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Health care

In the Dog (and Doc) Dept: Trust Your Gut…

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Remember how I was wondering whether a possible misdiagnosis of Valley fever by MarvelVet might be what’s killing my dog? Well…yeah. Just talked to NewVet: the results of the second Valley fever test are back. And no.

No. She does not have and never has had Valley fever.

So basically: we have destroyed this dog’s health and very probably killed her by giving her fluconozale on top of prednisone. Or prednisone on top of fluconozale, however you wish to look at it.

That is not a benign combination. What can it cause? Adrenal gland dysfunction.

And yeah, again. That is exactly what has happened. It destroyed Cassie the Corgi. Her health is permanently ruined, and really, if I had a backbone I’d put her down now.

This has happened under the watch of the Great Skeptic. Remember, I am the one who keeps carping away that one should QUESTION AUTHORITY. Don’t take what your doctor (or a vet) says without looking it up yourself, understanding what ails you, and understanding what the proposed treatments will do for you and to you. Sometimes the treatment is worse than the disease.

That certainly is the case here. We basically killed this dog by putting her on a cough suppressant with prednisone plus an antifungal in the absence of no empirical evidence that a fungal infection was what ailed her. Instead, what ailed her was what was obvious: a bronchial infection that was going around the city at the time and that, probably thanks to the dog’s old age, advanced to pneumonia. She should have been treated with an antibiotic. In fact, when NewVet put her on doxycycline for a UTI, her cough cleared right up.

Shit.

Trust no one. Believe nothing.

 

Shingles Vaccine Wow II

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Holy mackerel, did that shot make me sick! If the extortionate price doesn’t make you sick, by golly, the vaccine itself sure will.

Growing up on the shore of the Persian Gulf, about as third-world as you could get in the 1950s, I enjoyed a lot of shots. Every malign disease known to prey on personkind was endemic in Arabia, and Americans living there had to take shot after shot after shot after shot. Every six months, I was hauled down to the hated clinic for yet another round of jabs: typhus, typhoid, cholera, tetanus, diphtheria, smallpox, whooping cough… They didn’t have polio shots yet, so whenever there was an outbreak, every kid in camp was dragged down to a portable and stuck with a vialful of gamma globulin — and lemme tellya, that stuff hurt! Of the routine shots, though, typhoid and cholera were probably the most painful.

But none of them hold a candle, for lengthy acute aftereffects, to this accursed Shingrix concoction. Holy shit!

Administering it is actually not very painful. But shortly after it’s been pumped into a muscle, your arm starts to hurt magnificently. This spreads up your neck, across your shoulders and back, down into your legs. Before long every muscle in your body aches. And your head? Wow, what a headache!

Unfortunately, I can’t take aspirin, ibuprofen, or acetaminophen. So these little aches and pains are just something I get to enjoy.

Hardly slept at all last night. I probably fell asleep for about an hour around 1 or 2 a.m., and that was it.

Then this morning I had to get up, climb in the car, and traipse across the city to the dermatologist’s office, south of Sun City(!!). At 9 a.m., the rush hour is still on…so that was jolly fun. Really, I shouldn’t have been driving the car at all, that’s how sick I was. BUT…I managed to shoehorn myself in to the doctor’s schedule  this a.m. to have them look at a recrudescence of this damn thing on my hand. They insist it’s not growing back and that it’s healing up. Yeah. Right.

Soaking in a hot bath for awhile helped some — which was surprising, since the stuff made me feel like I had a fever of 110 and I thought what was needed was cool water. But it’s damn cold in the house — we’re having some kind of a cold snap — and I just couldn’t force myself to stand in a cold shower. Surprisingly, the hot water helped.

That notwithstanding, I still hurt from stem to stern by the time I had to roll out the door.

God, how I hate driving in this city! It’s just like Southern California now: mile on endless mile of bumper-to-bumper, aggressive traffic through tracts of ticky-tacky housing and shoddy strip malls. And wherever you’re going, you can’t get there from here without an endless trek. Horrible place!

Especially when you feel like hell… 😀

To get out of the ’hood, I had to pull an “Arizona turn.” That’s when you dart out in front of traffic bearing down on you from the left, floor it to keep from getting hit, veer into the center turn lane, and make a Uie. This was the only way I could turn west on Gangbanger’s Way this morning. Ultimately, I had to do two Arizona turns: one to get out of the clinic’s parking lot and turn east to come home.

You wonder why I insist on a six-banger? Yeah.

All that notwithstanding, I was happy to be able to get a vaccine that at least has (heh!) a shot at providing some protection from shingles.

