A Very Bad Month

 

Not from my garden!

 

Let’s do a quick review: As soon as most of the snow from the first big storm of the year, at the end of March, had mostly melted, we had the second biggest snow of the year on April 2 and 3 and…anyway, we couldn’t get out of our driveway until Friday. Granted, we only had one car to get out, because not only had the Husband’s snow tires been removed from his car just in time for the first big storm, but his car has been having a lengthy vacation at the garage. His transmission is dead, and the part that might fix it has to come from the dealer, and the dealer keeps sending the wrong part. If the part, which never arrives, doesn’t fix the transmission, then it’ll have to be rebuilt, which will cost something like $5000 and who knows how much time? Or where that money will come from? That’s what my second car cost, new.

This is when I started beating my head against the wall. Then we had an earthquake, which I felt – everything went side to side – and that was exciting. Oh, and 4 days later, a solar eclipse. The gods are having a field day this month.

In the meantime, my F’ing FL friend’s (F-FL F) PCP had posted something alarming about her health on his medical site after his April 1 appointment with her, which caught my attention and initiated a series of emails between him and me. Not with her, because she’s not been speaking to me since October, when I told her, after trying three times unsuccessfully, that  month, to get her to answer some simple questions about her daily activities so I could re-up her on the F-FL Medicaid wait list, that she seems to be unable, anymore, to follow simple directions; I pointed out some other simple things she’s been unable to follow instructions about, and told her I was worried about her and reiterated that she needs to communicate with her cousin and me before making decisions about important things, consequently. Her last communication to me, following that email: “Every time you write to me, Deb, every single time, you’re horrible and mean and say things to me that I’d never say to a friend, and I get IBS and have to take an extra pill then go sit on the toilet for four days in great pain, so I’m not going to read anything you send anymore,”

OK ! That cleared some time for me; I used to send her a pretty postcard 6 days a week and a chatty letter on the weekend. It didn’t take a lot of time, but added up over many years, it took a fair amount of time and money. No point in writing to someone who’s not going to read it, and it’s pretty darn hard to maintain a one-way relationship with someone who is, at best, uncommunicative, and at worst, never writes or calls. I’ll stick to the letters about health matters, which she’s not going to read but I need to send.

So when her PCP noted that F-FL F had informed him that she no longer had any interest in having appointments with outside practitioners, and that her pain levels had increased in the past two months so she is taking more of her opioids. So he’d told her she needed to see a pain specialist, and needed to explore with her psych whether her psych meds needed adjusting.  This is a red flag: I had to find out what was going on. My job, in taking care of her, is to deal with medical matters, since that’s my expertise; Cousin Paula deals with finances, as that’s her expertise.

Lots of back and forth and in effect, PCP can’t write a prescription for the level of opioids F-FL F now needs, and he’s noticed a distinct slow cognitive decline, and he thinks her psych meds/treatment (or lack of it) may be part of the problem. Besides that, she’s refused to see the dental specialist the dentist referred her to, or to make an app’t with a pain specialist, or see an ophthalmologist to keep an eye on her cataracts and developing macular degeneration; and her PCP was unaware of the hoard of hundreds of opioid pills F-FL F has hidden away in her room at the assisted living facility.

The nursing director, who left there in December, knew about the hoard and was supposed to have found and destroyed it, but didn’t; and the new nursing director didn’t know about it because the gone nursing director didn’t pass on the info; and no one knows whether F-FL F has actually had more than a phone call with her psych in more than a year because she can’t get there in person and has not been able to figure out zoom, which the gone nursing director was going to facilitate, but we doubt did.

