likely, because it isn’t absorbed through your skin…but whatEVER).

This was interesting. I continued to use it.

Come last week’s appointment, I present myself at the westside dermatologist’s office, where I’m greeted with ecstatic exclamations of amazement at how well the damn thing has healed up. I think…right, sure. This performance rings of “humor the patient,” but I go on about my business figuring that the nothing too drastic has been going on. Of course, I do not clue the doctor to the fact that I’ve been smearing cannabis oil on my sweaty little paw.

But…suppose this stuff really does work to promote skin healing? Suppose it aids in healing of actinic keratoses, in specific?

What the hell else can it do?

Could it, do you suppose, help to fade the age spots that speckle my hide like a leopard’s fur?

Clearly it’s a quack nostrum. Evidence that it works to fade solar lentigines (the techno-name for sun spots) is anecdotal and vague.

But…but on the other hand, it doesn’t appear that the stuff is likely to hurt you. It’s poorly absorbed through the skin, and so has few or no systemic effects, as far as I could unearth. And I don’t appear, idiosyncratically, to be allergic to it: no sign of a rash on the hand where I applied it so liberally.

Well. For the past three weeks, I’ve been smearing this stuff across the back of my left hand and on a particularly annoying age spot that adorns its finger-flicking finger…and…hmmmmm…. The left hand is the one that gets most of the blast of the sun coming in through the car’s window when you’re driving (surprise! glass doesn’t block enough UV light to matter, after all!). So it has lots of age “freckles” on it, as well as that spot, which looks like a map of Australia.

And y’know what? The thing is getting lighter. The smaller spots have faded, too: still there, but compared to the right hand, lighter and less noticeable.

But I could be dreaming this up, of course. Nothing like a little wishful thinking to make your age spots fade…right before your eyes. 😀

So I came up with a wee experiment:

Selected several particularly prominent lentigines — this is easy, because having grown up and lived in the subtropics all my life, I have them all over my body — and photographed them.

Next, I’m going to rub a CBD skin product into each of these sun spots, several times a day over the next three or four weeks. Then, photograph them again and see if any noticeable change appears.

This should be amusing… In the “doesn’t have enough to do with her time” department. 😀

What ARE you smokin’? And how do I get rid of you?

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Ever ask yourself those questions? Arrrhhhghhh!

Question # 1: Heaven help us, what are you smoking?

So this afternoon I’m  banging around the house as fast as I can bang, trying to catch up with all the chores that didn’t get done while I was traipsing back and forth across the Valley (40 minutes each way, 80 minutes round trip, two endless drives in exactly opposite directions, once to the Mayo and once back to the dermatologist in the wild) and flying through 31 pages of Chinglish academic language on an impossible deadline and on and on and unfuckinbelievably on trying to fix things that broke while all the medico-swimming pool BS was going on and trying to catch up with all the financial and household and… and the phone rings.

It’s Jim the Superannuated Pool Dude, the one who didn’t fix things and who got sent on his way when I called Swimming Pool Service & Repair to come drain the pool, power-wash every part of it inside and out with chlorine, refill it, and recharge the chemicals.

The pool, BTW, is beyond gorgeous today. Like…wow. Like this…

As opposed to this…


So, sez he, how’s the pool?

Great, sez I.

How much stabilizer did they put in?

Huh??? How the Hell would I know? I was batting from pillar to post across the city while the guy was spending his time wrestling with the damn thing.

Well, how much water does the pool hold?

Uhhmmm… 18,000 gallons. I think I’ve told you this only three times.

He should’ve put in 18 pounds. A pound per thousand gallons. Is that how much he put in?

Whaaaat?????? I wouldn’t know, Jim. I had other things to do than stand over the man’s shoulder and watch his every move.

Jim persists: I’ll come by at 6 tomorrow morning to test it. If they didn’t put in enough it’ll turn green again right away.

Uh huh.

Get off the phone, think about this, call Swimming Pool Service & Repair. Get ahold of Ashley, who gets ahold of Aaron, who says he put in four pounds, which is the amount you’re supposed to put in, and if this guy dumps another 14 pounds in there it will trash the chemical balance.

Who do I believe?

Three guesses.

Back on the phone to Jim, telling his answering machine that I believe I’ll wait on the added stabilizer, thankyouverymuch. So tomorrow morning he’d better not show up.

