Coffee heat rising

Doggie Resistance

Ruby is lobbying to head on out of the Funny Farm and go for a good long walk around the ‘Hood. Her human, however…not so much. The human doggedly resists…

Cripes. I’m so crippled I can barely limp from the dining table into the kitchen. Why?  Dunno.

Best guess is I must have slept in an odd position. A fine jab of pain hit the minute I woke up and tried to climb out of bed. So…about the most reasonable explanation is a cattywampus position in the bed.

Or…last night my son dragged me to the physical therapist. I suppose some of his hour’s worth of manipulations could have spavined some muscle or tendon. But you’d think I’d have noticed that at the time.

At any rate, just now I’m in no shape to trek around the neighborhood behind a lunging dog.

Whatever. It sure does HURT.

And y’know what? I am tired of hurting!

The nightmares never stop

O Gawd!  There really IS a point when it’s time to hop off from the merry-go-round that is life!  WHAT a flickin’ nightmare just living has become.

My poor son — make that my HEROIC son — has been dragging me from pillar to post: doctors, therapists, thisses, thats, and whatnots. Seems to be no end to it: we just go on and on and ON.

This evening we’re back from the physical therapist,  where what I accomplished was to spavin the hip even worse than it was already spavined. Ohhh my GAWD does this stuff hurt. 

No kidding: I hurt; I hurt; I hurt; and then I hurt some more. And frankly: I ain’t gonna be able to handle a helluva lot more of this!

JAYZUZ!  Just get sat down, and ringie dingie dingie ringie dingie dingie… a clear and present phone solicitor.

But with all the sh!t that we’re going thru just now, there IS an outside chance that this could be a real call from a real person.

Human Answers: Hullo. How may I help you?

Scam Artist Answers: Hullo. May I speak to Mr. or Ms. Human.?

Human replies: GET THE F*** OFF MY PHONE, GODDAMN IT!!!! Shrieked as loud as humanly possible into the phone.

Dammit. 

Need to get an airhorn to blast at the bastard phone solicitors. Hmmm…wonder if those things can be had from Amazon?

****

Mwa ha hah!  Looks like I’m not the only one who’s thought of this. There’s a whole collection of “air horns loud” 😀

Ohhhh yeah! Gotta order up one of these.

Hmmmm… Wonder if there’s a way to blast the phone solicitor without deafening oneself…  Yeah…

Suppose you got a sturdy wooden or steel box, set the phone receiver down in that along with the air horn, closed the box, and then let the air horn have at the ba*tard.

Hmmmm…that doesn’t look very promising. There’s gotta be a way, though.

Let us think on this…

Owwwwww!!!!

Was it REALLY only a day ago that I was whinging on and on about the pain in the hip?

Feels more like about a year. HURT? Hoooleee Gawd, does it HURT! To get up the hallway from the bedroom to the kitchen & front of the house, I have to stick out my arms and balance myself on the walls, s-l-o-o-o-w-l-e-e-e limping along. Every step — every s-l-l-o-o-w, interminable step — HURTS. 

M’hijito will soon be on his way over here to tote me out to the damn Mayo Clinic. Is there a REASON we couldn’t first (pleeze!) visit one of the nearby hospitals?  Hell, no! Nothing will do but the (putative) best: the Mayo.

The Mayo is in Scottsdale. On the freakin’ far side of Scottsdale: a good half-hour trek each way. And that’s just to get there and back. I can’t drive in the state I’m in (even had he not purloined my car some time back). And so now he has to take a half-day off work — which he sure as hell can’t afford to do — to drag me across the city.

What a fukkin’ waste of time and gasoline!

Young Dr. Kildare used to practice right up the road. He, however, fled our sylvan dales to take up his career in Sun City: halfway to California from here. So it’s as far to YDK’s office as it is to the Mayo…and M’hijito does NOT trust any doctors other than those at the Mayo.

Myself, I can’t tell much difference. A good doctor is a good doctor. A narrow-minded dimwit is a narrow-minded dimwit. Doesn’t much matter where they practice.

{sob!} What a gorgeous day. This is the time, this is the day to be walking with Ruby the Corgi from one side of Timbuktu to the other.

But nooooo. Here I am, barely able to hobble across the room, waiting for my excellent and long-suffering son to come pick me up and drag me out to the far side of Scottsdale.

Just the gawdawful drive out there and back eats up over an hour of his work day. And that doesn’t count trudging through the garage and across the grounds and around the clinic to get to the doc’s office. So that means any time he drags me out to the Mayo, he gets in trouble with his employer

Legally, an employer is not allowed to fire you for taking time off to go to a doctor — or, interestingly, for having to drive a sick relative to the doctor. So…he’s not likely to get canned for today’s excursion. But you can be sure he’ll be swamped with fell-behind work and nagged interminably by the bosses.

I probably could get the Uber driver who lives across the street to schlep me out there — to the tune of about a million bucks. But (he being no fool) M’hijito likes to be present at the pow-wows with the docs. Which is good: years of unpleasant experience have left me aversive as hell where doctors are concerned. And no doubt I often barely hear what they say…in my eagerness to get out of their office.

GOD, I hate going to doctors!

When I was an infant — this was a year or two before we went out to Arabia, and I just turned three when we arrived in those sandy realms — as an infant I almost died at the hands of a brilliant doctor. One evening, hospital staff told my mother I would be dead by morning.

