Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

This, That, and the Other…

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This…

Finally feeling up for re-engaging the exercise routine. The endless spate of surgeries has meant I wasn’t able to use the pool all summer long, and a significant part of the fat-reduction plan has to do with daily, vigorous swimming. The result, of course, is that despite my best efforts to starve myself, the fat is slowly crawling back.

Actually, in moments of particular distress and depression, I’m afraid “starve” was not the operative word: have recourse to comfort foods was more like it. My concept of “comfort food” entails large portions of pasta followed by large portions of ice cream. Or maybe even just a whole meal of ice cream with some fine sauce dumped over it.

{sigh}

Anyway, for awhile there I was as much as six pounds over the desired weight. Now we’re back down to three. So it shouldn’t take much longer to get back down to what I crave to regard as the New Normal.

That…

Speaking of the which, last night Ruby and Cassie BOTH trotted two miles with me, without dragging, sitting down in the middle of the road, begging to be picked up, or otherwise impeding traffic.

The weather is finally cooling down enough that Cassie, whose hair is about three times thicker than Ruby’s, can go more than half a mile without threatening to expire of heat exhaustion. Last night’s low, ô mirabilis! was 46.7 degrees. It was in the 50s when we sallied forth after dark. And I’ll tellya, those were two mighty happy dogs!

Happy human, too.

In the morning, I took them for a mile-long walk, then returned them to the house and went out for a second mile undoglested. So for moi, that amounted to four full miles over the course of the day!

And that’s my target: since I can’t swim or do a lot of yoga, I’m trying for four miles a day. If that doesn’t get the fat off, nothin’ will!

The ’Tother…

Yesterday the Mayo called to set up an appointment with a new radiologist. I’d already seen one, but WonderSurgeon wanted me to see whoever was in the “conference” in which she planned to discuss my “unusual” case. Other than scheduling an appointment with me at the standard three-weeks-later surgical check-up, she has had nothing to say. So I have no idea whether the consensus (if any) was to lob off her Work of Art or that it’s worth trying to save the newly and amazingly rebuilt boob. It may be that she just can’t bring herself to tell me they think it should go. Or it may be that she wants me to hear what this new radiologist thinks are the prospects for therapy. We shall see.

The more I think about it, though, the more I feel it’s six of one, half-a-dozen of the other…and that really, mastectomy may be the smartest course of action.

If that’s what the docs recommend, I’m going to ask if they’ll give me a two-for-one…  Since the entity that seems to have invaded half the right boob has been mammogram-invisible for years, it’s reasonable to suspect a similar one infests the left boob. If they can make a convincing argument for that, we should be able to persuade Medicare to cover it.

But even if we can’t, if they could keep the out-of-pocket cost under ten grand, I would just pay to have the left one lobbed off, too. That would obviate a whole slew of problems, mean I’d never have to see another mammogram machine for the rest of my life(!!!!), and make me even on both sides. The cash is there to buy a car; since I’ve already decided that a new car is off the table, I could use the automobile savings to cover the cost of lopping off the second boob.

So, there we are.

Meanwhile, one of my three fave clients resurfaced this morning with another book, bless his heart! Dearly love the man. He’s a very good writer, a very interesting human being, and he pays without wincing. 😀

You Know You Should Stay Out of Costco When…

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It’s Saturday.

It’s Sunday.

Today is the day before…

Hallowe’en
Thanksgiving
Christmas
New Year’s Eve
Easter
The Fourth of July
Labor Day
Memorial Day
Veteran’s Day
The Big Game (any Big Game)
The World Series
Your (child’s, spouse’s, mother’s, father’s, best friend’s, favorite aunt’s, favorite uncle’s,  beloved grandparent’s, boss’s) birthday
Your own birthday
The church potluck

You are…

Hungry
Feeling put upon
Feeling generous
Losing weight and need new clothes
Gaining weight and need new clothes
Depressed
Happy
In a great mood
In a terrible mood
Pregnant
Married to or otherwise closely associated with a pregnant woman
Planning a party
Searching for something, anything, to take to a potluck

You have just…

Acquired a new puppy
Acquired a new kitten
Given birth
Been told you will give birth sometime within the next nine months
Won $100 in the lottery
Received the annual Costco AMEX cash kickback
Been paid your biweekly paycheck
Been paid by a client
Fallen in love
Fallen out of love
Realized life is short and eternity is long

Damn, I’m Good!

