Splinters: Two basics ways to handle

If you are a normal and/or intelligent person:

1. Upon having a broom handle shave off a piece of itself the size of the Eiffel Tower into, say, the inside of the second knuckle on your index finger (let’s just say), let out a robust yell, possibly an expletive or two calmly alert those around you to the fact that you have just injured yourself
2. Retire to the nearest washroom, preferably with entourage in tow ready to assist with Operation Safe Splinter Removal
3. Wash injured area gently with soap and water
4. Carefully have your duly appointed deputy attempt to extract the splinter with your choice of:
   1. Sanitized tweezers, and/or
   2. Sanitized needle, and/or
   3. Sticky tape, if you’re lucky enough not to have a sliver which is pretending to be a submarine on a top secret mission in the deepest ocean trench in the world, and/or  
   4. A ‘drawing’ poultice
      1. Baking soda is popular
      2. Warm water + Epsom salt soak is another that seems to work well for a lot of folks
5. Upon ensuring you have gotten the beast outta there, apply:
   1. Antibacterial ointment
   2. Bandage
6. Keep clean and dry
7. In the unlikely event that an infection, swelling, redness, pus and/or an ungodly pain every time you even think about bending the damned finger kicks up, see your friendly neighborhood medical professional immediately

ALTERNATIVELY, if you are stupid and/or me:

1. Upon having a broom handle shave off a piece of itself the size of the Eiffel Tower into, say, the inside of the second knuckle on your index finger (let’s just say), let out a slight hiss
   1. If anyone chances to overhear this and ask what you did, snarl, “NOTHING!” at them
   2. If they ask again, glare at them and mutter something unintelligible until they give up 
2. Shift broom to uninjured hand, stealthily inspect injured finger while pretending to actually be inspecting tool 
3. If you spy any part of the splinter above ground (so to speak), use teeth to yank out
   1. This is totally safe
   2. That’s why $DEITY gave us teeth in the first place
      1. Not really
         1. They’re for softening leather hides
         2. And also opening difficult packaging
   3. Plus saliva has antibacterial properties
      1. Also not really
4. Put broom back in injured hand because dammit, this is how GROWNUPS deal with things – you don’t get a free pass just because you got a damned splinter, wuss!
   1. Plus if you don’t, others who happen to be nearby may realize you totally did too just hurt yourself somehow
   2. And if they know you at all, they’re going to be all, “LET ME SEE IT. RIGHT NOW.”
   3. Because just possibly they have been through this particular farce once or twice before and know how you are
5. Finish task at hand
6. Hang around for a few more minutes, just to prove you can
7. Sneak into nearest bathroom, wash blood off hand and peer angrily at injury
   1. Really glare at it
   2. This will possibly terrify the splinter into ejecting itself from your finger
      1. Not really
         1. Not even theoretically possible
         2. Unless you have psychokinetic powers
            1. In which case, why in the world were you using your hands to operate the broom in the first place?
            2. Man, I would be doing that work while loafing in an easy chair just to show off
8. Dig pair of tweezers out of the back of the junk drawer
9. Dig clean-enough looking needle out of sewing kit
1. If you can find the sewing kit
2. Otherwise, check the junk drawer
3. Possibly the storage shed? Gotta be one around here somewhere…
10. Sterilization is for losers. Just frickin’ get it DONE already.
1. The clock is ticking, cowboy
2. Any second now, somebody is going to come looking for you
3. You are surrounded by professional narks
4. They will so totally nark you out
11. Grab exposed part of splinter with tweezers and neatly pluck it out of your skin
1. Ow, OK, nope, that wasn’t the splinter, that was skin, @^*&@…!
2. Repeat until exhausted
3. Realize this isn’t working
12. Pick up needle and start poking around where you think the sliver is until you’re absolutely sure you’ve got enough of it exposed that you can totally grab it with the tweezers now
13. Repeat #11 and #12 a few times
14. Get all of the splinter out
    1. Pretty much all of it, anyway
    2. Well. Most of it
    3. All of it that, you know, matters
    4. Because you’re just sick of gouging at yourself at this point, therefore, clearly, you’re done
15. Spray with most gawd-awful stinging antibacterial spray you can find – the one that says, ‘Antibacterial and “analgesic” (lol) spray’ on it
    1. Stuff seriously stings like a @^*&@
    2. Wonder quietly to self if the “analgesic” property is purely comparative
       1. As in, “Once the burning this stuff causes starts to finally wear off, you’ll feel so much better than you did while it was still cauterizing your wound!”
16. Apply bandage
17. Immediately go and do any or all of the following:
    1. Hand-water plants
       1. Bonus points if you use the dregs of last week’s greywater
    2. Wash the dishes without wearing gloves
    3. Turn compost pile
       1. Ratty gloves with holes large enough to pass a mouse through optional
    4. Take a shower
    5. Move furniture / unpack boxes that have been languishing around in dusty, dirty, appalling conditions for months and months
18. The next morning, note that finger is…more sore and maybe starting to feel a leeeeetle bit…hot
    1. And hurts like a @*^&@ when you bend it
    2. And may be swelling, ever so slightly, right around where that splinter went in
       1. Or possibly developing a rather large…blister.
          1. Yeah. Let’s go with “blister”
          2. Because “boil” is such an ugly term
19. A few hours later, acknowledge that possibly you may have maybe missed a tiny bit of the splinter 
    1. I mean, most of it you surely got, but, I guess there’s probably a teeny tiny bit left in there
    2. Or something
20. Ignore pain, swelling, heat and signs of impending pus
    1. IN FACT, tell yourself that this is “good” – because actually, pus = nature’s lubricant
       1. That’s right! Whatever is left of that sliver is going to come shooting on out of there
       2. You know, probably, like, tomorrow-ish
       3. This is the natural way to handle this. You are a paragon of, uh, natural-ish living
          1. Very…zen or something
          2. You should totally eat a couple stale, bright blue Peeps to celebrate your earth-goddess stature
    2. Plus if that doesn’t work, well, your body will probably just break the thing down over time and problem solved
       1. Not really
       2. That is seriously a myth
       3. Your body is not going to ‘break down’ a slab of pressurized lumber any time soon
21. Continue ignoring increasingly achy finger until it cannot be ignored anymore – probably this will be at roughly the 24-hour mark after initial splinter-acquisition
22. Remove bandage
23. Give inflamed area the stink-eye for at least five minutes
    1. Yup.
    2. That’s infected all right.
24. Consult Google
    1. Have minor anxiety attack because Dr. Google is pretty sure that you’re going to die
       1. Because the splinter is heading straight for your heart, with laser-targeted accuracy
       2. Plus all of these symptoms? => could also be cancer
       3. Or Bavarian swamp-rat muck-tail disease
          1. …wait, what? Go home, Google, you’re drunk…!
    2. Realize that if you go to a doctor, they will do…doctor-stuff to you
       1. …go find reasonably clean looking needle…
25. Putting on best bad-ass face, poke sore spot gingerly with needle 
    1. Pffft, sterilize, what the hell for?! it’s already infected and besides, you’re going to wash it with soap in a second, and then spray it with more of the stingy-antibacterial-lol-analgesic-my-arse stuff in, like, two seconds
    2. What-ever
       1. I’m tough
       2. It’s just a stupid little splinter
       3. I got this
    3. Plus, there’s no time, in about ten seconds somebody is going to get home from work and be all, “WHAT are you doing?! WHAT did you do THIS time? Lemme see that…!”
       1. And then they’re going to want to “help”
       2. Which makes too much sense, particularly seeing as how it is your dominant hand that you’re trying to work on
          1. With your off-hand
          2. The one that has trouble dealing with things like toothpaste tube caps, and therefore clearly is the hand for this job
       3. Anyway, time is of the essence and cannot be wasted on such trivialities as ‘sterilization’ or even ‘thinking this through’
       4. Seize the day, people
26. Say a few bad words as ‘nature’s lubricant’ does its thing and the sliver does indeed come flying out of there
    1. Damn.
    2. That was huge.
    3. How did I miss THAT MUCH wood still in my finger?!
    4. Wow.
    5. I suck.
    6. Totally should have had the husband look at this thing yesterday
    7. …eh, whatever, it’s all good now…
27. Set sliver aside so you can show spouse when they get home
    1. Because now that it’s out, ha ha, it’s too late for all that fussing and carrying on about nothing
       1. That’s right, you can now live another day without having to get over your intense and completely irrational fear of people in white jackets bearing needles and medicines you can’t pronounce and stuff
       2. Now, the thing has awesome gross-out factor and must be shared with the spouse – this is why he married you, after all, because you are FULL of gross examples of your own idiocy
          1. It’s one of my many charms
          2. Along with putting half of all our belongings onto the bed while ‘cleaning,’ and then ‘not getting around to’  finding them all new forever-homes before bedtime
28. Immediately lose sliver when cat jumps onto table and swipes her tail right over the top of it
    1. Waste a few minutes looking for the sliver
       1. Realize it was only “huge” in the context of ‘a foreign object under your skin’ – it is actually almost microscopic
       2. You are never going to find it…particularly not on a splinter-colored fake-wood floor
       3. Seriously
       4. Just, stop already…
29. Now that all danger of being helped is past, complain vigorously to everyone you meet about the whole thing
    1. Possibly you could even write a blog post to share with the whole entire Internet just what lengths you are willing to go to in order to avoid being sensible about minor injuries

