This damn cold/flu/black plague/lung cancer/DEATH OF ME has gone on and on and on. I knew it would go on and on and on. If you get over a respiratory infection in, say, 10 days, it will take me two to three weeks to get over the same bug. That’s because my delicate little system lacks some part of its immune apparatus (according to a past doc), and so I just don’t recover from things the way normal people do.
But apparently I’ve overestimated how long I’ve been enjoying the current gasper. I thought we were in the middle of Week 7, and that next Sunday (by which time the thing, clearly, will NOT be gone) would be the start of Week 8.
No. No, however. Looked at the calendar and discovered that the day on which I came down with this thing — when I thought it was an allergy and so thought it would be OK to go to a Phoenix Chorale concert — was not seven weeks ago but only five.
So we’re actually in Week 5, not Week 7.
This means there’s hope. Typically a severe cold or flu lasts about six weeks for me.
Every evening as I’m choking and gagging and gasping for breath, I think tomorrow I’ve GOTTA call the doctor! But come morning, I’ve slept more or less through the night and I feel like I’m gonna live, until along about 2 p.m. when suddenly such a wave of exhaustion rolls over me that I can do nothing other than crawl into the sack. Literally, I’m not good for anything after about 1 or 1:30 p.m.
Yet…I am so All Doctored Out!
Just the thought of talking to another doctor makes me cringe. I do not want to see a doctor, I do not want to be treated by a doctor (nine times out of ten with drugs that make me sicker than the disease!), I do not even want to think about a doctor.
Am I crazy? Am I the only middle-class American who lives in fear of the avatars of the medical establishment? Is it normal to resist going to a doctor after you’ve been sick for five weeks?
Well, six weeks having proven itself a charm, I figure I’ll wait till a week from Friday (i.e., a week from tomorrow). If this thing isn’t almost gone by then, I guess I’ll be forced to call Young Dr. Kildare. Probably the scenic YDK over the Mayo, because he has common sense, that rarist of all qualities in a doctor.
Some time back my friend KJG’s husband, The Fireman, was reflecting on our shared War on Cats. They have an obnoxious neighbor who thinks it’s just grand to let their damnable cats invade yards, kill birds, dig up gardens, piss and poop on vegetables, and stink up entryways, a problem that makes Other Daughter’s cats a trifle.
Here at the Funny Farm, I had fortified the castle battlements by zip-tieing carpet tack strips along the decorative tops of the cinderblock walls: the top row of block has a pattern of holes, highly convenient for this purpose.
A minor dilemma arose: to wit, a slender block wall like this has a heavier, supporting block column about every 15 feet. Each of these is topped with a flat, solid block, leaving noplace to get purchase for your zip-tied lashup. After a couple of experiments failed, I ended up having to paste pieces tack strips to the tops of these columns, using outdoor-grade heavy-duty double-sided sticky tape. This worked…sort of.
Two and a half years have passed, and the problem with Other Daughter’s tabby cat and KnitWit’s black & white cat has been defeated. Cats do not enter my backyard. The neighbors think a Crazy Lady lives here, but that’s just fine with me as long as their cats are not using my desert landscaping as their toilet and my dogs are not eating their deposits — and all the parasites and diseases that come along.
As you can imagine, carpet tack strips are not made to weather wind, rain, and 118-degree sunlight. They’re really nothing other than thin strips of laminate, about a step above cardboard. They’ve held up a great deal better than I imagined they would — I figured they’d fall apart in about one season. But no. Even though they’re looking a little tired, they’re still up there and still doing the job. Of course, they want to buckle and they want to de-laminate, but where they’re secured to the decorative cinderblocks, the zip ties have held them together. Atop the columns, though, they have warped, buckled, curled, and pulled up from the sticky tape. Ugleee, though still effective.
The Fireman suggested that the column toppers could be held in place by nailing the strips to pieces of wood cut to fit the block and then sticking the resulting solid piece down to the crowning cinderblock.
This, it develops, is a brilliant idea. It’s easy to accomplish — carpet tack strips come with handy little brads that you just tap down to hold them in place.
Under constructionThe deed done
They’re sturdy, they stick on there firmly, and while they’re anything but elegant, at least they do look better than strips of tacks tied on with string and wire. 🙂
{Chortle!} Great WT stuff, isn’t it?