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LOL! Check out my latest tour de force over at Writers Plain & Simple. Feeling pretty smug about it.

One of my clients emitted a newly plotted Book I of his sweeping historical epic, complete with reimagined characters and richly researched details. As I was reading one section of it, certain baleful habits in verb use struck my eye. Naturally, since I never can keep an opinion to myself, I held forth at length about how to fix these. He claimed to like the result (at least he hasn’t thrown a frying pan at me yet). So I got his permission to use a few examples from that section as the basis for a post at the writer’s blog.

The result, I think, is kind of informative for people who want to be Writers with a Capital W.

Might be useful for bloggers, too. 😉

So, Where Were We?

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Where were we, indeed? I’ve lost track. But this morning a tiny  bit of normalcy trickled back into life: My accountant friend and I drove out to the weekly meeting of the Scottsdale Business Association, the business group that we’ve taken to calling “The Breakfast Club.” Business leads do get exchanged, but in such a low-key way as to be virtually unnoticeable.

Really. They do! Today I gave Francis the Gardener, who runs an upscale concierge service, leads to two of the Valley’s highest-end Realtors, one of whom went to graduate school with me. She quit at the master’s level to take up the practice of real estate. Some punkins are a great deal smarter than the rest of the vegetables in the patch.

If you’d like to see how the 1 percent lives, check out her featured listings.

Okay, that was a distraction. Where were we?

So it was pleasant and soothing to see my old bidness friends again. It’s a convenable and cheering group to spend time with, even when we’re grutching about the sad state of national and international affairs. Being too sick to go to those meetings or to choir has pretty much isolated me from humanity and that alone is demoralizing.

Yesterday the cough that prevented The Surgeon from doing the work she needed to do with me under a general anaesthesia got lots worse. So I betook myself to the precincts of the high-powered pulmonologist who treated the bronchitis I enjoyed two years ago; got in on the very day with his partner.

This guy diagnosed what ails me as a viral bronchitis. He wrote a prescription for codeine with Phenargan.

In the course of telling him how I came to this pass and why I was swallowing the pills I carried in to his office, I mentioned that I’m on cephalexin for a supposed breast infection that The Surgeon says is not an infection and allegedly proved it when she vacuumed out my boob.

He said, “If you don’t have an infection, why are you still taking an antibiotic?”

I said, “Because she told me to take the rest of it.”

“Why?”

Why? Trust me, dude, I was in no condition to ask questions! “I don’t know. Maybe she meant it prophylactically.”

“I think you should stop taking it. Don’t take any more of this.”

Oh. God. All. Mighty

So now once again we’ve got two heavy hitters dispensing diametrically opposite advice.

The Phenargan in the cough med he prescribed dried out my mouth and throat so much I couldn’t swallow. At all. Thinking my tongue was swelling, along about 11  last night I called 911. The paramedic felt that it could not be an allergic reaction because it had been so long since I took the drug; she thought it was a reaction to the Phenargan and so connected me with Poison Control, whose CSR opined likewise.

Lovely.

I’m prone to laryngeal spasms, a peculiarly disturbing quirk. They block off one’s breathing so that you can’t even gasp out your address to the 911 set, to say nothing of telling them what’s wrong. If you relish moments of sheer, unadulterated terror, try one of those in the dark of the night when you’re all alone.

So I decided I’d better not lay my head on the pillow or dast to go to sleep. So worked until about 3 a.m., when exhaustion won out. Then it was up at 6 to feed the dog and get ready to shoot out the door for the meeting.

At any rate, I got through 13 pages of a client’s project before accursed Wyrd did one of its infamous catastrophic crashes and lost two pages of it. Probably the re-do of those two pages was better than the first effort.

Just got a call back from the pulmonologist’s office; he wrote an Rx for Robitussin with codeine, which should do the trick. Still waiting to hear from The Surgeon’s underling on the question of why I’m being asked to take five more days of a powerful antibiotic if I never had an infection in the first place.