(Yeah, I totally did “take care of” a splinter that way this weekend. And I totally did try to save the splinter so that I could be all, “OMG, check this out!” when the husband got home tonight – but Fleur immediately started walking around on my desk and swoosh! gone. Which was probably for the best, because on further reflection I very much doubt the husband has any interest in viewing splinters I was storing in my index finger for any length of time, and probably he’d just give me that look and be all, “blah blah blah you need to not do stupid things blah blah blah” and then I’d be all, “What-ever, some of us are self-reliant, dude!” and then he’d give me that look again and I mean, really, what’s the point of starting all that again? NONE, there is no point. So, you know – it’s probably good that it is now safely in the vacuum cleaner [well, of course I vacuumed in here, because you know what sucks even more than splinters in a finger? splinters in your foot] instead of being gleefully shown off as first planned.)

Get those itty-bitty violins ready…

I had to go to the dentist today, to get the crown replaced on my implant and to get a filling.

I know. My life = so hard. We shall now pause so that everyone can play me a very sad song on their miniature, invisible violins.

{…conducts invisible orchestra…}

Anyway…I don’t know when exactly it was that “going to the dentist” turned into this horrifying experience for me. I know it wasn’t always that way, but at some point between my twenties and, well, now, it seems that my teeth have turned into semi-solid little lumps of pissy nerve endings.

They don’t like cold. Or hot particularly, but cold in particular seems to make them all yowl as if I’m ramming live electrical wires into them.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but, pretty much the entire time that dental things are going on in your mouth, there’s either cold air or cold water being jetted across all your teeth – both the numb ones, and the not so numb ones.

This plus a general sensitivity to cold…is not a particularly pleasant experience, and there isn’t a whole lot that can be done about it. They can warm up the rinsing-water, but the drills that blast cold air are gonna keep blasting cold air.

Feh.

Then while the new crown was baking (I am still somewhat astounded by the way this works now, where you need a new crown and you go in to the dentist’s office and a couple hours later you walk out with the new, permanent crown in your mouth – see, back in my day, kids, you had to go to the dentist, like, three times, a couple weeks apart each time, to get a new crown…because the first one would always be wrong in some way, OR would snap in half when they tried to install it, so, two more weeks at the lab for a new one to be made…but, I digress), they went whistling onward to the filling.

This is yet another example of the way I can simultaneously know how something is…and yet not quite get how it works. I know that my teeth are much more sensitive now than they were in my twenties.

And I know that in recent years (ahem), the amount of numb-stuff they have to shoot into me before my teeth will actually stop screaming over even very minor work being done on them has doubled or even tripled.

AND YET…it catches me by surprise, every time, when they do their thing, and I’m all, “Yesh, mah dips are numbuh, ish gud…” and then they touch that drill to the tooth and I leap out of that chair like they just stabbed me or something. Yoooooowch!!!

I never see it coming. I always think I’m more than numb enough. So it not only hurts, but it startles me into the bargain.

Every. Single. Time. (<= my Argonian name would She Who Never Learns)

My poor dentist was caught between laughter and irritation this morning; he had to more than triple the amount of numb-stuff before it would “take” enough for him to get the job done in there.

It was kind of funny, though: The first time he started and I went, “{JUMP!}”, he was all, “Oh, gosh, OK…” and he jabbed some more stuff in there and we chatted a bit while it ‘took’ and we were both so confident that it was completely numb, like, there is no way that anything could hurt now, hahahahaha!

And then he touched the drill to that tooth and it was like this little fireworks display went off in my jawbone and I went {!JUMP!} again and he jumped too and we just stared at each other wide-eyed and said, at the same time, “You have got to be kidding me!”

…I may have added, “…what the hell?!” to the end of that, but as nobody actually got that on film, it can never be proven.

Nor can the five minute rant I went on with his assistant while he was rummaging around in his storeroom looking for the super-nerve-nuke’em stuff. (I think he eventually found them under some leftover K-rations.)

But eventually, he got things numbed up and was able to go about his business without me leaping and squirming around, and then I handed over a slightly obscene amount of money and left.

And now the numb-stuff is already starting to wear off.

And damn, am I ever glad I had enough self-knowledge to go ahead and put in for the rest of the day off when we made this appointment a couple weeks ago. The throbbing, aching and general u-g-h factor is clearly going to be getting no less unpleasant for a while here.

I doubt I have much in the way of “productivity” ahead for the rest of the day.

Feh. FEH!, I SAY!

{…conducts invisible orchestra again…}

But, oh well. Considering the alternatives, I still feel like a very lucky person. It’s a temporary inconvenience, some transitory pain – followed by a whole lot of relief, and years of being able to have my steak, and eat it too.

Seems like a pretty good deal to me, all things considered.

…even if I am going to be having carrot soup for dinner tonight in deference to an aching jaw…

…maybe with some dinner rolls…hmm…maybe barely-sweet-ish ones, made with rosemary-infused honey as their sugar-source…

…wait…

…why am I suddenly feeling like the rolls are dinner, and the soup is the side…?

…still…yeah…I’m…just going to go trim a little rosemary off the bushes in the front of the Den…mmmmmm, rosemary…!

Real life is still so very real

So, today was my first day back to work after my unexpected three-day “vacation” in Resort du Hospitale.

Normally when I’m taking even one day off, there’s a certain amount of ‘putting things to bed’ before I log off before I take off. Just kind of proactively dealing with certain things, giving others the background info they might need in case things go awry, that kind of stuff.

Obviously, I didn’t do any of that. It was supposed to just be a quick, after-work-even appointment with the orthopedic guy; I had absolutely no idea, I never would have guessed, that I’d end up in the hospital for gah’s sake.

Even when I was getting the ultrasound because he was all, “{mutter-mutter-clots}”, I still didn’t honestly think that, you know, there actually would be…anything in there.

I expected the usual fuss-n-bother-and-nothing-comes-of-it. Because that’s what always happens. Except when it doesn’t.

So today basically went like this:

1. I made my own coffee this morning
1. Which meant having to go downstairs all by myself like a Big Girl
1. Illusion of being on the road back to self-reliance: Shattered
2. It costs me way more than I like to admit to do something as simple as “get downstairs, and then back up again”
3. Also, I do still need the stupid crutches
1. Argh!
2. NOT THAT I’M COUNTING (<= lies!), but, this would be Day 17 since I tore that @^*&2ing muscle
3. ARGH!
2. Several people are asking me – rather pointedly – how long this or that is going to take, because, per their email from AHEM, LAST WEEK WEDNESDAY…!
1. It would be much simpler if I would just own up and say, “Sorry, heh-heh, funny story, actually, see, I was unexpectedly hospitalized last week so I lost a couple days…?”
2. But I would rather die than have this become common knowledge at work
1. Well. Maybe not die.
2. But I’d definitely rather put up with people growling at me about their timelines
3. AND THEN, I got a call from the nurse advocate at the insurance company
1. Because the hospital stay was declined
1. Because the information they got was basically “we admitted her because of reasons”
1. Attending physician? => blank
2. Diagnosis/Reason for Incarceration Admission? => blank
3. Treatment Plan? => blank
4. Reason for Discharge? => blank
2. Apparently, “because we admitted her” is not considered a ‘medically necessary’ reason to admit someone to the hospital
1. Go figure
2. {bangs head on desk for a while}
4. That One Guy on the team naturally managed to go charging off in all the wrong directions while I was away
1. He always does this
2. ALWAYS
3. Honestly, his capacity for being Just Completely Wrong seems bottomless
1. It’s like a gift, really
2. A dark, dark gift…
4. And, why the end result of this always seems to boomerang back to me is something I ask myself on pretty much a weekly basis…
5. THEN, when I’m up to my eyebrows in All The Above, I got a call from the ‘patient something or other’ person – basically the nurse who makes sure you’re behaving yourself when you’ve been discharged
1. I was asked if I was remembering to do the elebenty-bazillion salutations in the cardinal directions on hourly intervals per release protocol
2. “…yes…?” <= lies, had only done one (1) round of the salutations, while still in bed that morning
1. And in only two of the cardinal directions
2. Bah, humbug!
6. AND TO CAP IT ALL OFF, RIGHT BEFORE LOGGING OFF FOR THE DAY…I find that the reason something “looks a little wrong” in the thing I was working on a while ago was because I had made a mistake in the code
1. …one that somebody else discovered…
2. @^*&@!

