Bottoms Up and Binging on Netflix

When four days of your life are taken up by one over-whelming theme a blogger feels compelled to write about it even though she or he may not want to because---well, because it’s a gross topic and I for one live in a time and place where grossness is usually left to under-aged boys and men who are having a hard time growing up aka they still love a good story involving poop. For me it started on a Friday night at 7:00 when I wasn’t allowed to eat anything but jello and that fasting lasted until Monday at 4:30 when I could finally have food again. During the fasting---if you haven’t guessed by now---I had to consume four Suprep treatments for a colonoscopy and EGD that were performed on the same surgical table at the same time. 

Why did I get so lucky as to have drink four Suprep solutions over three days followed up with 32 oz of water after each bottle instead of the normal prescription of two bottles of Suprep in one day? Because I’ve had IBS (irritable bowel syndrome) off and on since my 40s as a result of drinking a glass of raw cows milk and not seeking treatment for the diarrhea that followed for several months. Turned out the raw milk had some kind of parasite in it that got killed with medication but I was left with IBS that comes and goes---sometimes for years at a time---but if you’re prone to get impacted bowels my gastroenterologist's protocol is the prolonged fast and longer poop fest. I didn’t cheat. I didn’t eat and I drank every ounce of Suprep and water and I barely left the bathroom. I’d think it was safe and I’d make it across the bedroom to the door leading to the kitchen and have to turn right back around. When I wasn’t in the bathroom doing business I was doing laundry and cleaning in the bathroom. I lost track of how many half showers I took---and you can guess which half got showered. Even when I got back home after surgery was over I was washing the clothes I wore to the hospital because my youngest niece, who took me to my procedure, insisted. I wore Crocs cross trainers to the hospital and even they got thoroughly decontaminated as did my Crocs bedroom slippers. I’ve never asked but I’m guessing my niece is a bit of my germaphobic like me. 

So what did my surgeon find and what was she looking for? She found my tracks from mouth to rectum are free of cancer, polyps or anything else out of the norm. She also didn’t find anything like a small bleeder that would explain why I’ve been anemic for the past three years and why my right leg swells up from time to time. This was the latest and final test I’ve been through since last July 4^th where they’ve been trying to figure out both of these anomaly's. They started with a ultrasound on my leg to rule out a blood clot. Next was the EKG and ultra sound on heart and lungs followed by scans of my kidneys, bladder and lady parts (the inside edition ultra sound and many of us know how much fun that test is). And did I mention I’ve lost track of the blood draws I’d had? 

The two weeks leading up the surgery I’ve been binge watching a (bad) Netflix series called The Resident. The show has a resident, Conrad Hawkins, who is supposed to be the best diagnostic practitioner to come along since the vaccine for Polio was developed. He can just talk to a patient and often figure out what obscure thing caused the symptoms, that brought him or her into the ER, then they run the tests to prove him right. He’s always right, of course, and where is my Doctor Hawkins when I need a diagnosis? My real doctors ran out of tests to do. 

But I think I figured my leg swelling issue out on my own just from watching The Resident. A patient on the show had some crushed vertebraes in his back---the same ones I do---and it was causing problems with his legs. And that reminded me that my bone doctor mentioned that those verebraes effect my legs and that maintaining a good posture when sitting was important. It was the reason I bought myself an expensive desk chair five years ago. The dark side of my brain needs to bill the other side of my brain for that diagnosis. A couple of the doctors on that Netflix series say that corporate medicine is all about the up-coding and billing.

The show was advertised as a cross between House and Gray's Anatomy but I should have read a few reviews before investing so much time in The Resident. Phrases like the  “doctors don’t always practice good medicine” and "the stories features terrible people playing God…” might have put me off from watching it. My opinion? If half the stuff the series shows is true-to-life happenings in hospitals we’d never go inside one and I have to believe a lot of the story-lines were taken from medical lawsuits. It's just that so many things are condensed into a short time frame when you binge that it looks worse than it is. But I kept on watching because I’ve decided watching the worst stuff that could happen during a surgery was akin to me watching and reading so many apocalyptic dramas during the pandemic. It gives me a strange kind of comfort to go deep into the darkness when I'm about to experience something scary. I can prepare for the 'worst' and be happy when it doesn't come.

