The CCC Chronicles: From Foot Doctors to Reflecting Pools

 

In this week’s dispatch from Jean’s Continuum Care Community, the everyday rhythms of aging collide with the absurdities of modern life — from firefighters hauling residents upstairs to a foot that stages a midnight rebellion to a national monument wrapped in drama like a bad home‑improvement project. Jean brings her trademark blend of humor, candor, and side‑eye to the small dramas of communal living and the larger drama unfolding in Washington. As always, she finds the thread that ties them together....AI

“Who got picked up by the ambulance last night?” That’s a frequent topic of conversation at lunch or dinner tables here on my Continuum Care Campus. But today it was a different twist. The question was, “Why was the fire department here so long?”

The answer: the elevator in one of our buildings quit working, stranding several of our more fragile residents on the first floor when the repair crew couldn’t get a needed part until this morning. So the firefighters (stationed three minutes away) had to carry people up to their apartments. It was either that or they’d have to cuddle up on the couch in front of the lobby’s fireplace which wouldn’t be such a bad choice if it was winter, and not so close to the forth of July.

There are other times when our mealtime conversations turn into a litany of aches and pains, sounding like the very jokes younger people make about our age group. As Maxine of calendar fame says, "At my age, a 'balanced life' means 50% aches and 50% pains."

But for the most part, we leave our aches and pains at our apartment doors. Still, here’s a piece of advice if you’re thinking of moving to a CCC: don’t downsize your greeting card stash. I’ve written more “get well” and “thinking of you” cards (and “birthday,” and “sympathy cards”) since moving here than at any other time in my life. Not a week goes by that I’m not digging through my card drawer.

I’m no exception when it comes to having my own list of medical woes. I have a foot doctor, a hand doctor, and an orthopedist for the rest of the bones in my body. I’ve got an ENT, a dermatologist, an eye doctor, a gastroenterologist, a sleep doctor, an urogynecologist, a primary doctor, a nurse practitioner — and a dentist. Who could ask for anything more? Not me. I’m one of the lucky ones, though. A few  of my fellow residents have cancer and heart doctors on their lists.

Despite having all those people on my medical team, last week I decided Dr. Google was a better choice. I typed in my symptoms, and their AI “doctor” told me that shooting pain around an open sore meant I should go to Urgent Care immediately because it could be an infection. Not wanting to do that, I called my foot doctor’s office. They tried to schedule me a month out — until I repeated the magic words “shooting pain” and “open sore.” Suddenly I had an appointment the next day. Thank you, Dr. Google, for the buzzwords.

This all started just after my six‑month check‑up with my sleep doctor, where I gave him a glowing report. I shouldn’t have done that — it jinxed me. That very night the shooting pains started, waking me up and refusing to let me sleep again. My foot looked like the photo below. Actually, worse — that picture was taken after a week of swallowing antibiotics and daily slathering the area with silver sulfadiazine cream. 

The foot doctor claims there are no broken bones, but I don’t believe her or her X‑rays because it hurts too much. The weirdest part is I have no idea what caused it. I don’t remember hitting my foot, dropping anything on it, or doing anything dramatic like letting a stranger suck my toes. All I’m told is that the X-ray shows no infection or broken bones, but "skin bruises easily on the elderly” and the foot is “the slowest place to heal.”

Yup, I know that, doc. I had a similar gash on the side of the same foot recently, and it took four months to heal without medical intervention.

Lest I give the impression that all we talk about here is ourselves and our woes — not true. Recently at our Tuesday Night Conversation dinner table we discussed the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the cost of repairing it, and the claim that “vandals” cut a 350‑foot slit down the center despite 24/7 security cameras. I’ve got a bridge to sell you if you believe that. (But not the brand new bridge between Canada and Detroit that Trump refuses to allow to be opened, but that's another scandal for another day.) 

We can all read the news and draw our own conclusions about the pool, but around our dinner table the story sounds a lot less like “vandals” and a lot more like, “someone had their head up his ass.” You don’t need a PhD to connect a few dots: With cameras everywhere they would have stopped anyone in the center of the pool long enough to cut a 350 foot slit; a no‑bid contract that included no oversight by manufacturers of the liner polyuria coatings; and the presidential motorcade running over the uncured coating so Trump could get a closer look. The presidential limo alone weighs about 20,000 pounds, which is roughly the size of a small whale — and we’re supposed to believe a mystery vandal with a box cutter is the culprit. Please.

It doesn't take a deep dive in cyberspace to learn the experts all agree the failed project is due to one or more of the following: 1) improper preparation of the surface, 2) not applying the polyuria according to manufacturer’s specifications, 3) speeding up the timeline for applying a second coating, 4) the solvent added to kill the algae, and last but not least, 5) vehicles running over the uncured surface. 

