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Health care

How is it possible to HURT this much????

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December 26: Oh. My. GAWD! The Pain!!!!

What the heck did I do to myself???????

NO idea. All I know is my left hip hurts so much I can barely walk. And that is NOT an exaggeration!

Launching into the afternoon in a state of High Boredom, I took it into my pea-brained li’l head to walk about 16 blocks easterly, through a side-strip of Upper Richistan, to explore an upscale North Central block of fancy-Dan patio homes. This is a development I’ve long admired. And recently, I’ve taken to thinking I might sell the Funny Farm and buy one of those places.

Thereby freeing me from yard work, pool cleaning, and general hassle. Right?

The place is roughly of this ilk, though not at all the same. It’s in the same neighborhood, though. And “only” 400 grand…

So there I am, going oooohhh ahhh, I could live in THIS place, “when..OWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!”

The right hip goes out.

It goes out…and it STAYS out.

Hurt?   Lemme tellya HURT. 

What I did to set it off, I have noooo idea. But there I was: a good 16 blocks from home. In spectacular agony!

Limped and trudged and trudged and limped and finally after around 40 minutes of struggle, managed to make it back to the house. My GAWD does that hip hurt!!!!!  

And totally out of the blue. What on earth did I do to myself???

So here we are: the dawg and the human, perched on the bed. The human: hips and lower back wrapped in a heating pad, set to “high.”

MIGAWD! I don’t know when I’ve ever had anything HURT so much. And why? how? I have no clue!

*****

Didn’t get much of a chance to look at the real estate over there. And unless this injury (whatever it is) miraculously heals up overnight, I won’t get any such chance. If it’s not better tomorrow, I’ll have to put my poor son up to driving me to the ER. That, or hire a cab.

dayUM, but I’m sick & tired of doctoring. Pray (please!!!) that this hitch-in-the-giddyup goes away by tomorrow morning! 

Does It EVER stop? Or even slow down?

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Goodie Gumdrops! Now we’ve got a  new flu epidemic revving up. And the authorities expect it to be particularly bad in Colorado. That’s just across the state line…  😉

Seriously: if we have a flu epidemic in Colorado, we’ll have it here in lovely (adjacent!) Arizona. Tourists will bring it across the state line, and it undoubtedly will spread across the Reservation, too.

Not like I wasn’t already sick as a dawg, eh?

Seriously: I’m inclined to doubt that I’ll survive a really roaring case of the flu just now. Always have been preternaturally susceptible to respiratory infections — when I was a kid, one evening a doctor told my mother I wouldn’t survive until morning.

Huh. He seems to have been wrong about that. Unless I’m a ghost, eh?

Truth to tell, though, respiratory infections do make me sicker than they do most people. What you think is a cold or a mild case of flu will lay me low for three weeks. And that I would like to avoid just now, what with this current mildly terrifying ailment.

Ugh. I can remember those awful brats in grade school teasing and tormenting me because my mother would keep me home whenever I caught a respiratory infection. GOD, but those kids in Ras Tanura were monsters!!! I learned to hate them even when they weren’t actively tormenting me — most of the time I’d just stay away from the other kids.

This was good, in a weird way, because it gave me plenty of time to study. Hence, lo! those many years later: Phi Beta Kappa. But…I think I would rather have had a few friends than a decorative fake key. 😀

***

So, soooo sick. The peripheral neuropathy, while apparently not especially dangerous, is absolutely crazy-making! To the extent that, as ailments go, it might actually be “dangerous,” it’s because much more of this would indeed make you suicidal.

No, don’t panic, please! I’m not about to throw myself off the North Rim. Yet. But I sure can see how, if this goes on and on and on, a person would be mightily tempted to bring an end to it. It hurts. 

And so I hurt constantly. If there were any way to stop it, I’d be inclined to try that way…even if it meant an end to life. An end to life, after all, means an end to pain.

And please: spare me the advice to take an aspirin or an ibuprofen. Both those nostrums — especially aspirin — cause peripheral neuropathy in me.

No kidding. Take an aspirin, and within half an hour or so, it’s bzzzzzzzz…

Yes, I will use aspirin. But only if I’m in a lot of pain. With the peripheral neuropathy lurking at all times, I figure one of those OTC pills will aggravate the hell out of it. And one thing I do not need to do is to make this buzzing and tingling and burning worse! 

Stop the World!
I Wanna Get Off!

She Would’ve Loved….

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Oh, my goodness! How my mother would have loved this adorable little corgi. Ruby is…

…hopelessly cute(!!)
…sweeter than candy
…doggily persuasive
…richly funny

What a charmer. She surely would have seduced my mother within minutes of their meeting. And they would have been pals for life.

Or at least, for rest of my mother’s life.

She’s long-gone now. My father remarried; then he died in misery. The new wife was merrily ejected from my life…she’d be about 181 by now, I imagine, if she were still living.

My mother was murdered by the tobacco peddlers.

Yeah. If you have a kid…or anyone you care about or who cares about you…don’t get seduced into smoking. It truly is a murderous custom.

She deserved to see her grandson. She deserved to see the cuteness that is the corgi. She deserved to live out her husband’s life. But no. She smoked herself to death, and so never saw any of those things…or any of the other beautiful things that should have graced her later life.

Don’t let them kill you, friends!

But do get a corgi!!!! 😀  Everyone should have a corgi. Right?

She killed herself. Why, why, WHY the Hell????

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I fail to understand how she could have done anything so stupid. 

