So this afternoon, after having spent the morning finishing up the first of two indexes for a couple of 380-page books only four or five days late, it was off to the Paradise Valley Costco to collect the new progressive glasses that have been sitting there for a week, while I’ve been wrestling with various crises editorial and otherwise. This, because my beloved stylish fancy guy, who was forced out of Uptown Plaza when the proprietors “upgraded” the mall and jacked up the rent, wanted $395 just to replace the lenses after I fell and irredeemably scratched one of them. And…how did that work out?
Not too bad.
The frames are clunky, no question of it. But for what I paid, one could hardly expect the airy height of style. They’re clunky, wouldn’t be my first choice if I had a job, but WTF!? At this age, no one notices you.
Annd…in with the…uhm…old-fashioned…
Seriously: it is literally true that very few people actually register the presence of a woman my age, much less care one way or another how she looks. She’s just part of the background, like leaves in an oleander hedge.
That is, after all, not a bad thing…
It means you can get away with clunky, which means you can get away with buying a whole new pair of frames along with a whole new pair of progressive lenses for a fraction of the cost of a classier pair of lenses to fit your now-defunct classy pair of practically invisible frames.
So… In the store I try on the new pair of specs, and WOW! It’s a whole new world! Like the entire interior of Costco has been electronically enhanced.
Put them on to drive home, and yeah: pretty impressive. I can see the car’s dashboard as though through a microscope, and the road adorned with my fellow homicidal drivers as though through a telescope. I am, in a word, wowed.
Notsomuch when I get home and sit down to the computer. I can’t see either screen — laptop or desktop — without cocking my head like a blue heron. And this, as you can imagine, is ever-so-slightly painful.
Luckily, I have two old, supposedly outdated pairs of glasses — both progressives, which provide a more or less intelligible view of the distance. These allow me to see what I’m doing when I’m passing hour after fuckin’ endless hour working for pay. Or for fun, as in blogging.
So. We have yet to see whether these new glasses will allow me to read music scores for choir. We’ll know in a few hours, because rehearsal comes up in about two and a half hours. If they work for that purpose, then I’ll use the new thangs for driving, shopping, and choir, and put one older pair in the office next to the desktop and one pair in the family room next to the laptop.
If they don’t? Well…I haven’t a clue.
Figure that out when I come to it, I guess.
Old age is not for the young or the faint of heart. That’s for damn sure.
So while Cassie the Corgi was in her last days, I had to lift her up, carry her outdoors, and set her down, then lift her up, carry her indoors, and set her down. Because she slept on the bed and was too small to jump up or down (even if she had that much strength at the end, which she did not), I had to lift her onto the bed and left her off. She weighed about 23 pounds. That’s not much, of course. But she had a habit of arranging herself in awkward positions, just out of reach on the bed. Upshot: I wrenched my back, but good.
At one point I felt something tear and thought “oohhhh shit!”
Falling and spraining my wrist did not help things. I expect the fall probably added to the back injury.
At any rate, it hurts a lot: enough to be disabling. Yesterday I had to beg off a volunteer chore because I can’t even begin to lift things. Experience shows that doctors can do little for back pain, so I suppose there’s no point in wasting my time traipsing across town to see Young Dr. Kildare. I’m allergic to aspirin, ibuprofen, and acetaminophen these days, so there’s basically nothing anyone can do. Whiskey works pretty well, as does wine. Or a couple of beers. A long soak in a tubful of hot water. Applying a heating pad. Tincture of time…
It’s nowhere near as bad as the time Anna the German Shepherd put my back out, thank gawd. Holy mackerel!
Anna was only a few months old at the time. She had already displayed her life’s ambition: to bring down a car or truck by the oil pan. This, she passionately desired. Even as a pup, she was a very powerful dog, fully capable of dragging a 130-pound woman into the road.
This one time, I had taken her for a walk in the ’hood, which means I’d taken her for a linear wrestling match. Without thinking about the fact that we were approaching the height of the rush hour, I turned onto Feeder Street NW, which runs through our neighborhood on its route all the way from Gangbanger’s Way to the state capitol downtown. Despite stoplights that last an eternity, many people prefer to drive through the city on this street because it’s less hectic than the main drags.
As we turned north, I realized a steady stream of vehicles was sailing past us…and so did Anna. Within a couple minutes, she realized she was in Predator Heaven, and she went bat-sh!t berserk trying to catch the cars whizzing past us. To avoid being yanked into the traffic, I had to pick her up and carry her back to another street deeper into the neighborhood.