Everything shows its age eventually — our bodies, our buildings, even the places meant to inspire awe. Here at the CCC, we meet those changes with humor and a little stubbornness, because what else can you do. The reflecting pool could be funny too, if it weren’t such an expensive lesson in what happens when oversight and comment sense takes a holiday. We can’t stop time from aging us or our monuments, but we can at least insist that the people in charge stop accelerating the process. © 

Nabbed off Dawn's Bohemian Valhalla Blog

              

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.

The Doctor and the Realtor

 

My appointments with the doctor and realtor happened two weeks ago but at the time I had other stuff that had to published in a timely manner or be trashed or break my rule about posting no more than twice a week. I didn’t want to trash my stress induced reaction post to the election or my essay about my 1,000^th post, so here I am trying to remember the details about my above mentioned appointments.

I had to see my internist for my bi-annual and the Medical Care Wellness Check where they ask you questions we older people have learned to lie about. No, I don't have any throw rugs that can trip me, doctor dearest. How's my sex life? Only in my head, doc, but I have lots of book boyfriends if that counts. That sex life answer wasn't a lie if I'd actually said it out loud. Instead, I mumbled something about being a long-time widow. It ticks me off that they actually ask it because the medical community never cared back in the days when I was sexually active so why should it matter to them now in our Medicare years? If I had answered that I was playing the hide the bologna game on a regular basis would I have then gotten the safe sex talk? If you've done the Medicare Care test you know they ask some stupid stuff and thank goodness they don't hook us up on lie detector machines while we take it.

I was a little concerned that I was developing lung issues because I’ve been experiencing shortness of breath since I saw him last. Apparently I’m not good at self-diagnosing, even with Dr. Google’s help, because I thought it might be from gaining too many pandemic/comfort food pounds combined with wearing face masks. But my lungs were fine and my internist was more concerned with the fact that I’ve picked up an extra heart beat since I last saw him. He hooked up the EKG machine and that put a technical name of ‘ventricular ectopy and DOE’ to the extra heartbeat. Then he ordered a few blood tests to rule out stuff like anemia. Turned out my RBC (red blood count) came back on the low end of the scale but still one point within the normal range and my doctor says he’s comfortable with waiting until my next bi-annual to have me wear a Holter monitor (echo-cardiogram) for a few days to see what I’m doing when I get short of breath. I don’t need to wear one to know it happens when I jog a few yards with the dog, walk up hills and go shopping at the acres big grocery store---but he made me promise to call if I start getting dizzy or feeling faint with the breathing issue. Stress and lack of sleep can feed into the equation Dr. Google said, so hopefully as the nation heals those factors might resolve themselves. Ya, I know hope and two cents will give me something to wear in a pair of penny loafers. Off topic, but I remember going on a date in high school and my mom having me put dimes in my penny loafers in case I had to phone home. Phone booths and dimes to make a call...those days are long gone.

And, oh goody my doctor wants me to work on losing my pandemic pounds. A month or so before I saw him I’d already started cutting sugar out of my diet but I got side-tracked when the tricker-or-treaters didn’t show up. I used to get around 140 kids on good weather days and 70-80 when it's cold and rainy and since the township didn’t cancel the tradition because of the pandemic I bought enough for 75 kids. Fifteen showed up leaving me with a month of eating two pieces of candy a day. I’ve always hated Halloween for starting me on a sugar binge that would last until New Year’s Day. Not going to happen this year. Fingers crossed I stick to the two a day plan. I'm calling them multivitamins because I'm very careful with medications.

New topic: What did I get myself into? The son-I-wish-I-had wanted me to talk to his realtor friend even though he knew I liked another firm I’d had a walk through with---two lovely women in their 50s who specialize in dealing with senior citizens. Tim and his guy do a lot of business back and forth and he has known him for years, trusts him. So I had an appointment with the guy and I thought it would just be a quick walk through, meet-and-greet appointment like I had with the two women. Didn’t turn out that way. He’s been here twice. The first time with a presentation selling his history and experience and doing the walk through and he left a large, expensive looking leather notebook full of reading material on how to get your house ready to show, blah, blah, blah and the clever little devil wanted to schedule a second appointment "to swing by to pick the notebook back up."

At that second appointment he gave me so much information that my eyes and legs were crossed before he left and I think they killed a tree just to make all the papers he left behind. Homework, he told me of multiple page listings of the past 30 comparable houses that have sold in my neighborhood including all their interior photos. Plus he left every public record to be found on my house including aerial photos and Google street maps shots and some he took which he used to create a sample listing showing a breakdown of what I'd net out of a sale. I hate wasting paper and that stack of listings gave me the heebie jeebies as I sat there trying to decide how I could use the back sides of all those pages.