So today I plan to start replacing the weathered strips along the endless lengths of decorative cinderblock, a little at a time. There’s no hurry. While it’s cool in the morning, a few feet of old strips can be discarded and a few new feet installed. By the end of the week, the eccentric lash-up will be fully replaced.
Dogs
While I’ve been sick with this seemingly endless respiratory infection, I’ve again had recourse to rolls of FreshPet dog food, the commercial product that’s the closest I’ve found to the custom-made chow I feed the hounds.
The dogs like it, and gosh it’s so much easier than stewing and grinding and mixing up 10 pounds of dog food at a time. Since the dogs eat a pound of food a day, ten pounds goes fast. Usually I can make a week or ten days’ worth, and then it’s back to the kitchen.
It’s good for the dogs — you’d never know Cassie is over ten years old now — but it sure as hell is a PITA. Especially when you don’t feel good.
FreshPet is bracingly expensive — depending on the store, $12 to $14 a roll, plus 10% sales tax, for enough to last about a week.
So yesterday while I was at Costco, there to purchase some more dog food makings, I tried to calculate a cost comparison. It’s not easy, because custom-make dog food is not the same kind of apple as factory-made stuff. But after much tergiversation, I figured that buying pork, chicken, big bags of frozen mixed veggies, oatmeal, rice, and sweet potatoes is marginally cheaper, over the course of a month, than serving up premade dog food with the same ingredients.
Plus: the main reason I go to Costco these days is to buy dog pork, dog chicken and dog veggies. Really, I can buy everything else in other places, and absent the impulse buy factor, doing so saves money. This month I’ve spent a ton of money in Costco, which I would not have done had I been shopping in grocery stores — the purple jeans come to mind as an example.
So, I dunno. It’s a nuisance to make dog food. But it probably is better for the dogs, and apparently it’s cheaper. If I could train myself only to buy the stuff that’s needed in Costco and not to grab a pair of colorful jeans or a package of oversalted pre-cooked lamb shanks or a couple of bottles of wine, it probably would be cheaper.
Dieting
In spite of past six weeks spent pounding at Death’s Door — or maybe because of it — I’ve put on enough weight to push the BMI borderline between “normal” and “overweight” (i.e., “fat”). The jeans still fit, but they’re getting tight.
So I determined to knock off the bread (every morning two pieces! With cheese or dipped in olive oil or smeared with butter and honey!!) and the pasta (comfort food of the first [salted] water) and the potatoes (mmmmmm hash browns!!!).
And it’s worked! By adding salad or fruit to each meal and subtracting the wheat products and the potatoes, I’ve lost two pounds in a week. This, without going hungry, without exercising significantly, and without knocking off my favorite potables (one beer or one bourbon and water per day). If I would get off my duff and bike or walk without benefit of leaf-sniffing dogs, I’d probably lose weight even faster.
Since only about five pounds need to go, I should be back to my former sylph-like self in another week or two.
One thing I did discover: if I arrive at the church about an hour before morning choir practice, I can sneak in a mile or so of strolling… ahem, “power-walking”…in a different environment without the animals suspecting that I’ve made my escape.
One of our associate rectors came up with the idea of a virtual “walk to Jerusalem” for the weeks coming up to Easter. She mapped out a mile-long route around the church, and they tote up the number of person-miles walked by the interested group, to come up with a total equivalent to the distance between Lovely Uptown Phoenix and Jerusalem. This, she taped in a window, allowing me to see exactly where to walk around the church to rack up an even mile.
The area around there in fact is rather lovely. North Central Phoenix is full of expansive 1950s ranch houses on huge lots, each now worth in the vicinity of $750,000 to $1 million, and the main drag through the center of the district is flanked by what once were riding trails — and now are shady walking paths. So it’s a great place to walk and it offers some scenery a little different from the ’hood’s. When you’re there, you’re smack in the middle of Richistan, rather than having to hike through a buffer zone to get to a scenic upscale tract.
So I’m thinking that as part of the diet plan, I should do this every Sunday I go over to the religious HQ. It may even be light enough an hour before the midweek evening choir practice to pull this off (I wouldn’t walk on Central Avenue after dark) — so that would provide two monotony-defying, dog-free walks a week, instead of just one. 🙂
Welp, on to today’s exercise stint: pulling old carpet tack strips off the walls and zip-tieing new ones up!
