Wednesday (cough cough) Wibbles

OK, that’s enough of that. The “new” Blogger editor was sitting and spinning so I gave up and went back to the old one.

So it’s after midnight, and thus technically Thursday morning. Oh well, it’s still Wednesday night somewhere.

Mason has an ear infection, brought on by his back teeth coming in. I have some unspecified virus, according to the doc, that’s been going around Sector 706. Two different causes, but we’re both feverish, congested, and we both sound like we’re about to cough up a lung on occasion. I was well for about four days between shucking the first whatever and catching this one. I’d sleep all night anyway, or most of it, if Mason wasn’t waking up miserable.

Today (that is, Wednesday) was Mrs. Fetched’s and my 26^th anniversary. We had a dinner out, just the two of us. Kind of nice for a change. I bought us an AppleTV to go with the new HDTV as an anniversary present, and pulled some YouTube stuff in just to show off. The Boy has a Netflix account, and he said he’ll punch it in so we (Mrs. Fetched, really) can pull down movies to watch. Me, I’ll probably use it to stream Groove Salad or some other ambient station when I’m trying to put Mason to sleep.

With White Pickups pretty much wrapped up, I pulled it (episode by episode) into Sigil, a Free authoring tool that uses ePub as a native file format. From there, I gave it a more novel-like format, including actual chapters, and added some more story toward the beginning. There’s still a lot to go, but I pulled it into Calibre (a free ebook manager) and convert it to MOBI so I could load it onto my Kindle. I’m busy reading Thoreau’s Walden right now, but I’ll be soon marking places where the story needs more fleshing-out. I’m sure the ending (and other parts) will need a little work, but that’s what drafts are for, right? Whether I find a publisher or go indie (still trying to decide), the novel will have editing improvements and extended material.

Speaking of writing, I’ll have a #FridayFlash ready to go. It needs a little work as well, but that’s the beauty of flash fiction — it can be fixed up well enough in an evening or two.

I can’t wait to get better… I have stuff to do outside. I never did get the winter garden started, although the rain (and snow) never did let the patch dry out enough to dig up. I still need to finish clearing up the bank out by the road and hacking back the vines there. At least I managed to lose four pounds compared to June (at my last checkup), even with Eating Season. But I need to get exercising too. Maybe I’ll stay healthy for more than four days this time. :-)

Rest of the Week Roundup

All the other stuff that happened this week…

Yesterday came the last step of that little procedure I had last Monday — in other words, they took the stitches out. Once again, this went smooth as warm butter: I hardly felt it, even when they warned me to “let us know if this one hurts much.” Of course, it’s right in that part of my back that I can’t reach, so I still can’t scratch it when it itches. They told me there might not be much of a scar, which is kind of a bummer; scars are part of my history, reminding me of things that happened. “Yeah, this one is from when I was 7; I was riding my bike down the dirt road by my house and I hit a loose patch of dirt and went into the ditch.” (and so forth)

Some (ahem) twit took out the name LibTardBot on Twitter and attached it to a skr1pt. Basically, it scans the public timeline for tweets containing the word “teabagger” and retweets them with a pre-programmed insult. At least, I think it’s a script: with teabaggers, it’s hard to tell. Either one spouts their talking points on cue, and neither one can actually learn anything — it’s all programming.

Mason is getting better… actually, he’s pretty much over the ear infection and other sickness. The amoxicillin started helping almost immediately; by Saturday night he was wanting to get down and play a little instead of being clingy all the time. But he was still fighting an infection, and between that and trying to be his usual busy self, he was waking up ravenous in the middle of the night. He’s starting to get that back to normal too, fortunately… he slept all Wednesday night and only woke up once last night (and The Boy & Snippet got him). He’s also doing what The Boy used to do at that age: point at stuff and go “dat” (as in, “what’s that?”). He loves pulling wires, pushing buttons, and so forth… yup, geek in training! He figured out the OFF button on the TV this week, much to my amusement (nay, delight) and everyone else’s chagrin. I applauded him and Mrs. Fetched said, “No, he’s not supposed to do that! I popped his hand last time!” So when he went to do it again, I tried to tell him NO but was laughing too hard.

He has fat little feet, like the people on the Axiom in “Wall-E.” I’ll try to get a picture soon. As much as he runs around, I’m stunned that he has any foot fat at all.