She weighed about 40 pounds by then, I think. WhatEVER: she was too heavy for me to carry around, and certainly not to haul some blocks. I didn’t realize how badly this antic had hurt my back until, some hours later, I almost passed out from a surge of pain. When I sat down, I couldn’t get up. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced such extravagant pain, before or since.
SDXB, who was living with me at the time, called 911. Paramedics showed up, loaded me onto a gurney, and carried me off to the hospital in an ambulance.
There they treated me by injecting me with ibuprofen or acetaminophen — don’t remember which. I had not yet developed the interesting sensitivities to these drugs, and so it worked without killing me. Today, that would be highly ill advised…
So that leaves booze and hot baths as the only analgesics. I guess I could go to one of those marijuana quacks and get a fake “prescription” to buy some dope. But I have a feeling that might be ill-advised…
At any rate, I’m getting damn tired of this. It’s been two weeks since Cassie was despatched to her Maker, and I’m mighty tired of hurting. But…apparently it can take six to ten weeks(!!) to get over a sprain. It looks like a month or so is more typical…but wow! That’s a long time to go with this kind of pain, especially when there’s no one around to do the household tasks.
Asking the Hive Mind:Is long-term care insurance (the kind that covers nursing home stays and in-home nursing care) worth the cost?
While I was working for the Great Desert University, I bought long-term care insurance through TIAA-CREF. The price was nominal at the time. Then TIAA-CREF decided insuring the future elderly against old age was not the best business to be in. They unloaded their policyholders on MetLife.
MetLife, which has also said it would like to be out of that business, has steadily increased its rates. This year I’m paying $130 a month. That’s $1,560 a year I could either put into savings or use to buy food. Problem is, this policy has (in theory) a deal where every couple of years you can opt to pay more for inflation adjustment. Shortly after I was laid off, the time came to opt in to that year’s extra gouge. But I was broke. I called and explained this, and the rep said they would give me a couple of months (by which time I would be receiving Social Security) and then offer the chance to opt in. They never did present that opportunity, and when I called them to ask after it, they said too bad, so sad. So that $130 a month is not covering the full current cost of nursing care. At best, it would only defray it.
Look up MetLife’s long-term care insurance on the Web and you find they work hard not to cover what you think they cover: so say Forbes Magazine and a whole raft of unhappy customers. Apparently Metlife is difficult to deal with and does everything it can to weasel out of paying.
The alternative is to move into a life-care communitybefore you need its nursing home. Friends of mine just moved into the Beatitudes, a life-care campus whose amenities remind one of a fancy resort. My father, after my mother died, moved himself into a similar life-care community, which not only kept a roof over his head and two (truly mediocre) daily meals on his table but also covered the cost of any stay in its nursing home. In effect, it provides nursing home insurance: apartment residents have, as part of the package, guaranteed access to and coverage for the on-campus nursing home.
Out of curiosity, I looked into the Beatitudes and found they charge $10,000 a month(!) for nursing home care (unless, of course, you’re a tenant in their life-care community). The Beatitudes does the best it can to hide its costs from the Internet. One site, which more clearly is talking about life-care accommodation (not nursing-home care), estimates the average is $3647 a month; my friend’s husband remarked that they were paying around $5,000/month for a two-bedroom apartment, including utilities, semiweekly cleaning service, and meals. At Royal Oaks in Sun City, the cost is around $3600/month (my total average living expense here in my paid-off shack with yard guy., taxes, insurance, & utilities is around $2000/month). In effect, the elevated monthly cost of these places amounts to nursing home insurance.
However, one wonders whether that is worth the cost. Noting that 1 in 4 Americans will die in a nursing home, a study done between 1992 and 2006 showed the median length of nursing home stay was 5 months and the average length was 14 months. Interestingly, only 27.3% of the 8,433 subjects lived in a nursing home at the time of their death. Okay… 14 months at 10 grand a month would come to $140,000, which would nicely clean out the assets you’d like to leave to your heirs. Even 5 months would be ridiculous, but it would leave a few pennies for the offspring.
Let’s say one lives to be about 90 before needing such care. At $1,560 a year between my present age (74) and that age, I’d have forked out $31,200 to MetLife, which at today’s supposed rates would cover a little over 3 months of nursing home care. According to a recent Rand study, about half of middle-aged Americans will land in nursing homes at some point, but the cost will be only about $7,300 over a lifetime. If you put $130/month into savings, in 5 years you would have set aside more than $7,300.