Well, I don’t know what worked — the leftover codeine or that reliable old standby, tincture of time — but the Cold from Hell is slowing arriving at the almost tolerable stage. Still barking, but not suffocating anyhow. I managed to drive to choir last night, having swallowed half a dose of the menacing opiate when dawn cracked, a good 12 hours before choir call. So felt it was safe enough to drive by then.
And amazingly I also managed to sneak through two hours of rehearsal without causing a scene that was too operatic. Easter, our religion’s seriously hyuge spiritual frenzy, is fast coming upon us, and some of the music is beyond amazing.
We’re singing Mealor’s Stabat Mater, which defies belief in the “Gorgeous” category.
Last night we also rehearsed Stopford’s Ave Verum, one of my favorites…
And Alan Hovhaness’s “Out of the Depths”…
And K. Lee Scott’s “Open My Eyes”… In English, it’s true, but this Korean choir does better justice to the piece than the only other rendition I could find on YouTube:
And Pablo Casal’s O Vos Omnes…
Can you believe we got through all that (and three hymns) in two hours?
No wonder I didn’t feel like driving to Scottsdale at 6:30 this morning. How much longer that networking group is going to put up with my absences, I do not know. Claro que I’ll have to show up next week if I don’t want to be drummed out of the club!
Meanwhile, one of the things I need to do between now and next Thursday is rejoin a Toastmaster’s group, since speaking gigs will be central to the marketing scheme for the new magnum opus. It’s ready to go to print — I’ve just been too overworked and then too damn sick to do battle with the PoD guy’s software. And I believe the eBook dude is about ready with the Kindle and ePub versions. I intend to sell those off my website, since I’m mightily fed up with dealing through Amazon — and since Amazon sales are beside the point with this book.
And mean-meanwhile: a colleague’s book awaits my editorial attention. And so, away.
Not for awhile, if experience speaks. I’ve now enjoyed 2017’s Cold from Hell for two full weeks. The worst of the infection symptoms have pretty well passed: the fever is gone, the nasal congestion is gone, the headache is gone, the overall sense of wet-noodle weakness is pretty well gone. But — as usual — the frantic coughing hangs on.
Speaking launches a frenzy of chest-deep coughing and hacking. I can’t even utter the words “good dog!” without flying into another cough-fest.
I’ve found, in the past, that a cough like this can hang on as long as six weeks. I hope it will fade enough for me to go back to choir in another week or two, but…the specific reason I so dread catching a cold is that it typically takes me three times as long to get over it as most people require.
At one point my great old (now retired) doctor ran an elaborate series of blood tests on me and came up with the finding (theory?) that I’m missing a small part in my immune system. That, he thought, explains my susceptibility to viruses and probably explains why it takes such a godAWFUL long time for me to get over what ought to be mild respiratory infections.
It’s also why I’m swimming in pneumonia and flu vaccines. And why I do not take communion: you couldn’t pay me to drink out of or dip a cracker into a communal cup of wine.
I think this is neither pneumonia nor flu; I think it’s a chest cold that quickly morphed into bronchitis. Accordingly, it will take a long time to get over it.
Yesterday I wanted to go to a friend’s wedding. So I spent the day swallowing Robotussin every four hours. Usually, Robotussin does exactly nothing for me. But this time around it has a mild but perceptible effect. Two of them: 1) it upsets my stomach and 2) it takes the edge off the cough, as long as I keep my mouth shut. That beneficence lasts about two hours.
I’ve held off taking the leftover codeine, partly because the cough is still productive and I think when you’re coughing up crud, your body is trying to tell you something. And partly because…yes…it upsets my stomach, to say nothing of knocking me into the middle of next week. But today the thing has reached the point where nothing much is coming up and I’m just hacking reflexively, a state that I imagine results from two or three weeks of pharyngeal irritation. Whenever I think it’s safe to do so and I don’t mind sleeping half the day, I probably will dose myself with that stuff.
Still in the middle of the current editorial project, I really can’t afford to knock myself out for a day or two.
Otherwise, the weather has warmed up nicely — we’ve had several days in the mid-nineties, a phenomenon that has, in the past, helped to clear up colds, flu, and bronchitis. The pool is warming fast. Yesterday in passing I thought it was almost warm enough for a swim. But then thought better of that! 😀 Nevertheless, a grandparent or two at the wedding (the newlyweds are themselves grandparents) remarked that the little kids had been in the drink.
Ah, the grandparents. My son’s friends came into town, the bride being his buddy’s mother. The mother-in-law came along.