PCP told me it was time for me to get involved in F-FL F’s health care again whether she liked it or not. So I spent about 30 hours writing a detailed letter to her asking for an explanation and warning her that cognitive decline has been noted by several people, and if she couldn’t explain her decision not to see specialists reasonably, I wanted to know if she understood that meant she was risking blindness, and that her pain meds were going to go away, and did she then intend to start using her hoard? I explained that I didn’t know what would happen but she’d need to be protected from herself, if necessary – and got no reply of course. Then there were many emails and phone calls to the new nursing director and the new facility director, and a letter to the psych, and copies of  my letter to her to all of the above and Cousin Paula and the PCP, and Cousin P and I gave  permission for the facility to do a search and destroy of the opioid hoard and put F-FL F, at her PCP’s request, on medication management, which means the facility will hold onto her prescriptions and deliver doses to her to take at proper times.

And I warned them all that F-FL F would throw a major hissy fit when she found out about all of this.

Let’s leave F-FL for a moment and go back north to NH on the day before the latest huge snowstorm. History: I badly hurt my back, leg and foot in mid-January (a cat was involved), and no one can figure out what’s going on and why it’s still not healed; but it was horrible, involving swelling and calf pain and aching back and xrays and ultrasounds and cramping and shooting pain and too much hurting to sleep, and on and on, but slowly slowly with Chinese medicinals and lots of acupuncture and times of ibu+Tylenol, it’s been changing weekly and was bad but not horrible before the storm.  

April porch furniture - expect another storm!

I’d not finished pulling the over-wintered parsnips from my raised beds, and decided I should really pull the rest of the patch of them before they got covered in feet of snow, again. Out in the wind in the cold was I, bent over, pulling huge long parsnip roots out of the ground and filling a large basket, from time to time standing up and saying, Ow! Ow! Ow! about my aching back and foot. Suddenly, I was flying through the air, arms and legs flailing, unable to touch down or catch my balance, and eventually landed, face down, 9 feet away between the two garden beds on the gravel path, sore leg in the bed, other leg half buried in gravel, and thank god for boobs because otherwise my face would have been buried, too!

My considered opinion is that the garden gremlins or gnomes were mad because I was removing the last of their winter food stores, so they picked me up, and tossed me; I have no other reasonable explanation. What I know for sure is that the skin on the sore leg had road rash on the knee, and I discovered a couple of days later that I also had a big lump on the heel of that foot, which was very sore to touch. I expect I knocked that heel on the concrete wall of the raised bed either when I first went flying or when I landed. And I twisted my back all over again. But at the time I was in the midst of a round of prednisone to try to fix the damned sore leg, so except for some blood, and back pain that ibu and hot packs eased, I didn’t think much more of it. Except when I had to help shovel the heavy wet feet of snow several days later and my back started aching like crazy.

Gremlin food?

Hop back forward to mid-April, in NH. The Husband was due to have a colonoscopy, first ever, and he’d carefully followed the pre-colonoscopy routine, took the pills, drank the nasty stuff – and nothing happened. No diarrhea. No pooping. But a lot of cramping and gas and bloating.

Next day, I heard afterwards, the surgeon who was doing the colonoscopy found 2 large tumors and some polyps in his sigmoid colon (close to the rectum), which so blocked the opening she couldn’t even get a pediatric scope past them. And his large intestine was still full of poop. Is still full of poop.

I got a phone call from the Husband an hour after he got home from the colonoscopy, because then the laxatives finally kicked in, and he spent hours sitting on the toilet, and has done for the whole past week. Next day he had the pleasure of having a dyed CT scan: there might be malignant spread to local lymph nodes, or to the outside of the colon, and there’s a suspicious something in the liver that needs to be checked. So he has cancer, we don’t know how much yet, but the next year is going to be a round of operations, chemo and possibly radiation, so a year from hell.

The very same day of his colonoscopy, I got home to discover lots of emails from F-FL nursing home people, PCP, and Cousin Paula (nothing from F-FL F, because what I’d written to her was another of the mean horrible letters I’m always writing to her, so I’m sure she never read it, but also sure she knows I’m responsible for the current commotion involving her. The nursing home people had gone to her room to do a search and destroy and take away her meds to put her on medication management, and F-FL F, as I’d warned them, threw a temper tantrum: they can’t take away her independence, she’s going to call an elder care attorney, she’s going to fire her PCP, she’s going to move, and apparently ranted and raged about many other things, no doubt me to a large extent.