So I question whether it’s worth continuing to pay $130/month (and more…and more…and more every year), when money is tight and I sure could use $130 to cover daily necessities. The original TIAA-CREF policy had a deal where if you’d been paying for awhile and then you quit paying premiums, some degree of coverage would remain. Apparently MetLife does, too: see page 4 of the linked PDF. If you put that $130 a month into a savings account (or invested it), after 20 years you’d have stashed over four times the amount needed to cover the typical lifetime cost of nursing care (according to Rand). Since I’ve been paying into that LTC policy for many years, a monthly $130 stash in a bank account plus whatever was accrued permanently at MetLife might cover most of my cost, especially if I were lucky enough to die within two or three months.
Still. It’s one bitch of a dice throw. If you have a stroke that disables you but fails to carry you away, if you come down with Parkinson’s or MS or ALS or Alzheimer’s or God only knows whatever open-ended horror, you in fact could need months or years of care.
That would clean out your estate, leave you living (after a fashion: breathing, anyway) on the public dole, and rob your heirs of everything you worked so hard to pass down to them.
So…what’s your opinion?Do you have long-term care insurance? Why or why not?
Really. There can’t be a dull moment, can there? No such thing can ever be allowed to happen, can it?
Classic Glendale cottage
Some time back, my friend VC and I had planned a shopping junket to our favorite boutique and its associated kitsch shops over on the west side today. After impoverishing ourselves on appropriately countercultural costumes, we would go over to our favorite tea room for lunch.
Downtown Glendale is full of vintage bungalows, dating back to the 1910s and 20s. They’re now occupied by quaint little gift, clothing, and (heh!) “antique” shops. On the way from the favored clothing boutique to the coveted restaurant, we stopped at our favorite kitsch shop, which indeed did offer the ridiculous object I’ve been searching for these past few weeks. Woo hoo! I knew it!
But…when we bounce in the front door, I trip over a three-inch high step at the entrance and fall flat on my face. I put my hand out by instinct, and of course spavin my wrist in the process.
I think it’s not broken, because it doesn’t swell and I still have the full range of motion. But it hurts like hell. Really: I hafta say it hurt more than any acute injury I’ve ever enjoyed. Felt like surely a fracture must have happened in all those complicated little wrist bones.
But shortly the worst of the pain passed. I put a decent face on it because I didn’t think I was seriously hurt, and the shop’s proprietor was in a panic.
Ohhkayyy…so there we are: the drama of the day. Never fails, eh?
From there we proceed next door to the restaurant, where…really, given week after week after week of shit, I just do NOT feel like eating. Order a cup of soup that I don’t want; choke on a spoonful of it; set it aside. Hurt, whine, and worry. (I’m very good at whining, as you might imagine…) Visit the laydeez on the way out; have one heckuva time wriggling out of and writhing back in to the ever-so-slightly too tight size 8 jeans, using just one hand.
We each head back into Phoenix in our respective chariots.
Driving with one hand, I get about halfway across Glendale Avenue when I think…damn! Where’s that doodad I bought?
Not in the car, that’s for sure. So have to pull a U-ie and schlep ALL THE WAY back into Glendale, park, hike to the restaurant. Amazingly, no one had stolen the just-purchased doodad. Someone had set it aside in the Laydeez Room, and the maîtresse d’ found it.
Back into the homicidal traffic: retrace my steps toward home. Debate, each yard of the way:
Call young Dr. Kildare?
Call the Mayo, get routed to a PA on the phone, who will just guess at the problem??
Drive to the urgent care facility up the road in the hood, which no doubt will be full of gunshot, knife, and overdose victims???
Go home, wrap an elastic bandage around the wrist, and hope for the best????
As I’m contemplating those alternatives, I approach Conduit of Blight Blvd., and there…what should I espy to my amazement but a BRAND-NEW BANNER HOSPITAL URGENT CARE FACILITY! Right on the corner of Glendale Road and Conduit of Blight!
Hot diggety!!!!!
Veered across the train tracks into the parking lot, charged in the front door, and…there was NO ONE ELSE THERE!
Got right in…before I could even sit down in the waiting room. They X-rayed the wounded paw from several directions and then, taking the opportunity to nag me about the osteoporosis and the osteopenia, said there was no fracture. AND they kindly gave me this velcro splint thing that really helps with the pain. Not only that, but it leaves the fingers free to tap the keyboard. 😀
Poor li’l medic also fretted about the blood pressure: astronomical. Right. A-n-n-d why would that be?
