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Health care

Poor, Poor, Pitiful Me…

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Still pounding at Death’s Door. The bastards won’t let me in.

Having consumed another whole bottle of Albertson’s cough medicine, I had to drag down to the store again this morning. Bought two jars of the stuff this time, hoping to forestall at least one journey into that (crummy) shopping center. At ten bucks a hit, I’ve now spent $40 on cough syrup alone. Oh, wait, no: not counting the Mucinex I bought at AJ’s yesterday.

Along about two in the morning, I tried to gag down a dose of that. EEEEYUUUCHHHHH! The stuff is so vile I literally could not force it down. Ended up spitting it out in the kitchen sink.

So I guess we’re pretty close to $50, actually.

Noticed my old steamer — more eruditely called a “humidifier” these days — is barely working. Can’t see that it’s caked up with hard-water deposits. Prob’ly worn out, I think.

So I go to order a new one from Amazon.

Nope.

Apparently they no longer make warm-air humidifiers! Or if they do, they’re pathetic little jokes. The only ones you can get that look even remotely like they might work are those cold-air things, which turn your bedroom into a clammy cave. How comforting!

So now the steamer parts are soaking in vinegar. That’ll take all day, if it works at all. If it doesn’t eat up the innards of the damn thing.

While I was at the Albertson’s, I went up the laundry aisle in search of a bottle of oxygen bleach. You know, the stuff that doesn’t contain chlorine? This stuff has myriad uses, not just whitening your laundry without eating holes in it. One of the things I like to do is pour a little of it over a wooden breadboard to bleach out food stains without harming the surface.

Seems like an ordinary enough product, right?

Nope.

Not. One. Brand of the stuff! When I asked an employee about it, he didn’t even know what I was talking about.

Can you imagine? WTF? Young pups don’t use O2 bleach anymore? Are you not allowed to put the stuff in the wonderful new washers that don’t wash clothes, is that it?

So I had to order that from Amazon.

Amazon is convenient, that’s true. But having to order things from Amazon gets real old, real fast. Now I have to wait until tomorrow night to get a product that should be on the laundry-products shelf of every grocery store, Target, and Ace Hardware in the goddamn city. I should not have to drive from pillar to post to find it, then give up, come home, fire up a computer, and order the damn stuff off the Internet.

Ugh! What a brave new world. I feel like I’ve fallen into some kind of space warp and come out on another planet.

Crawling Out from Under the Rock

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Fell asleep last night along about 6:30…woke up this morning at 7:30. And today felt marginally better.

Even felt like eating, though not like slamming around to fix much. Running slap up against deadline, I managed to finish edits on the client’s last chapter and send it off to him along about 4 p.m.

Hope it’s at least reasonably coherent. That thing has now been edited in ER waiting rooms, edited in ER examining rooms, edited in the Mayo Clinic’s doctors’ waiting room, edited inside doctors’ offices, edited in bed, edited on the back patio…gestaltlich, we might say.

Meanwhile, this afternoon I had to report a nut case on Quora who emitted some threatening rhetoric. Dunno if the guy is around here, but it doesn’t matter…it would be very easy to track me down, if you’re crazy enough. Which, speaking of rhetoric, reminds me that I need to buy a long gun and some ammo for it and for the other armaments. And I really need to get off my duff, go up to the range, and practice. I’d like to take their safety course over again, too — it’s been a long time since I’ve even thought about those things.

But what with Trump’s Loonies carrying on about civil war should their hero be impeached, one ought to be prepared. At this point, there’s almost no question he will be impeached. The question is, what then?

Let us hope the U.S. military is capable of containing a guerilla uprising within the borders of our country. I’m fairly certain they are: they have their own guerilla training, plus they have the advantage of some very sophisticated hardware and software that a bunch of bumpkin revolutionaries can only daydream of. Nay, not even revolutionaries backed by the occasional billionaire.

