The Burrow

After weeks of inactivity, my first attempt did not go well.  Many deep breaths and a cool face wash helped me finish the class, but instead of going to the garden I drove straight home and slept for 3 hours. It's too expensive to keep heating the pool, so swimming isn't an option.   Recently (and for the foreseeable future),  Amster's travel schedule and mine have kept us apart and away from our weight workouts in her home gym.   Today, I tried again.  The mind was willing but the musculature was a lot weaker than I expected.  There are adjustments and modifications to the high level exercises and I took full advantage of them.   I'm reminded that it takes far less time to lose it than to earn it back as I feel everything starting to wake up.  It's a good start.   Too bad it will soon be interrupted by our Halloween visit to the Big Grandkids. This may just end up being the season of getting back in shape... it's the jour...

I showed up right on time for my COVID and flu shots. Last time I got them both at once and had no reaction.  Foolishly,  I thought the past was prologue. Unfortunately,  they only sent the full strength, not the extra strength flu vaccines, to my Albertsons' pharmacy.  Being of advanced age,  the pharmacist and I agreed that I should search elsewhere for the more powerful dose.  I didn't care which arm he used.  I was offered Pfizer but asked for the Moderna version, again, foolishly thinking I'd be okay.  The needle was undetectable.  I didn't feel anything when the serum went in. I spent the afternoon waving my arm around to distribute the vaccine and keep it from getting stuck in my tricep. I felt fine until I didn't.  Sleep was elusive.  My digestion was carrying on a somewhat disturbing conversation with itself. By 7am I gave up and sat up and wished I hadn't.  Malaise.  Generalized yukkiness. A slow, dull, rhythmic ...

My daughter called the after-surgery-photo I sent next level . My husband texted Wow, that's some bandage. The puffiness moves around my face; this morning I woke up looking like Donald Duck. The small potato stuck to the middle of my face did nothing to improve the situation. Nothing hurts.  The bottom of a 16oz Costco water bottle fits perfectly over my eye, cooling above and below while avoiding my eyeball.  15 minutes on, 45 minutes off, my arm holding the bottle propped on a pillow when TBG's forearm starts to wobble.  It's an all hands on deck situation. The bandage is a distraction covering the occasional itch.  It's in my line of sight, which makes typing and reading a brain teaser.  I can ignore it only for so long before I have to cast my gaze to the horizon.  I've been listening to podcasts while football players run across the television; neither activity requires much of my eyeballs. I'm writing this Saturday morning.  Tomorrow I remove th...

I'm fine.   It was as pleasant as something like that can be.  Everyone was helpful and thoughtful and skilled.  Only one pass of the scalpel was needed; I was home before noon.   I am sporting a  gigantic bandage in the middle of my face.  I look  like J. P. Morgan.  That's the worst of it.  I'm a very lucky person. 

I am to be at the office at 6:30am, for Mohs on my nose, as the rhyme goes.   It is not life threatening , but last week the dermatologist told me not to wait to see the surgeon, so here I go.  It's an out-patient procedure in their stand alone, Medicare approved, state of the art clinic located 7 minutes from our house.   It takes 2 hours to develop and analyze the tissue samples.  If there aren't clear margins, they go back for another slice.... and so on and so on, in two hour segments, until the doctor sends me home, cancer free.   TBG insists on driving me there and back.  He would want company for the duration;  I just want to be left alone.  It took all my persuasive powers to convince him that watching him sit in a chair for 3 or 4 or 6 or 8 hours was not the way I chose to spend the afternoon.  I am quite used to being the one doing the sitting; from personal experience I advised him to make better use of his time. Wha...

Or so the gerontologist said yesterday, while showing me my DEXA Scan results.  She gave me a sandwich - good news on the outside, the bad news smooshed in the middle.  There were 6 pages of information, but she said the last 5 were less important than the top sheet, the one with the Densitometry Results. My spine is Normal.  That's abnormal for a person of my age, sex, complexion, eye color, and heritage.  I should be in the Osteopenia range.  I'm not.  In fact, my spine is in 7.9% better shape than it was two years ago when I last had a scan.  That was the good news, surprising to my doctor and comforting to me.  My right side seems just fine, too. The filling of the sandwich was filled with less wonderful news.  Apparently, my left femur neck is Osteoporotic.  It's such an ugly word.  It sat on my heart.  My eyes began blinking back tears I didn't know were hiding, up close and ready to drop.  As the physician des...

