The Move-in and my Personal Woe-is-me Day

I woke up at 4:30 and couldn’t fall back to sleep so at 5:30 I got up, had some cocoa and here I sit in front of the computer screen. I was not surprised. I went into my bedroom last night around 9:00, selected a Netflix movie and promptly fell into a deep sleep by 9:18 (according to my sleep app) until the ending credits when I woke up long enough to turn off the TV set. My usual pattern is to watch a movie until around 11:00 then take two Melatonin gummies and turn the TV off at midnight. It had been a long, busy couple of days for the mind and body. My two nieces were in town setting up their father’s room in the Memory Care building on campus and I was there for awhile and they were here for awhile. I also played Siamese Mahjong with my instructor, the first time we’d attempted it and we were both on our phones reading directions. How did we ever live without our palm sized libraries of knowledge at our fingertips? Two of our regular players were gone---one at her husband’s death bed in our hospice building and the other on a color tour, thus the need to learn to play Mahjong with just the two of us. I’m sure we both generated a bunch of new brain cells while we played a game that is complicated enough with four of us at the table. We were essentially each playing for two. I love that game. Mahjong is full of crazy rules, and is a combination of skill and luck to win.

At dinner I ate with four others and we made arrangements to make it a standing Wednesday night date. I’m dubbing us the Secret Society of Liberal Ladies. We talked freely about the upcoming midterms and who to vote for or not. We talked about the Proposals on the ballot including women’s reproductive issues. We cannot believe after 50 years of living under Roe vs Wade that we’ve come to this. Here in Michigan we even have a Trump backed state senate candidate who once started a think tank called the “Society for the Critique of Feminism” where he put forth the argument that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote or work outside the home, a real Handmaid’s Tale kind of guy’s utopia. Now he’s claiming it was satire but how can voters trust a guy who licks Trump’s boots down to the stitches and seams? 

I’ve never been inside our Memory Care building---been to several outdoor events---and my brother's room is very nice. It’s been newly remodeled with fresh paint, new fixtures in the bathroom, new carpeting and brand new furniture, all in a what I’d call a winter wheat color. But it’s a thirty year old building with narrow halls and a layout I can’t figure out yet. They are remodeling the whole place, including tearing down a wall between two lake view common rooms and that will be entertaining for my brother to watch. He’ll want to help. I told our maintenance man who was there doing last minute stuff in my brother’s room that he’d better keep an eye on his tools when Jerry is around. He likes to take things apart and can’t put them back together again---his latest was the furnace. 

It's both sad and otherwise, watching my brother get moved from living in a big house to a single room with a bath, bringing in just clothing, some wall decor, a candy dish, a few place mats and throw pillows. I couldn’t help thinking someday I could be moving in across the hall way and my life would boil down to a handful of possessions. What would I want on my walls, on my lounge chair? God, I’ve always been a long-range planner but do I really need to make a list in my head of what I want my nieces to grab from my current apartment when/if I get moved on down the road? Apparently I do/and did.

I’m having a ‘Be Sorry For Myself day’. Taking a shower one-handed was tougher this time compared to the first hand surgery because of the way my shower stall is set up and putting on my socks made me want to cry for all the times my husband struggled doing it one-handed over the twelve and half years after his stroke. When I had my other surgery it was summer time and I didn’t have to put on socks. I helped my husband if we were in a hurry or he got particularly frustrated but most of the time he did it himself and I’m going to break my computer screen if I don’t find a way to kill a pesky little gnat that seems to follow me around. He was hanging around my coffee pot earlier. Every where I go, there he is like he thinks we’re the Bobbsey Twins. When he gets around my face I’m afraid I’m going to snuff him up my nose or give myself a black eye trying to swat the devil gnat. The meme at the top is the second biggest question of the day. 

The first being how did my brother handle it when he was introduced into his new living quarters today and figured out he isn't going home from the Covid rehab where he's been gaining strength after a hospitalization with the virus. I'm on pins and needles waiting for a report. His kids are rallying around him in a show of unity for the decision they've made and I won't walk down there to visit until I know how things are going. I'm hoping maybe by the weekend but it could be longer. Their patient liaison told the kids it generally takes a month before patients settle into the fact that they aren't going home again. It was the right decision at the right time, but that doesn't make it an easy one. 