Interesting, isn’t it? How can you be so smart as to make that much money and still be so stupid? Or…maybe one just doesn’t have to be real bright to make that much money. 😀

Arrrgh! What times we live in! Times that are getting late: gotta go scarf down some more cough medicine and fall into the sack.

 

Never Pours but It Rains…

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LOL! This little comedy of errors is getting ridiculous. Actually, we could call it a “comedy of fiascos.” One damnfool thing after another.

So after spending the night before last at the Mayo’s ER and getting exactly zero sleep, of course (wouldn’cha know) the next day I had to go down to the church and spend the afternoon minding the front desk and answering the phone, a task I’m not very good at under the best of circumstances. And fully incompetent at under the worst of circumstances. So that must have been amusing to anyone watching. 😀

And yesterday as all the antics were winding down, I kept spiking a fever. It would shoot up to something over 100° — which is very high for me, since my temp is normally well under 98.6°. But I figured it must have to do with the UTI, which had gotten bad enough to produce some interesting pain.

But…well, no. Nothing can ever be that simple in these precincts.

I woke up this morning with a roaring sore throat, a fever, and a cough. So…presumably I’ve contracted the flu, a cold, or strep throat…also presumably picked up while passing hour after hour in a hospital emergency room. This, despite getting a flu shot while I was at the doc’s office a week ago. Yes: it takes two weeks for a flu shot to take effect!!!!!

Sumbiche.

So…now I’m having to cut choir practice tonight — not that I would be up for two hours of rehearsals even if I weren’t a latter-day Typhoid Mary. And I need to weasel out of staffing the church office’s desk tomorrow. This means, of course, I spent four hours yesterday spreading germs all over the phones, desks, and computer at the office…isn’t that ducky?

Meanwhile, it develops that despite the influenza hazard, it probably was a good thing I traipsed in to the Mayo the other night. One of the nurses there said, after I remarked that I felt embarrassed to occupy their attention with such a petty, stupid little ailment, that urinary tract infections can be “very serious.” Well…she wasn’t kidding. This morning along comes word from KJG that her mom has been in the hospital with a UTI that she chose to neglect — thinking that it would go away on its own.

Wrong. She ended up spending several days in a westside hospital, severely ill, and then being transported to a nursing home, where, KJG says, she “barely has awareness, is very weak, cannot do anything for herself.”

Good grief. Is that terrifying, or is that terrifying?

Well, I hope the poor woman recovers. She’s not in the best of shape to begin with — though I don’t think she’s much older than I am. But evidently, if you think you have one of these UTI bugs, you should trot off to the doc the minute the light dawns in your hazy little brain.

Meanwhile, in addition to being genetically susceptible to every damn virus that comes along, I’m allergic to aspirin, acetaminophen, and ibuprofen. So that means the only way I can address a fever is to stand in a cool shower. Which, it develops, is what I’d better go do right now…

WordPress to the Rescue…partly

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Well, that was…uhm…jolly fun… Spent the better part of the night at the Mayo’s ER after spiking a high temperature and enjoying a spectrum of annoying symptoms. Develops that the UTI that I was enjoying returned with a vengeance. The ER doc re-prescribed the stuff his colleague had given me. She’d written a prescription for only 5 days. He said I needed to take it for at least 10 more days. It was after 2 a.m. by the time I got home, and of course I didn’t sleep very well.

Head hurt like hell this morning…but  eventually I realized it was probably because I hadn’t eaten a thing since yesterday morning.

Client mathematician wanted a word count of the first five chapters of his current book, the edits of which I sent off to him the day before yesterday. In editing math copy, I don’t charge for content that I’m too stupid to understand: videlicet, just about every mathematical expression. Word counts every element in a mathematical expression — all those Greek letters, all those numbers — as a separate word. So in order to figure the actual editable number of words, you have to go through it line by line and delete every equation, every mathematical expression, every graph, every table…on and on and ENDLESSLY on.

Well, Word was having none of that. It kept crashing, and even when it didn’t crash, getting this done in any sane manner was almost impossible.

