So Much Fun

Organ Recital:

My sinus and ear continue to be a worry. I'm on day four of the ten day course of antibiotics and I hate it. I hate taking drugs or medication of any kind and I worry constantly when I do. Ten days of constant worry is wearying.

I've been sleeping a lot, a way to escape the anxiety of being sick as well as helping my body (I hope) to fight off the infection. So much fun.

I wore a mask today while Dave and I went to visit Paul in the hospital. They found strep in his lung and I didn't want to expose him to my stuff and I didn't want to be exposed to his stuff either. When I was wearing the mask, the sinuses in my forehead started to get achy, which is new. I'm hoping it's the last gasp of the bacteria up there, but that's only my hoping. My anxiety tells me that it's something new, like, say, the bones of my sinuses being eaten away by that same bacteria--or a bacteria that's resistant to the antibiotic now that the antibiotic has wiped away its competition.

This is how my anxiety talks to me all day. So much fun.

Paul is not getting better as fast as he should be and he's going to have to have a PEG tube placed because he can no longer swallow well enough to keep from aspirating food and water. I sat out a couple of visits to him, but Dave reported that all Paul talked about was food. (He's also been NPO--allowed to have nothing but ice chips--for ten days. That would make anyone crazy. And now, to find out that his eating days are over has been quite a blow to him.)

Judi is stressed out, too, of course. She comes to the hospital every day and stays for several hours, but it wears on her. While she is there, Buzz stays in his crate. I hate that. Of all the things to hate, I hate a crated dog.

(I tell Dave all the time that if I had stayed with Buzz when Judi and Paul went away just after they got him, that Buzz would not be a crated dog. This is what happened with Crunch, their last dog. I refused, after the first time I did it and came home to a sad dog that had vomited in his crate, to crate him and from then on I put up with all kinds of bad behavior from him until he seemed to get it all out of his system. When Judi and Paul returned from their month-long trip, I told them that I hadn't crated Crunch at all while they were gone. I told them maybe about a tenth of the stuff he had done--not admitting that he had pooped and peed on the rug or chewed up as much stuff as he had chewed up. But by then he was a perfect and perfectly uncrated dog. And he was never crated after that unless he was traveling long-distanced by car with Judi.)

So.

Other Random Things:

Dave and I went to lunch yesterday with my brother, mother and aunt. I haven't been sleeping well at night (though I had slept the previous day away) and had only gotten about ninety minutes of sleep the night before. About halfway through lunch, I was ready to collapse.  Though it was nice to see and talk with everyone, I was ready to come home and get back into bed. I ended up sleeping about twelve hours (waking up every few hours, as usual).

We have a new washing machine now and this afternoon I'm using it for the first time. (Dave has been doing a load or two of laundry a day, but I haven't been much help in the laundry arena.) It's a tiny washer, so it doesn't hold much, but it's nicer than our old washer. While Dave is off visiting with his mother this afternoon, I'm washing a few things. It's a nice clear day, so I'll hang them outside and hopefully they'll be dry by this evening.

I've been reading a lot, too. In the last few days, I've read a lot of kindled autobiographical stuff, mostly garbage. I've read Alec Baldwin's Nevertheless, Amy Schumer's The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, Nell Painter's Old in Art School, Oprah Winfrey's What I Know for Sure, Retta's So Close to Being the Sh*t, Y'all Don't Even Know, and now I'm in the middle of Ruth Reichl's new book Save Me the Plums. I think I'm going to re-read Cheaper by the Dozen after this and then maybe Charlotte's Web, which I haven't read in decades. (Something reminded us about it at lunch yesterday and I kindled it this morning.)