The Boy & Snippet were nearly handed a perma-ejection this week. Personally, I’d have gone ahead and done it; I have no clue why Mrs. Fetched gave them Yet Another Chance. Daughter Dearest is a little cranky about the whole situation, and has threatened to move out a couple of times. Maybe the only reason she hasn’t is that I’ve threatened to move in with her. Meanwhile, M.A.E. and Moptop are still here, but they now have a firm departure date — two weeks from today. She lined up various public and private agencies to help her out, and she signs the lease on her apartment on Monday. Yes, she’s had a lot of help from Mrs. Fetched and others, but she’s taken a lot of initiative, found a job, talked to the various aid people, and basically made a lot of things happen. If The Boy and Snippet put half that kind of energy into getting their act together, nobody would have a problem.

Mrs. Fetched has been on me for a couple of weeks to pull some stock out of my account to raise some moolah for DD’s college (and, I hope, kill another credit card or two). I farted around for a while, then couldn’t get into my account. As it turned out, the delays were good because the price went up a buck & a quarter in the meantime… so I got to keep 40 or so shares that I would have otherwise had to give up to raise the same amount of money.

What kind of oddball things have you seen this week?

While My Grandson Gently Sleeps

A little update while Mason’s napping…

My stitches itches. But that’s pretty much it. Except for a tiny stinging, it hasn’t hurt at all. I’m supposed to get the stitches out on Thursday, and then I don’t have to worry about scratching it anymore.

Daughter Dearest went to Savannah with her roomie-to-be this week. The roomie’s mom does a lot of traveling, so they make an extended outing of it. It’s been really nice for DD, it’s a few days away from the cRaZy and time to do some girlie things. We picked her up last night and brought her home…

… to a very dark house. Some storms came through, and the power went out around 9 (about an hour after we left). J, Kobold, Brand X, and Evil Lad NOT were up here for some reason. Snippet rounded up a few candles and lit them up so they could navigate. We have plenty of LED flashlights in the bedroom, so we got ours and were able to move around pretty well after that. Somewhere in all that, one of The Boy’s friends decided to drop in around 11 p.m. You have to wonder sometimes… Mrs. Fetched told The Boy to send him home ASAP, and he left after ten minutes or so. The power came back on around midnight, and everyone went to their respective homes and beds.

Mason’s more than a bit under the weather at the moment. The Boy and Snippet got sick with this early in the week, and Mason decided to catch up. He started not feeling good Thursday afternoon, as that’s when he started getting clingy. He had a fever on and off much of yesterday. Mrs. Fetched called the doc yesterday evening and they were booked for the day, so this morning Snippet and I went looking for a place that would look at him. The “family care, minor emergency” place up at the freeway doesn’t see anyone under 3, and opened about 20 minutes late, so we went up to the hospital were Mason was born and took him into the ER. They were amazingly quick about getting him in; I stepped out to use the bathroom and the ER doc was poking and prodding him (which he objected to at full volume) by the time I got back. He has an ear infection, which some amoxicillin and some infant acetaminophen should take care of.

Oh… and DD’s new roomie is OK, and so is her vegan mom. Her brother asked her out last night. Wouldn’t be a problem, except that he’s 32. He’s a big guy, recovering from a parking lot accident in which he had a leg and shoulder broken up pretty badly (the car that hit him was totalled), so at least she could put some distance between them if necessary. But it’s a little disconcerting.

And that’s all I got. New White Pickups episode goes up, as usual, Monday morning.

My Little Cyst (with photo!)

A while back, I mentioned in passing that the doc checked out the Eternal Zit on my back and told me it was a cyst. I got the appointments confused and thought she was going to yank it the next day, but it actually happened on Monday of this week. I figured (correctly) that they would use a local pain-killer on me, but I had no idea how I’d feel when I was done, so Mrs. Fetched offered to drive me. No problem.

So I got there, and a brand-new medical assistant intern put me on the scales… and promptly kept sliding the slider the wrong way. (Yup, she’s blonde, but I figured it was first-day jitters.) They hauled me into a corner room I’d never been in before, and I shucked my shirt and emptied my pockets.

“Hey, you brought us your pocket knife!” one of the nurses said. “We won’t have to use ours!”

“Knife?” I replied. “I figured you’d just drill the stupid thing out!”

Having never had this done, I was a little surprised at the numbing process: they stick you several times, around the cyst, because poking the cyst could make it more difficult to get out. The second shot is the one that hurt most; after that, I have no idea how many times they stuck me because I was pretty well numb. In came the doc, and she got to work…

“That was easy!” she said, “I thought it would be bigger.” She laid her prize on the table. It took her less time to do the work than it did to prep me.

“Looks like a blueberry that’s not ripe yet,” I said… and it did. It even had a stem at that point. My initial squeamishness went away fairly quickly.