Finally it dawned on me (ever slow to tumble to the obvious…):

Hey! WordPress counts the words in a blog post. And when you paste copy from Wyrd into a WordPress post, it converts to HTML! 

Hot damn! Unlike effing Wyrd, HTML is extremely stable.

Or maybe just…dayum!!!

It took hours and hours and HOURS to paste each chapter into a post and then, in “Text” (HTML) view, to sift through line by line by line and delete every equation and every mathematical equation. Much of this stuff, WordPress converts into tables. You then have to find the table (even though it doesn’t appear as a table in the more easily comprehensible “Visual” view). This entails more sifting: through the HTML in search of tables, and then having to force WordPress to delete the damn things…which it does NOT want to do.

*******

Along about the time this adventure ground to an end, I realized I had a 100-degree temp on top of a number of unpleasant other symptoms. That’s high for me: my normal temperature is well below 98.6, so if I have a fever of 100 degrees, I am sick.

And I have a splitting headache.

Eventually I decide to drive to the Mayo’s ER, which is a distance. What time? Late…the roads were very clear, which is some sort of a miracle.

Though they kindly saw me promptly and were, as usual, marvelously attentive, it was after 2:00 a.m. by the time I rolled out of there and made my way through the black night to the Funny Farm. They called in a prescription to the Safeway near my house, saying I should show up there the minute the place opened — that would be 8:00 a.m. — to retrieve the pills and start gulping them down forthwith. In the meantime, the doc handed me one (1) of the horsepills to take while I was sitting in front of him and said “Get your tail to the pharmacy the minute they open, grab the Rx, and start gulping these things down!” This, as you will see, is a trick easier said than done…

*******

The few hours that remain to the night pass uneventfully and without sleep. Now I have to be at the Safeway at 8 a.m. to try to extract this stuff from their pharmacy.To make things even jollier, I promised one of the volunteer front-desk workers down at the church that I would do her gig this afternoon so she can visit family in California. That chore runs from 12:30 to 4:00 p.m.

So there’ll be no nap time for me. Can’t imagine how I’m going to get through the day.

First off, though, the problematic issue of getting to the Safeway pharmacy at 8 a.m.:

There are essentially three main drags that run from the north parts of the mid-city through the central commercial district to the downtown lawyers’ and bureaucrats’ district. Central Avenue goes through a genteel old-money residential area and ends at the North Mountains. Seventh Avenue also goes up to the base of North Mountain but then flows into Meth Lover’s Drive, which will take you westward if that’s the way you must go. Seventh Street indirectly joins a freeway bringing residents from the far northern bedroom communities, picks up people who live in the north central part of the city, and proceeds downtown.

Our City Parents, in their infinite “wisdom,” took it into their collective mind to convert the left-turn-only central lanes on Seventh Ave and on Seventh Street into one-way NO left-turn lanes during the rush hours: southbound from 6 to 9 a.m.; northbound from 4 to 6 p.m. While this sort of (marginally) speeds commute traffic (but not so’s you’d notice), it creates a GIGANTIC headache, because…well, no matter where you’re going, you can’t get there from here. Everybody who needs to go left to get to a destination travels on Central, so it’s bumper-to-bumper all the way downtown. The other roads move faster, but you have to perform what is known as an “Arizona turn” to get where you’re going.

An Arizona turn? That’s where you turn right to go left…and in the hands of a gifted driver, this can be quite the little maneuver.

This means that to turn left out of my neighborhood during the rush hours, you have to drive around and around and AROUND Robin-Hood’s barn. Because everybody else is trying to get to the same place you want to go, it creates vast traffic jams on the surrounding streets as people try to avoid those goddamn no-left-turn lanes.

Stupidly, I decide to drive across GangBanger’s Way to 12th Street (going north in order to turn south). This lovely boulevard is heavily traveled by my fellow law-dodgers but usually is navigable. BUT….I fail to take into consideration the goddamn high school on Gangbanger’s. At the high school, the city in its infinite stupidity has installed one of those crosswalk lights that holds up traffic whenever some pedestrian pushes a button. The upshot of that is that around 7:30, when I leave the house, traffic on this 7-lane main drag just flat comes to a dead stop, as kid after kid after kid ambles across the road.