So, to sum up:

1. I quit
2. I quit
3. I quit
4. I quit
5. I quit
6. I quit

There. I think that about covers it for tonight.

Tune in next time, when I’ll complain vigorously about the clothes moths (!!!!) that moved in shortly after all the construction began, and which now love to flutter juuuuuuuust out of my reach because I’d swear they know I can’t leap to my feet to squash them…!

What a long, strange trip it was

The orthopedic surgeon we saw Wednesday afternoon confirmed that I had a moderate tear in my gastrocnemius (<= the bigger calf muscle).

Then he sent us for an ultrasound to check for blood clots, because my leg and foot were rather swollen, and had been for a while, and I had not had any particular success with getting that swelling to go away.

And that was how it was that I ended up spending two and a half days in the hospital hooked up to a heparin drip and having blood drawn every 4-6 hours to check for progress (and me with my bordering-on-actual-phobia about needles…you can imagine how well I dealt with this) before My Beloved Physician was able to confirm that I didn’t actually have an actual clot, but rather only alarmingly elevated risk of one.

This is one of the things we love so much about this guy: A lot of doctors would have been more like, “Look, you’re already here and we’re halfway down this path, so, my work here is done. You have another four to seven days in the hospital (!!!) while the warfarin takes over from the heparin, then three months (!!!!!!) of taking the warfarin daily (with daily / every-other-day lab work, I might add), because that’s what we’re doing.”

Instead, I got to just come home with instructions to be very alert about the swelling returning, and with a prescription for a mega-dose of aspirin.

It’s not exactly that I’m furious and want to have stern words with anybody for making me go through all that “for no reason.” There was a reason for it. They saw veins that looked like they were under stress, there were markers in my blood that said, “probably has a clot in there” – I think what they did was the right thing to do.

You don’t fool around with suspected deep vein thrombosis. Having a clot break loose and travel up into your lungs can kill you – I’ve still got an awful lot of Denizen-rearing to do, and I’m kinda curious how it all turns out.

So on the whole, I’d like to, you know, not die of something stupid and miss all that.

Still. It’s a bit…vexing, to spend all that time hooked up to an IV and being stabbed by cheerful, smiling lab folks what felt like every fifteen minutes over and over in the same general area, only to be told a couple days later, “Oh. Never mind. You ‘just’ have a rather elevated risk of clotting from that area. Here. Have a prescription for a mega-aspirin, aaaaaaaand if your foot or leg puffs up like that again and you can’t get the swelling back down quickly? Get your arse to the emergency room, what are you, STUPID or something?!”

The crook of my left arm looks like I have a serious drug problem (or like I was attacked by near-sighted vampires mistaking my elbow for my neck or something); plus, of course, the fact that I was on a blood thinner means that I bruise fairly easily, so I have all kinds of beautifully yellowing marks all over me.

Sigh.

I probably have about six to eight weeks of recovery time ahead for this stupid thing altogether before I’ll be back to more or less normal, and a month or two after that where I’ll still need to be a bit circumspect about how much stress I put on the leg; it’s just one of those injuries that take a looooong time to heal.

Meh.

But, it could be worse. I could have been stuck in the hospital for over a week.

With the convenient, in-house, available 24/7 lab people.

{shudder}

And now, the ALIEN SNOT MONKEYS!!

(Fair Warning: This post is about stuff like endometrial polyps and alien snot monkeys. It is probably not appropriate for any audience. But I just can’t seem to stop myself. I appear to be dead-set on sharing this, even though it is a) gross and b) gross and also c ) gross. So if gross girl-stuff makes your toes curl up, this is probably a really good post to just skip.)

So I’ve been having all these Female Troubles lately. And they have been unpleasant and varying degrees of disgusting for, like, two months now. And then Tuesday – after a night of epic cramping that had me sketching out plans for a DIY hysterectomy (one bottle of Glenlivet and a kitchen knife oughta do ‘er…), well…

I’m pretty sure I gave birth to an alien snot monkey.

It was possibly the single most disgusting thing I have ever seen emerge from my body. It was fleshy and tissue-y and, well, it looked like something you’d pull out of a particularly ill-cleaned dead chicken. I mean, GROSS, people, GROSS.

Now, with all the mayhem that has been going on with me, you’d think I’d be relieved that something tangible had finally shown itself. Not looking at it and going, oh, GREAT, what’s THIS?

But I was. And also, I had no idea what it might be. I’d never seen anything like this. So I scooped the thing into a take-n-toss container, called the poor, unsuspecting OB/GYN who so unwisely didn’t tell me he already had too many patients and to go away when I called back in May, and very calmly told him that I had just given birth to a 6x2x2 centimeter Alien Snot Monkey, and asked if that sort of thing was, you know, expected given Everything Else that was going on…or if I should drop everything and rush in for an immediate hysterectomy (hope springeth eternal and all) (if you are sensing that I am ever so slightly sick and tired of my uterus right about now – yes, yes I am).

“Huh. Sounds like an endometrial polyp,” he said (Dunno what that is, I thought to myself, but it sure sounds booooooring!). “Do you still have it? We should definitely send it to pathology.” (Ooooooookay! And now, it sounds vaguely sinister!)

And thus it was that one lidded Gladware container was delivered to his office, to be forwarded on to Pathology.

Now, it turns out that these polyp-thingees are almost always benign and not all that sinister really. So we can drop that and move on to more important things, like discussing the relative merits of the terms ‘endometrial polyp’ and ‘alien snot monkey.’

It is this writer’s humble opinion that the term ‘endometrial polyp’ is boring-yet-ominous sounding, and should be replaced with the far more interesting moniker of ‘alien snot monkey.’

Not only is it more visually appealing (oh hush, it is too!), but it sounds far more exotic and exciting. Plus it would make an excellent name for a band – a far better band-name than endometrial polyps.

Imagine if you will that you are in a large stadium waiting for a concert to begin. Which of these sounds like a better show to you:

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Endometrial Polyps!”

“Ladies and gentlemen, the Alien Snot Monkeys!”

SEE? Alien Snot Monkey  is a totally better term, and I vote that in future whenever some crazy freaked out woman calls up her gynecologist clutching a take-n-toss container full of something that looks like it was picked up off the slaughterhouse floor, s/he should immediately tell her that it sounds like an Alien Snot Monkey  and that pathology would love to take a look at it.

Because also, telling somebody that they should send their endometrial polyp to pathology sounds far more serious than it actually is…whereas I very much doubt anybody could manage to work up an ounce of concern over sending an Alien Snot Monkey to pathology.

Disagree with me. I dare you.

And this will make no more sense than the other one did!

So, first: My insanely fancy bean trellis!



There is, of course, a story here, and it goes like this. Last year, I planted just a couple of Stueben yellow-eyed beans on something of a whim. I got about seven pods out of the two plants, which turned out to be (I thought) pole-bean type. (There are both pole and bush types of these, so, planting store-bought beans really was a crap-shoot that way.)

I harvested those pods, carefully and gently dried the beans, and put them into my seed box. There were exactly twenty beans-worth-saving. And then this year, I stuck my bean towers in the ground, planted the beans and waited.

They grew, and grew, and grew…and did not show the slightest sign of wanting to vine. Instead, they were acting extremely bush-like. They were spreading out instead of striving up. Every other day, I would inspect them closely, looking for the telltale tendrils that say, “Hi. I’m a vine, and I’m looking for something I can climb!”

Nada.