And what is he smoking? According to the people who have a vested interest in selling you the stuff, you should add 4 pounds of stabilizer per 10,000 gallons, so that would be about six or seven pounds for the particular hole in the ground into which to pour money that dwells in my backyard. However, the pool tabs I use to dispense chlorine also contain cyanuric acid (which is what stabilizer is), and so you’re better off to go a little light on dumping the stuff in, because (especially in this heat) if you apply too much, it will tie up the chlorine and you’ll get, yea verily, green water.

Aaron’s four-pound dose was maybe a little light…but 18 pounds is effing crazy!!!!!

So, on to….

Question #2: How do I get rid of you?

Gawdlmighty.

How do I get rid of the superannuated pool dude? Well, I’d like to be kind to him, because he’s been nice to me and seems like a sweet (if eccentric) old fella. Just as soon not tell him to get lost, but I suppose if I have to, I will… Called him, reached his recorded yakathon, told him I would be out at 6:00 tomorrow morning, and there’s no need to add more CYA to the pool.

Will that get rid of him?

Whaddaybet it won’t…

And in the “Get Lost” Department, how do I tell the Mayo Clinic never to let one of their quacks come anywhere near me again?

Holy Sh!t. So I traipse way to hell and gone out there, halfway to Payson from my house, to get a second opinion on the lesion on my left hand, which still hurts and which doesn’t exactly seem to be what you’d call healing up properly.

I want to know if this thing has been treated correctly, and if so, how long can I expect it will take before it heals fully, and one way or another what’s with the burning pain that courses from the wrist to the elbow and hurts so much it wakes me out of a sound sleep in the wee hours of the morning, and should I use the fluorouracil the dermatologist in the wild prescribed (which is going to fuck up the skin on my hand and possibly do permanent damage) or can I safely wait a while to see if any more lesions appear there?

So first thing they do is sit me in an examining room and send in a resident. I am to be this kid’s teaching moment. First thing she does is demonstrate that she has no clue how to take an accurate blood pressure measure. Then she asks me a lot of questions, which I answer quietly and patiently.

She goes off and I’m left sitting and staring into space for about 20 minutes, until Her Nibs shows up.

When the actual fully accredited medical doctor enters, I hand over the printout of the biopsy showing the abnormal results, repeat what I’ve already said once about the present state of the ailment, describe what has been done and what has been recommended, explain my reluctance to use the topical drug, and ask if it would be ill-advised to wait a while to see what happens before slathering the stuff on my hand.

Well. This woman beats around the bush and beats around the bush and beats around the bush. She does not answer any of the questions that I’ve asked her.

Finally at one point she says, “You seem anxious. Are you feeling anxious?”

WHAT? What DOES that have to do with the price of beans or the state of the lesion on my sweaty little paw?

I think and almost say (but no, do not: my mother didn’t raise me in a barn, after all) damn right I’m anxious, bitch! I came in here with three specific questions — is this thing healing up properly, why does my arm feel like I dipped it in a vat of sulfuric acid, and can I safely delay using a skin-scorching chemical on my hand until we see whether in fact any more of these things comes up — and you have not answered a one of them!

From the “are you anxious” she goes on to ask me if I’m considering committing suicide!!!!!

No fuckin’ joke!

I’m going to kill myself because I have a 2-millimeter sore on my hand? WTF?

During all of this roundabout, wacko palaver, she parts with one (count it, 1) bit of useful information: about the fluorouracil she remarks (these are her words): “We don’t usually use it unless there are a lot of lesions in an area — like 15.”

Fifteen? I’ve had two in this spot, the back of my hand. All told, over the past four to six months, Dermatologist in the Wild has removed four from distant spots all over my body, none of them clustered together.

“So,” I ask, “you’re saying that it’s not necessary to use this stuff at this time?”

“That’s your decision,” she says.

Yeah. That’s exactly what she said. Helpful, hm?

In awe, I’m thinking how the Hell did you get into medical school? And HOW the Hell did you get hired by the freaking Mayo Clinic????

She was, it must be allowed, an extraordinarily beautiful woman. Indeed, one of the two most beautiful human beings I’ve ever seen. Can you get through medical school by dint of pure, unalloyed gorgeousness?

Possibly so.

