Well sometimes manufacturers make excellent devices! My little spot carpet cleaner is an awesome machine. You would never know that yesterday morning there was a fecal Jackson Pollack in my guest room that is completely gone and there is not a spec of bad smell in the room. Still, I am leaving the window open until the end of the month. But what a blessing to be so easily able to solve the problem and clean up Sheba’s mess.
Our morning walk was a short one because I’m desperate to see the lump on my Achillies heel shrink. Long walks are temporarily out. It was cloudy, 18°, and it felt like Fall, but it felt good to start our day with a forest walk. And then I came home to water all the beds.
I did all the backyard beds right after lunch, and just as I was finishing, a Fedex truck pulled into our driveway. My plan for today was to stay home and do little until my medication arrived, but when I saw the truck, I knew that it was the medication and that it was arriving a day early.
I was stunned by the size and weight of the box, but on the side was printed, “temperature sensitive product,” so I guessed my medication was in a cooler. And sure enough, it was, plus ten kilos of ice in plastic. I put the small box containing my medication in the fridge and called the pharmacy to tell them that my package arrived a day early and to ask how I could return the cooler and ice packs as Fedex does no pickups on Gabe. I’m going to give the cooler to Fedex when they deliver my next dose.
At 13:00, I FaceTimed with my friend Nicola who is at her place on the Bay of Fundy shore in Nova Scotia. We talked for 90 minutes! It was a blast, and then it was time for a walk in the woods with Her Highness, and then I watered all the beds in the edible garden and front yard. By then, I had earned a spa. All in all, it was a pretty good day.
At 17:00, I gave myself my first shot here at home. It was my second dose of Tezspire though, and for some reason I like shooting myself up. At first I thought it was because it gave me a role to play in my treatment, but taking a pill does that. I guess it just became this BIG THING because it was so expensive, because I had to go through the Special Authority process, and because it was going to give me more time. It was a shock to hear that I had fibrosis from asthma and an uncomfortable prognosis. This has been ‘sold’ to me by Dr. Dorscheid as a miracle drug. I though Prednisone was a miracle drug, but Tezspire somehow does repair work on my alveoli. It is a big deal and when I inject myself, I visualize the drug streaming into me, each molecule a sniper or a medic.
I felt the same way when I got the cocktail when I had AIDS. The medicine was a magical healing elixir, and I loved putting it into my body. I learned how the medicine worked from my doctor, and I visualized the molecules in action, thereby healing me.
I went back through this blog, and I don’t seem to have mentioned a recent incident. Involving me and Cathy Fox, the local mental health nurse. I met her when I first moved here, and she called my symptoms indulgences. It’s bugged me ever since, so when I saw her in Nester’s I told her that I thought that it was inappropriate for a mental health nurse to use a judgmental and pejorative word to describe a patient’s symptoms.
She didn’t apologize. Instead, she told me she used that word because I’d told her that I sometimes, or all the time, was faking my symptoms to get attention. Trust me, I did not say that. Steve thought that way at first, but I would NEVER say that.
She angered me. The mental health nurse was turning responsibility back on me. And, as I said, she did not apologize, nor did she acknowledge the pain she caused me. What a fucker of a mental health nurse. The incident made me think if Frani, who dumped me believing my diagnosis was a sham and I was capable of just growing up.
She was here, having dinner. She and her husband were staying here over a weekend. We were having dinner, and I said something about sharing a neurological diagnosis with Chris, her husband, who has MS, and Frani went ballistic on me, saying really awful things about me and Dr. Shoja. I was shattered. I spoke twice: I asked her why she was mad at me and why she was yelling at me. We’d been close friends for 52 years.
When I reached out recently to try to patch things up after four years of banishment, she replied saying that she had found a way to forgive me for the awful and hurtful things that I’d said, that she didn’t want to discuss it ever again, and that we would not be getting together.
Here’s the point of writing about these two incidents: In both cases, the person whose behavior hurt me recalls the incident very, very differently, and in both cases, their memory of our interchange absolves them of recognizing that I was hurt by them.
I was appalled by the responses of both individuals. And it makes me want to never be with people. They make me afraid to go ‘out there,’ to encounter strangers and even friends. I’ve become very scared of people and that feeds my speech and seizure disorders.
I have a lot to discuss with Dr. Shoja next week.
Today is a free day. I thought I’d be here waiting for my Tezspire delivery today, but I’m free to do as I like. I doubt that I’ll need to water because it’s so cool now during the evenings and today’s high is predicted to be low as well. It may only reach 21°. But Come Friday, endless sunshine and temperatures in the very high twenties are predicted.
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