Dilemma time. I really liked the women but I'd be going on pure instinct since I don’t know anyone who’s used them. And while the guy wasn’t so aggressive that he turned me off, I thought he had just enough aggressiveness to give him an edge on selling my house. Leaning toward him, I thought I'd have a few months to decide between the two realtors but the day after that second appointment I got a greeting card in the mail from one of the lady realtors saying she’d seen the progress done on my future home and thought of me. Oh, crap! I don’t want to lead anyone on so I’ve got to come up with a thanks-for-your-time-but speech to deliver to one of these two companies. ©

Soup and Medicare Wellness Tests

I was influenced by a late night TV commercial to crave a bowl of tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich that I could have made at home but cooking didn’t appeal to me anymore than having a Slim-Fast diet drink for lunch which I contemplated doing in an attempt to lose twenty pounds by the next morning for my bi-annual appointment with my internist. The choice between being good and letting the Campbell’s commercial rule my life was postponed because I needed to get to the post office before they closed for lunch. As it turned out, they hadn’t even opened that morning because it was Columbus Day. Bummer! 

On my way home, my Chevy Trax auto-turned itself into the Guy-Land Cafeteria’s parking lot, probably thinking I needed some comfort food to compensate for my disappointment at the post office. They usually have tomato soup but that day it was vegetable beef and barley. I moaned and groaned and the chief cook and bottle washer assured me that it goes great with grilled cheese. He had no reason to lie to me so I went for it. Ohmygod! Was he right! It was the best soup I’ve had since my mom was alive to make vegetable beef and barley soup. I’m surprised I didn’t have a Meg Ryan, When-Harry-Met-Sally organism right there and then which would have been embarrassing, given I was the only woman among the twenty male patrons. Am I wrong? Women would have understood it was the soup, not the sea of gray-haired old men I was excited about.

The next day on my way home from seeing the doctor my Chevy Trax did it again! Only this time it turned into the Breakfast-Only Café. Apparently it thought I needed to celebrate the fact that the god of doctor’s scales was kind to me and didn’t give my internist any reason to tisk-tisk me for being a bad girl in the kitchen. Or maybe he couldn’t get a word in edgewise, my mouth was running like a rabid coyote. Not that I’ve ever seen a rabid coyote but fast moving coyotes are a common thing in old cartoons, aren’t they? The doctor was going over the Medicare Wellness questions about depression which got me started on how excited I was about my future move to the CCC. Or maybe I was trying not to get caught in a lie about having throw rugs on the floor. What’s Medicare going to do if you answer that you have them? Send the rug police to your door to confiscate them? 

The doctor said he goes right by the lake where I’ll be moving to on his way back and forth to work and I joked that he could stop by for surprise throw rug checks. He laughed and said he’d do that. He’s been my doctor for over twenty years, was my husband’s doctor, too, and I can joke around with him but I don’t usually talk so much at my appointments. I shouldn’t have this time either because he was already running forty-five minutes behind schedule. I guess I wanted to be sure he didn’t think I was one of those depressed old people that the Medicare questionnaires are trying to root out because I really needed a refill on my Ambien sleeping pills. 

Medicare would probably frown on a doctor giving a depressed senior a prescription of Ambien. Or maybe not. Maybe they’d encourage them to prescribe a double dosage to save the system money if we offed ourselves. Just kidding, of course. I can’t take those wellness test questions seriously. I will go to my grave lying about the Oriental rug in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen. I just hope I don’t go to my grave because of that Oriental rug. If that happens, my niece has my permission to add a sentence to my tombstone that reads: “She lied on her wellness questionnaire and this is what happened.” 

This week the dog also had an appointment with the vet technician for a recheck on his teeth. At his spring appointment, which covers everything a dog can get at a yearly wellness and vaccinations appointment, the vet pronounced that Levi’s teeth were clean enough not to need his yearly cleaning but he wanted this recheck in the fall. This time the vet tech said he's got some tartar on one side of his mouth which means he's only chewing on one side of his mouth. "We should probably get in there and check out why he's doing that." They made him an appointment for cleaning on the first available appointment which was the Friday before Thanksgiving. But on the way home I decided I might cancel it. I only chew on one side of my mouth and I don't have a bad tooth. He's been getting his teeth cleaned every spring since he was three and I'm mad at myself for allowing the cleaning to get postponed to snow season. Not going to happen again! ©