By the time I got down to my car in the basement parking garage, I’d gone from annoyed to fuming. And by the time I’d driven my car from the Mayo Clinic on the east side of Scottsdale to my house perched on the tracks, I’d gone from a low simmer to a full boil. What a total waste of my time…and to add insult to injury, this supposed dermatologist tries to do an amateur job of psychoanalysis on me?

This episode occurred 11 days ago.

Yesterday I got in to see Dermatologist in the Wild, almost as far on the west side as the Mayo is on the east side.

By now I’m using a certain magical mystery elixir on this thing — some fine CBD cream a friend brought over as a house gift. She handed it to me and, without even thinking, I slapped a dab on the sore thing, and…holy sh!t, the pain stopped right then!

Yeah. So I’ve kept on slathering it on — happened to have another jar of the stuff in the house. And it is starting to feel much, MUCH better.

Or else I’m just feeling no pain, though we’re told this stuff can’t soak through your hide and make you high.

Westside Dermatologist (a.k.a. Dermatologist in the Wild) looks at the spot on the paw, the one I’ve been slathering with the magical mystery cream, which I have carefully washed off before surfacing in her precincts.

So she gets out her speculum and peers at the damn thing and she says…. “This is AMAZING.”

I think “uh oh…amazing that it’s already progressed to terminal cancer?????”

“I can’t believe this!” she enthuses. “It’s perfectly healed up! It looks great!”

Uhmmm…who’d’ve thunk it…. 😀

Heh heh heh…naturally I failed to mention the presence of the quack nostrum to her.  But the instant I got home, I ordered up a four-ounce jar of the cream from some outfit called Eden’s Herbals.  Amazon doesn’t seem to carry it, but this place does, & the sales pitch looks almost credible.

Oh, effing em gee. Can you imagine?

At Amazon I found the heavy-duty sunscreen the dermatologist’s office recommends, at significantly less than said derm is peddling it for. Ordered up a bottle of that stuff, too.

Derm in the Wild said, when asked, that the burning pain up the right arm was not related to the lesion, but is probably some kind of neuritis. She suggested I ask my GP about it. I said well I have a checkup scheduled in October. She said fine. I asked if it would be reasonable to hold off applying the flesh-eating fluorouracil until we see if any more lesions appear on the back of the hand. Good plan, said she. She sprayed freezing nitrogen on two new lesions that have surfaced in other widely separated spots and explained, when asked, that all these things are popping up seemingly at once because I’m getting old and 74 years of sun exposure are catching up with me.

Little does she know I probably won’t ask her about a mosquito bite after this. But when I see Young Dr. Kildare, who’s scheduled in the near future, I’ll specifically  ask him about the arm pain. And…mercifully…YDK’s most sterling quality (besides his spectacular cuteness) is…are you ready? Common Sense.

I’m dead certain the pain has to do with our little surgical procedure, because placing an ice pack on the (ex-) lesion quickly makes the burning sensation go away. And because the lesion was located almost on top of where a nerve proceeds from your index & second finger, across the back of your hand, and up your arm…right where the pain goes. My guess is that while we were shaving off flesh to biopsy or while we were freezing off the lesion, we must have dinged a nerve or two. Whether it will ever heal remains to be seen.

So I’d better get used to going to bed early, in order to get in seven hours of sleep before this thing’s alarm clock goes off at 3:00 a.m.

Either that or commit suicide, hm? Take a flying leap off the North Rim…with an ice pack tied to my paw?

Drivin’, Drivin’, Drivin’…

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Welp, I’m on my way…first to a hair appointment of long standing, and second to the Mayo, where they urgently wish to see me. Looks like the clindamycin is, as I tried to tell the endodontist, indeed very possibly causing a fine case of C. difficile. So it’s off to their acute care section, where I have to be at 2:40. It’s an hour’s drive, and I have to be at the hair guy at 1 p.m. So…40 minutes to Shane, another 40 minutes from his place to the Mayo…should work out just about right…

ugh. Just what I wanna do with a nice, humid 112-degree afternoon.

***

Like a rocket, straight across the city to lovely Olde Towne Scottsdale!…

Well… More like a mule and a flatboard…

So here I am at the hair stylist’s, about 10 minutes early. He’s still eating his lunch. Appointment isn’t until 1:00, but fortunately, suspecting the usual worst, I left 50 minutes beforehand.

