Grunt-and-Move-Through-it Medical Month

Between the mole biopsy on my leg that doesn’t want to heal---the doctor said a shin surgery can take eight weeks or more---and some other medical stuff I’ve got going on I’m declaring August to be my Grunt-and-Move-Through-it Medical Month. And it’s starting with me having to take my nearly brand new hearing aids back in because one of them quit working. At least the skin doctor just requires me to e-mail a photo of my half-dollar sized, red and warm biopsy sight. Thank goodness our concierge is a jack-of-all-trades here because there is no way I can take a selfie of the outside of my ankle and she’ll have to do a few more between now and the end of the month. Still, I had to set up my patient portal just to get the first photo to where it had to go online. Silly, time consuming stuff. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, as we age it’s important to keep our computer skills up. Even scheduling appointments for yourself is less time consuming than waiting for a real person to do it over the phone. Even my internist answers messages through his portal quicker than I’d get a call-back.

Also on my medical stuff on my To-Do List are surgeries for a trigger thumb and carpal tunnel scheduled the eight of September with the pre-surgery appointment for an EKG and blood work coming up soon. Another set of blood tests are needed for my coming Reclast infusion for my bones, too, but who knows when the infusion center will get me on their schedule. There’s been a snafu going on for over a month between the doctor’s office, the infusion center, the specialist pharmacy and the insurance company and I'm about ready to scream with the phone calls and text messages this is generating. And with all the darn blood draws I’ve had this year for anemia I’m surprised I even have any blood left to give. At least I’m remembering to drink a zillion glasses of water the day beforehand to help the blood lab find plumb veins. And since you want to ask, no the various places that want my blood don't seem to want to share the tests results.

When I was at my bone doctor’s office to get the results of my full body bone density test he was really pleased at the improvement the Reclast is doing. My risk factors for a major osteoporotic fracture is 18% and 3.7% for a hip fracture, both numbers down from the two previous years. The crushed cervical vertebras in my neck and lower on my spine are no worse and investing in an expensive office chair was worth it because none of the pain they cause me now is worth going through surgeries to get them fused together. But I finally called Uncle on having him do my trigger thumb on my dominate hand because getting it stuck in weird positions is happening more frequently and it's increasingly harder for me to manipulate the thumb back to where it belongs. What made me realize it’s finally time scared the crap out of me. One day my thumb on my left hand got stuck folded under my palm and while I was trying to get it unstuck the thumb on my right hand got stuck. With both thumbs locked up in each other and I thought I'd have to use my tongue on my emergency dialer to get help. 

In the meantime, I’m doing a course of Prednisone which is in the corticosteroid class of drugs and according to Google, "It prevents the release of substances in the body that cause inflammation." But doctors don't like you to be on it long term---trust me, I've asked---because it also suppresses your immune system. Great timing on having a suppressed immune system since Covid is starting to show up back on our campus. One of my nieces and I both say we could happily live on a daily dose Prednisone though. All your joint pains disappear and you feel like you can do anything....best time to tackle a deep cleaning projects. Ever. My bone doctor hands Prednisone packs out like a pervert trying to lure little girls into a van with candy and you can bet your booty I won't turn down another 10 day course of it after my surgery.

The day I was at the bone doctor’s office he was running an hour and a half late and I was given the choice to stay or reschedule. I stayed because I’d once been the cause of him having an emergency that put him off schedule and I knew once he was with in the room he’d take all the time I needed. But I was not prepared with questions for having two surgeries at one time so I allowed Dr. Google to scare me with all the stuff that could go wrong. Had I not paid my $100 to hold the surgical date and had the EKG appointment all lined up before jumping on internet I might have backed out. So I’ve made up my mind to grunt-and-get-through it the way I get through everything…by making pre-surgical To-Do Lists and have my Plan A and B in place and trusting everything will go according to plan. My dominate hand will be in a splint for less than a week but I’m still trying to figure out how to eat that way. I’m having flash-backs of my husband’ having to make that transition after his stroke but he had me to cut his food, not to mention that he didn’t have to eat in public in the beginning. ©

Sleep Apps and Weird Dreams

I’ve been trying to improve the quality of my sleep. Nothing new here. I’ve played that game off and on for years. My latest attempt started several months ago when I gave up on my then new $129 Fitbit from ever talking to my android cell phone and I got a cheap $35 fitness watch that does sync properly like two old friends at a back street bar. I had an older model Fitbit that worked as it should with non-Apple products and every morning when I sat down to my computer I could view my sleep pattern on my monitor. Until I couldn’t anymore. Fitbit did a firmware update and there was no going back. Not only do the new Fitbits not work peacefully with computers but they don’t like androids cells phones. Trust me, I’ve investigated the depths out of that quagmire. 

