Why I was doin it rong

Mister purry ginger cat was decidedly ill today, feverish and off his feed. It occurred to me that he had not eaten or played rodeo with his sister last night.  I felt the loose skin on his back and decided he might escape and go off and die of dehydration without a vet visit. The vet concurred. She was of the opinion that he had consumed too much squirrel earlier in the week and was suffering gastritis as a result; his belly xray was inflamed but not showing any visible squirrel parts. So one expensive injection and sub-q fluid bolus later, he got a cat taxi ride home and slept it off. He feels better tonight but he is staying in tonight to heal up, not that he is appreciating it.  Next time he shows up with vermin it is going into a Kroger bag and the garbage can, never mind how bad it smells it up, it beats paying a day's wage for belly medicine for a cat with bad taste in rodents.

Pictures and pills

I got my busted foot up to the doc today and she sent me off to have its picture took. Finally figured out a way around the $125 xray copay; she is a master of coding. Did you know that your xray is covered on your insurance if the doc codes "foot hurts in a few places" but you have to pay a big copay if the doc codes "dumbass fell down"?
Rachel Maddow said the other night that health insurance companies were evil whether you are covered or not and I think this is an example of that.
I made the appointment to tell her, I give up, I want morphine, I can't stand living at pain level 7 anymore.
But this weekend I stumbled on a small study about an antibiotic that is not absorbed, it just works in the gut against traveler's diarrhea and was useful to some people who had severe diarrhea-type IBS with restless leg syndrome and fibromyalgia. I don't let the docs quantify my severe, painful leg spasms as RLS or my generalized, pressure-point pain as fibromyalgia because I don't want them to think I am a nut, but the criteria do fit. I showed the study to my doc and she was elated; she remembers me coming to her after a bout of what seemed to be tourista after a meal at a festival, with diarrhea that wouldn't give up, and horrendous atypical colitis that had resulted. She had recently mentioned my case to a collegue and he had asked if I'd had too many antibiotics and perhaps had bowel overgrowth as a result. She happily wrote the antibiotic scrip, I went and got the zinc and probiotic that is part of the regimen, and I will start taking the antibiotic today. I really hope this is the magic bullet. Then the other supplements my sis sent me for my depleted adrenal function would have  a chance of working.

Don't talk with your mouth full

It cooled off a lot last night and I left the back door open this morning for the air. The critters have been enjoying strolling in and out, even lazy old lady dog. I was answering a friend's email when I heard ginger boy cat enter by the open door, meowing almost continuously, unusual for him. He usually just calls once and purrs. I got up to see what had him so excited. Oh, dude.
  Not again.
Well, it was really a squirrel this time, and it was all dead. Ginger cat usually does not allow himself to be carried but I was steadily fussing and he was concentrating on not dropping his big ole dead squirrel so out the two of them went the way they came. Slam went the door behind the pair of them.
So much for relaxing enjoyment of the three days of fall weather we get here. I do have one window that is not painted shut, that will have to do. Until a dead possum dragged by a cat comes in it or something.

All-Important Nose and Tail Security

I like how my orange guy loves to sleep with his nose and tail all tucked up safely. He can purr super-loud even with his nose buried like that. Seems like it would tickle. If I am too noisy he wraps his paws over his eyes, like I am giving him a headache and he is trying to hold his head on. 