§ § §

In the absence of Ruby the Corgi Pup, Cassie the Corgi has come back to life. As we scribble, she’s in full Ball Pestering Mode, to her great delight. Pup had brought a stop to playing with Ball — in the first place because she grabs it away from Cassie and threatens to kill her if she comes anywhere near the thing, and in the second because I had to pick all the balls up and put them away (i.e., lose them) because she chews mightily on them — tennis balls are very dangerous to dogs that want to chew them up. Cassie does not chew balls, nor does she hold them in her mouth for any length of time. She picks them up and throws them (no joke — she actually can pitch one of those things clear across the room) at the sucker who gets started with her.

Cassie is eating her food in peace. Cassie is getting unmolested doggie walks — the last couple of days I’ve been able to crawl around the neighborhood, which I’ve not been able to do while trying to manipulate Pup with a boob that hurts at every tug and hurts even more every time I have to bend over. Cassie is resting beside my chair again (she was relegated to the back bathroom, where she went to hide).

She’s still not back to normal. She may never go back to normal.

What to do with Ruby remains to be seen. My son still has her, but he has said he doesn’t want to keep her permanently. I can’t deal with a puppy in my present condition, and it appears this isn’t going to get better for quite a long time. So I suppose she’ll have to go back to the breeder. And that is a whole ’nother difficult and depressing project to launch and see through. Just haven’t had the strength or the heart to get in touch with the woman.

But I guess that’s gonna have to be done pretty soon.

 

Rain?

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Lordie, it’s hard to sell newspapers! Or news websites… Local Play-Nooz has been whipping up hysteria over a HURRICANE (eeeeeek!) about to SLAM (yowwww!) Arizona and FLOOD PEOPLE’S HOMES AGAIN (auuuuugggghhh!).  They’re making as much hay as they can over Hurricane Odile, which is weakening as it passes over BATTERS Baja. This blather is great for sales just now, since folks are a little sensitized by the recent record rainfall. Three inches qualifies as “record” in Arizona…

And in fact, because the infrastructure isn’t designed to handle a real rain, three inches does max and overwhelm the roads and the drainage systems. There’s also the fact that Arizona homes aren’t built for rain, either. If your slab is at or below grade, then your door’s threshold is going to be….yup! at or below grade. My friend La Maya’s pretty office flooded during the late, great Deluge. It has a sunken floor and a pair of exterior French doors that look out onto an enclosed courtyard that lacks sufficient drainage to handle three inches of rain.

One of the few small mercies that have visited me of late has been here all the time: A slab built up about four inches above grade. I did get water on the patio, as I do every time it rains. But when I stumbled out, in a stupor, to see what was happening, it wasn’t anywhere near the door. In fact, the puddle rose less than it did the last time Lake Patio filled.

The other day Money Beagle, wondering whether changing habits and changing tastes signal the onset of decrepitude, mentioned a couple of alternatives to radio, streaming off the Net. One is Slacker and the other is Freegal. Checked them both out. Freegal I dunno about, because it requires you to set up a userid and password, which I hate and avoid when possible. Slacker, however, is free and uncomplicated. No annoying demands that you divulge your name (real or fake) and e-mail address. No advertising. And (so far) nonstop streaming of more music than you’d ever imagine existed.

Right now a bonanza of outlaw country is flowing into the MacBook’s tinny little speakers. There is, of course, a Slacker app, which I intend to download to the iPad. Then, I figure, a couple of cheap Bluetooth speakers in the Dog Chariot will free me from the vicissitudes of commercial radio and NPR’s endless talkathons. And begathons.

Actually, with this you could listen to the NPR shows you like on the car’s radio (assuming you have a superannuated car, like mine, that doesn’t have an entire computer lab in the dashboard) while letting the genre of your preference play as background.

Welp, it’s time to return some phone calls and then get back to reading copy. And so, to wyrk…

 

Damp!

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Okay, here’s the fourth attempt at a post today. In fact, this is being written in Word so WordPress (or, more precisely, Cox) can’t erase it again.

So the dawgs and I awoke to quite the little freshet this morning. It stormed most of the night, and by dawn water was hosing out of the sky.

The mayor and the governor declared states of emergency over the storm. Tina said all the freeways on the east side of town were closed, and they’d closed her daughter’s school. She was supposed to go in to Tempe for some big confab with one of her several bosses. Haven’t heard whether she even tried – it would have taken her two hours to get there through the frantic bedroom-community commuters. When a freeway shuts down in both directions, the gridlock defies belief.