If you’re still reading this “cheery” little post I owe you a gold star for sticking with it. I do apologize. Truly, between this medical event and my brother’s passing I’ve done nothing else to write about. Nothing I wanted to write about. But that changes in a few minutes when I’m going to an opening day viewing party for the Tiger’s Baseball season. 

On another cheery note, I bought  myself a gift for not having a bleeder inside me to fix and recover from…a Mahjong mat to go with my new mahjong set. Have I mentioned lately how much I love that game? Buying myself a frivolous gift for coming through a dark patch in life is a long-time tradition in my life. Or as one of my blogging friends, Dawn, might say, "A little retail therapy is good for the whatever ails you."

Until Next Wednesday?

No One Sees Me!

Back in September I had thumb surgery on my dominate hand---both hands actually but only one is bothering me now. It’s been bothering me since my first fall between Christmas and New Years and about the time I decided I needed to see my surgeon about it I fell the second time and all thoughts of my hand went by the wayside. Yes, heavy drugs and broken ribs trumped losing the pincer grip and fine motor skills in my thumb. I’ve dropped a few drinking glasses and I struggle to pick up mahjong titles or pills and buttoning clothing is a struggle. The bottom line my thumb is swollen and hot all the time and after viewing my x-rays the doctor says I have Skier’s Thumb also known as Gamer’s Thumb. "Oh goody," says the old woman who is sick of acquiring new aches and pains. My doctor described it as a “floating bone attached to a pulley (the ligment) that needs to go back on the other side of the joint.” See the x-ray up above..

Obviously you don’t have to ski or be a gamer to get this condition. It usually happens in a fall where you are griping a stick---hockey, bat, tennis rack or ski pole---when you go down. In my case during the first fall I tried to hold on a door jam and wrenched my thumb backward. If you're betting I’m headed back to surgery you could be right. My doctor takes the least evasive steps before putting you on his surgical table and in this case that means I’m doing a massive amount of Methylprednisone for a week---to get the swelling down---and I’m wearing a brace that goes half way up my lower arm. I’ll go back in a few weeks and we’ll decide what happens next. The success of this kind of surgery goes down if not performed in a “timely fashion” and I've passed that tipping point. Without surgery the condition will become chronic. "Oh goody," says again the old woman who wistfully wishes she could write a post about an old man who paid off a porn star and goes to jail. Could happen and that would make me as happy as a seagull with a French fry. (I wish I could take credit for that metaphor, but I can't.)

With the surgery my thumb will be immobilized for 5-6 weeks and I won’t get full use of my thumb for 3-4 months. If it was my non-dominate hand it wouldn't be a big deal to live with a thumb you can't trust and it seems petty to sweat such a small thing when others have bigger health issues on their plates. But we each have to play the cards we're dealt. One thing is for sure: I need to buy some plastic drinking glasses.

I also left the doctor’s office with a back brace. During my first fall I ended up with my left lower leg completely black and blue and now it swells occasionally and gives my artificial knee joint a feeling like restless leg syndrome in the evening when I first get off my feet. He took x-rays of my spine and neck and he’s saying the leg issue is my coming from the crushed vertebrates in my lower back. Got three there and one in my neck as well, C-6. We’ve known about them for a long time but he thinks the fall might have agitated them. I hate the looks of that brace but the first time I wore it that night I didn’t get any of the craziness in my leg nor the bedtime needles and pins feeling in my feet that I’ve had for several years. Finger crossed that's repeated in coming nights.

Yesterday afternoon after leaving the doctor’s office I decided to bite the bullet and go down to lunch here on the continuum care campus wearing my wrist and back braces. The back brace goes from under my bra to my waist in front and dips a couple inches below in the back…hard not to notice. Or so I thought. All total I passed by six people in the lobby and we greeted each other and I sat with four others during lunch and not one mentioned the braces! I didn’t even see any eyes wandering over my “accessories.” No one really sees me! The hand brace I could understand no one noticing that because last year between the two trigger thumb surgeries I was in a smaller wrist brace for quite a while. But I’ve never worn a back brace. 