Watch what you ask for

I strapped the broken foot together with tape, literally, and somehow got into an office for an interview without the manager being able to see me limp in or out. Magic, really. I had worked really hard on that new state application and made myself super resentful in the process. It took about half an hour of Work for me to tease myself back into a human state of mind after finishing it, I was just so annoyed by the ten pages of paperwork. So the job is not a great one by any standards; it's in a really gritty hospital, pays fairly poorly, and offers no benefits besides the paycheck. But it's a foot in the door, if I pass my boards I would have a good shot at any good openings that came up, and it's eight-hour shifts and no lifting. Plus, hey, they offered it to me. Seriously. Only five months out of work, and I finally got a job offer here in town. I'm trying not to worry about being too sick to pull off a whole day of walking and working; I'm telling myself it will help my stress to not worry about money and have the opportunity to get a better job in the system.  Now: heal foot, pass boards, buy street clothes that will accommodate big swollen belly as none presently do, and set off to work in a month if my background check comes back okay. It should, I just passed two of them for other hospitals. My belly's huge, unexpected, and unpleasant response to the good news of the job offer made me really glad I had turned down that New Orleans gig. I can't really cope with the stress of a change here in town without a lot of deep breathing and belly pain, so trying to move house and start that new career would have meant a very bad end indeed. I'm so overdue for a remission on this colitis. The docs looking pained and hopeless do not make me feel better when I ask them when I will get some relief.
In really good news, OoA#1 got a meeting with the professor she wants to do research with and it looks like she will no longer be wandering in the wilderness, but is now invited to lab meetings and will be given access and be welcome in the group. They were super nice to her this summer, then the academic protocols of the grad school dictated they keep their distance; another prof tried to poach her but she only wants to do research with this group and it's been a lonely two months for her until now. I feel better and have less stress already knowing that she will have a group to join since the campus in general has been such a bust in terms of potential friends.

Countdown Begins!

I finally got confirmation of my registration for my tests that I sent in, um, six or seven weeks ago. Maybe eight, who's counting. Anyway, they straightened it out, and I am taking one of them on Oct 5 and one Oct 19th. The only problem is the test is hard-scheduled for 1145 which is not so great for my belly. The old group had times throughout the day you could choose for the two-hour test. But noon is better than nine so the studying continues!

Bargain Healthcare

My leg is not broken, so I've got that going for me. The Kinesio tape has pulled most of the bad bruise out of the  shin area and it's stopped hurting now that the bruise is superficial. The foot is another matter. I ran into my acupuncture doctor at the Sam's Club and she pointed at the wreckage in dismay. I told her the story; luckily in her view, OoA#2 can do no wrong, and she was not mad at him for dragging me off. Even though she's pretty sure he broke my foot. "Immobilize it" is her decree. Because there's no visible bruising and I can take some weight on it, she's pretty sure it's stress fracture type breaks from the foot getting twisted, and I will need to keep it taped up for about four weeks at least. Going to the pool is pretty great though, by the time I walk down the lane and back the foot stops hurting. I'm glad I have the daily water to move around in.
We bartered OaA#2's fixit skills for some extensive dental work that had to be done on his fat ginger cat. The poor thing had some type of very strong thin string lodged high on one of his canines, and it gave him a terrible abcess. The tooth had to be removed and surgery done. Luckily his vet is awesome; she is a cat specialist and knows we are both job deficient, and had failed gutters on her house. So the fella has two weekends of gutter repair, the cat has many hundreds of dollars of oral surgery and medicine, and the vet has a home with lovely pristine eyebrows. It was her idea to barter and such a huge relief. I am hoping it is a sign our luck is turning. I have been working very hard on re-doing my state hospital application form, and such a nightmare of typing you can't imagine, all for a job that is full-time no benefits bad hours but dammit a job. If I could just get one of these bum feet in a door somewhere.
I was elated this morning to find the ginger avenger in the back yard. The man next door had an aggressive calico who regularly came over just to beat up my two smaller cats. They started moving their territory farther away, which has been really distressing to me; I have this wonderful yard and I want them to stay home! The people who have been living there recently moved out and the calico is gone. It's taken a week for my cats to realize they can be in their own yard. I hope they stake it out. Old lady dog spends less than ten minutes a day in the yard doing her business, so she is no help with menacing strays. The cat vet says I should get traps from the shelter and box up the mean ones for the pound, and give car rides home to the ones with tags so they will be traumatized by coming to my yard and stay out. I feel like a BB gun on one pump would be more effective and make me look less crazy. Do they still make pump-style BB guns? I bet not. Paintballs are too hard, I know that.