Now I'm off to the pharmacy to pick up a third prescription for an UTI that has resisted the first couple of antibiotics the doctor gave me the week before my surgery. I'm so sick of peeing sixty thousand times a day that I'm about ready to declare the UTI a winner and lay down and die. I'm allergic to that 'shotgun antibiotic' that kills everything possible growing in your urinary track so they had to grow a culture with my pee to come up with this last (hopefully) medication which should have me feeling better soon. But on the good side of life, I'm typing this is real time. The hand still has some swelling but so far so good on keeping infection out of the stitches. ©

I Need a Nondisclosure Agreement with Myself

 I also need a volleyball named Wilson to talk to like Tom Hawks had in the Cast Away movie.  Thankfully, I have a dog even though he’s a boring conversationalist. “Give me a treat!” he barks then repeats: “I said give me a treat. Right. Now!” “Open the door!” “I said open the door. Right. Now!” Ya, Levi’s a demanding housemate who only think of himself. If I need a hug he’s not on board. If I need him to quit barking at the neighbor’s dog, he’ll give me that look. The one that says, “You’re not the boss of me.” But he IS a living organism that's keeping me sane during the pandemic so I put up with him mouthiness. A volleyball would be easier to live with though.

I’ve never thought of myself as a person who needed others around me to be happy. Having no children and working out of my home for the majority of my working years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time alone. But this pandemic is starting to make me feel disconnected from society and not in a good way. Sure, I’m connected through Facebook, e-mails, text messages and through listening to television playing in the background of my life, but the people on the other end of those various forms of communication are starting to not feel real. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like the world is becoming all digitized and robotic and all my social contacts are like Alexa or Siri---voices with no hug-able bodies attached, no eye contact to make them real.

Speaking of Alexa, aside from missing her old voice---they soften the voice to sound more real---I also miss her spelling words for me every morning. My Kindle quit charging and no amount of trouble shooting would bring it back to life. During the pandemic reading trashy books has become my lifeline and this past week I’ve been in reading withdrawn hell. That is until I discovered that my old Kindle 3 still works, after four years of inactivity. Thankfully, I didn’t get around to taking it to electronics recycling and now I won’t. Ever. But without a light-up screen it’s not as good for reading in bed like my Kindle Fire 8 was. I was planning to get a Fire 10 next summer anyway because it has a few features I wanted like Zoom and a better/louder speaker so I can listen to books and I figure the bigger screen will be better for watching movies, when I'm ready to do Netflix's. But I’ve been sitting on my fingers to keep me from ordering the new Fire because I’d just purchased a new computer chair (after my old one broke) and I wanted to pay the credit card off so I could use the points toward the Kindle. Finally the points did show up on my Amazon Card and the wait was worth $54.00. The Fire was also on sale for Christmas so for $100 and taxes a new Kindle is coming my way soon.

I’m not sure who I’ll Zoom but it would have come in handy for an e-Visit with the doctor’s office this week and that will probably be the main way I’ll use Zoom going forward. I’ve got one of those annoying UTI. I kept putting it off calling the doctor because I thought they’d make me come in to the office to leave a urine sample and with the Covid-19 raging in my state a medical office was the last place I wanted to go. I get an UTI every 4-5 years so I was pleasantly surprised that the doctor’s nursing assistant just called in a prescription. 

Aside from the usual annoying problems that an UTI causes I wanted the darn thing under control because I needed to make an appointment with the foot doctor. Across the top of my right arch is painful and by night-time the lower half of my foot swells and I could visualize it causing a blood clot if I let it go on too long. I called the office thinking it takes at least 2-4 weeks to get an appointment but they got me in two days later (today)….on the third day of my UTI medication and thankfully I got through the appointment without having to rush out of the exam room like a cheetah with its tail on fire in search of a bathroom.

I seem to be good at assuming the worst when I’m walking into a doctor’s office. I was sure I had broken a bone and would need to have surgery and/or a cast but the pain was getting too bad to ignore. Turns out the pain IS caused by a broken bone but ones I broke back in the ‘70s. The fracture lines are so full of arthritis that it’s pinching a nerve that is causing the pain, swelling, tingling and needles-and-pins feelings followed by numbness. The She Doctor doubled the dosage of a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug that I take for my arm pain, wants me to use ice for 15 minutes every night on the foot and she’s sending me to a specialty shoe store to get a pair of shoes that I’m to wear in the house. No more Crocs for me! Ever! And trust me, I hated the woman for that proclamation. In six weeks I’m to go back and if doing all this stuff hasn’t helped she’ll inject some gel along the fracture lines to get some space around the pinched nerve which is the same thing my bone doctor will be doing in my shoulder at my next appointment.