Is everyone just so used to me wearing weirdly out of date clothing that they don’t bother looking below my neck? I was wearing gray pants and a gray top and I tried to decide if others could have thought I was just wearing a too-ugly-to-mention new outfit with a wide black belt. That lovely thing has the feel of a cartoon character’s jet pack strapped to my body only without the cord to pull to take off flying. The hard plastic part has a pocket in it for an ice or heated pad.... "or snacks," says the old woman who went to Traders Joe's today and came home with a bag full of dietary sin.

The Velcro on the wrist brace keeps getting stuck to the side of the back brace and it makes the ripping sound when I pull my arm loose. Tomorrow I'm thinking about going down to lunch to test if others can hear me. It's either that or I'm leaving the back brace in the apartment and just wearing it when I'm at home because it's truly an ugly accessory and my natural body is fat enough.

I'll end this post with a tip on how to get lint out of the hooked side of Velcro. (My Velcro quickly filled up with pink bathrobe fuzz.) Their website says to use an old tooth brush and it works well but I feel like I need to slap a label on it, to explain to my nieces why they'll find a tooth brush on my computer desk after I die. It's the handiest place to delint the Velcro on my braces during the "find my muse time" when I'm trying to write a blog. ©

Second Sugery and Second Writing Group Meeting

This post was written a few days before my second surgery for carpal tunnel and trigger thumb that took place on October 17th. I was thinking this one would be the easier of the two surgeries because I know what to expect. With my dominate hand done first I thought it would be a piece of cake but I just realized that holding a computer mouse with a splint on my hand will not be possible for the first week where with my other hand in a splint I could still type with a few fingers tips. Plus I'm going into this surgery with a great deal of pain from a frozen elbow and shoulder that I'll have to deal with as soon as possible. So expect shorter replies to comments made on this and the next pre-written and scheduled posts coming up which also means if anything exciting happens in my life between now and, say, October 26th you won't be hearing about it. (Like how much excitement could happened to an 80 year old?)

One of the things that will happen before I get back to real time posting is my brother is moving into the Memory Care building here on campus tomorrow. Exciting for me and his kids but, of course, it will be hard on him. When they told him he was moving, my youngest niece asked, "Do you remember when you visited Aunt Jean and you said you like her place...?" And my brother got upset and shouted, "I'm not living with my sister!" So I guess I'll have to let him get settled into his own building before I can walk down the road to visit. The family was told it takes new residents a month before they finally settle in and know the move is permanent. But I'm dying to see his freshly painted and carpeted room and his view.

Our Memory Care program has won state awards and his building has the same view overlooking the lake and the woods in full color now. It's a bit of a drive for his kids to visit but this CCComplex is in an area where they all come to shop the near-by malls and visit specialists. (The main reason I picked it in the first place.) He'll be living just one buildings away from me so I'm sure I'll get to see everyone more often than I do now. I'm excited for me but sad for him even though it truly is the right time for him to transition out of living alone. His kids have done a wonderful job of bringing in help to keep him safe at home for as long as they did, but those of us who've been in that situation knows how draining that can be.

And now on to the writing group: As I suspected would happen, Chatty Catty who took dictation from God for the songs she produced, didn't come back so we are down to four of us and we are all a good fit for getting along. Ms. Angel couldn't make this meeting because she had a last minute spiritual consultation but recently she's written and read publicly two poems---one at our anniversary party and one at our monthly Resident Dialogue in lieu of reading an opening prayer---so we know the quality of her work and she's excited about writing more. Mr. Graphic Artist brought six poems to read---five older one and one new one he just finished and he thinks this group is helping to get back into writing. When he moved here, like me, he thought he'd be spending all his time writing and doing art which didn't happen for him (or me)---just too many activities to get involved in.

Ms. Librarian blew us away by reading twenty pages of a novel she wrote since our last meeting. It's set in 1940 in a French Convent. It's good, it's really GOOD but far over the 1,000 word limit we'd set for our readings. We had that same issue in another writing group I was in and the facilitator didn't say anything about it, so neither did I. None of our Group's guidelines are set in stone and as long as we can get everyone's readings into our meetings I guess it won't matter.