Why, indeed:
The patient is in a freestanding ER, an environment she hates, and is about to do medical business with people she’s never seen in her life.
She’s just driven, steering with one hand, way to Hell and gone across Glendale Road through homicidal traffic, a junket in which she’s had to navigate an aggressive U-turn, traipse all the way back into an adjacent city, park, beg for a carelessly lost package, and then retrace her route back through a fairly dire slum.
Her hand hurts.
Despite having just gone to the bathroom, she again needs to pee so bad she thinks she’s going to explode.
Her pants are way too tight.
They’ve perched her on the side of an examination table with her feet hanging in the air (this drives up BP numbers) and they’ve let her hand fall into her lap (ditto).
Plus of course she hatesloathesanddespises having her blood pressure taken, and she feels about the same in regard to filling out forms and answering nosy questions.
Is there a reason why the BP figures indicate I’m in orbit around Saturn?
Well. I’m still alive. So the neglected little dawg and I went out for the mile’s walk that we missed this morning.
😮 😀 😮
Wow! How amazing. I was so thrilled to find that place. It’s a new addition to our part of town, and it could NOT have been more perfectly located. The staff were very kind and acted like they knew what they were doing.* And I got an X-ray promptly, it was seen by a real radiologist promptly, and within minutes I had his (reassuring) opinion.
*Well. Except for not knowing how to take a reasonably accurate blood pressure reading…
Images
Glendale: John D. McNair house. By Marine 69-71 at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25316396 Hand splint: DepositPhotos
So my friends from church, J & L, have sold the manse and are moving into a life-care facility called The Beatitudes. J is thrilled at the idea (well, pleased, anyway), whilst L says it’s going to be like moving into a prison. Today they took me to lunch there, after we dropped off some loot at the new digs as part of the moving project.
The future of old age?
The Beatitudes has been around since long before “life-care communities” became a Thing. As long as I’ve lived here (and that has been a long time), it existed at its present site as a nursing home and warehouse for the elderly. As my generation has aged, we’ve become a gigantic communal cash cow, and so the present places are being massively upgraded as their management tries to keep up with newer resort-like living arrangements for the affluently agèd.
I’ve been interested in J & L’s experience, partly because sooner or later I’m going to have to figure out how to get myself cared for and partly because my two friends’ widely disparate views of the thing exactly reflect my conflicted thoughts on the matter.
As soon as my mother died, my father got himself into one of those places. This was in the mid-1970s. Run by the Baptist Church, it was called Orangewood; like other surviving first-generation independent living facilities, it has been massively remodeled — rebuilt would be the term — and now sports a new name. He was only 67.
Before my mother took ill, he proposed that they move to this Orangewood place, mostly because he preferred apartment living to having to take care of a house and yard. Life-care communities were a recent development at the time, and as soon as he learned about them, he thought it was a great idea. Horrified, she resisted. She died before that argument could go very far. So, off he went to Orangewood.
He apparently liked it. However, it’s important to note that having gone to sea all his adult life, he was well adapted to institutional living. (“Institutionalized” is the term that comes to mind…) He didn’t seem to care about regimentation or confining rules or living elbow-to-elbow with his fellow inmates. If anything, he seemed to relish it.
So okay, he moves into Orangewood. When my friend L says he thinks moving to the luxurious environs of The Beatitudes is going to be roughly the equivalent of moving into a prison, the Orangewood experience is where he’s coming from. In exchange for a great many amenities — some of which were true Godsends — Orangewood extracted obedience to some onerous conditions. For example…
Two meals were served each day: a light breakfast and a heavy mid-day meal. You were required to show up at one of them, so they could check on you to be sure you were still ambulating around. The food, we might add, was by and large dreadful.
For three rooms, one bathroom, and a nonfunctional kitchenette without even a full-size refrigerator, my father and Helen paid as much per month as my then-DH and I paid for 3000 square feet (five bedrooms, one of them converted into an entertainment room) on a third of an acre of prime North Central real estate.
You were supposed to use their doctor, an exploitive quack.
If you fell ill, you could be required to move (usually temporarily) into housing close to the on-campus nursing home, where you could be watched more carefully.
They, not you or your family, decided whether you would be moved into the on-campus nursing home.
But there were trade-offs that made these conditions not so onerous.
