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.