***

Yea verily, as usual in lovely Phoenix, wherever you’re goin’, you can’t get there from here. Hence, almost an hour to make a twenty-five-minute drive was cutting it close. No sooner do I turn out of the Hood onto Main Drag East than I spot emergency lights flashing at the Desired Intersection, about a mile & a half down the road.

Dayum! think I: Wrecky-poo. Better turn left at First Intersection so as to dodge that mess.

Weirdly, there is exactly no traffic on Main Drag East. This is one of the mainest of main drags in the city. During the noon hour, lots of my fellow homicidal drivers should be dodging up and down it. Nary a soul.

So I get into the left turn lane and hope for a break in the traffic on Main Drag South, enough for me do dodge suicidally onto M.D. South, eastbound. From there it will be all the way to 12th Street and then down to Glendale, which turns into Lincoln Blvd, which will take me to Goldwater Drive, which turns into Scottsdale Road, which deposits me at Shane’s salon.

Cross-traffic on M.D. East is heavy. A cop pulls up and parks on someone’s yard, and I think Ah! He’ll direct traffic and let me turn left. No. He never gets out of his car.

So naturally I dodge suicidally in front of the Oncoming, make it onto the eastbound arterial, and fly away.

Maneuver down to Glendale, past closed stores and a bum sleeping on the sidewalk, driving driving driving.

At 24th Street our honored City Parents have Glendale/Lincoln CLOSED DOWN TO ONE LANE while they excavate the road.

Mile on mile on mile of road. Lincoln is restricted from 24th Street all the way to Tatum Blvd. This is, says Google Maps, only three miles, but when you’re puttering along at under 25 mph while you try to get to an appointment on time, it feels like about 30 miles.

Water line replacement.

I do not know why it is that wherever I’m goin’ they have the roads torn up, wrecks littering the landscapes, crazies banging around, ambulances and cops tearing back and forth…but it never, ever fails.

***

Oh well. I make it to Shane’s place. He does a beautiful and expensive job on my long flowing locks, chatting all the time. His brother died, sadly enough. Colon cancer. The guy lived homeless in the woods outside Flagstaff, his schizophrenia making the sound of human company an agonizing distraction.

Shane has one last photo of his brother, the two of them posing together. What a strange and heart-breaking contrast: Shane handsome, healthy and vigorous; Bob tired, gaunt, and streetworn.

***

From Shane’s it’s up to the Mayo Clinic, where I have an appointment a scant hour and a half after the hair get-together. This, arranged on the fly along about 9 this morning.

For the third day in a row, I have runaway diarrhea. And if you read the flyer and the online material for clindamycin, you see that clindamycin is associated with Clostridium difficile infections, and that often this comes within a few months of taking it. So…it’s tiiime!

Heavy traffic on Scottsdale Road, but not bad eastbound, halfway to Payson, and into the Mayo.

So here I am… Just talked to the cutest young doctor in training. He thinks it’s not C. diff but more likely a passing virus; maybe a bacterial infection. He thinks it’ll go away in a few days.

Let us hope so!

Doc-in-Training’s boss doctor comes in, a middle-aged soul who has the look of a person who has absorbed considerable acquired wisdom during her life. She also opines that I do not have C. diff, and reels off a number of good reasons. She offers to do a test. I say if she feels confident that this is really just a passing minor bug, then in my opinion less is more. She inclines to agree. I am out the door.

Now I have to get home. How to avoid whatever that was, if it’s still there. Three hours (plus) have passed, so presumably the mess, signal outage, whatEVER is gone by now. But if not..,.

Ah yes, if not…by the time I get there it will be High Rush Hour. Rush hour starts at 3:00 in these fine parts. That’ll add a mess to a mess.

***

Driving driving driving back through central Scottsdale, reflecting that the stores and malls there have hardly changed since my friends and I were in graduate school and this was our stomping ground. What has changed was the tract where my best friend B and her husband bought a little (tackily tossed-together) house on a big chunk of horse property. The structure was so cheaply built that you could see the sky where the living-room window didn’t fit the frame. The builder hadn’t even bothered to fill the gap with putty.

