Happy Birthday to me

3-2

 Another round of chemo today. I still haven’t been able to see a primary care doctor, but the people at the Ada VA clinic have been really helpful trying to get my records transferred up here to be seen locally. Thankfully the oncologist heard enough of my complaining about being short of breath that he prescribed an inhaler for me to use. I’m not sure if it’s the placebo effect of my just having it, but I haven’t needed it yet. My brother and my son have asthma and now I have a small inkling of what they go through. My brother’s got better as he got older as did my son’s. Hopefully, soon I will be able to get to see a PCP ( Primary Care Physician ) and I’ll have someone that can look at everything.

Like almost everyone else I have good days and bad days. The bad ones are usually weather related. I don’t move as quickly as I used to ( welcome to getting old ) and cold weather really gets to me. However, the weather has been fairly moderate around here lately. We finally got our  ’59 McCormick  460 moved from where it quit last summer to a place where it’s easier to work on. This thing is a bit of a beast, but it makes it easier for me to work on. Almost everything to work on is at eye level to me and at the lowest it’s at waist level.  I’m in the process of rewiring it and I think I’m almost done. Next is to pull off the starter for a quick check. We did try to turn it over, but it wouldn’t make one full revolution. My next step if the starter is good is to pull the plugs and try to hand crank it to see if one or more of the cylinders have fluid in them preventing the cylinder from being able to fully end it’s stroke, then remount the starter. And if this all is successful and we get it running, I still have to find a seat for it. What’s there now is the framework where the seat goes and when we got it, it came with a worn out pillow for a seat. The last seat that I used on it was out of a boat and it was just sitting there to keep me from having to stand up to drive it. This thing is six foot tall at the top of its hood, so me standing from the operators area puts me at almost ten foot and there are way too many low branches for that. There’s no cab on it so every branch is read to slap you in the face or whatever. What I truly need is a Bostrom lowrider seat from an older truck. The frame for the seat is almost the same frame that I remember from some of the first trucks I drove in ’67. (More on my trucking career later in My Life Story, coming to an email near you!) At any rate, when we get this thing motivated it should be able to handle just about anything you can throw at it. Of all of the projects that need attention around here, there are a lot that require horsepower in one form or another and something with as big tires as this thing has will be able to pull quite a load. Things getting stuck here is another recurring theme where I get to practice the recovery scenarios that I’ve learned through the years, not the least of which came from my Army experiences.

 Teresa has her own project going. We now have 10 (hopefully) female chicks. They currently reside in the downstairs bathroom, cheep, cheep, cheeping their time away. When they get about half grown, or big enough to fly out of the plastic tub they’re now in, they’ll move outside to an enclosure we’ve built for them. The hope here is for a supply of eggs. Current prices for eggs that you can buy from one of the neighbors is $3.00 a dozen. From the store in town it’s closer to $2.00, but the store is also 20 miles away. Heck, I’d have a cow for milk if I knew how to milk one. Years ago when the kids were little, I would go to a local dairy and buy milk from them. We would get about a quart of cream off of each gallon. We even made our own butter once, but decided that the cream was better put to use as homemade ice cream. Of course all of that required that someone do some actual work for the result and children are hard pressed to crank on an ice cream machine when they know that the finished product is waiting for them in the store in a huge variety of flavors. Even I have to admit that if I were making ice cream or butter now, I would find a machine to do it.

3-9

 Two doctor’s appointments today. The first was chemo and the second was to get a PCP. I wound up with a nurse practitioner. It seems that the actual doctors don’t want to have to decipher how to do things on the VA computer in the office so they leave it to someone who has figured out the system. At any rate, she was knowledgeable, even if we did have to go over my family life and health history all over again. Someday maybe I’ll put it all down on a USB key and just hand it all to them. I’m sure HIPA would have a stroke, but I’m sure I don’t care. I left there with another prescription for an antibiotic that will hopefully clear up the congestion in my lungs. She also has placed an order for a nebulizer for the albuterol to help me breathe easier. I have tried the inhaler and it leaves a slight burning in my chest. She said that the nebulizer gives you the same amount of medicine, but over several more minutes and more diluted so as to even out the dose more or less.

Rain, rain

In the past two weeks we’ve gotten around seven inches of rain and that makes for some muddy days around here. We have dug diversionary trenches here, there, and everywhere trying to reroute some of it to keep from having quite so much of it standing around. We may still get a freeze, but spring is a springin’ and the temps are beginning to moderate a bit. The grass is greening up and trees are budding out. We’ve made plans as to where the garden will go in and now all we have to do is plow it up. I say all we have to do like it’s no big deal. We still have to get a tractor or a decent tiller running to be able to accomplish this. The land here was terraced long before I was born to prevent erosion, so there are berms that hold water back that create small ponds of water that tend to keep the water in place. Normally this is a good thing if all you want to do with the land is pasture, but living in the middle of all of this gets a bit mucky. With forty acres you would think that picking a garden site would be easy, but the possibilities are limited to where we can get water to.

Happy Birthday to me 3-15

 I guess this was about as good a birthday as I could have hoped for with two doctors visits and chemo thrown in for good measure. After all of that, we got home and I pretty much goofed off the rest of the day. Teresa made me a Whopper pie and relayed all of the well-wishers from Facebook and I took several calls from the kids and family.