“You must have some around your place,” she said, cutting some suture. “I planted some, but they all died.” She sewed me up and slapped a bandage over it. The admonishment to take four ibuprofens in the afternoon wasn’t needed; all in all, there was very little pain and a little more itching.

Being around all the weirdness at FAR Manor has rubbed off, because I had to get a picture:



The little round dark thing right of center is the cyst. It got knocked around a little bit and the stem went away before I could get the picture.

State of the FARf

Shortly after Mrs. Fetched got off the phone Friday afternoon and told me about my doctor appointment coming up Monday, my phone and computer also got in on the act. I punch those follow-up dates into my phone on the spot so I'll have some warning.

But when Big V somehow managed to end up at the manor, with Splat's kid Skyler, it was a somewhat less than restful night. Big V passed out in the rocker that we use to get Mason to sleep, so he was up for quite a while… The Boy and Snippet ended up taking him upstairs with them until he wore himself out. Each of the babies woke up through the night, and I just don't sleep through that… so when morning rolled around, I didn't start rolling until it was impossible to get to the doc's office on time. I called and they said I could be 20 minutes late without having to reschedule, so I jumped in the car and booked it. I just made it, even with the obligatory slowpokes, but just barely.

Blood pressure was good, even with the hassle of getting there. They ran an EKG, which seemed to go OK since I didn't get referred to a cardiologist. She put on The Glove… and assured me she'd take to dinner first next time. That wasn't so wonderful, since she found a bump that didn't belong there. Now I get the full reaming, boo hiss. A large "eternal" zit on my back turned out to be a cyst, and that will get yanked tomorrow.

Might as well get all the scary stuff out of the way since I'm still employed, right? At least Big V was at her own house last night.

Breathing is Good

I cut out of work a few minutes early yesterday afternoon, being Friday and all. As always, especially at any time before 6 p.m., the first three miles out of the office could almost be walked faster, and can certainly be bicycled faster (I’ve seen it). So as I was sitting in the clot, the smellphone rang.

“Come by the hospital,” Mrs. Fetched said. “Mom’s here, and it’s not good.” Well… after you’ve said in the hospital, then it’s not good is sort of redundant. But Mrs. Fetched sounded upset more than usual during one of these episodes, and my first thought was that her mom’s aneurysm blew… but when her blood pressure soared from seeing the cows knocking down sections of fence earlier this year, I figured if that didn’t do it nothing would. But it was another issue.

Mrs. Fetched’s parents went to Ryan’s for lunch yesterday, even though her mom wasn’t feeling all that good and only ate a bowl of potato soup. She got behind the wheel, said something along the lines of “this is it, goodbye,” and keeled over. He freaked out, which is understandable, and gave her chest squeezes to keep some air moving around. Then he saw her cellphone in the van, called 911, and got back to it. The paramedics took out her teeth, got her some oxygen, and took her on down to the hospital.

So I met them in the emergency ward… several people were walking (or sitting) around with face masks, which I figure were people showing swine flu symptoms (the masks do a better job keeping the virus in sick people than it does keeping it out of healthy people). Mrs. Fetched and her dad got me up to date with what was going on, and we sat around doing not much of anything for most of two hours. The ER staff at the hospital managed to misplace her teeth, and tried to claim the paramedics didn’t turn them over at first… this resulted in Mrs. Fetched going into “DO SOMETHING NOW (without actually doing anything to solve the problem)” mode, which cost us about two hours this afternoon.

Meanwhile, her mom recovered enough that they moved her from ER to ICU, and took out the ventilator shortly before noon. By the time we got down there, she was sitting up and able to talk. A gaggle of relatives filed in, and she finally got worn out. Mrs. Fetched and her older sister (not Big V, as you’ll see shortly) pitched in and got business taken care of. Right now, her primary concern is getting her teeth back.

Not to be outdone, Big V went into some kind of convulsion yesterday. As expected, she’s not doing a thing to take care of herself — her diabetes is pretty much eating her up, and she doesn’t seem to care. So now she’s in the same hospital, getting surgery on her foot (due to an infection). So there’s two members of the same family in the same hospital, and neither car wreck nor fire was involved.

A rather strange Saturday, even by FAR Manor standards.

Now it’s Mrs. Fetched’s Turn

OK, that’s it: Tonya Harding is now our official mascot at FAR Manor.

The heavy rain may not have brought it on, but chicken houses prefer to screw things up at the worst possible moment, so of course that’s when the water line (or water main, if you will) broke and created the usual havoc. So for the last few days, Mrs. Fetched (and everyone she could recruit) have been up to their knees in mud and so forth — there’s also a foot of water standing in the pump house, since some debris has clogged the overflow pipe.