Shingles is decidedly not an ailment you want to enjoy.

Some years ago, I met a woman in Portal, a little dump in the Chiricahua Mountains. The Chiricahuas host a research station run by the American Museum of Natural History. It’s quite a place, and it attracts droves of high-powered scientists. These folks arrive there and fall in love with the place. The Chiricahuas form what is known locally as a “sky island”: with its own ecology, the area looks much like Bali Hai.

As a result, a number of very high-octane scientists take up temporary residence in Portal, and some of them retire there. This woman and her husband were among those who decided to retire. They built a home in a beautiful little canyon and took up bird-watching.

Shortly after they arrived there, she came down with shingles. A bad case of it. By the time I met her, she’d had it for two years, and it wasn’t getting any better. It had wrapped itself around her torso, so that she could not breathe or move without constant pain. About all she could do was huddle on the sofa, trying to stay still. She was, in effect, crippled.

At that time, there was no immunization for shingles. If you’d had chicken pox and you were pushing old age, you had a good chance of getting it. In fact, one in three older Americans get shingles. Some, obviously, are not as severe as her case. But…there’s no way of knowing who is going to get a crippling vase of it and who is gonna get off light.

I remember looking at that lady and thinking, holy shit! whatever you do, DON’T GET OLD!

Well. The alternative is fairly drastic, and so far I haven’t felt inclined to take advantage of it.

So even though the present episode was a passing miserable moment, and even though I’m really pissed that something so important to public health should be priced exorbitantly and not covered by Medicare D, I’m really, really glad to live in a time where the shot is available.

Image: Chiricahua hoodoos: By Zereshk – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4171231

$hingles Vaccine: WOW!!!

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AFTER treatment of skin with Herpes Zoster (Shingles)

So when I went to get the first of the two required Shingles (make that “$hingles”) shots, Safeway’s pharmacy dinged me $160. Shee-ut! That was in spite of what I believe to be pretty damn good Part D coverage. I was led to believe it would cover both of the two required shots.

Not so much.

Comes the time to trudge back in for the second shingles shot: they gouge me ANOTHER $160!!!!!

Like…hey, dear GSK Global (Glaxo Smith Kline)…you couldn’t make a zillion bucks by charging five bucks apiece for every baby boomer who needs and wants this shot you’re manufacturing? Noooooo…you  had to get greedy. And by greedy, we mean fuckin’ greedy.

Over $300 to get shots that are supposed to be covered by Medicare D. Why, I asked Dear Pharmacist. She said “that’s Humana’s deductible.”

When I got home, I called Humana and asked why their Part D coverage didn’t cover the shingles vaccine, especially given the savings to Medicare and to the society in general if shingles could be eliminated or at least much attenuated in the Baby Boom generation.

“Because,” their representative said frankly, “there’s so much demand for it.”

Yeah. Because everybody over 65 is responding to advertising and PR campaigns and because no one who has ever seen anyone with shingles wants to get it, they feel justified in gouging.

And that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Turns out $160 is an average — maybe even a fairly modest — ding for a single one of these goddamn shots. Consumer Reports explains: the bastards have managed to get Shingrix, an ordinary vaccination, deemed a “prescription drug,” and therefore not covered as an ordinary vaccination. Therefore: eligible to qualify as a gouge, of which GSK takes every advantage. Scroll down in the comments section of this post, you find some people have paid as much as a thousand bucks to get both members of a couple vaccinated!

If you doubt that Big Pharma is corrupt and greedy…well, let’s be frank: you’re a damn fool.

Holy Mackerel! It’s NOT…

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CANCER! To coin a phrase: WTF?

This morning I called the dermatologist’s office to ask if they had the results of the biopsy and whether, even if they didn’t, could we please make an appointment to have this THING on my paw excised because it hurts and it itches and it’s driving me fricking crazy.

Silence ensued. Eventually the office spokesindividual came back on the line: Yes, they did have the results. No, it is not squamous cell cancer, as diagnosed by not one but two medical professionals. It’s “just” (heh) a fairly extreme actinic keratosis. It can be frozen off with the application of iced nitrogen.

Well. Sumbiche.

In the aftermath, comes the weirdest feeling. It’s not “a great weight lifted from your shoulders” (gimme a break!). I mean, puhleeze…after having both boobs lobbed off, I am not frightened by slicing away a small lump from the back of my hand, thankyouverymuch.

It’s more like…

Suddenly, after six or eight goddamn nightmarish weeks, the hassles and the worries and the effing nightmares come to a DEAD STOP.

