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.
Why is it when you explain the conflicting views of your Doctors and their prescriptions that I relive that baseball skit with “Abott and Costello” in my mind. You know the one “Who’s on first…What’s on second…etc… “. And to have paramedics at your place last night after calling 911 …and then go to your “Leads Club” the next day….MAN you are tough…
Mercifully, the paramedics didn’t show up here. That advice was dispensed over the phone. For that I was grateful…just what I needed: for the drama to spill over into neighborhood spectacle!!
No two of these docs seem to share the same opinion. One person — the head of the church’s health ministry, I believe, who herself is an oncological nurse — said the trick is to focus on what each doc’s specialty is. If a radiation oncologist says you need tamoxifen when someone else says not, ignore the radiation oncologist. If a surgeon says you do not have a surgical infection and a gynecologist does, ignore the gynecologist. Apparently, they’re reasonably reliable within their narrow specialties; outside of them, they’re full of beans.
I still think the boob surgeon who says you don’t have an infection is trying VERY hard to cover her ass. Medical school teaches them that they are godlike and therefore don’t make mistakes; malpractice premiums teach them that if they DO make mistakes (welcome to the human race, Doc) they’d better cover them better than a cat covers its bidness. You have more sense of your own body than an entire hospital full of MDs. Use it and do what feels like the right thing (Cephalexen is working; finish the dose).
Since you haven’t a hope in hell of recouping your Ruby-dollars from the breeder, maybe you should try finding a Corgi Rescue operation that will re-home her, and just let the breeder know when this is accomplished. Easier to get forgiveness than permission.
The breeder specifically asked that buyers bring the dog back to her if anything happens that we can’t keep it. She doesn’t offer to pay back the money, but she does want to rehome the dog herself and not have it end up at a dog pound or with someone who will use it as pit bull bait.
The corgi rescue lady here is a little strange. I would never leave Ruby there. Not a chance.
I do not believe there was an infection. Yesterday Dr. P’s nurse read the pathologist’s report on the gunk they washed out of the boob: nothing but stale blood. And as soon as the discomfort from the procedure faded, the boob was hugely improved: swelling pretty much gone, pain gone.
It’s important to realize that the incision had burst open under the pressure of a balloon of blood the size of a hefty man’s fist. It had been open for several days. Even though I washed it a once a day with chlorhexadine (marketed commercially as Hibiclens), bacteria breed and live on your skin. They move around their environment (i.e., around you) and naturally move into an open wound. Old, thick, brown stale blood was oozing out of the wound into surgical pads, where it sat in contact with the bacteria until such time as I could change the pad and wash the area again. Some of those bacteria will be pathogens, for the simple reason that ALL HUMANS host streptococci, staphylococci, and a number of infection-causing bacteria on our skins.
So, a doctor — or a patient who has any sense — has no choice but to regard a surgical incision that comes open as contaminated. The next step after contamination is infection.
Thus the pulmonologist’s advice that I stop taking the cephalexin was the height of foolishness.
Even if an infection had occurred, that is not necessarily the surgeon’s fault. As I say, pathogenic bacteria live on your skin. They’re just THERE, and you can’t always get rid of all of them. Sh!t happens. In my case, a lifetime of sh!t seems to be happening all at once, possibly because I have not had my fair share of sh!t in the 69 years that I’ve occupied this earth in peace and surprising prosperity.
I do have to agree on the woah factor of the properties in the link you put up there. It’s always amazing to see the high end style and such, of course the high end price tag is enough to make me admire from a distance. I suppose if I had a few million lying around…
Take care of yourself! Hope to see things more on the upswing.
LOL! Even MORE amazing, in my infinitely humble opinion (is that IMIHO?), is that often the owners don’t live in these things. They may own more than one of them…or a MacMansion here, a $10 million pied-a-terre in New York, a flat in London or Paris, an island in the Caribbean. That’s probably why so many of the piles look a great deal like hotels.
Some of them, when you look at the pictures you think wouldn’t it be TO DIE FOR to live in a place like that?! Then you think yeah…you’d die trying to take care of the joint, just riding herd on all the hired help.
Matter of fact, that’s exactly what Francis the Gardener does as a concierge: He rides herd on all the hired help.