In an email I had with her PCP later that evening, he said he might just fire himself – if she’s not going to co-operate, listen to his advice, and is going to cause this much work and furor, what’s the point in him trying to treat her? I had to tell him I really wasn’t sure and I understood.

Now Cousin Paula is taking over the F-FL whole situation while I’m wading through the NH medical situation.

Parsley's starting to grow

And yesterday, the lump on my heel returned and I have shooting pains and aching and the whole of the bottom of the foot around the heel is very sensitive to the touch and I can’t stand on it without a lot of pain. I can’t see it, but the Husband says it’s red and bruised. I can’t put it flat on the floor, so I’m gimping around on the ball of that foot, which is causing the leg muscles to go into spasm all over again. Did I fracture or crack a bone in the foot and somehow make it worse while I was beating my head against the wall in frustration this past week? The xray I’d had preceded the flying parsnip event by weeks, so who knows?

My seed potatoes, some of the onion sets, and shallot sets arrived in the mail last week; the rest of the onions, and leeks, and tarragon plants will be coming momentarily. These will all need to be planted soon, and the rest of the garden’s going to need to be started, too. And I’m hobbling. And the Husband will certainly be starting some kind of therapy or surgery by mid-May; and he won’t be able to do anything for a month (surgery) and will be feeling too crappy to do much (chemo) for weeks. And I’m hobbling. And we don’t know yet how many operations will be involved – partly because they still can’t see past the poop.

And we really, really need to have a yard sale this spring – stuff has been building up for several years, and my brain needs it gone. And I’m hobbling.

And beating my head against the wall. Maybe I should try kicking the wall, instead…I wonder if that would fix the foot?

 

For the blog April 21, 2024: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com

All photos Debra Marshall

Jonquils survived the storms. This is the raised bed that got me.

 

Give Me A Break

Ghostly freesia

 Day 2 of sitting here grumpily staring out the window at White: white trees, white ground, white driveway, white porch railings, white air, white white white. In this, our second surprisingly nasty late spring snowstorm, there was rain and sleet and hail and freezing rain and wind wind wind first; and now the short trees and bushes are bowing down with heavy snow and ice, the tall trees are snow-free because of the wild winds, the Buddha on the front porch is covered to his chin, again, with snow, my cats are grumpy and fighting with each other, the birds which are trying to fly through all this – lots of them spring returns and not at all prepared for this kind of weather - are freaking out; and the humans are all also freaking out about potential and real electric outages and can we get out of the driveway – no – and when will be able to get out of the driveway, anyway? 

Not that we could go anywhere today, since there hasn’t been a sighting of a snowplow yet, though we did see neighbor Eddie Bear going by on his tractor a couple of hours ago. We’ve filled pitchers of water for drinking and buckets of water for flushing, just in case the electricity does more than just flutter on and off. I’ve warned my tomorrow’s patients that it might not be happening. 

I’ve sent cranky emails to the nurse at the assisted living place in F-FL, where I’m told it’s 85 degrees for heaven’s sake, who I’ve been emailing all week with no response and with whom I need to speak because my F-FL friend’s PCP told me it’s time I get more involved with her healthcare, again, whether she likes it or not; and I’ve had a cranky conversation with a local nurse who works for a group that seems to think their patients can make last minute plans, no matter what else we need to do, to fit their procedure schedule. I am not amused, and have made that abundantly clear. 

Wasted most of yesterday waiting for a return call from the F-FL nurse, looking bleakly out the window, napping, and listening to one of the worst audio books ever. Libby, the NH State Library’s system through which one can borrow kindle books and audio books and I don’t know what else, using your local library card, downloaded onto your digital device, is a wonderful system. I know VT has a similar system and I assume most states do – now we have digital devices this has taken the place of the “order it through the mail” system we used to use many years ago when we lived in Maine, where a thick, waterproof zippered bag would arrive in our rural route mailbox regularly, stuffed with books from the state library, postage and return postage paid. 