Eventually, as my midget not-pole beans began crowding around the base of the coveted bean towers and still not reaching, you know, up, I thought I had to be suffering some form of memory loss and that these had actually been bush-type beans.

And thus it was that I yanked the bean towers out, patted the beans fondly on their collective little blossoms and moved the towers over to become cucumber towers instead.

…about, oh, two days after the cucumbers were coming up? Vines.

On the one hand, I’m a bit relieved that they are, indeed, pole beans. Because I had such vivid memories on that front, and was frankly a bit perturbed by the fact that I had been so thoroughly wrong. I mean, what else am I not remembering quite right? I might be rich, famous and glamorous right now! Only I don’t remember it that way!

On the other hand, now I’m a bit perturbed by the fact that I was so willing to talk myself out of what I knew was the case. I remember the vines. I remember dealing with the vines. I was growing them on this little oddball patch of dirt, just to see what would happen. And they grew into these insanely long vines.

But I talked myself out of that pretty easily, all things considered. Which worries me. Because, seriously: What if I am actually filthy rich, but talked myself out of it because I thought I had conclusive evidence to the contrary, but I was wrong?!

These are the things that keep me up at night. Along with low back pain and, thanks to Recent Developments, a rollicking case of nausea and really vivid dreams that make even less sense than my usual rather…cough-cough…quirky subconscious offerings. (Y’all can imagine, right?)

In related news, today was my first work from home day. I worked from home today because yesterday I was pretty sure I was going to barf or something. Plus I almost just sort of randomly fell over backwards on an escalator because my inner ear got into a fist-fight with my other senses and kept insisting I had to lean back! further! further! QUICK, YOU’RE GOING TO FALL FORWARD OFF THIS THING, IT’S MOVING WAY FASTER THAN YOU THINK IT IS!

YA KNOW…I’d forgotten just how badly birth control messes with my system.

But it is coming back to me – oh yes, it is definitely coming back to me.

Last night, I was awake an irritatingly large chunk of the night because of stomach cramping and other complaints – like my stomach insisting I was going to throw up any second and then going, “Ha ha, fooled you!!” after I’d clawed my way out of bed to crouch obediently in the bathroom for a while.

This morning, I looked at the package of birth control pills, thought about yesterday’s middle-of-day smackdown (which felt like somebody had punched me in the gut with a syringe full of stomach flu virus or something), and decided that in my considered opinion, I could not support the given instructions to take one of the blasted things twice daily for the first week because said instructions violate my Personal Code, which includes among many other things the fact I will not turn a blind eye to human arrogance.

BECAUSE I MEAN, YOU KNOW…what is a week? It’s just a meaningless human construct we’ve erected in a pathetic attempt to declare ourselves the masters of the world we inhabit by inflicting our own rules on its nature; thus we divide a cycle of dark-follows-light into blocks that only make sense to someone who has lost three of their fingers in a tragic gardening accident (ooo, I so can relate!) and call it “a week.”

Because that person also couldn’t spell and was trying to describe how they felt after the accident, see? It’s all just made up, people! And I refuse to support such hubris by obeying instructions such as, “Take one pill twice daily for one week.”

{cue vaguely patriotic music}

We must face our uncertainties, embrace our own smallness, and not continue to double-down on chemicals which are making us almost fall over backwards on a BART escalator due to a sudden wave of vertigo. Word.

(Yes. I am the queen of rationalization and amplification.)

(Also, someday I fully expect that I will drop dead of something completely preventable because of logic very similar to this.)

(But, not this time. My hormones just got lost while trying to navigate through a normal menstrual cycle a few months ago. And then my body got all confused about whether or not it was pregnant, decided it totally was, and hilarity ensued.)

(Said hilarity being even worse than side effects of the hormones? I guess I’ll put up with it.)

(But not twice daily for an arbitrary duration set by human beings on a power trip. Because I have SOME standards.)

Then again on second thought…

So, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was something of an herbalist. By which I mean, my pre-parental-phase apartment was like a medieval apothecary’s lair. Dark bottles full of mysterious liquids, some sweet and airy like fairy kisses, some unctuous and reeking of…urine of night mare or something.

But once the husband moved in with me, I got rid of most of it; while I didn’t have anything eye-of-newt or “two drops of this will KILL YOU” lying around, I did have things that could cause…ahem…intestinal distress or other unpleasantness if taken incorrectly.

And there’s this thing people do with herbal stuff, where they assume herbal = 100% safe and/or “I can go ahead and take fifty-seven cups of this, it can’t hurt me because after all, it’s just herbal.”

And I wasn’t comfortable with having the herbal-rookie boyfriend crashing around deciding to try something labeled “headache – six drops in tea” with some weird bunch of letters on it that was actually my code for “go light on the drops and use a tea with ginger in it, otherwise your stomach will go bat-poop crazy on your poor backside” and then put a SQUIRT of it into his COFFEE or something because if six drops is good, well hell’s bells, a DOLLOP must be better.

So recently, I’ve started adding some herbal goodies back into my life; still no eye of newt or Deathly White Mushroom Spore or anything like that, but some powdered mixes and stuff to work on joint inflammation, appetite issues (I ain’t got none) and (ahem) aging female stuff; between the cost of supplements and my hippie tendencies, I’d just kind of like…things I understand. Things I could, in a pinch, grow, dry, powder, and blend myself. Without a prescription, without having to go through the “Oh, is this for female troubles? Because ya, {long involved story in front of God and everybody about her own female troubles} and I was wondering about this stuff…” conversation at the register.

It’s awesome living in a smallish town, you know? We do that stuff, chat at the registers and lots of folks have no problem at all digging right on into yer personal beeswax and sometimes, I find myself thinking, YA KNOW… back in Da City, ain’t nobody woulda said nothin’ about nothin’ and yet here I am, discussing whether or not comfry is good for irregular periods right in front of this poor, squirming, oh so very male truck driver.

ANYWAY. So I’ve been ordering my herbs from a favorite old source, Rosemary’s Garden, with a few fill-ins on the side from here and there. (The one problem with getting more and more and more “into” this kind of thing is, you find yourself going, “Yes, but, do you have the kind that is grown on this particular slope at such and so a time of year?” – which is ludicrous in some ways but, possibly due to the power of suggestion, you are nevertheless convinced that ONLY this very-specific thing will do. I can’t justify this in the slightest. Really. I just can’t.)

Now, at first I said, bravely, “Don’t bother with all that capsule-this and dissolve-powder that, I’m used to herbal teas and rather enjoy them even when they’re a tad different or bitter or what-have-you, I’ll just brew it. That would be simplest. And cheapest. Yes. Let’s do that.”

Yeah. Um. Some of this stuff tastes like…well, night mare piss. And sometimes they’re…stinky.

As in, if I tried to quietly make myself a cup or small pot of this at work, I would clear the whole building out. All thirty-three floors of it.

AND, the one blend I use most smells perfectly pleasant (whew!), but sets off my gag reflex big time when in tea form. I’m not kidding, even though it smells fine or even pleasant, and doesn’t exactly hit the tongue badly, I get about two swallows in and I’m gagging.

But, it works pretty darned well. So I said, said I, “OK, well, fine. I’ll just switch to capsules, whatever.”

And then I went looking for empty capsules…because of course I'm too damned cheap thrifty to discard what I have and just buy pre-filled capsules, are you crazy? AND FURTHERMORE, I have no intention of doing that going forward because price-per-dose of the raw materials is, like, less than a nickel BUT the price-per-dose is damn near a dollar if it is pre-capsuled.

Pffft. Like I can’t handle filling my own capsules…used to do it all the time, back in the day, yessir, and that was after I walked five miles in the snow uphill both ways barefoot, with nothing but a baked potato in my pocket to warm my hands…

Ahem.

Yes.

Well.

Empty gel capsules aren’t exactly hard to get (my local health food store had them, bless their hearts), but, you will get some mighty odd looks if you walk into your neighborhood pharmacy asking for them. And this is where Tama once again demonstrates that her familiarity with the drug cultures is somewhere between ‘none’ and ‘what are we talking about again?’ – I’m all, “Oh hai, ya, do you have, you know, empty capsules? That I could fill with herb powder?”

And the pharmacist is all, {eyebrows crawling clear to the back of her head}, “Nooooooo, we don’t…carry…anything like that.”

Took me three failed attempts and three rounds of wondering why they were looking at me like I had sprouted five heads to realize that waitasecond…California… “herbal powder”…ooooooooooh, they think I’m using…ooooooooooooh!!!!