I was working at home today, when the phone rang about 11. Mrs. Fetched’s mom: "She hurt her knee, I think she has to go to the doctor. Bring the crutches."

"Fine, I’ll take her.” I had accomplished the two primary tasks of the day, and it was almost lunchtime anyway. As it turned out, she didn’t need the crutches; Mrs. Fetched’s mom has a walker and loaned it to her. I packed her in the car and took her to the chiro-cracker, which is whom she wanted to see first. He took x-rays, saw that her knee joint was a little uneven, and did what he could to straighten it out. He seemed to think it was otherwise OK, just stressed a lot from the mud work.

"Stay off it for a few days," he told her, "ice it, and wear a knee brace. Put a little weight on it when you can." She took a fairly long nap this afternoon, after which she sounded a lot more like her usual self, and I got her settled in the chair where I mostly lived a month or so ago while nursing my own knee issues.

So Mrs. Fetched finally gets to rest a little while. and no cheating. That means I’ll probably be the one sitting in a boat tomorrow night, running a plumber’s snake up the overflow pipe into the pump house. In the rain. With any luck, the boat will be off to one side.

Kneecapped Again, The Final Chapter

The Great Unwrapping was yesterday. The doc was pleased with his handiwork, and told me I could pretty much do whatever I wanted as long as I could stand the pain. He suggested some lifts and bends, and ice when needed, but other than that he seemed to be “just do it” and it would be 100% in the next two or three weeks. (You can still see the nurse’s initials on my kneecap, that’s how they made sure they poked the right one.)

He did say I might have some chronic pain with it, which could be taken care of with a “partial knee replacement” (very partial, as it would once again be an outpatient thing) — but he said they also wear out over 15–20 years, so if I can wait until I’m 75 it will probably outlast me. ;-) But with the two bone chips removed, and it behaving most of the time even before, I hope it will just go on as normal. The chips came off the left side of the right knee; the doc showed me pix of what was going on in there… I forgot to ask for copies, but I really couldn’t make heads or tails of it anyway. It’s just meat. MY meat, but what else can I say?

Well… if it hurts, I now have some pain-killer:



While we were on vacation, someone came by and dropped off what appears to be 18 cases of Planet Georgia’s Finest — there’s 12 quart jars in each case, so that adds up to Lush Paradise. Mrs. Fetched was obviously in on it, as she told me about it and that it’s like 15 years old… and wonders if it’s any good to drink. Her idea, not a bad one entirely for the whiskey, was to treat it as ethanol and mix it with gasoline as an extender of sorts. But at least some of that is apple brandy, which would clog up fuel filters. I opened one of the brandy jars this evening; it smells pretty good and a sip confirmed it. She’s all “I don’t know how you’ll feel in an hour,” and I would like to know how it was made (if there was a radiator in the still, forget it) before enjoying it too much.

Guess I just need to heal up.

Kneecapped Again, Update

OK, so… yesterday, the bum knee started to get a little better, but I went to the doc’s to have it checked out anyway. She sent me to X-ray, where the shots turned out a bit dark because I couldn’t get the leg straightened all the way out, and found what looked like a bone chip. “I don’t think it’s in where it’s causing any trouble,” she said, but referred me to the orthopedist who fixed Mrs. Fetched’s knee (after a chicken house incident) and DD’s ankle (after a dodgeball incident) just to see what they thought and how best to deal with it. She also told me to start putting some weight on it to keep it from getting too stiff. Hooray… now Reality is one crutch instead of two! I mostly carry the crutch and use it when the knee starts to gripe a bit.

I slept fairly well last night, and woke up able to completely straighten my right leg, so it’s definitely getting better — the swelling going down agrees. It will bend through about half its normal range now. I tried driving down to the in-laws’ for lunch, and that wasn’t so wonderful (especially when I had to use the brakes). Maybe by tomorrow…

With lunch out of the way, Mrs. Fetched drove me up to the orthopedist’s. There was some confusion where we were supposed to take the X-rays with us; fortunately, the doctor’s office is a minute away and Mrs. Fetched had them long before I got called in. I was set up to see the P.A. first, perhaps so a “just keep on keepin’ on” case could be taken care of without involving an expensive specialist… fine with me. He took one look at the X-rays and said, “Whoop, looks like a bone chip in there.” I told him what my doc said, and he replied, “I might have to disagree. Let me get [the orthopedist]. So in he came, and said, "Yup, you’ve got an extra part rattling around in there. That needs to come out.” To hear him describe it, the arthroscopic surgery is going to be about as routine as a brake job; I’ll be in & (walking) out of the office in a day, the day being August 5. I’d love to get photos, but I get a bit squeamish at seeing myself get poked even if I’m numbed up first. Maybe I can persuade Mrs. Fetched to take pix or get video.