Can you imagine?

Well, they seem to have been wrong. I’ve 0utlived her, the poor woman. And she lived almost to a ripe old age. Would have made it ripeness if she hadn’t smoked herself into the grave.

Tobacco manufacturers and vendors should be prosecuted as the murderers that they are…

Oop! Sorry: sidetracked!

But seriously: if you smoke, quit. Someone is getting rich on your dying. A number of someones, actually. Cut the ba*tards off in their tracks!

Oh well: speaking of tracks, I seem to be easily sidetracked this morning.

Ohhh damn. Here he is!

 

Ah hah! Back IN!

Thought WordPress had locked me out of Funny about Money. But nay! Here we are!!

Actually, M’hijito is probably the one who got me back in. He’s in the study right now, wrestling with the computer and the Internet. Must say: you have to own a LOT more IQ points than I do in order to make this online stuff work. The frustration level is bracing.

Oh well…we’re back online. Fully.

Also bracing, in the Department of Frustration, is trying to work with doctors when you’re chronically ill. And that, alas, is the predicament in which I find myself.

One runs into any number of roadblocks, here in this predicament:

* Doctors often only half-listen to you. Consequently, they miss much of what you say.

* They are right and you are wrong. No argument, you!

* If you are a woman, you are by nature stupid.

* If you are a woman, you are  by nature wrong.

* Often they will prescribe an OTC drug — or even a prescription drug — without being fully aware of all its potential side effects. These side effects can be highly unpleasant, and some are even dangerous.

You see: this is WHY, over the years, I’ve developed an aversion to medical care. And to doctors. It also is why, whenever a doctor prescribes a drug, I look it up in the PDR (Physician’s Desk Reference) before I gulp it down!  

When you do this regularly, often you realize that your doctor has not looked up a given prescription drug, does not know its potential side effects, and even — incredibly enough! — does not realize it should not be given for your specific ailment.

And that’s the issue: Too often, doctors don’t fully understand what they’re giving you. Not because they’re incompetent. But because they’re busy; they’re overworked; they’re going by what they’ve heard from a colleague or at some conference; and because they assume they know better than you. Especially if you’re a woman.

So, as you can imagine, I’ve about had it. 

Pain, Pain, and More Pain!

Omigawd. Wanna hear about hurt?  Lemme tellya HURT. 

For reasons unknown, my right hip is massively spavined. Seriously: I have no idea why or what caused it: must have twisted around funny in my sleep. All I know is that the joint hurts SO MUCH that I’d classify it as about the worst pain I’ve ever had. And I delivered my baby without anaesthesia….

Yeah, no kidding: labor doesn’t hurt as much as this old bat’s monthly periods. Nowhere near that much. So I didn’t realize I was in labor until we got to the hospital and the kid was hopping out into the world.

😀  😮 😀

ohhhh welll…. Just now we are enjoying a bit of palpable pain.

M’hijito is working. Doubt if it registers with him how much the old bat is hurting.

Doesn’t matter, anyway. A spavined hip joint ain’t fatal. If I show up at the ER going wah wah! my leg hurts!!, I’m gonna get ignored, ignored, and then ignored some more. So…shee-ut! Why bother?

 

 

Another Day Later and Deeper in… ??? …

A day later and early evening. Still sicker than a dawg. Well: that’s not surprising, since the Dawg shows no sign of anything resembling an ailment…whereas I’m banging at Death’s Door. 😀

Well.  At least…at some doctor’s door.

Jeez. Did you know you could get peripheral neuropathy in your damned teeth???  No kidding: my two upper front teeth are buzzing like an electric current is running through them. And as usual these days, the hands are stinging and tingling and hurting enough to make typing freakin’ uncomfortable.

Whatever the hell is causing this, I do wish it would go away. From what I can uncover through  my endlessly brilliant excavations of the Internet, apparently the neuropathy that afflicts the paws can take aim at other parts of your body. The lips and gums are among those parts. I’m not gonna assume that’s behind today’s fun sensations — I are a English major, after all; I are not a doctor — but it does give me something fresh to pester Young Dr. Kildare with.

Or the new doctors down the road.

YDK has moved to freakin’ Sun City — a 40-minute drive from here, through crazy-making traffic. So I’m afraid our relationship has ended. That’s too bad…because I like him a lot and found he had a fine dose of common sense: a rare commodity in an M.D.

But…now we do have a doctor’s office just down the street — within walking distance, even!   Alas, so far I’m not impressed with those folks. Nothing bad about them, mind you…but nothing notably good, either. Personally, I crave a little more than mediocrity from my doctor.

M’hijito perennially wants to drag me out to the Mayo Clinic. Their docs would be fine if they just weren’t halfway to Payson…  Sorry, but an hour of driving through thick traffic to see a doctor for 10 or maybe (if you’re lucky) 15 minutes doesn’t make it for me.

Am I the only one who imagines that medical care in America used to be significantly better 15 or 20 years ago? Honestly: these days, it hardly seems worth burning the gas to get to a doctor’s office. They don’t pay attention to what you’re saying, and even if they do hear you, they seem to miss the point you’re trying to make.

Perhaps I exaggerate, though. Or more likely,  because I’m old doctors don’t pay any more attention to me than they do any other old person. Which ain’t much…

What a culture we live in, eh?