I live a very sheltered life, really, you know?!

ANYWAY. When I finally hit the health food store looking for capsules – where they immediately knew what I was talking about and that I meant no really, pleasant-smelling-but-somehow-still-nasty-tasting herbal powder I can’t get past my gag reflex, instead of nudge-nudge-wink-wink-herb-powder-heh-heh-heh – she immediately handed me an enormous bag of maybe 200 capsules, each approximately the size of the Chrysler building.

I set them down disdainfully.

“Don’t you have anything in more of a, say, 00?” I asked with the air of someone who knows what the @*^&@ they’re talking about – which, thanks to Wikipedia, I sort of did. But not really. Because she immediately fired back.

“Wellllllllllllllllll…what are you filling them with again? Umhmmm…{knowledgeable pause, setting a long-fingered hand gently on the discarded product with the air of a wise woman} You may find you prefer these in the long run, because the standard dose for that in powdered form is roughly a tablespoon, is it not? The 00 will require between ten and twelve pills for a single dose, whereas these would be only three to four…”

Now friends. It has been many, many years since I messed with any of this, you know, myself. And I happen to know she’s right: The single dose is going to be roughly a tablespoon of the fine powder version - which is a lot to be cramming into capsules at one time.

But. Do I take the nice lady’s advice and tell myself that, after all, it would be four pills versus a dozen and I would probably be happier overall with filling four (4) capsules, not twelve (12), two to maybe three times a day? And that on the whole, I'd rather have to grimace down four super-sized pills (which would be exactly like taking two large vitamins at once, four times) than repeat the two-large-vitamin swallowing thing SIX times? Practice a little humility and try what somebody who actually deals with this stuff about every day recommends?

Shoot no.

Of course not.

That would have been intelligent.

Instead, for some bizarre reason, I decided I had to act like I No Really knew what I was doing. So I politely insisted that nooooo, I would really rather something more in the 00-size.

She smiled pleasantly, took back the Chrysler-building-in-gel-capsule-form, and handed me a nice bag of 750 00-sized capsules. (For point of reference, these are about the size of a ‘large-side-but-still-standard’ vitamin pill.) (The other ones are, like, something you would use to medicate your horse. Swear.)

And I went on my smug way, confident that I had shown my clear empty-gel-capsule-filling and self-knowledge superiority.

Uh-huh.

A couple hours go, I filled a dozen of the damned things for my pre-dinner dose of digestive + nervous system + joint tonic.

I am having second (third) (fifth) (thirtieth) thoughts about those super-sized gel caps. These 00’s are much smaller than they seem in the bag. My fingers have grown somehow larger. Plus I can’t see what I’m doing. AND YES, I’M WEARING MY GLASSES.

…or would be, if my Gran hadn’t thought they were hers and taken them home with her at Thanksgiving I DON’T WANNA TALK ABOUT IT, OK?!...

{sob} My life, I could almost hate it sometimes…

(But I’m still not buying pre-filled capsules. Because cost savings, people, EXTREME cost savings…)

Next, on Geriatric Adventures

I almost got into an accident on the way home from the optometrists today. Totally the fault of my new – and dreaded – bifocals.

SEE, I was driving along? And then I glanced down at the gauges? And they were, like, sharp and clear and easy to read?

And then I was so distracted by the Look At Road Signs, Look at Gas Gauge, Look at Road Signs Again, Look At Speedometer game that I almost drove off the road.

Bifocals: They are dangerous.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m still way getting used to them. I’m having to learn how to hold my head so that I’m peering through the right “half” of the lens for whatever-all it is that I’m doing.

Reading labels: Looking down.

Reading store shelf tags: Looking up.

But I have to admit, I did not expect them to be so…cool.

Nor did I fully understand just how…wide the variance was, between my long and short distance vision.

I knew that I constantly played the “glasses on, glasses off” game – off to look at your face, on to read your presentation, off to drive, on to shop. Except off again to see the BIG signs. But then on again to read the tags. Argh.

And while I was getting them tweaked around to more or less fit me, I was grousing that they were going to be worse than before. Worse, I tell you.

ALL YOU PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEM? You are crazy.

They suck.

Then I started driving, poised to rip them off my face if they proved distracting.

But they were fine. Actually, it was very nice. I generally rely on my keen sense of direction rather than street signs , because, uh, I can’t see them all that well. With or without my glasses.

Now I could see them.

And then when I glanced down to check how fast I was going, it really was kind of startling. It was so sharply focused – where I’m used to just kind of knowing that around there is the 40 mph mark – that I really was driving a little distracted for a minute there.

Glance up, glance down, glance up, glance down…

Yet again, I am astonished by the cleverness of my species. Of all the things to figure out, you know? Not only mashing two different prescription strengths together in the first place, but to then figure out how to do it so that there isn’t even the barest hint of a line between ‘reading’ and ‘distance’ – that’s danged clever.

Y’all were right. They’re not bad. They’re actually really neat, and exactly what I needed.

Still don’t like that part, though. Because inside my own head, I am still maybe…oh…twenty-six. Maybe. Occasional downgrades to eleven, especially when I’m playing Toontown and some kid is mean to me, like, saying my hat is dumb or that I’m not using the right gags or something (What? I only play it to make sure it remains a suitable environment for the kids. Because I am a crazy-awesome and devoted mother that way.)

I have no choice when it comes to growing old. Unless I manage to get myself killed off earlier somehow [not high on my “to-do list,” thanks], it’s kind of inevitable for me. But growing up…that I can resist until the bitter end. And I intend to be one of those ultra-embarrassing-yet-oddly-cool grandmothers someday.

With a motorcycle.

And bifocals with big, purple frames, possibly with little bug wings coming off the sides of them. Because how awesome would THAT be?!

I know. I’ll go away now, and let you ponder the awesome of enormous purple-framed bifocals now with big old bug wings coming off the sides of them.

Why Tama will never make it in fashion design: Exhibit One…

I’d roll my eyes, but it might hurt

I finally got around to getting an eye exam. It’s only been four years, and I’ve only been kvetching about my glasses “not working” for two of them, so, this is practically a new speed record for me.

Ahem.

ANYWAY, so, I made the appointment and then I dutifully trucked myself into the tidy little office where they proceeded to take all of my paperwork and blah blah blah, and then they asked me to read lines and barely kept from snickering when they handed me the card and said, “Just read this as you normally would…” and I held it out almost at arm’s length and then tilted it until it was almost horizontal while lifting my chin up and no matter how I tried not to, still squinted trying to make the little dots hold still and be WORDS, dammit.

For everybody except me, the fact that I was going to be getting bifocals was a foregone conclusion. I know they have no lines. I know nobody else is going to necessarily know I’ve “graduated” to bifocals. I know that eye health and comfort comes first. And I also know that just because you have bifocals does not mean you are contractually obligated to put on silly looking hats or start wearing nothing but muumuus.

{kicks at dirt, mutters} I just didn’t want to hafta NEED them yet…

But, I do. I so totally do. I’ve been doing the ‘schoolmarm’ thing for years, where I’ll yank my glasses waaaaaaay down my nose and then peer up at you over them. This is because I can’t read without them, BUT, I can’t see your face with them.

This is why mankind invented bifocals.

ANYWAY. Having already received this unsettling news, I spent a rather sulky fifteen minutes as my eyes dilated (joy) picking out new frames (fortunately with a great deal of assistance from a more fashionable staff member…I don’t think I’ll look like too huge a dork in the new ones).

And then we started the final phase of the eye exam.

And then the nice doctor went, “Huh.”

And then we went through the “look up, gooooood, now down? Goooooood. Now, all the way to the left…gooooooooooood…” game again.

And then he said, casually, “Tragically, you are going to be blind within a month, BLIND, BLIND I TELL YOU, OH, THE GRIEF AND SORROW OF IT ALL, YOU ARE DOOMED, DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED, POOR CREATURE!!!! OK, so, I’m seeing something that might be a slight anomaly between your left and right eye. I’d like to use a stronger dilating drop and see if I can get a better look at it.”

To which I said, eloquently, “Oh, uh, rokay…?”

And then he seared the top five layers of…um…whatever eyeballs are actually made of…off my eyes. And rendered them incapable of filtering any light. Plus put me in this bizarre place where my long distance vision was actually better than usual but my ability to fine-focus (reading, television, KNITTING!!!!!!!) was so badly impaired it was just…not OK.