Before I bought the second Fitbit I, of course, checked its compatibility with my android phone and supposedly it would work with an abbreviated app but pairing and syncing them up only works when you cross your fingers and toes during a full moon and you're headed south in a slow moving brown van. In two months of trying I was only able to do it three times. I hated abandoning that second Fitbit but it was time to call “Uncle” which I should have done before the cut off date to send it back for a refund. Yes, I’m stubborn; I hate it when tech stuff gets the better of me. It makes me feel old which I am but let's not talk about that. Let's instead bask in the glory of having a dependable sleep app back in my life again.

When I get up, the first thing I do is make my bed---well, it's the second thing I do if you count peeing as the first. Then I put on the coffee pot and walk to my office where I’ll open my sleep app and wait for it to download a night’s worth of stats. Last night, for example, I got up three times to pee, had an average heart rate of 65 and a stress level of 30. It took me ten minute to fall back to sleep after my trips to the bathroom and I got 4 hours and 48 minutes of light sleep and 2 hours and 44 minutes of deep sleep. My sleep quality score was 89 which was in the ‘good’ range and in the past 60 days I’ve only made it into the ‘good’ range four times---all with the aid of an ambient sleeping pill. In June I averaged 6 hours and 3 minutes of sleep a night and so far in July I’m up to 6 hours and 41 minutes a night. People who get less than five hours of sleep a night are twice as likely to get dementia according to lots of sleep studies like this one from Harvard. Sleeping pills aren’t the answer, either. You don’t get the right kind of sleep when you take them. I only take them when I toss and turn for more than two hours and haven’t fallen asleep yet.

Not surprising is that my longest stretches of uninterrupted sleep are towards morning and often times I wake up with a dream hanging around. Sometimes----like today----I’ll jot down a few notes before walking to the bathroom. (It’s the only thing that works to help you remember dreams and I’ve been doing it off and on since Kennedy was the president.) Today I wrote down: Tiny Don. Matchbox. Swamp. Boat. Map. College kid.  I was dreaming that I found my husband in matchbox where he was all eyes and grinning when slid it open, as surprised as I was at our reunion. The matchbox was on an old Army cot and the cot was in a cottage in the marshlands only accessible by boat. Last week I’d seen the movie Where the Crawdad Sings so it was easy to figure out why my brain came up with that setting and at one point in the movie the main character opened a matchbox just like in my dream. Her’s was empty.

They say the actions in our dreams--not the settings---are the important part, telling us something that our conscious minds don’t/won’t and if that’s true the fact that in my dream I didn’t take the box with my husband inside with me when I left speaks volumes. It’s a sign that I’ve moved on, right? Instead I promised to come back to visit. The dream ended when I got upset because I didn’t think I could find my way back through the marshland to visit but a college kid on the dock promised to buy me a map at the campus bookstore and mark the cottage’s location. That’s when I woke up. 

Sometimes I do miss my husband even thought he’s been gone ten years now. I think it's because there are couples here at the CCC who occasionally remind me of my caregiver days. Like yesterday a guy was trying to help his wife transfer into a car---she'd recently had her foot amputated---and I came close to saying he'll have to bite the bullet and trade that car in for something easier for her to do transfers in and out, but I didn't. When the time is right an occupational therapist will suggest it if one hasn't already done so. Watching them struggle brought back a day at a car dealership, trying transfers to find the right combination of seat height and grab bars for Don's transfers.

It’s a process of letting go in steps to see your spouse’s mental or physical health deteriorate. At least here, those caring for their husbands or wives are never far from supportive words or kindnesses shown. It might be just a brief meeting at the trash room or at the formal, monthly caregiver support group. I’d call it a blessing that they don’t have to experience the caregiver loneliness that I went through but ‘blessing’ is not really the right word. They chose to move here; it’s not divine intervention. They took control of what little they can control. And in at least one case, a terminally ill guy insisted on getting his wife 'settled in' where she could make friends before he left this earth. He lived a month here before passing away and our widows rallied around her just like he figured we would. ©