But if you know where you’re going, eventually you can circumvent the schemes of Our City Parents and…yes: get there from here.

A hard left across three lanes of oncoming takes me and the pickup ahead of me into a neighborhood. We weave our way through this fairly dire little slum (there’s a reason I call it Meth Central), back to 7th Street, go north (opposite of the direction we need to go), shear right on Butler, cruise through a slightly less dire slum (yes, even this garden spot is beginning to gentrify), and come out on 12th Street. There we cruise southward, he toward whatever his destination might be and me dodging westward (a right turn) on Glendale toward the Safeway that I can’t turn left into because it’s at 7th Street and there’s no left turn allowed there.

Once I reach 7th Street (turning west now in order to go east), I sail into the nearly empty parking lot, shoot through the Safeway’s front door, and accost the two pharmacists, who bless their hearts are in a pretty good mood at this hour of the day.

However…the lucky soul who chooses to take me on has no clue to the Rx that was supposed to have been sent over at 2 a.m.  Finally she realizes: they’ve made it out in my unpronounceable legal name, a little horror that I never use. Being a little frazzled myself at this point, I don’t think of it, but just as she’s about to send me away (having tried and failed to get thru to the Mayo on the phone) it occurs to me that maybe this funny name thing has been applied to the Rx, and lo! So it turns out to be.

Finally I get home around 8:45. It has taken a full hour to make a twenty-minute round-trip drive and grab a bottle of pills!!!!!

Ugh. Now I have three hours before I have to schlep up to the church, where I stupidly volunteered to take on my friend Barbara’s afternoon shift at the front desk.

“When will they ever learn?”  NEVER volunteer!!!!!

I’m too keyed up to sleep now; I really should take the poor little dog for a walk; I’m sure there’s a sh!tload of things I should be doing right this very minute (pay the bills?); and I cannot even imagine how I am going to stay awake through three hours and thirty minutes of excruciating tedium down at the Church.

Why do you suppose they have a switchboard-like phone at all? I do NOT understand that. There’s no reason the staff/clergy (all of about 12 of them) can’t have their own phone numbers that will ring direct to their office phones or to a voicemail. They want somebody lurking around the front office to bounce out the homeless and greet the parishioners?? Whaaa? Maybe two people a day come in. Could the office manager, who appears to be a kind of Guy Friday, be parked in an office near the front, where he can see and greet whoever comes stumbling in the door?

Our rector is in the final running for the position of Bishop. That’s good for him: he’s a pretty ambitious guy and an exceptionally worthy candidate. But it means now we have to get a new pastor. That means major hassle, as you’ve no doubt noticed. I’d like to see them plant our associate priest in that job. She happens to be a woman. She also happens to be amazingly sweet and she can give a killer sermon.

The present incumbent was hired to rescue our merry group from a fairly dire financial predicament, after the prior regime took a richly endowed organization and within three or four years ran its finances right into the ground. Having performed what we might best describe as a dramatic rescue, indeed, he’s ready to move on to the next stage in his career.

We, on the other hand, are not and never will be ready for him to move on….

Live-Blogging from the Doc’s Office

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So…here I am at the dermatologist’s office…AGAIN. Ten minutes early: didn’t take as long to fight the traffic as usual. Only one moron, all the way across 103 north-south avenues and six east-west main drags.

Ah! This is amusing. I see typing on a keyboard annoys my fellow waiting-room inmates. Some woman just got up and moved herself closer to the (annoying!) yakathon television. To keep the patients calm, this particular practice serenades us with an UNENDING loop of some TV home-improvement show episodes. On and boringly on about ripping out shelving and installing cabinetry and fixing the plumbing. Sooo soothing…

Young Dr. Kildare’s office is right around the corner – this being the dermatology practice he likes to refer his patients to. Consumed a third of a tank of gas a couple days ago to consult with him about a weird traffic event in which I damn near killed four people by trying to pass an aggressive moron who I thought was in the middle lane but who was actually in the left-turn lane.