But at least then he was able to categorically state that it wasn’t this thing, it was this other thing, which is not exactly common or particularly good but it’s also not anything bad per se except that it can be an indicator of something-something-something and that I should use lubricating drops and come back in six months so we could see if it got any bigger or smaller or perhaps built a little house for itself and started homesteading – because the cattle could be a real @*^&@ on your retinas, you know?

(Optometry in general leaves me feeling like a magician’s rabbit…one minute I’m all snug in my warm, dark little hole and the next I’m being held up in front of a shouting throng by some overdressed con artist thinking, “Wait, WTF?! That was a hat?! When did that become a hat?! And what does abracadabra even mean?!?!”) (“Is it better one, or two? Gooood. One, or two? Gooooooood. One, or two, or about the same?” how did he KNOW they were going to be about the same?!?! - sometimes, I half want to lie and say ‘oh, no, two was much better!’ just to mess with him…) (…except that then, I’d end up with Cyclops Vision or something, so, I don’t. But I think about it, every single time…)

Afterwards, as I was complaining mentioning that a) this really hurt and b) like, the diffused lighting felt an awful lot like lightning bolts zapping straight into my brain and c) my ability to read the receipts and stuff they kept shoving at me was what might be termed minimal, he tosses off ever-so-casually that Oh. Ya. Blue eyes tend to be like that, actually. They take the drops harder and more thoroughly, and they also tend to experience more of the unpleasant side effects such as light sensitivity and ‘flashing’…and that sometimes they take longer to shake it off as well. Should be no more than six hours but could actually take a DAY OR TWO, he tosses over his shoulder as he runs for his life…

Only the thought of how much the bright orange jumpsuit would have hurt my eyes right about then kept me from murdering him.

I had planned to be out of the (home) office for about two hours for this. I ended up having to take the rest of the entire day off. I had some delusions at first. I got home and unlocked my work laptop and…a bunch of…ink smears, floated up at me. In a pathetic and useless gesture, I put on my old glasses. Great. Now, it’s even worse.

I read through one simple email. I picked out the words one by one. I began to develop a pounding headache. The light from the screen was torture. The words were twisted, blurry, dancing-dancing-dancing. Dammit.

So I opened up an email and typed in the generic distribution group I use for general ‘administrivia’ messages – when I’m going to be out of the office or have brought cookies to work or whatever. And I typed in a message about my eyes and that I was going to go sulk rest them in a nice, dark room and give them a little while to un-dilate themselves.

And then I proceeded to compulsively try again to read things. Again. And again. And again. And when I wasn’t trying to read? I was pacing. Or, trying to go outside to look at the garden. Which I could not do because the light, the light, it burnssssssssss…!!

Yeah. As it turns out, I’m not very good at waiting patiently for something.

I know. It was a shock to me, too.

Because I’m a slow learner, I then took out my knitting – which is this Bernat Fair Isle Yoke Sweater…which I only just cast on and the pattern for which reads like, “First, do knit-one-purl-one rib forever…then do straight stockinette for forever plus five years…and then it will get mildly interesting!”

I finally settled on this project, after a great deal of indecision, precisely because of its simplicity – because I felt it was something I could continue working on, no matter how tired I was, how dark it was on the train or bus, how stressed out or distracted I was, etc. etc. etc.

So I said to myself, with great confidence, “It’s OK, Self. You can still work on this. Heck, you worked on it all the way home yesterday while staring out the window most of the time! You don’t need to be able to see-see to work on it!!”

And then I learned something. I frequently think I’m “not looking” at my knitting – and it’s true. I can knit in a movie theater. I can watch TV and knit. And I do stare out the train window a lot while knitting simple things.

But.

I also glance, in passing at it a lot. And without these swift glances, I become lost. And once you become lost on a k1p1 rib?

You end up with seed stitch.

Possibly quite a lot of it.

Sigh.

And the whole time, my eyes were burning. And itching. And even indirect sunlight was the bane of my existence.

It was not the best of days.

Plus.

I’m getting bifocals.

{pause to contemplate the emotional trauma}

You know…I never should have gotten out of bed today.

I just shouldn’t have.

Well isn’t that special…

So I saw my doctor yesterday, and he gave me a whack of stuff for my assorted grievances.

There’s a codeine-based cough syrup for the rib-cracking coughs, and a butt-kicking antibiotic that allegedly does in five days that takes a lot of antibiotics two weeks to accomplish. Namely, it kills everything in your whole body…and then lets nature sort things out, you know, later.

And some promethazine. To encourage my stomach to let food happen instead of tossing it straight back up.

I was skeptical. And irritated, because the cough syrup also contains promethazine; which means that I have to do math and keep track of when I took what, and how much of what I took and cumulatively speaking, how many mLs of this-or-that have gone into my system.

Which is a bit harder to do when one has been pounding back the codeine, jest sayin’.

But I was needed to believe in it. My body had been rejecting food for eight long days. I was hungry, exhausted, strung-out, light-headed and beyond irritable.

I needed food. Actually? Not just food. I needed food, dammit.

So I took one of those little pills and, while giving it a little time to work, tried to balance believing with all my SOUL that these little pills would work with a reasonable amount of caution.

It is my firm belief that what any medication will accomplish relies heavily on what we believe it will. If I do not believe that a sleep aid will help my insomnia, well, it generally doesn’t…if I do believe it, it could be nothing more than a tablet of pressed powdered sugar with a little yellow dye added, and it’ll work wonders for me.

But at the same time, chemistry can’t always be overruled by what my brain thinks should be the case. If I swallow antifreeze while firmly believing that it is no more harmful to my body than Gatorade, well…yeah. Still gonna die.

Chemistry can be mean that way.

So I sat there telling myself, firmly, that this was going to work.

And by golly, it did.

It took every last ounce of self-control I had remaining to me not to plow straight into the refrigerator and not lift my head from it until every last scrap of edible material had been sucked into my newly-quiet stomach.

And then I napped. Hard.

This is where I’d love to say that I got up this morning and was feeling so much better that I dug out all the weeds in the garden and did the laundry and put away the dishes and then worked a regular full day before heading off to run a marathon to raise money for abandoned sea turtles.

Eh…not so much. I’d kind of hoped that maybe I’d be feeling a lot better sooner, but apparently my doctor’s guess of two to three days before I started seeing much improvement was more accurate.

I still felt really bleh today. Some of the medication has raised (ahem) other issues, the rest of it makes me a marvelous combination of tired, listless, and brainless.

And doesn’t work on my cough. Makes me more cheerful about my cough (codeine + me = giggles), but I did absolutely zero work today of any kind.

Too busy coughing, you see…

I’ve dozed off in my chair. And played a video game. And tried to read, although my eyes are still kind of fuzzy on me. And tried to work on the cardigan, but what I needed to do kind of needed my eyes not to be going all fuzzy on me every time I try to focus them.

As things turned out, I have a sinus infection, a probable GI tract infection, the possible distant rumblings of a urinary tract infection as well, and a possible if not probable case of pertussis, a.k.a., whooping cough.

Astonishing. Shouldn’t be, but nevertheless is, somehow. I mean, I know I’m not young and that by extension this would mean that vaccinations I have not had “boosted” since I was a child are likewise old. And I know that they can lose efficacy over time. And I even knew that we had a fairly ugly round of pertussis going out here.

And that it was crazy-contagious.

What I hadn’t known was that sometimes, even if you are fully and recently vaccinated, you can still manage to contract pertussis. It’s a virulent, fast-spreading, easily-caught bacteria; it lives a long time outside the body, and has a million ways to get there.

And it hitches a ride for quite a while before you have any inkling that you’re sick; I was probably highly contagious for days before the first symptom hit me.

It’s a wonder any of us survive, you know? A testament, really, to the human body’s ability to take care of things on its own.

Most of the time, anyway.

You know, except when it doesn’t, and instead lets every bacteria it meets just come right on in and make itself at home, breed, fill up all the available spaces, dude, my parents are, like, in Malibu, come on in and PAR-TAY…

I was assured that I should start feeling a lot better in two to three days. And instructed to stay away from people for five days, giving the antibiotic time to kill off the bacteria enough that I won’t be spreading this thing any further than it has already gone.

…sigh…

Well…could always be worse. All things considered, I actually got off pretty light here, and should probably just count my blessings and be glad that…oh…

…OH…

Wait. I forgot something. Yeah. The cough syrup? Yeah. Grape-menthol flavored.