Kneecapped Again

It has been a while since the last one of these… in fact, I had to go look it up.

Seeing as I’m off work for the next two weeks (hooray!) but we won’t be leaving for Michigan until later in the week (boo!), I figured it would be a good time to look into some of the maintenance issues at the rental place. We’ve known about the rain gutters for a good long while, but there was also a recent problem with the A/C unit kicking the 50-amp breaker (very bad). I threw some tools into the crate on the back of the bike and putted down there.

Big G (not Big V, we both have issues with her) was there, which helped a little. After making sure the breaker was off, I inspected the wiring and found a small kink where some wire was showing through the insulation; the wires were exposed to the elements but the rest of the insulation looked OK. I wrapped that up with some electrical tape and sealed up the wire nuts, just to be sure. Then we cleaned some crud out from around and inside the coils and hosed them out as best as we could. It kicked on later and seemed to be working fine.

With the small job out of the way, I started on the gutters. When The Boy (at age 10-ish) and I put up the gutters, I also bought and installed screens to keep debris out. They mostly worked, but some have rotted over the years and others broke off… and plenty of crud had collected in there. The roof isn’t very steep, but Big G “doesn’t do good on roofs” and I’m quite comfortable up there anyway… so he handed me a blower and I got a bunch of debris off there (and out of the ridge cap). My knee started giving me a little pain, but it does from time to time and usually goes away. It has been like that since my early teens — a disinterested doctor dismissed it at the time as “growing pains” — so I can still pretend I’m 30 even if the knee is acting up.

With the roof dealt with, I turned to the gutters themselves. I knew there was a wasp nest on one side, but got caught up in what I was doing and got too close. One of the SOBs got me on the left wrist, which hurt for a minute then stopped. And my knee stopped hurting, too. Acupuncture? Or maybe just my brain dampening the pain receptors? Whatever. I took care of the gutter on the other side, blowing all the crap out and nailing up a place where it had come loose. The gutters on the other side need more than that… the fascia board was cracked where the nails had gone in all the way down one 8-foot length, and the one on the end looks rotten. I’ll have to get new boards (and screens), paint the boards, then pull down the gutter to replace those boards before nailing it back up again.

After I’d finished on the roof, and we were looking at what limbs need to be cut off an oak tree, my knee buckled. Very painfully. I hadn’t had one of those in a long time. After getting home, I should have stayed home instead of going to the retail district to get lunch and repair parts, but live and learn I guess. I’ve got the ice cuff on it now; I expect it to be better before we make the long drive north.

How did it happen? I blame the chicken houses: I was helping to run feed last weekend, which entails a lot of bending and stooping to shake the pans and flats. My legs were quite sore the next day; my left leg cramped up pretty good around the back of my thigh, and was like that until this morning. I’ve been putting more weight on the right leg all week, and I guess the knee decided it needed its own vacation. All in all, an inauspicious start. But I’m hoping that’s the worst of it, and things will get better from there. At least I’m out of the honey-do loop for a day or so.

Whew

So today was the father-in-law’s catheterization, in which the docs would seek (and perhaps repair) any major blockages.

They found a couple of minor blockages, but they weren’t enough to impede blood flow. Given that he’s been feeling better since they replaced the Lasix with a different medication, one that wasn’t beating on his kidneys so much, they now think perhaps the root of his problem was kidney- rather than heart-related.

He’s going to spend one more night for observation (post-catheter thing) then send him home tomorrow. There will likely be more tests to confirm the current guess diagnosis, but he seems to be out of the woods for now. I hope he wants all his stuff back. ;-)

UPDATE: You know, last night he was in a semi-private room and didn’t have O’Liarly on. And he was feeling better. Coincidence? I think not!

Gas Update, Father-in-Law Update

Yesterday, the three stations closest to the office were out both morning and evening. But they all had “product” this morning. Things may have settled in for now; as I mentioned on Nancy’s blog this morning, I expect to see the occasional “no fuel” sign over the next couple of weeks, but there will be gas when needed. Prices are converging toward either $4.09 or $4.19 for regular now; there are outliers on either side but they’re getting fewer every day.