Abruptly, I realized about two-thirds of the “gotta-do-it-today” To-Do’s do not have to be done today, fuckthemverymuch. It was like…a door to normalcy flang itself open.

Cassie was coughing when she woke up this morning and plainly isn’t well today. Call vet, hurry her over there, rack up another thousand bucks? Maybe not so much. The world didn’t end for me; quite possibly it’s not ending for the dog. Watch dog; see what happens. Open back door: dog flies out like a rocket. If that was Death’s door, she seems not to have minded.

Am I broke? Yeah, I am broke. BFD. I’ve been broke before. Remember the time when I was stockpiling canned goods whenever I could find them on sale? Perhaps that predates my blogging period.

Today I do not give a damn that I am broke.

Today I am not calling the vet yet again.

Today I am not spending another hour or two online with an Apple tech trying to figure out why my MacMail doesn’t work.

Today I am not driving halfway across the city and paying to have the half-baked ID card (NOT) from the Medigap provider encased in plastic.

Today I am not posting a damn thing to Plain & Simple Press.

Today I am not finishing the chapter I was writing to post to Plain & Simple Press.

Today I am not depositing Crystal’s check for the latest paid post I published at FaM.

My son gave me four packages of chicken parts, thighs & drumsticks, which have been residing in the freezer. Remembering these and then remembering, from many MANY years ago when I was a young thang and had a young husband for whom I cooked dinner every evening, an accidentally marvelous chicken recipe that involved braising in a LOT of garlic and white wine and chicken broth after laying slices of lemon across the pieces of dead bird, I thought: I’m celebrating with this.

Trot down to AJs, pick up a bottle of cheap white wine, a new chunk of overpriced cheese, a package of made-in-Italy pasta, and some other delectables.

Drive home. Chow down on freshly made rye bread and overpriced cheese and a glass or two of said cheap wine. And am now about to put the dog and myself on the bed. Whenever we roll out of the sack: it’s on to chicken in garlic (one hell of a lot of it) and wine and Meyer lemon. And…oh, yeah…the rest of the bottle of wine. 🙂

Onward.

State of the Chaos

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A little quieter here today… let’s hope it’s not the calm before the next storm. Let’s see how the various crises are doing:

1. In the department of Funny’s Money: I have no idea. I don’t even want to know, it’s such a chaotic disaster. This month I never got an untrammeled moment when I wasn’t too exhausted to sit down and work on the budget, so I’ve just been spending left and right. Financial manager sent over enough to cover the down payment on the pool rehab, which starts Monday. I reset the checking-to-emergency savings automatic transfer to move less than half of what I originally thought I could manage, so that (at least) will leave a little more basic survival money in checking.

2. Hand cancer: still waiting on the biopsy. But I’m calling the doc’s office on Monday to ask if we can accelerate the process. I want this damn thing OFF. Where they shaved off enough to send to the lab, it’s growing back with élan. Whatever it is, it’s very fast-growing and so presumably aggressive. And at times it really hurts. Hurts and itches. Turns out pain and itching are defining characteristics of squamous cell cancer. Why exactly we have to wait for biopsy results until the cows come home to cut the thing out escapes me.

3. Dog decedence*: No credible sign of croaking over yet! Matter of fact, this dog is getting much better. Just now she remembered the chicken jerky treats that reside in a jar on the kitchen counter and decided to do the Dance of the Manipulated Human, thereby eliciting a chew treat for herself and for Ruby. The cough seemed to come back a little: it had subsided to the point where she coughed only when she slurped up a lot of water (which she’s always done…corgis do that). She had stopped coughing when she barks and stopped coughing when I lifted her off the bed. So I cut back the Benadryl from 1/2 tab in the morning and 1/2 tab in the evening to just 1/2 tab at night. A-n-n-d…the cough started to come back. This morning I gave her a dose at doggy breakfast, and lo! No coughing.

*Yes, yes, I did invent that word. Why do you ask? Etym: Late Modern English, from decedent (a deceased person)

4. Car: It seems to have survived its brush with the flatbed trailer with no very serious damage. The gouged tire is still rolling. It hasn’t blown, at least not so far…and yeah, it has been on a freeway or two. I’m trying to stay off the freeways, because I don’t trust the thing. But to get out to the new dermatologist’s office sometime before the end of my life expectancy, I pretty much have to ride the 101 for a number of miles. So far, so good.

5. Cord-cutting Cox escape: Last night La Maya and La Bethulia invited me over for dinner. In the course of conversation, I remarked that I need to get rid of the fake “land line” (Cox’s new version is really VoIP, and not very good VoIP at that), replace my extensions with cheap clamshells and get an iPhone.