I brought in a rather sad poem I wrote about our Memory Care building here on campus and copy of one of my favorite, funny blog posts from my caregiver days as a sample of what my past writing style was like. I ended the meeting with asking everyone their writing goals for the coming month and I reading from a the book, A Year of Writing Dangerously; 365 Days of Inspiration and Encouragement. All and all it went great. We had some interesting conversations generated from our readings and we are all committed to keeping creative writing on our front burners, so to speak. We also hoped to get one more person in the group and we thought we had her but the Activities Calendar overlapped our group with Line Dancing and she's really into that, so she had to choose. Hopefully, that won't happen next month. ©

Embarrassing Meltdowns and Moles that can Kill You

Boy, did I have an embarrassing meltdown last week in the fine dining room. It’s so embarrassing I don’t even want to write about it and expose my childish behavior. But this issue has been doing a slow boil since I moved in to my continuum care complex and in Stephen King's non-fiction book on writing he says words to the effect if you're not willing to be brutally honest in your writing you're never going to be a good writer.

So, here's what happened when the new manager of our dining room came over to our table to ask us how our meal was and the filter in my brain stopped working. “Who cuts the pies around here?” I asked as I moved my piece over next a table mate's, lining up the outer crusts back to back. Her slice was over 2 1/2 inches wide while my mine was a scant 1 1/4 inches. Another person at the table spoke up and said uneven serving sizes has been an ongoing problem here since they opened. And before I knew it I jumped into my theory that "the waitresses always give me the smallest portions because I’m fat."

That night the lady who got the larger piece of pie was a tiny little thing who usually leaves part of her desserts behind because she eats like a bird. I’ve seen that happen so many times around here and it drives me nuts. Growing up I had to sit at the table until bedtime if I didn't clean my plate and even though I'm in charge of myself now, I still can't stand seeing food wasted. When people want to linger over dinner and there is still food on their plates I have the hardest time not asking them to taking napkins and covering up the uneaten food, an old Weight Watchers trick. Out of sight out of mind.

Aside from that, sweets are my drug of choice and the wanting equal serving sizes is an issue that also comes from my childhood when my brother and I used to fight over who got the biggest serving of our desserts. Finally my mom made us start a new thing of one of us cutting and the other being the first to choose. We kept a ruler in the kitchen for this nightly ritual and it cut down on the fighting but as long as we lived together the measuring and cutting was part of our sibling relationship.

That night when I announced that the waitresses were body shaming me with their decision on who gets the larger portions I realized that I was speaking loud enough that the people on both sides of us could hear me, I wanted to be teleported out of the place never to be seen again. The new manager has only been on the job two weeks and probably wears a size two dress but she knelt down next to our table and softly said, “I’ve got a pie cutter on my list of things to buy. I’ll get this resolved.” My biggest shame in this is that in my heart I know the waitresses aren’t doing it out of malice---or even necessarily on purpose if I were inclined to be fair minded. We have three college students from Ethiopia, all from the same family and they are super sweet and respectful, polite and well mannered thin little girls who are very religious. They come from a family of nine and one of our waitresses is studying to be a lawyer, another is going into bio-engineering and the third is just in her first year. 

Speaking of young people, I went to see the PA associated with my dermatologist who did the biopsy on my cancerous ankle mole last June. It’s not healing up and I’ve been sending photos of it each month to the doctor ever since but this time I insisted on going into the dermatologist’s complex. I could have waited six weeks for the doctor or take the PA right away. The PA turned out to be a kid who looked all of twelve years old and he was as petite as the Ethiopian sisters. I’m used to young doctors but this kid, truly had a baby face that he tried to age with big horn-rimmed glasses. It didn’t work. 

He suspected there was more going on than just a slow heal on a part of the body that, in general, is slow to heal because of circulation issues in our extremities. He gave me three choices and I went with door number one which involved a deeper biopsy to makes sure they got all the cancers cells the first time. He said that because the mole was in a slow healing place, they don’t generally go very deep. Not sure if he was just covering up for the doctor or what but it is what it is and the damn itches like crazy.

I just got this second biopsy report back and now I'm scheduled for a "live mole surgery" that could last one to five hours, depending on how deep they have to dig. And won’t that be fun. It's the surgery where they scrape a layer off, put it under a microscope, then keep repeating until they are sure they got all the cancerous cells. At least I'll be three weeks out from having my second carpel tunnel and trigger thumb surgeries on my right hand.That takes place October 17th. Trying to keep our bodies working gets more time consuming with each year, doesn't it. ©