Meanwhile, my father-in-law finally got to the hospital. He went to the doctor yesterday, and the doctor sent him “upstairs” so to speak. His attitude is the scariest thing so far… he’s acting like he doesn’t expect to get out. But like I told him last night, he needs to hang around for two reasons: 1) he wants to see the farm (i.e. chicken houses) paid off; 2) it’s just not right for your mother-in-law to outlive you, therefore he needs to hang around for another 10 years. He found that amusing, which is what I’d hoped for. Of course, he has Bill O'Liarly on every night and that can’t be good for the soul. They transferred him to the hospital in Gainesville this evening, which is good because it’s a top-notch cardiac facility. Mrs. Fetched figures that as soon as they figure out (and treat) what’s going on, he’ll feel a lot better. I agree with that, but he needs to get his attitude in the right place.

Kneecapped

I must have whacked my knee a good one the other day at the chicken houses. It started hurting a bit the night before last; it woke me up around 4:30 and I took a couple Advil to make it quiet down a bit. This evening, it was noticeably swollen and Mrs. Fetched finally realized I had some issues with it. She’s made me all comfy in the living room, dropped an ice pack on the knee, and even ran an extension cord so my MacBook would have da jooz.

I can kind of walk on it if I keep it straight. If I don't move the joint, it doesn't hurt that much.

The pain isn’t worth two lousy days away from the chickens. If I’d done it earlier, and gotten a week off? Maybe.

Let the Countdown Begin!

I hopped on the scales this morning, expecting to see the usual 202 maybe even 204 — it’s been a stressful week & I’ve done a little snacking on the side.

Nope. 197. The first digit IS A ONE!

Knowing that our scales can give a different reading on a different part of the floor, I moved them and tried again. 195.

The countdown has officially begun. If I stay below 200 for an entire week, I conduct my “special celebration.” I think a week from Monday will be the right time; Mrs. Fetched will be testifying and Daughter Dearest will be at school. It also happens to the be the first Monday of our vacation.

Smoke from a Distant Fire

The south GA/north FL fires are depositing a thick layer of smoke all the way up here — I was pretty sure at first that there was a fire nearby. Someone at church this morning said she heard on the news that ash was falling on the south side of Atlanta. Supposedly, it’s not so bad on the mountaintops.

All the windows are closed and we won’t be doing much outside today. Today, a 30-mile bike ride could be a good way to get a case of black lung.

Taking My Medicine

WARNING: Too Much Input follows.

Mrs. Fetched confiscated the DSL modem yesterday, because The Boy refused to get out of bed and help with the chickens. Not that it mattered: I was awakened a bit too early (after staying up too late) with a bout of what I call LGS (Le Grande Shittes). I had a scheduled checkup at the doc’s yesterday morning anyway, so i figured I’d get that seen to as well, especially when I felt slightly nauseated on the way over.

This checkup was a little more intense than usual: in addition to getting poked for blood (which I hardly felt, they’re good about that), I was also handed a cup. The nurse asked me the usual battery of questions that usually have the same answers, except for the symptoms of the morning. Then when the doc came in, she asked about those and said I probably had a stomach virus that was going around, it would be gone in a day or so, eat bland food and drink plenty of fluids.

Then she pulled on The Gloves. “I don’t enjoy this either,” she reassured me.

“Just like being at work!” I said. Well, maybe the annual review part. She then boldly went where no woman has gone before.

“All the time, people show me things they don’t want to show me and I don’t really want to look at,” she said. I suppose that’s one of the things they don’t tell you about when you start med school. Lord knows it’s the same for technical writers, and probably any other profession: you end up mucking around in things you never really thought about in school.

“No blood in your stool, and your prostate feels normal,” she said. I suppose my dignity was a small price to pay for that good news. “But there was some blood in your urine sample. You need to give us another sample in two weeks, then if it’s still there, I’ll refer you to a urologist.”

The thing she didn’t tell me was to go back home and ride out the stomach virus in bed. Naturally, I felt pretty rough by the time I was ready to go home (probably running a fever) and went straight to bed when I got home. I slept until 10, when the fever finally broke, then read my Asimov’s for an hour or so before turning the light off. The bed was hot; I thought Mrs. Fetched had put a heating pad under the sheet but it was just me baking the virus (and the mattress).

I still have a little LGS, but that’s not completely bad. I haven’t truly been what the old folks call “regular” since I started taking the RIpitmore, and I needed a good purge. I wouldn’t recommend it as a way to lose a pound, but I did that too.