“I have two old iPhones that I’m not using!” says La Bethulia. “Want one?”

Do I want one???? Grab!  Well, she quite reasonably wanted to delete all her data on the thing before I trot it over to the Apple store to get it set up. And they’ve forgotten the password for the thing. But it turns out it’s not hard to reboot the thing all by your little self. So…I may try to do that with my son’s help, or just hire an Apple tech to do it. Paying someone a hundred bucks or so would be a lot cheaper than buying a new iPhone! 🙂

6. MacMail fiasco: Still not fixed. Right now the only way I can get to my email is through the Web interface, which is less than ideal. It does allow me to access incoming mail, but all my carefully designed preferences have been screwed up. Not erased — which would have been far preferable — but all jumbled around. So it’s a mess. And I guess I’m going to end up either having to pay Cox for an email account, the bastards, or start using Gmail, which I really really REALLY do not want to do. This, I will figure out later.

7. Other little dramas: Have yet to decide whether I’m going back to choir. The associate director has kindly put me on the women’s chant choir, which I love.  She urged me to come to choir on Sunday despite having turned on my heel and marched back to my car and gone home after last Wednesday evening’s unpleasant exchange at the door (not with her but with a woman who makes no secret of her dislike of me).

I don’t know. I’d pretty well decided to quit — just never go back, that’s how disgusted I am. And besides…

Really, the only thing that keeps me from feeling a great deal more serious about moving out of Crime Central is the choir. I can’t afford any other close-in district — this neighborhood is cheap because Conduit of Blight Blvd, Gangbanger’s Way, the Blightrail, the meth clinic, and the population of bums keep the property values way down. Comparable homes anywhere else are at least a hundred grand higher, and these days more like two hundred grand.

Abandoning the choir and the church would open two housing options: Fountain Hills, wayyy on the east side of the Valley, and Sun City, wayyyy on the west side. Both have the advantages of low crime rates and pretty decent nearby shopping. They’re both quiet and peaceful, and there’s no way any politicians and their greed-driven backers are going to build a boondoggle through the middle of either one. Sun City is a ghetto for old folks, which I really do not like. Fountain Hills is one helluva long way from everything but the Mayo Clinic, a distance that I also do not like. I don’t know anyone in Fountain Hills and, because I don’t make friends easily, this would make me feel isolated and unhappy. But Fountain Hills has pretty scenery and it is close to upscale shopping and to my favorite second-hand store, My Sister’s Closet. Sun City has the advantages that it’s very cheap to live there, and that I do know some people there and so would start with a kernel of a social life. Which would be good. I guess. And the writer’s group I favor meets way on the west side, so it would be easy to cultivate more friends there. I guess.

Well, if I’m going to snab that phone, I need to get up and do it now…La Maya’s relatives are about to descend on the house. And so, away!

Month from Hell: It gets even BETTER!

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Honest to God. If you wrote this stuff into a novel, no one would believe it. Really: it has been just about a disaster a day for the past month or six weeks. Today’s disaster: cancer.

Yeah. The thing I thought was ringworm? Young Dr. Kildare believes it’s skin cancer. He thinks it’s a squamous cell carcinoma.

Charming.

Mine doesn’t look quite like the things in those images. There are some infections you can get that actually look a lot more like it. Whatever it is: dayum! Another little drama…another PITA.

Truth to tell, though: this is a blessing in disguise. I have not been able to get in the door to a dermatologist since my last dermatologist fell off the radar. In our parts, their schedules are so jammed with skin cancer patients and Baby Boomers seeking rejuvenation treatments (which apparently is where the big bucks are…) that many of them won’t even make an appointment with you. Even at the Mayo, where I’m a patient, the wait list is six months.

He gave me a referral, and incredibly, when I dialed the number…are you ready for this?…a live human being answered the phone!!!!!

Jayzus. I don’t know when I last ran into a human being on the phone at a doctor’s office…not in living memory. 😀

Anyway, they arranged to see me on Tuesday. Not only that, but the doc will do a full-body exam, which will give me a chance to ask is there’s anything she can do about the damn neurofibromas. And of course, get rid of the current crop of actinic keratoses, which anyone who lives in Arizona for many years routinely sprouts.

So I don’t feel like it’s exactly world-ending. It’s just another damn nuisance to soak up time. The drive to YDK’s office takes a good 40 minutes, and this dermatologist is even further west — basically out in the vicinity of Sun City, only further to the south.