Well, I’m gonna wrap it up and save the rest for the next one.

Continued

2-4

 Had hernia surgery today and had to say it went a bit better than I expected. The vampire nurse ( I know this sounds mean, but it’s what they call themselves ) got me on the first stick, painless, and in the hand. That was a first. They got me settled and after about an hour or so I was in surgery. The Dr. had been in and made a mark on my side to indicate where to start after a joke about why they do that. Seemingly an hour or so later I was in recovery, and another hour or so ( actually a few hours-surgery drugs have a way of distorting time ) I was in a wheelchair to the truck and on my way home.

 Getting over surgery now has gotten a little harder due to age and general physical condition. I know that it’s to be expected, but it doesn’t make it any easier to take. While I may be retired, it’s not a voluntary thing. The need for treatment necessitates being off of work for long periods of time so that you can give both the body and mind time to heal. I had the surgery two days ago. I had a lot of pain the day of and the day after, today not so bad. I took the pain pills that the dr. ordered at least as often as he prescribed, if not a little more.  I no longer have to look forward to a UA every couple of years at least, so I take pain meds at least as much as prescribed. I have a fairly high tolerance for pain, but along with it comes a higher tolerance for pain meds. I understand the need for UA’s for different professions, but I don’t believe that absolutely no meds at all is true for everyone .Almost anyone that would care to can find a vet that might tell you of someone that has put up with incredible, indescribable pain. Be that as it may, at four days after I’m down to one to two pills a day. I still can’t do much, but I can move around with tolerable pain. Not that I move much either. Lately I mostly sit around and watch TV or play solitaire in one form or another. If I get up it’s to either get something to drink or go outside for a short walk to see what the wind has blown around this time. The wind is another recurring theme here. That’s something that does take some getting used to. All of the yard pretties that we had in Texas, wind chimes, bird feeders, etc. haven’t fared as well as we had hoped. The wind chimes sound more like an out of tune calliope or maybe just a bunch of two year olds banging on pots and pans. Until we moved here we hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the wind. If it blew in Granbury, there were an abundance of houses and trees to slow it down before it got to us. Here it’s more like the old joke about nothing between us and the North Pole is a barbed wire fence. It doesn’t blow all of the time, but just when you’re about to be lulled into a sense of calm, your hat blows off and lands about two acres away. In Boise City,Ok. on U.S. 287 when you’re going south through the town, on the right side of the road, there is a mechanic’s shop that has what they call an Oklahoma wind gauge. It consists of a very large chain about ten feet long with a sizeable rock attached to the bottom of it. The gauge is quite old and in the 80’s it read at 4 to 5 inches “ ain’t blowin yet”, at 2 to3 feet “ hold on to yer hat”, and at the point when it would be at right angles to the ground it said “hed fer the shed”. Well, if that gauge were here, it would have read hold on to yer hat a lot.

A short rant

 The price of gasoline has gone down to the point of almost breaking the $1.00 mark around here anyway. To hear a lot of people tell it, this might be the total downfall of the economy. Now, to paraphrase someone much smarter than me, “Those who don’t learn from their history are doomed to repeat it.” We have gone through this mess before and yet our esteemed leaders have still put if not all then a lot of their eggs in one basket. Taxes are down and this state along with many others, have revenue shortfalls that stagger the imagination. Two words come to mind, diversify and invest.

 Now, on top of that, everything that every company blamed their ever soaring prices on fuel costs and jacked their prices up to “cover the costs of fuel” have yet to even hint at bringing the prices down. And while I’m on the soapbox, let’s look at the price of oil in quart bottles. A quart of oil comes from crude that has been refined. Gasoline comes from crude that has been refined even more. So, if a gallon of gas is $1.50 then WHY is a quart of oil $4.00? This can only be explained by an engineer with a doctorate in both physics and math that works for a major oil company. To say this mess is way above my head is putting it very mildly.

 Ok, enough of that. Our life now seems to revolve around doctor’s appointments, mine and Teresa’s. Mine for cancer and hers for physical therapy for a frozen shoulder. How her shoulder got frozen is anybody’s guess. The doctors don’t have any ideas as to how or why this has happened.

2-23

 Started a new chemo today. This stuff is methotrexate. It uses the body’s immune system to fight the cancer and is the least bothersome to me of any of it. I’m not sure why we couldn’t have started with this a little sooner or even a cocktail of this along with other stuff. It seems that oncologists are really big on drug cocktails, or at least their pharmacologists have convinced them of it. I will be on this once a week through the middle of May, assuming that a mid-cycle CT scan doesn’t tell them it’s not that good. I had a CT done the other day, although the results aren’t as easily read by us as the ones from MDA and the CD report takes a heap of doing by nurses that are already over booked and under appreciated, so we have a bit of a hard time asking for much extra.

 I do have to say that the people at Mercy in Ada live up to the name. They are without a doubt the most helpful and compassionate group of healthcare workers I have dealt with. After my hernia surgery the nurse in the surgery unit sent me a get well card .They are truly the best.

3-1

 Well, I have run out of things to say for the moment, and looking at the date I realize that it’s been much too long since I’ve posted. So, adios for now.