Visitations

The Boy is still “vacationing” at the Cinder Block Resort, but with any luck he’ll come home tomorrow. We’ve been pretty good about going to see him, and he seems ready to do what’s necessary (or rather, avoid what’s not necessary) to stay out and get his act together. I sure hope he follows through; I think he means what he says right now, but there’s no telling how he’ll feel in a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Fetched’s mom is laid up after (successful) knee replacement surgery on Friday. She has gone stir-crazy even faster than The Boy — after three days, she’s impatient to be able to walk and otherwise get back in the game (kitchen, garden, cannery). The plan was to visit The Boy this afternoon after church, then roll on up to the hospital and visit her for a while.

Things rarely go as planned around FAR Manor. Daughter Dearest’s chorus sang at the big Baptist church, and Baptists usually run overtime anyway. We got to the designated restaurant, but the food was slow in coming and it was already past 1:30 (The Boy’s visitation time) when DD and I finished our lunch. Mrs. Fetched suggested we go to see The Boy, they (she and her dad) would go see her mom, and we could come on home.

So I’ve been taking it easy this afternoon. DD needed a portrait in her black dress, so I shot one for her outside (very bright sunny day). I thought I had one more frame of film in Clickzilla, but it was used up — so I grabbed the digital and used it instead. I wrote an entry for my work-stuff blog (under my real name on Yahoo 360) then wrote this post. Now I’m going to do some reading.

With a window open in the living room and in DD’s room upstairs, we’re getting a good draft through the house. Very pleasant outside… I think I’ll take a book and a lawn chair outside and do some reading.

Universal Healthcare: Necessary but not Sufficient

Family Man wrote a brief post about the state of what could laughably be called “healthcare” in this country, after he found that his insurance wouldn’t cover a stop-smoking medication (WTF??). My response got a bit long for a comments page, so I decided to put it here.

This actually started with a trip to the chiro-cracker today. A little money shook loose and we were all feeling somewhat kinked (in the neck & back, not the other way), so Mrs. Fetched called them up and got us back on the monthly plan. There’s a big whiteboard behind the counter, where they usually flag their evening seminars and the like; today it had a bunch of negative statistics about the medical profession. I have a feeling there was a lot of FUD involved, but the things that stood out for me were the huge number of unnecessary surgeries (for whatever definition of “unnecessary”) and the number of emergency cases due to drug interactions or allergic reactions to drugs. Both of those could be attributed to the profit motive — in other words, a system devoted to healthcare rather than profitcare would naturally attempt to minimize both.

In the system we have today, everything in the medical system is geared toward maximizing profit. Providing some level of healthcare is necessary to keep people from demanding change (although that has begun, and may be too late to stop), but that hasn’t been the primary concern for quite some time. We’ve all heard of — or perhaps experienced — the assembly line-like visits of “managed health care,” and read the articles about people with cancer or other major illnesses whose doctors have their hands tied by HMO bean counters. The Boy’s diabetes medication, now that he is not covered by our insurance (not at home and not in school), is pretty much unaffordable for him. Drug companies have to recoup their “research costs,” although much of that research is funded by taxpayers (that is, you and me) and their marketing budgets are often higher than their research budgets. Then, of course, you get episodes like Merck trying to downplay (or even hide) serious side effects with Vioxx — because, after all, there’s money to be made.

FDA analysts estimated that Vioxx caused between 88,000 and 139,000 heart attacks, 30 to 40 percent of which were probably fatal, in the five years the drug was on the market.

(The numbers were on Wikipedia, take with an appropriate amount of no-salt.)

The other side of the coin, of course, is how the profit motive promotes unhealthy activity — smoking this cigarette makes you cool, drinking that soda improves your life, open a beer and you’ll immediately be surrounded by Hot Babes™. This processed-to-hell-and-back "food product" is soooo easy to fix and tastes great! (just don’t look at how much sodium & cholesterol is in it) Oh, and by the way, watch this TV show and that TV show — it’s much more relaxing than exercise.

Now you have a McMansion you can barely afford and can’t get rid of, and you spend two (or more) hours a day commuting to/from a job that stresses you out. Your spouse works a similar job, so neither one of you have the time or energy to fix healthy meals. Breakfast is a sausage and egg biscuit in the car, lunch is a dash to the burger stand, and supper is a pre-packaged whatever.

So one day you wake up: you’re 45 and your weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol are in the “sucks” range. The doc diagnoses your spouse as “pre-diabetic” (you don’t exactly know that that means, but it sounds scary) and tells you both to get some exercise and start eating better. Oh, and by the way, here’s your prescriptions.

But we don’t have time to take care of ourselves! We have a lifestyle to maintain!

And you, one might say, are the “lucky” ones. You make your weekly pilgrimage to Wal-Mart, buy a bunch of stuff you don’t need and gripe about how shoddy it is, without a single thought about the people wearing the blue vests. They have many of the same problems as those of us “comfortably” in the middle class, but when the time comes to make that trip to the doc, the price tag attached to those prescriptions is simply beyond their means.