That was exciting…

And alarming, because in 42 years of driving, I’ve never gotten so confused I didn’t even know what damn lane I was driving in! So I wanted to…

Oh…the woman disturbed by the sound of keys tapping is yapping on her phone, sharing her personal life with one and all! Love it!

…where were we? So I wanted to ask him if he could tell whether I’m starting to Alzheimer out.

He said. “That’s not dementia. That’s road rage.”

😀

Oh, God! Her kid’s teacher called her on the phone earlier to report that the brat was “having an off day” in school: not paying attention in class. She gets into a worried heart-to-heart about this.

Did any child, anywhere, ever pay attention in those interminable, brain-bangingly stupid grade-school classes?

…where were we? So Young Dr. Kildare says the only thing wrong with me is road rage, and I need to get a grip. And, interestingly, he shares the fact that he also is plagued by constant road rage while driving around Our Fair city.

At this point, I share with him my Universal Theory of Phoenix Drivers. This, as you will recall, goes as follows:

Hypothesis 1: At any given time when you are on the road, one in ten drivers coming toward you is a moron.

He says: “Oh! I would have said two or three!”

I say, “Well, given the volume of traffic on a road like 7th Street, that could be so, but I believe that to be an illusion. Fewer people are morons than we perceive.”

Hypothesis 2: At any given time when you are on the road, one in ten drivers going in your direction is a moron.

Corollary: Therefore, at all times when you are driving in lovely Phoenix, you are surrounded by morons.

He persisted in his analysis, that the numerical value is grossly underestimated. This aspect will need further investigation to produce valid statistical results.

At any rate, the dearth of morons at 10:00 in the morning is puzzling. Usually, one would expect to encounter at least three or four of them.

Today must be some kind of moron holiday.

***

That was easier than I expected.

Meeting with the dermatologist’s PA, I explained that I’d gone to the Mayo to get a second opinion, because that is what I always do, after 40-some years of experience in the Land of Medical Science, and that the alleged doctor I’d spoken with would not give me a straight answer to even ONE of the three fairly simple questions I asked her:

  1. Is the most recently treated lesion, which remains red and has a white spot in it, healing properly, or do we need to do more to clean it out?
  2. What is the cause of the apparent nerve pain up and down my arm, which arose when this lesion was frozen off and has only partially cleared?
  3. Is it really necessary to use the Efudex prescribed by the westside dermatologist’s practice at this time, or can we safely wait to see whether freezing these things off works?

Mayo’s doc simply refused to give me an answer to questions 1 and 2. To question 3, said she: “Well…we normally prescribe that when there are a lot of lesions. Like, 15.”

There had only been two, at this point.

I said, “So, are you saying it’s reasonable not to use the product at this time?”

She said, “That’s up to you. It’s your decision.”

WTF??? Why the hell does she think I would ask her opinion if I had a clue about the advisability of applying a product that is going to blister up my hand, inflict an array of unpleasant and painful side effects, and very possibly cause permanent disfigurement?

So when I tell Wonder-Dermatology’s PA about this, she says…

  1. The recently treated lesion is healing quite well. The redness is to be expected and will go away slowly. The white spots are scars.
  2. It’s really unlikely the arm pain could be caused by treating that particular spot, because to reach the suspect nerve one would have to burrow in a great deal deeper than a squirt of frozen nitrogen can do. Young Doctor Kildare’s theory that it’s a variety of tendinitis or some kind of muscle strain is probably correct. But if it doesn’t go away, I should ask him for a referral.
  3. Hilarious! Yes, actually, we can wait safely to see whether any more keratoses arise after today’s treatment. Fifteen??? We often treat even one or two lesions with Efudex.

And then she kindly sprayed not just the latest visitation on the paw, but the big ugly brown spot on my face, too. The one I’ve been trying to get her to freeze off since I first showed up in her precincts.

Adventures in Medical Science…

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.