So… My father moves into a one-bedroom apartment that seems to suffice for him — bearing in mind that he had spent most of his adult life living in a ship’s cabin. It was certainly better than an SRO, an option he had more than half-seriously proposed. Shortly, Helen notices him and sets her sights on him. (Even in his late 60s, he was a handsome man.) Before the end of the year, they marry. They move together into a cramped two-bedroom apartment which to my taste would have been OK for one person. But that was what was made available to married couples. Since Helen clung to her worldly goods like a crab with prey in its claws, this place was, shall we say, cluttered.
But that was none of my business, even though it made my father crazy.
Every now and again, they would invite us to join them for the dinner-sized midday meal. I abominated this, because the food was truly awful: steam-table buffet gunk, most of it reconstituted from packages. I remember looking at it and wondering how can they justify feeding this stuff to elderly people with cardiac conditions? Every meal was high in starch and high in salt. Every dessert came out of a box. Equally wonder-making was how the inmates could bring themselves to eat it, day in and day out.
As far as I could tell, they apparently didn’t mind. I concluded that it was true people’s taste buds die in old age, and so they couldn’t tell the difference between industrial junk food and real food.
(In my own old age I have not found that to be true. Believe it or not, I can still taste food and I can still tell the difference between real food and fake food that comes out of a box or a can.)
But whatEVER: my father and Helen didn’t complain. Nor did they seem to be able to understand why we would always have something else to do when invited to dine with them.
To my mind, the place was dreadful: the apartment oppressive, the limited space cramped for one person and hideous for two, the food terrible, the Big-Brotherly oversight creepy, and the institutional conditions questionable. At one point a plague of food poisoning spread throughout the entire population — almost everyone was sick with severe diarrhea and vomiting. This, the inmates were assured, was a harmless and passing “stomach flu.” Which, I guess, was how the management spelled “someone in the kitchen failed to wash their hands.” Or worse.
The Beatitudes is much different — at least, the part I can see is. J & L’s high-ceilinged apartment, which is not exactly spacious but still is well laid out and has an astonishing view of the city and the Phoenix mountains, has two full bedrooms and bathrooms, and a full kitchen with plenty of cupboard space, a pantry closet, a full-size double-door refrigerator, a full-size stove and oven, a dishwasher.
You should see this place. It’s like moving into the freaking Ritz-Carlton!
My friends insist that no rule requires you to show up at any of the three eateries (two of which are pretty fancy). If you pleased, you could cook all of your own meals. We went to the informal joint for lunch — it’s a kind of bistro-like affair where you can get soups and salads and whatnot. Service is sit-down: food is delivered to your table. You do not bus your dishes.
Some of the food was pretty good. Not great, but reasonably good. I had a white bean chili that was edible enough. L had a sandwich of packaged cold cuts that looked revolting. J had a bowl of soup, about which she did not complain.
I think if I lived there I would fix most of my own meals in the apartment’s more than adequate kitchen. But those restaurants would always be there if you didn’t feel like being bothered.
Given that you can now order up groceries for delivery, you could stay pretty independent for a very long time in that place. If you were not required to eat in the restaurants (I think they may have to buy a certain number of meal tickets, but no rule says they have to use them) and if nobody was poking their nose into your business, it actually would be a reasonable way to address the vicissitudes of old age in a fragmented society.
It’s something to think about.
I do worry about what is going to happen if I live another 10 or 15 years. My friends are in their early to mid-90s. But even in your 80s, you certainly could find keeping up a big house and yard quite a challenge.
You could hire help…but…who’s to say what kind of help you’re going to find? My friends have a cleaning lady who comes in regularly. As the two contractors who are helping to move them to their new digs were hauling stuff out to their vehicle and mine today, we found most of the stuff we were picking up off the tables and cabinets hadn’t been dusted in weeks. This woman is apparently not dusting things like the lamps and the fake dieffenbachia and the pictures. If she’s not doing that, what else isn’t she doing?
An apartment is a lot less space to have to take care of than the Funny Farm. And quite the cottage industry is growing up around the aging of the Baby Boom. The institution down there on Glendale Avenue is only one manifestation: the other day I read about a woman who started a business driving elderly people around. She’s apparently doing quite well at it. And then we have the two women who are helping my friends pack up for the movers and organize where things should go in the new digs: helping elders move IS their business. They’ve made themselves known with a bunch of the old-folkeries like The Beatitudes — there are now quite a few of them in town — and they have as much work as they can handle. Sometimes more. Then there’s the guy who charges people to serve as a companion for exercise walks. Want someone to get you off your duff and into your walking shoes? Call this fella.
See what I mean? Given that this industry is developing, why not take advantage of it?