Sometimes we/I spill too much personal information in my posts especially since the pandemic has kept me at home with nothing but the four walls to write about. I mean do faceless Alexa and Siri-like people out in cyberspace really need to know about my UTI or the other innate thoughts rolling around inside my head? That’s a rhetorical question. You don’t need to answer. But I do think I need to sign a Nondisclosure Agreement with myself to set some limits on my what my loosey-goosey standards allows me to type into my blog. Maybe I need to put that down for my first New Year's Resolution. ©

 Photo Note: The cast up above is the actual cast I had on my foot when I broke my foot. I had that thing on for 12 long weeks. I broke several bones in my foot when I missed a step while running down a staircase.

No Cardboard Box under a Bridge for me!

Don’t leap to conclusions on what I’m about to tell you but I had an appointment with a person whose business card says he’s “a specialist in home care and assisted living placements.” I met him in March on a bus tour of independent and assisted living facilities and I was impressed with him enough to want to take advantage of a free service where he can estimate how long your money and assets will last in places like. I’m nowhere near wanting or needing to move into a facility but I wanted to get some footwork done for someday maybe. And don’t we all worry about whether or not we’ll end up in a fleabag Medicaid dumping ground or worse yet, get loaded up in a shopping cart and set loose at the top of a hill. Bye bye, there’s cardboard condo community down there under the bridge that you can afford.

 

He said I have enough assets to qualify to get me into most continuing care places---the kind where you start out in independent living and as needed they move you up in care levels plus they won’t kick you out if your money runs out. Not that he’s recommending that for me (far from it) but he said---and this is the important part---qualifying for those kinds of places is an great indicator that a person has enough assets to private-pay at nice/r places, with lower monthly fees for the rest of your life. (Continuing care places cost more up front in exchange for that life care guarantee and no one gets anything back if you die long before using up all your own money.) Of course, no one knows how long any of us will live but it’s the same principle as buying extended warranties---the companies selling them are betting you won’t need to use them i.e. continuing care facilities have developed extensive mathematical formulas and they are gambling you’ll die before it starts costing them money. And they are factoring into their calculations a two year stretch at the highest cost level at the end. I didn’t tell him this but the dark side of me wonders if when your money runs low if that's when you have a "tragic accident” like my sister-in-law did, chocking on a pill because no one was around who was certified to do the Heimlich in a timely manner?

The guy was here for nearly two hours and by the time he left I felt so much better---no eating cat kibble to save money for me! If there’s anything he doesn’t know about the various facilities around town, it isn’t worth knowing. For example, he asked if a religious affiliation was important to me and I said, “Quite the opposite” and I told him I didn’t like one of the places we toured on the bus trip because it felt “too churchy.” He replied that it’s common in this town for places to boast that they do prayers, devotions and Bible readings daily with their meals. “Not a good fit of me!” I said emphatically. And he named some places in my target area that don’t let religion bleed all over their mission statements. We covered the dog-friendly places, the view out the unit window, the ideal location for family support, the food and activities, etc., etc. Three pages of questions and answers and it will all be on file for my nieces when/if they need it. He’d take me and/or them on a tour of his top three recommendations when the time comes, or even next week if I wanted. I’m not ready for that. I hope I’m never ready but we all know our health can change in a heartbeat so when ‘hope’ fails it helps to have a plan. 

Change of topic to something else I’ve never done before: I had my first e-visit with my doctor’s office. I got diagnosed online for ‘acute cystitis’ otherwise known as a UTI to the ladies out there. I filled out the questionnaire at 9:00 Monday and by 11:00 I had the promise of an antibiotic called in to the pharmacy and orders left for a urine test. By Wednesday morning the lab order still had not shown up on my patient portal and I thought, well, maybe e-visits don’t do it the same way as office calls, so I went to the lab. No order was on file and I had to wait for them to call the doctor’s office. Finally, I got to pee in a specimen bottle.

I made three trips to the same medical building that day. One of those trips was for a mammogram and we all know how much fun that can be. I was getting pulled, stretched and pressed at the exact same time a lab technician two rooms down was leaving a message on my home phone that I’d failed at giving an adequate urine sample and I needed to come back and do another. Great! I’ve been peeing a million times a day and the one time it counted, I did a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am quickie that only satisfied one of us. The bummer part is the e-visit doctor told me not to start the antibiotics until after I’d taken the urine test so I had to spend over 48 hours lusting after the promised relief sitting in a medicine bottle on the kitchen counter-top. ©