Thursday, like any day
Written on September 2, 2010 at 10:53 pm, by bk
I guess I’m not done with the pneumonia. It’s hanging on a lot longer than my previous bouts with bronchitis. The most annoying part of it all is the way my heart seems to thump away inside me, pumping hard to make the most of the reduced oxygen. When I try to take a deep breath, I end up in a coughing spasm and end up with even less air. It stinks in the way that things unfair do.
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I’ve been passing the time by setting up my new computer. It’s all super fancy and exuding the perks of Windows 7. I guess. Anyway, for the first time in two years I was able to trot out my music library, scraped from the internet into a sizable collection of my favorite tunes from the better, good old days. I hooked up the surround sound speakers and lit up a copy of Stephen Stills’ Southern Cross before my wife stuck her head in my door (the first time today) and told me I was making too much noise and to turn it down. I reduced the volume and turned it from hi fidelity and hi definition surround into the flat Muzak drone of Wal-Mart. I shut it off. If you can’t enjoy it, what’s the point? Around here, everything I do stinks, makes noise or hurts someone’s feelings. Never mind that I get roused all the time by the highly encouraged exuberance of children screaming with glee that could be just as wonderful somewhere else than right outside my door. I know that my smoking habit smells badly; but so do the countless open used diapers that populate virtually every wastebasket in the house, especially the kitchen. (What happened, Bob? You were hungry a minute ago.) If you look up the expression “double standard,” you’ll find a picture of our house. Okay, their house.
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I was supposed to go fetch my repaired scooter yesterday and then today, but I feel too shaky to drive. My wife keeps saying she’ll go with me and do the driving, but the few times I was ready, she had something else to do like play on the floor with the babies or shampooing the carpet she did last week. So I keep making appointments with the repair company and then standing them up. I wouldn’t be surprised if their opinion of me was low. I’ll try again tomorrow. If I miss that, it will have to wait through the weekend because the company is closed on Saturday and Sunday.
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Tomorrow is Friday and the day that hospice said they would return to see if I’ve changed my mind about staying their client. I tried the Trazadone they gave me for sleep the night before last. I went to sleep alright. But I walked around in a nearly uncaring cloud all of yesterday. Or would have if not for the helpfulness of my step-daughter to raise my ire. But even it was kind of passionless. I hate to sound like a scene from Star Trek with Kirk screaming “I need my passion!” after his psyche was cleaved into good and evil and he was trying to uncleave himself. But I get his point. I don’t want to be dumbed down, I gotta be me. Jeez. Another lyric. Is it just me, or does everyone’s life follow a pattern laid out by a film or music producer?
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I’m just an aging veteran
Who never returned from war.
I wasn’t expecting to get much,
But I thought there might be more.
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Anyhow, since they can’t provide me the O2 and their drugs aren’t the droids I’m looking for, and they got some important information wrong, my thinking is that there isn’t much point in retaining their service. I still haven’t heard from them since they said they would check on the oxygen thing and call me back. That gives me the distinct impression that they are finding me as problematic as I am finding them. Last night I put their Hydromorphone (dilaudid) dosing suggestion to the test. We knew that in the hospital that it took two milliliters of dilaudid to have a positive effect on my pain. So the question was, how many of these pills did it take to equal that two ml? They called their pharmacist to ask, and the reply given to me was that it took four of the pills to equal one ml. Ergo, I would need eight pills. Turns out the pharmacist said that it took 4 mg of the solid to equal 1 ml of IV dilaudid. In this case, that meant that one pill was equal to 1 ml. Always suspicious of medical advice these days, I blew off the four pill ratio and thank god I did. I took two of the pills and spent the next five hours VERY stoned. This told me two things; one, I was right to be suspicious and two, how can anyone possibly like being high on this stuff. I hated it. But then there I was with full doses of both morphine and dilaudid in me. I can only imagine what would have happened if I took eight pills. I sure as hell wouldn’t be writing this today. I’d be in the drooler ward. Or the morgue. And all because there was a misunderstanding; they were thinking and saying “pills” when their pharmacist was talking milligrams. It’s an innocent mistake, but there sure seems to be a lot of those in my life. After a while, you kinda don’t care how innocent it is.
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Oh, well. No one ever said that life would be kind or fair. But I sort of figured that the promises made to me would be honored. I was wrong. So I keep having these sound bites echoing in my head; The best care anywhere. Love, honor, and cherish. Factory refurbished. P.T. Barnum said it: There’s a sucker born every minute. Perhaps that’s why I feel like I have a stick up my … never mind. I’m just grousing.
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My new super whiz-bang motor operated, computer driven telescope is still sitting in its box. The skies were really clear last night, and from my window I saw a shooting star. Usually you have to get away from the city to see them, but there it was, sliding across the sky against a backdrop of scattered diamonds resting on black velvet. It was pretty. Anyway, I have to assemble the scope from it’s 8 boxes in the big box, and the instructions show it to be reasonably simple, but a process that must be executed with care. It’s very easy to jar a telescope and misalign the optical pieces. If that happens, you end up owning a $650 kaliedoscope. So I’m picking my moment to spread it all out so I can follow the steps in the directions. Doing this in my room will be a challenge; it’s already pretty well packed in here. But this is the only room in the house over which I have even marginal control so it has to be done here. I can’t take it out to the living room because that is family territory, replete with toddlers who would be congratulated for their industry if they toppled the equipment. I could do it in the middle of the night, but then that would mean foregoing sleep, which doesn’t particularly appeal to me. In my wife’s parlance, that means I am choosing to be cooped up.
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My beloved runs hot and cold; bipolar I think. But I’m no psychologist. I just know that one moment I’m being told how loved and important I am, and the next I’m a heinous and hurtful bastard who’s ruining her life. No middle ground. Today I’m apparently an ass. It started yesterday, actually. Right after I got off the phone with a bill collector trying to collect a bill that had been paid. I emailed him a copy of the receipt and that shut him up. But when I got off the phone I said that I was really tired of being screwed, and the next person who wanted screw me better kiss me first. I didn’t use the word screw. With everything about her. my wife, I think, took it to mean I was talking about her. She’s been the ice queen ever since. I have no intention of setting her straight, she wouldn’t believe me anyway.
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Multiple Myeloma doesn’t only disintegrate one’s bones; it disintegrates lives and spreads its tentacles out to everyone adjacent to the victim. It’s easy to see how death could be a relief for some people.