I miss skinned knees and mosquito bites

I had this big plan, marry a great guy, have four kids, be happy. Well, the great guy turned out to be a weasel, the four kids soon devolved into all my eggs into one beautiful little basket, and my plan has had bandaids on it pretty much ever since, mostly financial. We had a lot of fun when she was smaller and there was less economic pressure; even though she's kind of a handful with her tendency to panic, she was really balanced out when she was dancing a lot. It seemed harder to me once I sent her off to college and she started having problems I couldn't help with, like the mono that kept coming back and flooring her, followed by the catastrophic migraines. There wasn't any outlet at college for dance for her, and I had high hopes for grad school, they promoted their dance programs a lot.
Grad school so far has been brutal. She's been there five weeks and has yet to make a single girlfriend; she's never been anywhere twenty minutes without a new lifelong buddy.
She got heat rash so bad she developed a sensitivity to her own skin and got hives on top of heat rash. She hates taking medicine and is now having to keep up with a migraine and allergy regimen to avoid being put on steroids.
She was elated to sign up for jazz, tap and ballet classes. She loved the teachers and happily fell on her butt after four years out of class. Then the school changed her class schedule and she can't go to tap or jazz. She went from nearly five hours happy a week to a sad little ninety minutes.
Her car died dramatically yesterday and had to be towed, just as she was trying to go to the one fun thing of her week, the farmer's market. It had been sputtering but she had been saving up and planning to take it in to the garage after the next paycheck to keep the budget from being busted. So much for that.
The weather there has already begun to turn cold and gray, and it will be cold and gray for seven months. I need to Amazon Prime her a light box and pray it keeps her from becoming suicidal in the dark, she would get a little mopey in November here in the South for crying out loud.
I think I wouldn't worry so much if I had a job, really; just knowing I had enough money coming in would make me feel more capable of making her feel better. No, I couldn't buy her friends, but I could fly her home for a break from not having any and make her some manicotti.
 I thought this mom stuff got easier when they got older.

Seven to Twenty-three

Of all the ailments of error my sorry excuse for a Christian-Science raised youngun self has experienced in my lifetime, I can honestly say I miss hyperthyroidism the most. Gawd, yes. In my teens  I slept a few hours an afternoon in the newspaper room up at school, a few hours at home, and ate at least four thousand calories a day while maintaining the figure of a praying mantis. That actually continued until college, when a bout with some unlimited Jersey milk brought on an extra fifteen pounds and the most enjoyed bout of anorexia any girl ever exercised her way into. I have a picture of myself at that time, thinking how fat I looked, and the wind blowing my hair was more substantial. Until my foot surgery two years ago, there's never really been a time that I couldn't just limit my portions and exercise off any extra weight, usually as an adjunct to the celebration surrounding the release of yet another significant other into the wild. Last summer changed that pretty dramatically. I'd been going to pain management, trying to keep plugging along at work, and the Lyrica she gave me for my horrendous foot pain gave me a sudden extra ten pounds on top of the eight I'd gained lying around with both feet in the air all winter and the ten I'd put on with feeding the boyfriend some fine-ass vittles. All of a sudden I was hugely fat, like at the pre-eclampsia delivery weight but without a baby, and then, boom. Colitis to cut me off at the knees.
Here is the thing. Diarrhea does not make you lose weight. Your metabolism changes and you store fat around the middle. Even at its worst, when I was unable to eat more than six hundred calories a day, I didn't lose much: I got down to 165, still ten or fifteen pounds too heavy for my frame, and the steroids put it all back on in two weeks.
Right before the trip to New York, I had another flare. The trip was, okay, horrible physically. I got back and showed my docs my bloated belly and how my hair came off in my hand; they shook their heads, again, and said, well, at least this time it wasn't caused by a CT. I had gained another 5 pounds right before the trip all in my belly and that is the most I have ever weighed. I could feel how the inflammation was making the guts all big in there, but I was not even going back on the steroids. Just back in the pool.
Right  around the time after I got back from New York, the weight started coming back off. My belly still hurts, the famous poop is still presenting itself at its usual intervals, but the weight is finally coming back off. Today it was seven pounds down. Now I have 23 to go; maybe if I can get the pressure off my guts they will stop punishing me all day, every day. My GI doc doesn't think so, he's never seen somebody get colitis from being fat, but he hasn't come up with anything better so far. Come on size 10 jeans size eight dresses, mama wants to not poop all morning and hurt all day long.

