One High, One Low and One Strike Out

Guess who I saw for lunch on Monday! Two of my old Gathering Girls pals. I’d tell you how that came about but then I’d have to swear you all to secrecy since it’s no longer my responsibility to organize anything. (Hint: I was looking for ways to fill up time while my house was listed.) Four of them RSVPed to go to a bar/restaurant where an indifferent waitress didn’t even ask us if we wanted to order drink. But at the last minute two ladies bailed out which only confirms what a few of them have been saying about “digestive issues” making the spur-of-the-moment invitations more desirable than the ones from ye olden days when we did fixed dates and times on a calendar. I accept this change and challenge of aging friendships, but don’t get me started on my wish-it-wasn’t-so-isms. I wanted us to be like the characters on The Big Bang Theory or Friends where re-runs would keep us forever together, fun and young and playing off each other’s humor twice a month like clockwork. Not going to happen so I'll take what I can get.

Tuesday I was supposed to have a full battery of screening tests: 1) to evaluate my stroke risk carotid artery plaque build up, 2) get a peripheral arterial disease profile, 3) an osteoporosis risk profile---already know this one but the bundle of tests is cheaper when you don’t pick and choose---4) an abdominal aortic abdominal aortic aneurysm screening and 5) an atrial fibrillation screening. They're not covered by insurance and you don’t need a doctor to order them through Life-Line Screening but for $150 it gives you piece of mind. It didn’t matter because Monday night I got a call wanting me to reschedule the tests to late September---the week before I move---because they were going to be understaffed. I got a little---read that a lot---upset. They threw me this curve ball a half hour before my realtor was due to present the offers I wrote about in my last post so my nerves were already flying higher than a kite in a thunderstorm. I apologized to the poor woman for reacting to her request like a whiny child but I didn't reschedule.

Five years ago when I got those same tests done I, of course, showed the results to my primary care doctor and I asked if they were a waste of money. He side-stepped the question by saying if we had any reason to suspect anything was wrong we could order these tests and insurance would cover them. But my husband had a football sized abdominal aortic aneurysm that was ready to burst any minute that they found while looking at his kidneys for something unrelated. They had him in an emergency, 10-11 hour surgery that same afternoon. People pay more than $150 for something they’ll wear less than dozen times before sending it off to Goodwill, so I reserve the right to get judgy with anyone who judges me for wanting to spend $150 this way when I really, REALLY need a new pair of shoes.

Wednesday I walked out of the Infusion Center after getting my IV bag full of Reclast for my brittle bones and I felt like a puddle of pudding. I sat in my car trying to get warm because they keep that place as cold as a meat locker and even though they give you a heated blanket to snuggle under its never enough to warm me up. Puddles of pudding are not safe to drive so I waited behind the steering wheel of my Trax, the summer sun beating down thru the windshield until I no longer felt like an elder in a tribe that sends their grandmothers off on icebergs to die. It was 11:00 when I left the parking lot and suddenly I was starving. An Atkins shake I had earlier was supposed to keep hunger away for four hours but it failed to live up to its promise. Had I not been driving I might have written the company a stern letter of complaint using lots of explanation points.

On the road my car knew that in my condition it needed to take me to the Guy Land Cafeteria which---surprise, surprised---was filled with old men hence my nickname for the place I will miss after I move. Some of those guys were racks of bones and looked like they should have been at the Infusion Center with me. Others looked like they were hiding bowling balls under their shirts. I ordered the super breakfast because it came with hash browns. Then I wondered if I might be pregnant because I haven’t wanted or ordered hash browns since the ‘70s.

I love people watching but frankly the old men at Guy Land that day were too bland looking with their ash white, paper thin skin and gray hair that matched their muted plaid shirts. (Or was my cataracts telling me that?) Either way, maybe I read too many romance books while my house was being shown because I tried to imagine what some of these old guys looked like in their primes. I got nothing. 