Grape. Frickin’. MENTHOL. What demented lunatic came up with that as a good way to make this stuff palatable? I’ll tell you what kind: A sadist, that’s what kind.

That’s it. I am officially the most abused person in the history of ever.

(Lord-Lord, it is nasty, seriously, abysmally nasty…it is like sucking down used antifreeze, mixed with crushed grape candies or something…UGH…!)

On day seven…

“Hi, you’ve reached the office of Dr. Awesome. If this is a life-threatening emergency, please hang up and dial 911. Otherwise, please leave your name, number and a brief message, and we will get back to you as soon as possible.” {beep!}

“Oh. Uh. Yeah, hi, uh, I think I might need to maybe make an appointment? Yeah, because? I’ve sort of had this thing for a while now? Like, it’s been over seven days, and I think it’s actually getting worse instead of better? But still, I think it’s just the flu so maybe it’s just a waste of time. I dunno. But it isn’t getting better. So, yeah, I think I should probably make an appointment. So, uh, here’s my number, and, uh, yeah. Lemme know if I should come in.”

That’s right. If you look up the word ‘forceful’ in the dictionary, you’ll find me listed there.

Under ‘antonyms.’

{face-desk}

I don’t know which is sadder: How long it takes me to call the doctor in the first place, or how conflicted I still am about the “need” to go.

On the one hand, seven days is a long time to be under the thumb of a germ. It’s just not letting up, not at all. Oh, it acts like it’s going to; I feel better in the mornings and think, A-ha! Finally! I’m getting better!!, and then, right about now every afternoon, WHAM. Covered in sweat, chilled one second, baking the next, whole body feeling like it’s being beaten with sticks, stomach cramps, sinuses exploding, etc. etc. etc.

Also, I haven’t managed to hold onto solid food since last Sunday night. This morning when I put on my jeans, I thought the gap between the waist and my body seemed a little more…generous…than usual: Twelve pounds have come off me since last Monday morning, when I felt just fine and had no idea I’d be kneeling in front of a toilet in a BART station by Monday afternoon.

…if only it were the kind of weight loss that would actually stick, you know? Because sadly, as I suspect we’ve all experienced at one time or another, losing weight this way is usually a very temporary sort of thing. Within hours of hitting the feeding trough again, I’m sure those pounds will be right back around my middle again.

Which seems bitterly unfair. I mean, not that “diet and exercise” are a particularly easy way to go, mind you, but still…this has been a miserable, rotten, lousy, no-good, wretched week for me.

Seems really unfair that the only good thing about it isn’t real, you know?

…feh…

But, on the other hand, long duration alone does not change the fact that it is probably just the flu. (In point of fact, it rather confirms that it is just the flu…as opposed to a really bad cold or something.)

Which means that going to the doctor about it is likely going to mean handing over $200 to hear the words, “Go home, go to bed, rest and drink plenty of fluids.”

BUT…at the same time…well. Much as I don’t think I am suffering from anything more dire than possibly a new sinus infection that is just starting up (…yeah…owies…), the fact remains that this has just been going on a while too long.

And wouldn’t I feel like a proper jackass if I were walking around with pneumonia or, or, or I dunno…Legionnaires disease…or…something?

Yeah. I would.

Even though I’m totally not.

I don’t think, anyway.

(On a related note: Do not ever attempt to look up your symptoms on the Internet in an attempt to determine for yourself whether your lungs are “crackly” enough to warrant a trip to the doctor. Holy crap. It’s either just a garden-variety flu bug, or…flesh-eating bacterial meningitis with raging coccidioidomycosis double-pneumonia radioactive cancerous nose job with a side of jelly-dipped bacon!!!)

(…wait, what?!…)

A day can’t be ALL bad when it involves mushrooms

(Unless, of course, you despise mushrooms. In which case, the rest of this little note will probably cause you to need to run for the bathroom.)

My dentist warned me yesterday that today might be a little…rocky.

To which I promptly stuck my fingers in my ears and yelled, “LA LA LA CAN’T HEAR YOU EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE I’M SURE LA LA LA!!!!!”

…which in retrospect may be why I woke up this morning with my jaw a little swollen and a lot painful. I mean, talk about just kicking Fate in the eye and expecting nothing to happen, right? If I’d crawled around trembling with fear and hoping for the best but resigned to the worst, and made all kinds of Arrangements for everything and alerted the media to the potential of me feeling like death warmed over, I probably would have been fine.

Instead, I woke up at 3:35 when the alarm went off and basically went, “…moan…”, turned it off, shuffled to the bathroom for pain medication, and went back to bed.

It was what might be called a slow start today.

And I managed to put in three (3) hours working from home before the combination of owies and prescription drugs for same rendered me a drooling idiot who should never be allowed near code of any kind.

Then, just as I was becoming quite certain that there could be no redeeming value to today…guess what?

(What, Tama, we’re dying to know what snapped you out of your drug-induced haze today…wait…you did snap out of it eventually, right?)

(Yes, and I have the renewed throbbing in my jaw to prove it…why, why does dentistry always have to be so @*^&@ing painful with me? Why can I never seem to have a simple little filling that doesn’t even require an Advil, let alone a regimen of pain killers that require military-like timing?)

(Welll, sweetie, if I were to have to take a guess, I’d say it’s probably because you ignore problems in your teeth until something really awful happens, like, I dunno, your tooth splits in half vertically, and only then will you make the time necessary to have them treated.)

(OK, who asked you?!)

(You did, and furthermore…)

(OH, SHUT UP! I CAN’T HEAR YOU! LA LA LA LA LA!!!!!)

Ahem. Anyway. Today, I finally ordered some goodies from Fungi Perfect.

Eeeeeeee! I can’t wait to make the husband get out there and drill a bunch of mushroom plugs into a whack of oak logs…!!!!!!

I’ve been circling this for a long while now. There’s a fairly large patch of real estate in the yard that stubbornly refuses to be good for anything.

In sheerest frustration, I stood there late this summer glaring at the lack of growing going there and started smarting off about how maybe, I should just grow mushrooms in it…

And then I thought…huh, I wonder…

And then (this being me and all), I knocked the idea around for a few months. Researched and thought about it and measured the temperature and the sunlight and compared that to ideal conditions and so forth and so on.

Finally, this very afternoon, I bit the bullet. (Not literally though. Biting and me are not on speaking terms right now.)

And I have four hundred assorted mushroom plugs, for lion’s mane, pearl oyster, and shitake mushrooms coming. Plus (because I couldn’t resist it) a start-up kit for what they’re calling “Espresso Oysters” – which grow in a medium made up of guess what?

Oh. You guessed. Yeah, coffee grounds. I have lots of coffee grounds. I usually split them up between the worm composter, the regular compost and direct application for the lemon trees and acid-base berry bushes, but, you know, hey. I could definitely spare a bucket or two to grow mushrooms in. (Also, think of the Conversation Piece possibilities! “Uh…there’s a…is this…erm…did you know that whatever-this-is has mushrooms going in it?”)

I found this picture on the Red Bay Farm website – this is what my “decorator feature” should look like once they get going.

Only, uh, there’s going to be, kind of…well. More than one log like this.



I'm so excited, I almost don't care that my jaw still hurts! I sure do hope this works...it's one thing to have a book tell you that you've got the right conditions and all like that, but another thing entirely to actually end up producing food at the end of the day.

So thaaaaaaaaaat’s…good…right?

This surgery has been a whole lot of not-fun. Friday, I looked like I had a golf ball stuck in my jaw. Kind of felt like I did, too. Pain, random bleeding, etc. etc. etc. The area stitches up is Considerably Larger than I had anticipated – silly me, I expected the surgery would impact the areas immediately around the one tooth. Ha ha ha ha ha. Yeah. The stitches extend from my front lower teeth all the way back to my last molar. I’m also still numb from the center of my lower lip to my ear, probably due to the swelling (which is gorgeously awful) putting pressure on that nerve that runs along the base of your jaw.

It’s awesome.

BUT, it went well and hopefully things will be getting a little better every day and then someday soon I will wake up and realize that I do not have to pound back anything because my jaw is throbbing.

When I woke up at Ridiculous O’Clock Friday morning, my entire life was one large red smear of pain. I could feel my heartbeat in my jaw. I was pretty sure I was no, really, dying. DYING. This was it. And then the great Pharaoh died of a toothache, the end.

Relief was about twenty feet away, in my bathroom. A bottle of Motrin, and a bottle of Vicodin. Four of the former, one of the latter, and I should be feeling the will to live again in less than half an hour.