Yum, Zoom, Splash

I got two big evenings out on the jetski this weekend and had a big old time. Sunday some of our vegetarian friends came and brought their cousin, and we had grilled leeks with romesco sauce, grilled eggplant stuffed with seasoned ricotta and covered with marinara and parmesan, crostini with fresh mozzarella, tomatoes, and basil, a pasta and white bean salad with pesto, and tiramisu. They brought the tiramisu from Target and it was yum, I made the rest. Yesterday we went by ourselves and had some ribs and homemade potato salad. The jetskiing was mixed both days; the friends were enthusiastic but timid, so we did quite a bit of shepherding them around while they drove verrry slowly, encouraging them to go faster so it would plane a little and not be such a rough ride. But they seemed to like their first ever jetski driving. Yesterday started a little alarmingly; a squall came up and I thought it would follow a previous cloud so I went across the lake. It followed me and basically washed my hair and kicked my butt; I've never had waves go over the whole craft before, and that part was not fun.  By the time I fought back across the lake, it had died down and I spun around a little so I would have some fun before I got off, I didn't want the horse to throw me. It smoothed out, both of us got on to scoot around, and he spotted a big green lawn chair the squall had blown into the water. He didn't want anybody to get hurt hitting it, so he tried to scoop it up; when he fell off in the effort, he dragged me off and my left leg got involved with the steering column. It's some interesting colors today, and the foot is making distinct "I am broken" grumbles. I think it's just ligaments and hyperextension, it was not very painful when I went to the pool today. We now have one good foot between the two of us, his right one. But the rest of the scooting was awesome, super smooth and fast, under a Maxfield Parrish blue and gold sunset. And we did get the damn lawn chair up on a pier.  Tonight I am making some crawfish etouffee as soon as this thunderstorm lets up so I can drive over there.  The writing is on the wall for his job, maybe this week, maybe next, but soon; meanwhile, we will eat well and party small.

What I did and didn't say

You would think that more people on this earth would realize that they enter it helpless and exit it the same way and are damn lucky if they don't spend a good portion of the intervening years nearly so. But as I limp and faint around, I find that there is a pissant attitude of superiority among the temporarily able-bodied that does make me need to bitchslap them occasionally. I managed not to hit anyone who acted alarmed for themselves when I would commence to faint and sit down suddenly last winter, probably because I was too weak to lift my hand to them. But wearing my Kinesio tape on my feet and legs has been a mixed blessing at best. The good thing is, it is remarkable how it can turn off some of the muscle spasms in my right foot and lower leg; think of having a charley-horse for two years and putting some stretchy tape on there, waiting twenty minutes, and realizing it has stopped. Ahhhhhh. I was really excited and also made extremely aware of just how goddamn painful the big spasm that stretches from the top of my sciatic nerve to my ankle is, so I taped that one, too. It helps some but it's not the light-switch fix, I guess because that muscle is so large and deep. Still, I'm not limping when I start to walk for the first time in almost two years.
Point of this is, two people at the health club have been rudely curious this week about my tape and I have been holding back....some. First there was this pet pomeranian junyaleegah pipsqueak woman in the dressing room. Her inquiries were at first polite, and I answered them, then she started hinting how disfiguring the blue tape was on my leg. I glared down at her puffy styled blonde hair and stated firmly, "I think it looks better than the limp." She cackled off with her feathers a little ruffled; junyahleegahs would rather die than have their legs taped apparently.
The next day, I was giving my lane in the pool to this guy who was, honestly, square. Really. He was about five two and about five feet wide; his neck-fat was wider than his chin. His moobs were as big as my boobs. His arms didn't go down, but out, because his fat distribution was all the way around him, not just in front. Now, I'm 25 pounds overweight, but he is carrying around enough stored calories to nourish Darfur for the whole dry season. What does this champion specimen say to me? "Hey, does that racing stripe on your leg make you swim faster?"
What.
I heard him fine but I smiled and made him repeat it.
Twice.
I kept smiling and nodding.
Here is what I did not say:
"Yeah, motherfucker, it makes me swim like Michael Phillips. Does that flotation device you are wearing make you the Guardian like Kevin Costner?"
Here is what I did say:
"Oh, yeah. Faster. Ummm-hmmm."
Honestly. What is wrong with people.