When three guys at the next table started talking about passing kidney stones through their penises I left before I was tempted to over share the woes of having urinary track infections. I’d much rather get my penis talk in fictional conversations in romance books, thank you very much. Although that word rarely comes up in contemporary "hot" romance books---no pun intended---and the euphemisms used in the last century when I started reading the genre are few and far between. Nope, now they go straight for the ‘C’ word and aren’t you glad you came by today to learn that bit of genre reading trivia.  ©

The Word Vomit Post

I can’t believe it’s already 11:50 AM and I’ve been sitting at my computer since 7:30! God, these machines are evil time sucking animals. No wonder my butt is growing faster than my IQ. Well, that’s not entirely true. It’s not like I’m sitting here downloading porn. Depending on how you use these time-sucking machines, computers can be very educational. There are online classes---not that I’ve taken any---and virtual museum tours---not that I've taken any---and a host of Ted Talks, Animal Planet and science stuff on the worldwide web. But more telling perhaps is the fact my butt would still fit on an office copy machine if that proves anything on the IQ-to-backside ratio. So there’s that. 

What did I do with my morning, you ask, if not improve my mind like I could have/should have done? For one, I lined up someone to clean out my rain gutters. And not a day too soon. The latest storm that went through had water cresting right over the tops of my evestroughs and it ruined a couple of my newly refreshed bark beds. I also spend time on my medical porta trying to find out when the infusion center can schedule my Reclast bone treatment now that the stay-at-home-order has been lifted. Supposedly it was ordered last April 15^th, when I saw the doctor. Since the pandemic shut down started the next day I figured that caused the delay. I figured wrong. What I found out is that the doctor’s office never sent the order in and had they done so I could have gotten the infusion back in April because that infusion is considered “essential for living.” The infusion center is putting an ‘urge’ tag on my file and I should hear back from them with an appointment date soon. 

The above two tasks ate up a lot of time but I also spent time online reading blogs, Facebook and e-mails plus checking on my e-Bay listings and watching panda and elephants cams. The panda and elephants cams are my secret indulgences. Better than fine chocolate for making me feel good. And I ask you, who on earth would pick watching porn over watching roly-poly pandas anointing themselves with sawdust or elephants giving themselves mud baths? That’s as voyeuristic as I want to get. And look who I’m telling that fib to---the blog community who has often read my voyeuristic ramblings on characters I’ve seen while people watching at the Guy Land Cafeteria.

Actually, would my Guy Land Cafeteria habits be called ‘voyeurism’ or ‘eavesdropping’? I just ask Alexa since she’s the only humanoid/virtual assistant who talks to me and she seems to think I’m eavesdropping at the cafeteria because voyeurism would require getting a derivative satisfaction out of obsessively watching a sordid subject. My fellow dinners are not ‘sordid’ and the only satisfaction I get is when what I see inspires a blog fodder topic. I don’t want to use the “P” word here again, fearing the internet crawlers will find this post and spam me with naked pictures of body parts, but Alexa seems to suggest that voyeurism rarely takes place in a public place where everyone is keeping their clothes on. People who watch “P” are voyeurs. But now I have another question: If pandas and elephants are naked and are being filmed without their permission am I an animal voyeur for watching them? Alexa says an obsession to watch is required to be voyeuristic. Check. Must be done in secret. Check. Get pleasure from watching. Check. Yup, add ‘animal voyeur’ to my resume.

Enough of the word vomit approach to writing a post and pick a topic, Jean. Okay, bossy voice talking in my head I pick coins. Foreign coins to be more exact. Back in my teens and twenties I collected foreign coins or I should say I bought them from several companies that were more than happy to advertise their wares via snail mail. They’d send you a batch every month and you’d keep what you liked, write them a check to send back with the coins you didn’t want. For decades I had my foreign coins framed and hanging on a stairway wall, but when I moved here almost two decades ago I took the coins out of the frames and threw all 250 of them in a box to dispose of later.