This current system is saving me, during my hours of driving north to treat patients every week, from having to listen to the appalling news on the radio.

The most recent book was so very ghastly it turned funny. It was a Gothic bodice-ripper placed in the “modern” time of post-war 20th-century Britain, read by a very British-accented reader. It was about as formulaic as can get – every theme from bodice-rippers and gothic novels was there: impoverished young female from a good family but whole family dead, courageously trying to make her own way in the world, is contacted by the law firm of an unknown-to-her distant uncle and is his only heir. She inherits his estate but she has to live in the house, which is an ancient Abbey set in the country amongst moors. There is a gruff and secretive housekeeper and her almost silent husband the butler, a hard-bodied impertinent driver and man of all jobs, who smells “like wood and smoke and trees and the fields,” a looming massive house with strange noises, locked rooms, hidden passageways, a haunted library, mad evil ghost of a monk, sweet gentle ghost of an anchoress, mysterious headaches that cause memory loss, haunted books that, when opened, cause the things they contain: bee swarms, monsoons, plague…to manifest in the real world. 

There are things that fly through the air, horrible dreams, footsteps outside doors, a nobleman who seems to be a nice guy but is actually evil, the evil society he and his more evil father belong to who want to get their hands on the evil ghost monk’s hidden manuscripts, which turn out to be written in a secret code that only the heiress can break. Evil lord drugs her, pretends they married, she’s stuck because she’s a woman and what can she do?? She has to obey her husband, of course, that’s what women do. Gag. 

The driver tries to save her but on the way out they stop for a cup of tea (!!!) [actual sentence in the novel: There’s always time for a cup of tea!] in the kitchen and get caught and imprisoned, she sets fire to the Abbey and escapes and frees hard-bodied man, housekeeper and butler, but they only go as far as the housekeeper’s cottage and again, stop for a cup of tea; then hard-bodied man goes back to the Abbey to try to find the manuscript which she’s left behind, but needs, giving her firm instructions to stay put. Which, of course, she doesn’t, as soon as he’s out of sight she also goes back to the Abbey and takes a nap in the haunted library (!!) while the evil lord and his more evil father and their evil society are hunting for her and the manuscript. 

Hard-bodied man finds her just in time and carries her into the anchoress’s hidden cell where she falls asleep again and confronts the ghosts, then she and hard-bodied man dig up the evil monk’s grave, which is conveniently in the achoress’s cell, and destroy his bones, which breaks the spell on the Abbey and library. But that’s not the end! 

Evil society and lords don’t know the spell’s been broken and heroine and hard-bodied man still want the manuscript, which it turns out the anchoress had actually written and is full of healing recipes lost to time, but the monk had perverted them seeking immortal life; so they go hunting for the manuscript and come across the society in the Abbey foyer with a huge vat of human blood, gathered from killing the kind servant (there’s always one and it’s always a female) and a bunch of local commoners, and into which the evil lord is about to submerge himself despite warnings from our heroine. He does, and drowns, and his more evil father pulls a gun, heroine kicks him and grabs the gun, and then shoots him, but not until she’s spent some time thinking about it and fighting her angry impulses. 

Evil society can’t decide what to do and consider threatening her, but then hard-bodied man shows up and they all run away, and he disposes of the bodies. For some reason no one ever reports the dead commoners and servants, the heroine discovers she’s long loved the hard-bodied man but can’t remember what they’ve done together but her bodice rips every time he gazes at her or brushes by her, finally they admit they’ve fallen in love and go into the moor to repeat their first kiss that she can’t remember but he does, somehow lots of money becomes available, they rebuild the burned Abbey and the Library and turn it into a revered site for academic scholarship, hard-bodied man discovers who his parents are, heroine becomes good friends with housekeeper now the spells are broken, they all live there happily ever after, everyone calls our heroine My Lady, and whatever.

At that point, I puked, it was all too ghastly. 

For the blog, 4 April 2024: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com 

Photos Deb Marshall