Shortly, she divorced her husband of the moment, mostly – truth be known – because at the time she took up with him, she was playing at being countercultural…but he really was countercultural. Alas, at heart, countercultural was not her game; under the long straight hair and the stylishly hippy clothes, she was a nice middle-class bourgeoise. When it occurred to her that he was getting more and more like his father (a dyed-in-the-wool eccentric) and that she did not want to be like his mother (to whom it fell to support the father and their three children), she flang him out.

She ended up (how, I do not know) with the house, and the debt associated therewith.

Now comes the amazing part…

Not very long after the break-up, along came a real estate developer. He wanted to buy up all the properties in that tract so he could convert the land into a shopping mall. A freeway – now known as the Pima Freeway or Loop 101 – was on the drawing board, and so the proposed mall promised to be profitable.

B refused to sell.

The developer was uncowed. He came back with new offers…the most attractive of which was “how’s about I buy you another house?”

She said, “I might consider that. But only if my mortgage payments remain the same. And it needs to have lots of space between me and the neighbors.”

Incredibly, the guy finds her a place on what was then the eastern edge of Scottsdale on over an acre of land, with a desert wash running along the back property line – adding another good 30 feet of width. The house was about 2900 well-built, handsomely equipped square feet. Basically what he did was give her a very fine home in one of the most desirable parts of Scottsdale, for the cost of the piece of junk she was living in.

She lived happily ever after there, working away as a college professor. Recently she retired, and she and her second husband sold the place for $737,620, just about enough to buy in the Pacific Northwest, whither they decamped.

***

Sailing homeward across the Valley on Shea Boulevard, I encountered traffic that was thick, heavy, but moving. Hit the freeway and you get the aggressive demented idiots, people who try to pass you on the right shoulder when you’re tailgating the guy who’s moving up the onramp ahead of you. Luckily, I also am aggressive and demented, and so in response to one of these this afternoon, closed the six or eight feet between myself and the guy ahead of me to four or five feet, fuckyouverymuch Jerkowitz.

***

So now it’s 4:19 and the Human has just made it into the Funny Farm. The light at the entrance to the ’Hood was functioning, but while I was gone, the City shut down a lane coming and a lane going, indicating that we will have to use Gangbanger’s Way for ingress and egress while they dig up the road, if we are to avoid yet another interminable traffic jam.

The Hotter’n’Hell, Pool Mess, Dog Menace, Little Ol’ Lady Jamboree

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These jamborees get better and better.

Arizona’s “monsoon” has finally arrived. What IS that? Rain, that’s all. It’s a late-summer rainy season. This is the time of year when reasonably tolerable 110-degree “dry” heat gives way to unreasonably intolerable swamp heat. Rainstorms blow in from the Sea of Cortez whilst it’s hotter than the hubs of Hades, combining soggy air with annoying temperatures. Sorta like a Georgia summer. ’Ceptin’ we don’t have no bitin’ flies…

Had to drive to the far West side to revisit the dermatologists, whose work of art looked less than artistic this morning. The current actinic diagnosis was regarded as just on the edge of flipping over to carcinoma…and it grew so fast it was enough to scare the bedoodles out of you, me, and a person with a degree in medical science. It’s not acting like previous frozen-off lesions have, so I called and asked….they said “get your butt out here.” That entailed about 90 minutes of driving through heat and unpleasant traffic.

There’s a big anvil cloud rising up like an angry cobra, off in the east. So I expect we’ll get more rain, more wind, and more mess in the pool.

The pool is cloudy again. Now it’s green cloudy, not gray cloudy. Just when I think I’ve got it fixed, it clouds back up again. Dumping wads of chlorine plus a third of a bottle of Skill-It into the water this morning did not help. Just dumped in more wads of chlorine plus more soda ash. I will be surprised if this works.

I think the filter needs to be cleaned. Its pressure gauge hasn’t moved off 10 psi since they replastered the puddle. And…y’know…THAT ain’t normal. Ohhhh no. You have no idea how ain’t normal that is.

I also suspect the plastering crew failed to apply stablizer when they refilled the puddle. That would explain the chronic cloudiness, and it would especially explain the volatility of the chlorine.

The pool replastering dude is supposed to come inspect on Friday. I called and suggested they should give me an estimate on jackhammering off the goddamned Pebblesheen surface and applying plain old-fashioned white plaster. He was audibly alarmed.