‘Later’ finally came this past week and I’m officially out of Foreign Coin Research Hell which is another reason why I’ve been living on the internet. The e-Bay listings will have closed and the packages mailed out by the time this post goes live but I don’t expect to make much money off from selling my old coin collection. Half the kids in America were buying stamps and coins from Littleton, Harris or Mystic back then and what we were buying by subscription were not rare by any stretch of the imagination. I divided up my foreign coins into eight lots and since I don’t ship outside of the U.S.A. I’ll probably have to beg e-Bayers to bid and I’ll be happy to do that thus ending another chapter in the mythical book titled Jean’s World of Collecting Curious and Obsolete Things. ©

Bones, Bacteria and Boogers

Hungarian Puli

Monday we had our first school closings of the season due to the weather. I didn’t have to go anywhere that day so being snowed in didn’t ruin any of my plans but I was keeping a close eye on the storm all same because I needed good roads the following day to get to an appointment at the infusion center and my niece was stuck at the Chicago airport, sleeping on a cot while all the planes were grounded---she was on her way home from spending the holiday in Texas. My other niece who had been up north at her favorite vacation destination in Traverse City was also keeping an eye on the storm and was able to leave in time to beat it before it hit southeastern Michigan and it’s a good thing she did. The storm brought them 6-7 inches of wet, heavy snow where she lives causing electrical outrages and backup generators were put into service.

Trust me, I won’t be getting my yearly bone infusion treatment in 2019 because I’m skipping next fall’s scheduling and picking it up again the following spring of 2020. This 2018 appointment was booked early last September at my biannual with my internist and this was the first opening the infusion center had available, and scheduling wait times are only going to get longer and longer as more baby boomers start getting Reclast for their bones. I’ve had super good results with the Reclast and hate the idea of letting a 5-6 month lapse without it but I hate the stress even more of worrying about winter storms colliding with important appointments you can’t cancel without it costing you a lot of money, more wait time and a repeat of your pre-infusion blood tests.

The day of my appointment I had allotted an hour to get across town. The side roads were wickedly icy but the biggest problem I had was all the street signs were covered with snow and unreadable otherwise the main roads were good plus I got all the green lights and I got there in twenty minutes. I always have my trusty notebook and pen with me so the extra time was put to good use while I waited out in my car. I also had my Kindle with a new book loaded on it. The infusion itself (an IV line in your arm) took an hour this time when the same infusion last year took half that time. It seems I’ve reached that “magic age,” the nurse said, when IV drips get slowed down because our veins are old and might spring a leak like an old garden hose. Right or wrong, that’s my translation for the medical explanation I was given for the change. I was lucky to get through the infusion without having to pee. The more water you drink in the two days before the procedure the better it goes and I was hydrated so much my veins were plumped up and eager to carry the Reclast where it needed to go.

The room I was in had sixteen white La-Z-Boys full of patients covered in white warming blankets and 6-7 nurses tending to our needs, checking our lines and beeping machines and working at desks inside a glass cage. Two chairs away the only black person in the place, a bored girl in her late twenties, sat down shortly after I got there. They handed her a bag that at first I thought was a barf bag that she breathed in for a good 15 minutes but it turned out to be a collection bag for bacteria. She had the IV portal in her arm but there was no line of liquids hooked up the entire time I was there. They were waiting for whatever it is they do with bags full of bacteria in the lab before starting her IV. I was glad she wasn’t right next to me because: 1) I didn’t want Bacteria Girl to breathe her bacteria in my direction, and 2) I was fascinated with her dreadlocks and I was afraid I’d be one of those rude white people who’d ask if I could touch it. It reached down past the middle of her back and she was constantly petting it as if she had one of those Hungarian Puli dogs attached to her head.

In between me and Bacteria Girl was a woman who’d been there with an IV in her arm for five hours and when I expressed shock at that the nurse told me they have a few patients who spend eight hours parked in their La-Z-Boys. Aside from that, there was very little conversation going on between patients this time or the other times I’ve been there. Most people, I assume, are there for far more serious treatments than I was and conversations seems intrusive---lots of bald-headed women, a few bloated up men and a surprising number of young women who obviously come there often enough to be well known to the nurses.

Most of my hour was spent pretending to read on my Kindle while surreptitiously people watching. I was afraid to use my notebook to write about what I was seeing out of fear I’d drop the book on the floor where I couldn’t reach it and someone else would pick it up and see the sentences I wrote about a guy with a booger hanging from his nose. I don’t know why a nurse didn’t hand him a tissue. I'm guessing they’re so focused on looking at IV lines that they don’t look at faces as they cruise around the room. Whatever the reason, Booger Man strengthen my resolve not to use the bathroom while I was hooked up to the IV. You have to drag the IV pole with you and all I could think about is how many germs were on those poles. Places like that always bring out the germaphobic me. ©