…but it was soooo…farrrrrr…awaaaaaayyyyyyy…

Eventually, I managed to overcome inertia. Staggered into the bathroom, got myself a swallow of water, tossed back my pills, and crawled back to bed to wait for the relief to wash over me.

Which it sorta-kinda-partially did, eventually. Still hurt like a @*^&@^&, but I was able to grudgingly admit that I probably was not going to actually-literally die of the toothache.

Saturday morning was more of the same. Waking up too early, pain too intense, can’t deal, relief is far, far, far away…

Saturday night, with those two experiences under my belt giving me wisdom and guidance, I set a bottle full of water and my pills right next to the bed – so that I wouldn’t have to actually get up to get the pain relief started.

So, when I woke up this morning after a fairly decent night’s sleep with my face sure-enough throbbing like I’d been kicked in the face by a mule, I rolled over and smugly popped my now-routine four-Motrin-one-Vicodin combo. Then I lay back, folded my hands on my stomach and began my Zen-like meditations on suffering and how each moment of our lives is like a drop of water into a holy crap I forgot to hide the Easter eggs last night, GAH!!!!

“Tim!” I hissed. “The Easter eggs! We didn’t hide the Easter eggs!”

“Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz,” he replied urgently. Curse you, Super Sleeping Powers…!

I contemplated the relative importance of hiding Easter eggs and lying in bed waiting for pain killers to come along and, well, kill the pain. I pondered the probability that any of the Denizens would be getting up soon. I calculated just how much light there was outside and how long it would take said light to penetrate into the Inner Sanctum of Captain Adventure’s room – he’s generally our earliest riser and seldom stays in bed much past dawn.

I didn’t have twenty minutes. Shoot, I probably didn’t even have ten minutes. If I didn’t get up and get those things hidden immediately, well, it would be a(nother) year of many good intentions and zero follow-through.

Damn.

So I got up, went downstairs, and hid the 48 Easter eggs all around the downstairs – just in the nick of time, because I barely had time to slip back into bed before Captain Adventure’s little bare feet hit the floor with a thud and we were off to the races.

That I was able to get up and do this is, to me, a sign of considerable progress.

Friday or Saturday morning, if you had told me that Jesus Himself Personally was at my door asking for a cup of coffee, I don’t think I could have gotten out of bed to make it for Him. I’d’ve been all, If the dude can turn water into wine, I think He can @*^&@ing well manage to make His own damned coffee. Leave me alone, I’m dying.

But today, merely the thought that the Denizens would be rather disappointed if (once again) we had forgotten to “do” anything with the Easter eggs we’d fussed with so much was enough to overcome the throbbing and get me moving.

Which means it had to have been less-intense throbbing.

Which is progress.

Of a sort.

Right?

Right.

But man…I wouldn’t wish this on anybody. Not even the people who drive like jerks around schools when children are present.

Especially since they probably wouldn’t make the connection, you know? “Gee, this pain is awful! It must be because I drive like a jerk around that school every weekday while children are present!” – probably wouldn’t occur to them. So it would just be a wasted hex.

And what’s the point of that, I ask you…?

Almost ready for solid food!

Heh…the things you don’t think about when life is just going along the way it usually does. Things like chewing, for example. Or being able to reach down to tie your own shoe without having to lie down for a second to let the throbbing subside.

This new antibiotic may have some (ahem) unpleasant side effects and all, but apparently it works. I was a little worried when I first woke up, but a “mere” three Motrin and some coffee later I felt more than able to sit down and get back to work!

…which is another thing you don’t think you’d feel happy about, you know, “Oh goody, I can totally spend the next eight to ten hours working, yay!” is not generally high on most lists…but it feels pretty awesome right now!

My big worry right now is my short term memory loss and documented history when it comes to remembering to continue to take medications when I’m not being poked in the backside by symptoms. Now that things are settling down and I’m getting back to my passes-for-normal routine, I’ll have to be very careful that I don’t forget to keep dosing up every six hours.

…granted, the side effects of the medication may help me to remember because heh-heh, yeeeeeeeah…this stuff is, like, the chemotherapy of antibiotics. The production line motto on this stuff must be something like, “Kill them all and let the body sort it out.”

But it surely is nice to be able to think about the possibility of maybe eating solid food again, at some point.

Even if what my digestive system chooses to do with it afterward may be a little on the scary side…

Fun and Excitement, now with Better Antibiotics

Needless to say, I called the dentist (actually, I called an endodontist, which is the dude who specializes in root canals and other “pulp” related problems, but if it waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck…) (also, ‘dentist’ is easier to spell than ‘endodontist’, just sayin’) this morning. We discussed how things had gone over the weekend and there was some frantic activity and eventually we came to come conclusions about what-all is happening now and what will happen soon.

We moved my surgery date up to next week instead of week-after-next. We could not, however, move it up any further because he can’t do the surgery while things are so puffy and oozy in there. That’s right. I have to get better before I can have surgery. Oh, irony…

To which end, they upgraded my antibiotic to something I’ve never taken before. It is rather expensive, but according to theory it should actually kill 99% of all germs and bacteria in my body within the first twelve hours of taking it. Including the “good” ones, so I can expect some (ahem) fun and excitement in the intestinal department over the next few days. Good times!

Then they told me I need to stay close to home until I have my surgery, or at the very least until we get the infection under control. If the infection migrates out of my jaw into my body we could have things go really bad really fast; and, the side effects of the medication can apparently hit really hard without warning.

I suspect being on BART between Dublin and Castro Valley at the time would be…bad.

I have to admit, they’ve made me really nervous about taking this stuff. The list of “expected” side effects is crazy-long, and then there’s also a long list of “stop taking this immediately and call your doctor if” stuff, and then there’s also a shorter but scarier list of “if this happens, call your funeral home immediately to make arrangements because wow, are you ever screwed” stuff.

But then again, the list of scary around not taking it is even, well, scarier. Not surprisingly I’m pretty focused on just the pain part of the whole ordeal, but the infection all by itself is a pretty gnarly one. It has probably been bubbling away in there for quite a while, too – thanks to the stuff I take for my back and hip, things whose warning signs include “inflammation pain” are going to get a pretty good head start before I’m going to catch them.

Sigh.

It just seems so…unreal, though. Last week Monday, I felt great. No more cold, no more sinus headache, all the Denizens finally back to school after a week of one or more of them home with some variety of scrounge…awesome.

I only made the appointment for myself on my day off as an afterthought – I was making appointments for them, and then I thought, oh yeah, I should probably see someone about this and that and the other thing too…

Can’t put the off forever, these things. I need to have a whack of fillings replaced, and the implant needs a skin graft done around it, and I have a cracked crown that should be replaced.

I expected to spend part of Friday all numbed up with some new fillings glistening from my poor old teeth…but able to head out into the garden afterwards, and to spend the rest of my four day weekend working on all the things I had planned.

Spending the whole time, plus an extra day tomorrow, lying around unable to even knit…was really not part of the plan.

Neither was yet another two unpaid days “off” in the same pay period for surgery and recovery next week. Fie.

Still. Even though I’m not particularly happy about the whole thing, I still feel like one of the lucky ones. My husband is around to take care of me and the kids while I’ve been indisposed. He is able to work from home today and tomorrow, the window where the chances I’ll need someone to run me back to the endodontist or the hospital are highest.

And my income isn’t needed for our most basic expenses – losing these days sucks, but it doesn’t mean we’ll be falling behind on any bills or having to eat grass clippings or anything like that.

Oh well. If I get a good tailwind on this thing, maybe I’ll feel so much better tomorrow afternoon that I can get out there and get those tomatoes into the ground where they belong. They’ve been hardening off all weekend (I got that done, anyway), so all I need to do is get out there, clear out the rest of the three beds…dig 160 holes…cut apart the trays and drop each tomato plant into its hole…pack the dirt back in…and…ugh…you know what? I think I need to go lie down again…

(The “new” pea bed is exploding with pods! EXPLODING! There must a thousand of them out there, swelling up…they’re delicious, too, little juicy-sweet bursts of pure goodness…also, Captain Adventure loves to pick carrots, and has become quite the expert at picking out the ones that are ready to be picked… “Get him DAT wun, mom-MEH! Him is a gud car-wot!”) (Still won’t eat the carrots, mind you, HAHAHA, ‘tis to laugh, but he thoroughly enjoys the picking process…)