If you have or dream of getting a pool, for godsake do not EVER apply PebbleTec or PebbleSheen. I don’t know what that stuff is doing, but it has totally screwed up the system’s chemistry. And brushing the algae off the surface is a lost cause: the accursed coarse surface EATS pool brushes. It wrecks your pool cleaner, too, BTW.

Moving on…

I spent I dunno how long this morning driving around the neighborhood trying to map out a two-mile dog-and-human walking route that will take us out of the way of the Shi-Tsu Lady who, propped up with braces and two canes, hobbles along with her aggressive, lunging little doggy pest in a path that intersects our way. This remapping project is not an easy trick, since our usual route goes through the shadiest, coolest part of the ’Hood…and when it’s 90 degrees at 5 in the morning, “shady” and “cool” are fully operative terms.

No matter when I leave the house or what route I try to take through Richistan, we do not seem to be able to avoid the Shi-Tsu lady. The issue is that her little dog goes batshit berserk when it sees Ruby the Corgi, who tends to respond in kind. This would be annoying but maybe not problematic if this lady were not 93 years old (her admission) and barely ambulatory.

Here’s the issue:

Our lively old gal only barely has her 25-pound killer dog under control. In fact, she does not have it under control. And given the state she’s in, a frantic 25-pound dog could indeed pull her off her feet, with dire results.

I do not want this sweet old gal to get hurt just because I happen to be walking along her morning route with my dog, whose mere presence drives her dog into a frenzy. So…this is developing into a problem, since she surfaces over there no matter what ungodly hour I leave the house. Get out at 4:30? There she is. Have a halfway decent night’s sleep and leave the house at 5:00 a.m.? There she is. Wake up at 3:00 a.m., manage to get back to sleep (sort of…), and don’t hit the road until 5:30? There she is!

This is a problem, because when I see her I have to cut our walk short, and we don’t get the two miles needed to keep me in shape and the dog…doggish. Another potential problem has insinuated its way into my hot little brain: liability. If her out-of-control dog lunges at my lunging out-of-control dog, yanks her off her feet and breaks her hip (or her back, or God only knows what), what will be my liability for any such fiasco?

Dollars to donuts, a lawsuit will ensue.

So now I’m trying to find ways to get the doggywalk in without having to encounter this woman.

Welp, I made a little discovery. At one point the Shi-Tzu Lady remarked that she lives on a neighborhood street we’ll call Gentrification Lane.

The other day I drove past Gentrification Lane, a cul-de-sac off one of the streets on our route. Glancing up the road, I spotted a couple of white, unmarked mini-busses…the kind used by places like the Beatitudes to ferry the inmates to doctor’s appointments and occasional grocery-store outings. Hm. What if…thought I…what if she’s not actually “aging in place” in her own home but lives in one of those convalescent homes various marginal operators slip into neighborhoods?

So I drove down Gentrification Lane yesterday morning, on the way home from the gas station, where I needed to score a couple of overpriced gallons from the QT to fuel a junket out to the far west side and back.

Yeah. There are two houses down there that are suspiciously run down and do not look…well…like anybody who cares how they look lives there. Side by side. In the middle of an area full of upscale houses with high-value maintenance.

Look up the addresses and find, lo! one of them is owned by Hacienda Health Care, a place in which one vegetative patient was notoriously raped and impregnated by an employee. Said outfit was in the news a couple years ago when relatives found maggots in an out-of-it elderly patient’s surgical wound. Here in lovely free-market Arizona, though, this fine enterprise remains in business.

Intriguingly, Tony the Romanian Landlord has gotten out of the house-rental business and into the quasi-nursing home game. After the economy recovered from the recession, he bought a house over in South Lower Richistan, which he razed to the ground and replaced with  a two-story boarding house, which he presented as a convalescent home. He kept this for a few years, and then about a year ago sold it.

Then someone — Tony, dollars to donuts — purchased a house at the intersection of Secondary Feeder N/S and Main Feeder E/W and converted it into a residential care home. It had been a rental for a long time — well maintained and stable, so we know Tony was not the landlord. It was a rental before Tony came on the scene. And out of Tony’s price range, so one would think. But now I learn from my neighbor Josie that she managed to get out from under the truly grinding care of her demented husband Manny (whose marbles long ago fell out his ears and rolled off to Yuma) by getting him into Medicaid nursing care.