Bellyache and Pondering

Stressing that phone call on Wednesday was like taking a gut punch. My insides went, well, crazy. I started wondering yesterday and woke up considering today if I was going to be having surgery to remove part of them on the left or if that spot was going to refrain from exploding. This problem is something my GI doc and I have discussed without resolution before: how do you know when your insides explode, when they often hurt enough to make it hard to breathe? When do you go to the ER?
He doesn't know either.
I had a good two days after the stressful call, too, got to visit with three friends, made some great food, got some great exercise, got an encouraging call from a recruiter who may have a lead on a local job in the next six weeks. You would think good stuff would cancel out bad.
Apparently not when it comes to guts with a mean streak.
I have, however, gotten ahead of a lot of this damn house. But it keeps trying to catch up with me.  There was an article in the NYT yesterday about floor-cleaning robots. I think they are on the wrong track. We need Jetson-style serious kitchen and laundry robots. Dishes in cabinets, clothes in drawers. That little Roomba shit will not get it. Hell, we need errand robots; give them your debit card and a list and send them to the damn Kroger. Let them send you pictures of stuff they have questions about. Men engineers think small. We need more female engineers.
I need to go drink some Pedialyte to mediate this new belly disaster and try to rally for some errands in the heat. Three stops feels like Everest some days.

Divining the Alignment of the Stars

I took many, many deep breaths yesterday and tried to turn down the job in New Orleans. Then I got the email from the nice guy who would have been my boss. The relocation money wasn't a joke, exactly, but it wouldn't have covered the moving expenses and the terms they wanted to pay it on would have given me some serious crunch in the finances. So I sat down this morning and wrote down all his numbers, left messages on all his voice mails, and answered his first prompt callback of this whole process. He was very nice and asked me to refer anybody who was already down there that I found out about and I told him I was going to a meeting next week and would definitely ask around.
Wow.
I coulda been a contender.
A contender who had to self-move to a place as humid as Panama, fix up a house, rent a house long-distance, comfort a chronically anxious senile dog, two wild cats, mend the fences at a small hospital that's mad because two of their friends got fired to hire her, establish a new practice, pass her boards, and make the cut on a 90-day probationary period with no one to even go to the grocery for her, in a place with very few grocery stores five years after Katrina.
I am hoping that I did the right thing. Right now I'm sure I did; I still get weak and sick after just a few errands and an hour of house work, and I still have to study for and pass my boards. I can make my money last until March, and with my certification, surely I will get something. It does bother me that I am sending out three to five resumes a week with no answer and most of the jobs I'm applying for fit my experience level really well. But I'm gaining control of the house for the first time in three years, and feng shui has got to help. My nerves, at least.
At ten nightly old lady dog and I go outside for her to pee. I peer up at the sky. So far, the stars aren't telling me much.