I wish you could meet these two women. What a kick they are! Each in her own way. The bride and groom are latter-day hippies who never moved into the brave new urbanized techno-world we enjoy today. They raise organic food and organic chickens, and he has an elaborate aquaculture operation set up in the backyard of their north Phoenix tract house. Back-to-the-earthers who have to make a living…but who I can imagine retired with great joy in Yarnell, a perfect venue for the back-to-the-earth life. The bride’s mother appears to be a normal Midwestern small-town gal on the surface…but be not deceived. She has the most wonderful, hilarious personality. I think she’s just more fun than life. She got on the dance floor and…can that lady DANCE. Fan-freakingtastic!
I probably embarrassed my poor son again (because I also can dance in a bawdy 1960s manner, though I did try to keep a lid on it last night…sort of). When I get going, I’m embarrassing. When she gets going, she’s a lot of fun. Too bad I never learned how to do that.
It’s three in the afternoon and suddenly, out of the blue the swampy nose is drying up and I’m starting to feel almost like living…after a whole week of the most bizarre cold I’ve met in a long time. It looks like the thing may be about to retreat as quickly as it struck.
It started about mid-morning exactly seven days ago. Until about 6:00 p.m. last Sunday, I’d have sworn it was an allergy. In 72 years of hosting viruses and bacteria, I have never had a respiratory infection that didn’t start with a sore throat, followed by a blocked nose, followed by a racking cough.
This bug started with the cough. By about 8 o’clock Sunday evening it had risen to the level of “racking.” But there was never a sore throat. The nose didn’t start to run with a vengeance for another couple of days, and even then the head was never especially stuffy. I just started coughing. And kept on coughing, for seven long days and nights.
I’d about decided that if the cough isn’t better by tomorrow, I’ll be forced to call Young Dr. Kildare. Won’t he be thrilled, after all, to welcome a walking nexus of contagion to his tidy, peaceful office? Arrrghhh!
But all of a sudden — just as suddenly as it began — this afternoon the thing seems to be lifting.
If you have recourse to the Hypochondriac’s Treasure Chest and google “cold that starts with cough,” you find…almost nothin’!
One site stokes your neuroses by informing you that a cough commencing out of the blue may be caused by GERD, whereinat stomach acid bubbles up while you’re sleeping and flows down into your lungs.
It looks like the comatose state is starting to recede. As we scribble, I’m swiggling the first snarfle of cheap (or any) wine I’ve been able to stomach in a week. The fever is gone, apparently once and for all — yesterday it came back, but by this a.m. my normal cold-fish state was restored. The cough is getting a little better, though any cough at all comes under the heading of “undesirable.” Or…how about as “deplorable”? {chortle!}
Y’know, we have got to design a Special Funny About Money DEPLORABLES T-shirt. How can we live without such a thing? I could give it away as a prize…uhm, gift…to everyone who buys one of my politically incorrect books. Or a Speed Queen Washer. 😀
One of the Choir Ladies says she’ll bring over some frozen meatloaf. Mirabilis! Has ever a better comfort food been invented than meatloaf?
In the meantime, I ran down to Sprouts, whereinat I found a box of chicken broth that really is low-sodium: 3% RDA, a far cry from the 24% spotted at AJ’s, that Emporium of All Things Gourmet and Effete. So just now a pot of corn chowder is heating. It’s ridiculously easy to put together: basically a matter of dumping stuff into a pot and turning on the gas. Thought about not pureeing it, but then decided a) I don’t feel all that bad that I can’t stumble over to the blender and b) as I recall, this was a particularly tasty brew, and I’ll betcha blending it had something to do with that.
Gerardo & his crew came by this morning to beat back the rainy season’s weeds. He said he and his wife have had the same epizootic and described exactly the same progress: three days knocked flat on their backs. He said he recovered faster than she did. Looked at that wiry little guy and thought Dude! You would recover from a train wreck faster than any of the rest of us would. That is one tough, powerful fella.
Muy macho.
Unfit for paying work, I’ve been dorking with the draft of a new noveloid. I seem to make a great deal more progress with Spider Solitaire than I do with drafting. So along about mid-morning, I set a goal to discover how much I could write in one hour.
The answer?
Six paragraphs…
…of dialogue.
Ohhh well.
Next: Let the current prospective client know she should send her material over if she so chooses; then eat this chowder; then go back to bed. And so, away!