TBG's brother, Uncle Chuck, tries very hard to take good care of his physical being.  That being has betrayed him more than once, but he doesn't begrudge it.  He's stoic where others (I, for example) would rail.  He accommodates his ailments with moments of crisis, but Auntie Em is marvelous at calming the waters.  He is a kind and gentle soul, without (as far as I can see) a competitive bone in his body.  Team sports were never his thing; riding his bicycle has kept him in shape into his 70's. There was a time in his life where a pan of fudge could keep him satisfied all day.  As he grew older and wiser he became more vigilant about his diet.  He read, he listened, he shopped.  He thought about what went into his mouth, and he tried to make wise decisions. For example, twice a week he treated himself to an enormous spinach salad at a local establishment.  He and I used to fork-fight over the last of Hough's creamed spinach soufflé at f...

The town which nurtured my children in their youths is in the news these days.  There's a youngster recovering from chemotherapy for leukemia and a unvaccinated cohort of classmates who are putting him at risk for measles. The little one can't be vaccinated; his immune system is too weakened by the cancer treatments.  Should he become ill, the consequences could be grave.  The school has a No Peanuts policy because "some children could die" but refuses to consider a requirement for vaccinations.  Though the school nurse was careful to insure that all his classmates had received the vaccine, that doesn't protect him at recess or assembly or on the playground, waiting for school to start. It's personal for me.  I was president of that school board.  We brought great changes to that district, not the least of which was not rehiring a long-time superintendent, and we paid a heavy emotional price for doing so.  There are still people who...

Opening my eyes hurts.  There are flashing lights shimmering at the edges of my field of vision.  Trying to focus makes them grow.  Ignoring them while trying to focus on something else doesn't work,either.  They are there, dancing in a semi-circle, blocking my peripheral vision with glass-block-like-impermeability. They are the precursors to the headache that is going to consume my afternoon.  Knowing that it is on its way doesn't help.  I can concentrate on the shimmering lights, or I can worry about the pounding that will be taking place behind my left temple when they disappear. It doesn't matter.  The day is shot. I took medicine - Excedrin Migraine - and lay quietly across the foot of the bed as the pills dissolved and made their way to the pain centers and the aura centers and the fix-me-quick centers of my head.  TBG had his hand on the clicker, so I never had to listen to commercials. I heard about Maria Sharapova and Aaron Hernandez ...

No one wants to be (or be near) the cranky lady who's always moaning and groaning about her aches and pains.  No one is that interested in someone else's problems, unless, of course, there's a good story attached to the limp or the splint.  Even then, the listener is usually more enthralled with the circumstances of the onset rather than in what follows.  Other people's ailments are more gross than engrossing. ***** Is there anyone who could argue with that thesis?  I was a medical social worker and I really didn't enjoy listening to my patients' descriptions of procedures and wounds and treatments.  I sympathized and I consoled and I explained but I wasn't having a very good time at all.  Of course, as I was wont to tell my supervisees, " That's why they call it work ." ***** G'ma is my role model for dealing with pain.  She shows such grace under pressure.  When I compliment her on her forbearance she responds with incredulity.  ...

I used to like opening the mail. A letter, a postcard, a sale announcement and the local weekly newspaper accompanying a bill or two, all placed in the mailbox just to the left of the front door, underneath the house numbers. The mailman was a friendly and familiar face. He shared lemonade and iced tea and once I even got to have ginger ale before lunch because he would share it with me. Now, sometimes I get my mail and sometimes I don't because it's mixed up with my neighbors' deliveries. And when it does arrive, it's advertisements for stores I've never heard of and solicitations and bills. And it's the bills I want to talk about. Actually, it's one bill in particular. Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Arizona has raised our premium 9.2%. I just had TBG show me how to figure it out on the calculator (my miserable math skills will make for a very interesting post someday) and it's true. We were healthier last year than we'd been the year before. In fact, th...