In the “froze” department, it’s supposed to drop down to 33 degrees here this week. For the Valley of the We-Do-Mean Sun, that is very cold. Many of the ornamental plants would be damaged by that chill even if they were used to it…which they are not. We haven’t seen freezing or even near-freezing temperatures here in years.
Light and even hard frosts used to be pretty commonplace — at least a few crisp nights every winter. But that has gone away, thanks to the heat island effect and the climate warming that we’re so credibly assured doesn’t exist.
Tonight, though, it’s already freaking cold out there and it’s only 7:30. So it was out to the storage shed, there to unearth the dusty old drop cloths I once used as frost protection. Covered one of the bougainvillea with a couple of those. The other three will just have to get by. One on the west side is pretty well sheltered by the big paloverde, though Luis cut the tree back so drastically this spring that it may not provide much cover. The other one is more sandwiched between the back wall, a garage wall, the eaves, and a bunch of plants…it’s usually not harmed much. The one on the east side will freeze back, and there’s not much I can do about that. Even when I’ve covered it in the past, it’s managed to shrivel up.
Bougs, however, are resilient. In fact, they may even like freezing almost to the ground. The following spring they come back, especially if you trim off the dead stuff.
Things on the back porch that are really house plants in this climate…uhmmm….not so good. I did find a shop light and managed to clip it to a wooden chair next to the ficus on the back porch (Unless I remember to turn off the irrigation as dawn cracks, water will come on tomorrow morning and that will create a pool around the ficus’s pot. The woodwork should keep the electric light out of the water…unless it rains…). With the fiberglass panels off the top of the pergola out there, the back porch gets a lot colder than it did. So stuff that did not have to be covered in the past now…does. The ficus, though, grew ecstatically when it was moved and it was freed from the fiberglass roof. It’s now so huge there’s no way I can wrap it effectively with old sheets and curtains.
In the “singed” (as in hot) department: I inflicted a second-degree burn on a wrist a couple days ago, in a moment of stupidity. Oh well. Naturally, this was right before Christmas, when you can’t get in to see anyone for love nor money. A nurse at the Mayo, having quizzed me on the key issues, decided it was relatively minor and advised me to apply antibiotic cream (not ointment) and bandage it.
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus Public Health Image Library (PHIL)
By this morning, the burn was beginning to heal, but now I had a crop of hives all over my hand and wrist. I figured — damn! — I must have developed an allergy to the stuff they make bandage stickum with. The Walgreen’s generic variety of these things was $2 cheaper than the Bandaid version — for a generous serving of seven bandages! So I’d bought the cheapo version. Maybe that wasn’t the best idea.
Or….hmmmm…. While this was going on, a fine (and very painful) boil sprang up on my face, next to the nose. I’ve had these before — they hurt, they look like hell, and then they go away. And I’ve had them on my hands and arms. But…so…what if these hive things are not hives but actually are some kind of infection along the same lines of said carbuncles? They don’t exactly hurt…they itch, suggesting hives. But I’ve never had an allergic reaction to bandage stuff or latex in my entire lengthy life. What if…what if…what if this is actually an infection, as usual on the eve of a major holiday, conveniently running up against a weekend…
So I call the new dermatologist. To my astonishment, they get me in to see a nurse practitioner TODAY!
She opines that the pimply bumps are probably hives. But then she notices the chronic irritation around my nose (where, interestingly, the giant zit/boil/whateverthefuckitis is now half-healed. She asked if I’ve ever had that treated. I say I’ve tried but no one has ever been able to do anything about it. No one seems to care that the outside of my nose itches all the time and the inside hurts all the time…I imagine everyone’s nose itches all the time.
She says she’d like to take some samples for lab tests. Why? Because she thinks it’s a staph infection, and she thinks it’s very possible the rash on the hand is the same thing: a staph infection. There’s an outside chance it’s a MRSA staphylococcus (a type of antibiotic-resistant bug). She writes a prescription for an ointment and says she’ll let me know the results. If she’s right, the gunk she’s prescribed will clear it up.
Well. That would be some kind of miracle. Over the years I’ve had the inside of my nose cauterized (now THAT hurt! for a good long time…and it didn’t work). I’ve tried gunk recommended by doctors (didn’t work). Have experimented with gunk of my own discovery (didn’t work). Have tried antihistamines (didn’t work).
As of this evening, I’d say at least a couple of the spots very definitely look like boils. Just what I need right next to a burn injury: a fulminating staph infection.
What have I done to offend the God of Israel? Tell me God is not on Donald Trump’s side….