And where is he? In that house! He gets out and wanders around the corner there, looking kinda lost and embittered. That house last sold for $430,000…right about the time Tony sold the boarding house. It’s now estimated to be worth over $750,000.

And what do you bet Tony is either renting that house on Gentrification Lane to Hacienda or runs it as a nursing home himself and contracts to Hacienda for customers?

When he had the boarding house…uhm, first convalescent home…, he put Pretty Daughter over there in charge of it, as its “manager.” So now she would have Experience and could hire out to places like that as an administrator.

Never a dull moment here in Paradise. 😀

 

Summertime, and the Livin’ Is…Keeriminey!!!

by

Okay, so…one good thing: Out the door with the dog at 4:30 this morning.

This meant we dodged the wee-hours dog-walker rush — in 112-degree weather, everybody and their little brother, sister, dogs, and puppies swarm the neighborhood streets and the park at 5:00 a.m. Not that I don’t love my fellow humans and their dogs, but…well…yeah: their out-of-control dogs when combined with my out-of-control dog add up to a damned nuisance and an annoying start to the day.

Yesterday I thought maybe I could avoid some of that by walking around the park twice (a one-mile circuit: I’m trying to get in two miles a day), on the far side of the road. The park is overrun at dawn, with people who think our neighborhood park is their private dog park. And no…across the street is not so great. There was some stupid woman in there with TWO big dogs off the leash, chasing around like rockets on high-test fuel after toys she was joyfully tossing for them. And here and there, other dog-lovers letting their “fur-babies” run around loose.

By circumnavigating the park, I hoped to avoid the elderly lady who has invaded my favorite circuit around Upper and Lower Richistan. She’s very sweet and I’d like to get to know her, but not around two nuisancey little dogs — hers and mine. She has an ill-tempered Shi-Tsu that goes batshit when it sees Ruby coming up the street and starts barking and lunging and yanking around. The old gal, who said she was 93 years old, has braces on both legs and limps along with not one but two canes while trying to control her fractious pooch. Of course, when Ruby sees this hound coming at her, she tries to lunge into battle, too, so now I have to struggle and fight to keep her under control. All the while worrying that the sweet old lady is going to be yanked off her feet and thrown on the pavement!

Augh.

Well, the park route proved not to be such a great idea, because of the chronic law-breakers over there. (It is against the law — city, county, and state — to let your dog run around off the leash.) (And no, I don’t need anymore dog fights: three is enough, for this pooch.) Which is why I started walking through the Richistans in the first place.

Guess I’m not the only one who had that idea. 😀

At any rate, hitting the road a half-hour earlier this morning seems to have resolved the problem. We didn’t encounter the Shi-Tsu lady, nor did we meet many other dog-lovers. We passed the lady with the gigantic Bernese mountain dog — what a critter! He, despite his vastness, is well behaved and quiet. We passed the guy with the lab-like Heinz-57: ditto…a well-behaved and quiet dog. We came up behind the big, hefty-looking gay guy with the two wee little toy poochie things, always an amazing sight. But that was it. A cat tried to follow us home from Lower Richistan, but gave up when it noticed we were drifting into the slums.

It is hotter than the hubs of Hades here. AC is pounding away most of the time. My son is getting $500 power bills in that leaky old house of his. I suggested he bring his dog and camp out here until the end of August, but of course (being sane) he’s having none of that noise.

The pool, which tends to haze, looked clear when I got up this morning but by the time I’d finished breakfast was full of London Fog again, despite my having poured in about 8 or 10 ounces of granulated chlorine as dawn cracked this morning.

Dumped in another pound of chlorine; Cl level is now back up to around 4 ppm, fairly high. This will drop quickly, because chlorine degrades in sunlight.

…some things, you don’t wanna know…

NEVER have I had so much trouble with the chemical balance in this pool — and I’ve been tending it for 16 years. I’ve about come to the conclusion that I need to have the damned Pebblesheen jackhammered off and replaced with old-fashioned white plaster, which IMHO looks better and which is one helluva lot easier to maintain.