More and more people are standing up and demanding universal healthcare. President Clinton tried taking the initiative, but it was shot down by the usual suspects and their shills in Congress and talk radio. But these days, even Bush-league must at least pay lip service to the grass-roots demand that something be done. Katiebird has a series of articles on Eat4Today that are simply titled, “Cover Everyone” — great stuff.

Universal healthcare will help those folks in retail jobs, not to mention people who can't find a job that can put food on the table, but it isn’t enough. For many of us, from the middle class on down, our very lifestyles have become toxic. We’ve bought into the mantra of “more” (try chanting it, drawing out the ‘O’), not realizing that it has given us less: less time because it’s wasted in a long commute, less money because we buy too much house and fill it with too much stuff, less health because we don’t take the time to exercise or eat right. We’re on a treadmill, all right, but it’s not the kind we should be on.

There’s no pill that can cure lifestyle problems (unless the drug companies are hiding a formula that will make people resistant to marketing… not likely), but it’s our lifestyle that is making many of us sick. We could create a perfect health care system that covers everyone, but the Constitution won’t let us ban marketing or even destructive lifestyles. I’m not sure we could even legally ban unhealthy food (especially since a certain amount of things like carbs, fat, sodium, and cholesterol are necessary nutrients). No, if we want health for ourselves and our neighbors, it has to start with us. We should work to Cover Everyone — that’s only right — but we also need to invent a better way of life, one that will keep us out of the doctor’s office in the first place.

Trip to the docs

I had my quarterly checkup last week. The doc I usually see wasn’t in, so I got the other one. He plied me with many questions about how I was feeling, took an EKG (it came out normal), and my blood pressure was “low end of normal” (which sounds good to me!). Then it wrapped up with the blood draw to monitor my cholesterol and other things.

Last time I was in, my cholesterol was like 236. Not great, especially for someone not even 50. They put me on Lipitor; while its most noticeable side effect gives it the nickname RipItMore, I was expecting some improvement. Over the weekend, I fantasized about it getting all the way down to 170, then got back to earth and set myself to be pleased with any score under 200.

So the test results came in today.

154

Yeah, you read that right: DOWN 82 POINTS. If Mrs. Fetched and Daughter Dearest had not been around, I would have been dancing naked around FAR Manor this evening!

To sleep, perchance to snore

Mrs. Fetched took Daughter Dearest to the doctor early last month, because she was feeling run down all the time. I figured that whatever it was could be fixed by her getting some exercise and staying off the phone with her boyfriend in Indiana at night — when you’re 17, you usually don’t need to worry about chronic conditions, after all. Mrs. Fetched agreed with me, but the doctor thought she might have sleep apnia.

Now none of the Fetched family figured there was anything to this — especially Daughter Dearest. Even she figured she needed to exercise more and lose some weight. Nevertheless, the doc (who has been pretty good overall) scheduled her for a sleep test at the clinic next to the hospital. As Daughter Dearest is a homebody, who likes her bed, we figured this would throw some false readings. And yet, off we went one cold night — and found that we had to check in at the hospital. Inconvenience is the most sure way to rile Mrs. Fetched, and this is certainly no exception. But after checking in, we hiked back across the parking lot (quickly! it’s cold!) to the sleep clinic where the technician and a big ol’ pile of wires was waiting.

So he got to work, putting goop and a couple dozen wires on her head and elsewhere. Her attitude wasn’t exactly wonderful, so when I asked her which finger they put the tape on… she showed me!



This was before they put the airmask on her.

When we went to pick her up the next morning, she said, “I’m sure they’ll say I failed. I didn’t sleep well all night.” Sure enough, a couple of weeks later the results came in, but the data was stuff that didn’t reflect a restless night: she stopped breathing rather frequently and her oxygen levels dropped to 70 (they should stay around 90 or better), causing an erratic heart rate. When they turned on the airflow, everything went normal. So now she has one of those CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) machines.

Mrs. Fetched figures I should have a sleep test, too. It wouldn’t surprise me if I do have sleep apnia — I’ve woken up on occasion feeling like I wasn’t getting any air. In my case, though, I tried the low-tech version: Breathe-Right strips. Mrs. Fetched had bought some for me in the past, but I never felt like they were doing my any good. I snore, but so does she. But this time, I noticed that when wearing them, I go to sleep faster and don’t wake up in the middle of the night (and I don’t snore nearly as much). So I’ll probably be using them for… ever.