This part of the city made out OK, as far as I can tell. My neighbor across the street lost a big branch of her beautiful specimen paloverde, which was quite a gem. She said she’d call our local arborist (guy lives here in the hood) and try to get it trimmed off. In the meantime, her hubby will trim off the broken branches and haul them into the alley.

We didn’t lose power, for a change, although some parts of town did. The water did not come up to the back door, thank goodness, so there was no flooding in the house. During the night there was a fair amount of lightning and thunder, I think. It scares the dogs and causes them to wriggle around.

Somewhere in the darkness, they tried to persuade me to get up and let them off the bed, but I was so heavily drugged they couldn’t get me to climb out of my stupor. So they finally subsided. In revenge, one of them peed on the floor come morning, when they were disgusted to find that vast amounts of water were still falling out of the air.

They hate to get wet. I mean hate to get wet. Cassie will not go out in the rain at all unless you pick her up and carry her out. When your boob hurts so much it feels like it’s going to fall off, that is not a very pleasant task. Carried her out three times and she still refused to go. Just stood there looking miserable. Same with the pup.

 Yesterday I worked up the nerve to try the cephalexin, after carrying it to a pharmacist and asking what would happen if I really am allergic to penicillin. She agreed that Cipro is, said she, “not the drug for you.” She said only 10% of people who have allergies to penicillin get a reaction to cephalexin, and advised having a bottle of Benadryl and the phone at hand.

Shortly after I arrived home from that venture, my friend The PC Magician (a.k.a. Your E-book Builder) showed up. When he realized what was up, he sat there and made small talk endlessly. I am pretty much on the verge of delirium and do not recall much of what was said, only that he did not leave after I swallowed one of the potentially toxic pills and then later decided maybe I should try a Benadryl.

He also has had negative experience with Cipro, and his lady friend is among the berzillions who have had seriously bad reactions to the stuff. He ranks, now, among the many who believe it is toxic.

Amazingly, yesterday I found a research study published in some journal of skeletal development where the team used Cipro to induce toxic lesions in the growing bones of adolescent rats.

That should tell you something, huh?

They discovered, btw, in this limited study (40 subjects, plus test groups) that magnesium supplementation worked to ameliorate damage to bones, joints, and tendons brought on by Cipro, which among other things chelates magnesium and calcium out of your body. That’s why the package instructions tell you not to take antacids with it (while the stuff is eating out your gut): an antacid containing magnesium, such as Gaviscon, neutralizes the drug by about 90%.

Magnesium supplements are nothing to mess with. You can make yourself good and sick overdosing on that stuff. However, quite a few foods are rich in magnesium, among them green leafies like Swiss chard, kale, and spinach, quinoa, bananas, certain nuts, and stuff like that. I, however, am too sick to drive around in search of more food – actually am out of food and surviving hand-to-mouth on whatever is in the fridge or kitchen cabinet.

Anyway, no ill effects ensued from the cephalexin. Can’t see that any especially good effects are ensuing, either. My fever dropped from around 100 to about 99.4. I need to get one of those digital thermometers: trying to shake the stupid mercury thing down has sprained my wrist, and it’s almost impossible to read.

My business has gone to hell on a skateboard. I had to blow off a client this morning who kept pestering and pestering about a stupid little detail and wanted me to revamp part of an index RIGHT NOW – before flicking eight o’clock in the morning!!!!!

My beloved novelist awaits a chapter that I haven’t even started.

PC Magician brought over an e-book proof yesterday and I haven’t read it. Spent the entire day in bed, unable to function. Actually, I hoped that maybe if I just stayed quiet all day while slurping down antibiotic pills, some improvement would take place.

So far, no dice.

Internet connection has been cycling on and off all day. Four times this morning, I tried to publish a FaM post, and four times Cox killed it. When you hit “Save” in WordPress, you’re engaging the Internet, too…so when I tried to save the things, Cox disappeared them by going offline in the middle of the process. Finally gave up and went to bed.

God. I must have food. Going to AJ’s to buy one of their overpriced dinners, which should last for two days. Bye.