It was as though she deliberately incubated the cancer growing in her gut so as to inflict as much suffering as possible not only on herself but on those around her.

She knew.

She knew because she had been through the same horror with her own mother.

She had watched her wild-assed mother fuck her way into a terminal reproductive cancer. And, half a lifetime later, she drank her way and smoked her way into the same damned thing, calculated so as to cause as much suffering as possible for her husband and for her only child. And for herself, while she was at it.

Because she clearly knew what she was doing. I would suggest that what she did was not stupid. It was calculated. She knew she was gonna kill herself. She knew it would cause as much pain and suffering as possible to those around her. And that was her strategy.

So…well…I have to say that what she did was not stupid. It was malign, maybe. Because it was deliberate. Purposeful: she knew.

My poor father! He attended her through just about every moment of her hideous terminal illness, caring for her, feeding her, washing her, medicating her, dragging her to (useless!) doctors…God help him.

No question in my mind: she knew what she was doing.

We had known since the late 1950s that smoking causes cancer. She died while I was pregnant with my son: in the middle 1970s. A good 20 years after the cause and effect were identified. The more she heard of the science, the more she puffed away. I do think she truly believed those reports were Big Brother trying to control her life.

Why, why, why are people so stupid???? 

Oh well. Can’t fix stupid, can you? And you sure can’t undo its results.

The horror of it, though, is pretty straightforward: one’s sense is that what she did was not stupid. It was deliberate. 

She knew what she was doing would kill her, and she engineered the process to create as much suffering and as much stress as could possibly be inflicted on herself and on those around her.

Just. Plain. Evil. 

And…whaaa? UNdone for????

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WTF?????  After this morning’s whiney whinge, now — come 3:34 in the afternoon — suddenly I’m a whole new person!!! 

Why?????  What on earth would cause a gigantic slug of misery to suddenly evaporate? To be replaced by a calm, almost complacent mood tending (even!) toward the cheerful?????

Seriously: I cannot imagine.

This morning I was truly miserable. Now: back to normal; indeed, even fairly cheerful.  Why?????

Well….I can’t imagine. Unless it was a nice sunny day and a long walk down Conduit of Blight Blvd and through the neighboring shopping centers.

Ruby and I hiked all over the ‘Hood, through three neighboring shopping centers and all around a part of the tract where SDXB and I used to walk almost every day, back when he lived here.

He has moved to Sun City, and so is long gone. Me: I wouldn’t go back there if ya paid me.

But he likes that kind of fustian fuddy-duddery, so he’s very happy there. He and New Girlfriend seem to be doing well enough, though it sounds like he’s pretty damn sick. With my mother (oh, lemme tellya horror show!!), we found the medical care in Sun City was even more substandard than you get in the typical American living space. Just. Gawd. Awful.

Would she have died if she’d had decent care?

Well, yes.

But she sure as Hell wouldn’t have suffered the way she did. And that little Life Passage is one of several reasons you couldn’t get me back in Sun City: not on a bet.

At any rate: free of that place, Ruby and I put some serious mileage under our paws and had a lovely time hiking around the ‘Hood and through the neighboring shopping centers.

What exactly I’m gonna do to get through the upcoming end-of-life years, I dunno. Have to confess that I haven’t the faintest idea.

Seriously: over the next few months and year or so, I do need to make some plans. Maybe confer with M’Hijito about what he wants me to do … yeah, I know: check my idiot self into the Beatitudes, a venerable old-folkerie.

Thanks. I’d rather take a flying leap off the North Rim…  So we do need to confer and think carefully about how to deal with the upcoming (potentially hideous) years. But just now…I get to enjoy life for a few weeks or months!

 

Done For!

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Continuing spectacularly sick. Ohhh well…by now I’ve gotten used to the what appears to be the fact that I’m never going to get well. The best that can be hoped, I reckon, is that life comes to an end in some reasonable period of time.

Though, it must be allowed, we’re well past any “reasonable period.”

This morning — it appears to be a Tuesday — I plan to call a venerable old-folkerie here in the Valley. Well…the place is what I regard as a prison for the elderly. They take everything you have: your life savings, the value of your home, any other cash you happen to have laying around. In return, they babysit you and feed you awful institutional food until you pass into Eternity.

Which, we must hope, will happen soon.

Soon as my mother died, my father signed himself into a similar place, one then called “Orangewood.” His experience was just hideous, but not because of the institution and its operators: he married a woman he met there, apparently imagining she could somehow take my mother’s place.

Well. No one could do that. He was deeply, truly in love with my mother, and she with him. This new broad…ohhhh my gawd! Long story short, that “marriage” promptly turned into a Horror Show from Hell.

For me, it had one advantage: taught me that if you get locked up in one of those places, you mind your own business and don’t get chummy with anyone. And especially don’t marry anyone!

I had hoped to save my assets to pass along to my son. Unless I drop dead in the very near future, that ain’t gonna happen. Clearly, this unholy ailment is going to drag on and drag on and drag on, as I get weaker and weaker, more and more unable to care for myself. Soo….might as well resign myself to the fact that he will get little or nothing from me, because the disease is going to eat up everything I have: the value of the house, the savings I’ve set aside for myself, the small but real inheritance from my father. Gone. All of it.

If I were little stronger, I’d bring an end to the horror show myself, right now. But I simply don’t have the nerve end my own life. Just plain not brave enough. Sooo…that which I have is effectively no longer mine. Shortly, it will belong to a prison for old folks.

What a world we live in!