You cannot get it clean to save your life. Because the surface is coarse — like fine gravel in asphalt — it eats up a pool brush if you try to brush the walls and floors. Literally pulls the plastic bristles out, which then get into the pool cleaner and break the damn thing. That’s OK, because the surface itself will soon destroy Harvey, and I’ll have to replace him with a new $400 cleaner that has wheels on it — which, we’re told, will break quickly under the strain of running over this stuff. Algae settles into the coarse surface’s billions of pores, so brushing is futile, anyway: the only way to dislodge it is by scouring it down with a hard spray of water from the hose. That’s not practical in the winter:  to clean the walls & steps with water spray, you have to get into the water. Result: haze and algae curtains. So you’re constantly dumping chlorine into the drink, which BLEACHES the damn blue Pebblesheen! So now that expensive new surface is not blue: it’s blotchy yellow (bleached spots) and green (algae) and blue (Pebblesheen waiting to be bleached).

I suspect there’s something about the chemical composition of the surface that bollixes up the water chemistry. I cannot keep the chlorine levels up to save my life. Last night after dark, I poured in a dose of chlorine — the dose I’d administered in the morning having burned out in the 112-degree sunlight. This morning I dumped 3/4 pound of granulated Cl in there — which should have sufficed nicely for the day. That was around 6:30 a.m. By 9 a.m, a test kit  registered ZERO chlorine in there. Actually, that’s with two different brands of test kit. (Yeah: it did occur to me that maybe something was off with HD’s kits, so I bought one from Leslie’s y’day). (No, nothing is wrong with the Home Depot kit…)

Two and a half hours later, and ALL the chlorine is gone????? Huh uh. Something is seriously wrong there

On reflection, it occurs to me that the Swimming Pool Service & Repair guy may have failed to apply chlorine stabilizer when he did the start-up after the pool was refilled. Seems unlikely — this IS their business and they’ve been doing it for years. How could you forget that little detail?

But…it would explain why the chemicals go haywire within a few hours after application.

Whenever I get my act together today, I need to return the wimpy test kit Leslie’s sold me (I found a better one on Amazon, same price, more options, better vials, better chemicals). While I’m there I’ll ask them about the stabilizer issue. It would be good if they had a liquid form (stabilizer is basically cyanuric acid). Some brands of pool chlorine incorporate CYA — particularly chlorine tablets. These were pushing up the acid levels so high that the Leslie’s guy recommended using granulated Cl — which may be the problem right there. If the granulated product doesn’t contain CYA, then…duh! No wonder the water’s clouding up.

I personally prefer the granulated product, which you simply broadcast over the surface occasionally. It seems less nuisancey to me than keeping track of the damned floating pool tab holders and wrestling with alarming potentially explosive tablets every time you turn around. But…hm. But. If the tabs will hold down the haze, that may be the first recourse in a series of strategic steps:

  1. Try the tablets again;
  2. Pounce Leslie’s affable manager and interrogate him about the stabilizer issue;
  3. Possibly buy and add stabilizer…

Which I sure would ‘druther not be hassled with.

Speaking of hassle, on Monday I go in to get yet another goddamn actinic keratosis frozen off my hide.

This has gotten very old, indeed…. A forty-minute drive each way, a fun doctor’s visit, and then a wound to have to care for over the next week or two.

Yesterday, to my horror and amazement, I learned that the current thinking among researchers is that actinic keratoses are not discrete phenomena. Instead, they represent what is called a “field disease,” especially where they crop up repeatedly in the same patch of skin. The theory is that they represent a larger area of diseased tissue. And the suggestion? Treat that area with a chemical, as well as freezing off each flare-up. “The management of multiple AKs is a long-term prospect, with no clear cure,” we’re told. “The best approach is the sequential treatment with a lesion-directed and a field-directed therapy.”

This, quite frankly, does not sound very pleasant. It entails applying a topical gel that singes your skin and can elicit some interesting allergic reactions. Monday I’ll have to take a printout of the article to the doc’s office and ask them if they don’t think they should prescribe one of the recommended drugs. Which, no, I would rather not use. But…besides the hassle and discomfort of these goddamn things (each one itches and hurts at the same time), the fact is they can convert to squamous cell carcinoma in short order. And that stuff will kill you just as dead as malignant melanoma will.

In other precincts: this heat is making me freaking comatose. I have not gotten anything done. Have not posted another section of Fire-Rider. Have not tried to get back to writing Ella. Have not done much house maintenance other than struggle with the pool (many other projects await the human’s attention). Have done little else but eat and sleep. And clean the pool. 😀